THE APRIL OF LOVE
From the book to the battle we go,
And it comes that we travel afar
Unto marts that we do not know,
Where a Philistine people are.
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Market-Place."
"I'm not very big," she said wistfully; "I'm only one of those
little harbor-tugs that wear the liners of life into their
berths--for the port has its perils as well as the open sea."--"The
Silver Poppy."
Mrs. Spaulding usually breakfasted at half-past eleven, just four hours
later than her husband. That gentleman, indeed, had passed through half
a day of delirious Wall Street business before the plump and loosely
gowned figure of his belated spouse rustled languidly down to the
breakfast room.
Mrs. Spaulding--and at the breakfast hour above all other times--liked
to believe that she was a very ill-used and lonely woman. If a touch of
forlorn desolation did cling about her even days, it was a desolation
quite different to her husband's. Through her loneliness she still
groped for something tangible and material; he found little toward which
he cared to reach.
He had first made his money in wheat, at Indianapolis. Later he had
doubled a substantial fortune by prompt and shrewd investments in the
then half-prospected iron-mines of the Lake Superior district. He was
an honest and simple-minded man, with a straight-forward and workaday
bent of mind, who still fretted at idleness, and was still wordlessly
oppressed by the gaieties of life when they chanced to fall before the
hour of the dinner gong and the Tuxedo coat.
It was not until his fortune had crept up to the million mark that he
ventured to ask for the hand of the youthful and overpretty Lillian
Bunting, a belle in her time, and a young lady, it was said, with marked
social aspirations for the Middle West.
Then, as time went on and brought with it an increase of prosperity, she
hungered, as a millionaire's wife, for that mystic urban El Dorado of
the affluent American, New York. Though he felt that he was sacrificing
a few hundred thousand by the migration, Alfred Spaulding finally came
East and built a handsome home for himself and his wife on West
Seventy-second Street.
It was all very dreary and very lonely for them both during their first
two years in this new home. But little by little Alfred Spaulding
drifted back to that world of business and strenuous effort which
constituted life for him. And day by day Mrs. Spaulding hovered more and
more closely about that high-walled garden where worldly wealth flowered
into sensuous affluence, though as the mere wife of an unknown
millionaire she seldom alighted on the borders of society, which to the
end she insisted in describing as "The Four Hundred."
But if she could not dine and dance and drive with them, she still had
left to her the compensating pleasures of dining and dancing and driving
in their wake. She could still reserve their tables at the cafés on off
evenings, and their boxes at the theaters when they were elsewhere.
There was nothing to prevent their milliners from making hats for her
own aspiring head, and she could still buy her jewelry and her flowers
in the same shops with them, and even drive bewilderingly near them in
the Park.
Then came the advent of Cordelia Vaughan. The young authoress from
Kentucky was just at the zenith of her fame; The Silver Poppy had, as
Mr. Henry Slater described it, "set the Hudson on fire"; her new-found
friends were still reprovingly demanding why she held back her second
volume, and publishers, it was said, were besieging her for manuscripts.
The public press, too, was hinting from time to time that the new
Kentucky beauty was laboring on a mysterious volume that was to shake
society to its very foundations. Then it was whispered about that she
wrote only from memory, that she was living the romance which later
should appear in type. Photographers sent to her, begging for a sitting.
Niccia, the sculptor, made a little bust of her, and declared she had
the only Greek nose in America, and there was a poem or two indited to
her "sad, sad crown of golden hair," as one melancholy versifier had put
it.
Cordelia Vaughan was indeed a very much talked about young lady, and it
was just at this juncture that Mrs. Alfred Spaulding had swooped down
on her and triumphantly carried her off, very much like a plump hen-hawk
making away with a homeless duckling. She was still delightfully
childlike and ingenuous for one already so great. The poor girl, Mrs.
Spaulding held, needed a mother's care. She was giving up too much to
her work. She must have more amusement, more diversion. She should have
a little den of her own, and she should work when she wanted to, and
play when she wanted to. She should be as free as though she were in her
own home. It was, too, in no way mildly hinted that under the roof of
such a patroness she would have unrivaled opportunities for studying the
foibles and weaknesses of New York's most exclusive circles. In fact,
Mrs. Spaulding would give a series of receptions and teas and things for
her, for she had always wanted to see more of those dear, untidy
Bohemians with the long hair.
Though the young authoress from the South had been a willing enough
captive, under what roof, indeed, did the eagle wings of genius ever
unfurl with ease? Cordelia, however, had hungered for a little of the
fulness of life. Her earlier New York existence, bright and attractive
as it had seemed to the outer eye, had been an unutterably lonely and
hollow one. Life in a Washington Square boarding-house had proved no
better than a more irregular existence in a dilapidated old studio on
lower Fifth Avenue, where for several months she invariably burned her
own toast and regularly boiled her own tea, and where her callers were
equally divided between overinquisitive reporters and impoverished
authors looking for assistance.
So Mrs. Spaulding felt that she had taken a new grip on life when her
timorous little _protégée_ was installed in the yellow-tinted study
which had been made ready for her. It was an eminence by proxy, but it
was better than nonentity; and in her silent gratitude she saw to it
that Cordelia wanted for nothing, and, on the whole, was not unhappy.
Alfred Spaulding himself had hoped to see grow up about him a family,
but having no children, he drank deep of the anodyne of the dollar; and
so, during the day at least, his loneliness was forgotten. In the
evening, when not too tired, he dressed and went with his wife to the
theater, enjoying it passively, but liking most of all those pieces
"which had lots of music," especially those Broadway performances
characterized as "Gaiety Successes." Sometimes they dined out, and
sometimes he sent Cordelia and his wife off together and ate at home
alone. In his earlier day he had looked toward his wife as the symbol
and embodiment of that softer and, he thought, that higher life which
was necessarily alien to him. Then as her prettiness passed away, and
her limitations came poignantly home to him, he concluded with pious
secrecy that womankind is the upholstery of life, wearing the soonest
where it is the softest.
Cordelia Vaughan, when she became a member of his household, did not
fail to realize the narrow and lonely existence he led. This touched
her keenly in some way, and she did what she could to throw a little
more of the lightness and color of life about his absent-minded coming
and going. He saw and appreciated this generous effort, and if the two
did not become fast friends, they at least grew into more or less good
comrades. Often in the mornings she drove down with him as far as his
office, for Southerner though she was, it was an inexorable rule of her
life to rise early. In some way, though, she was finding her time of
late less and less her own, and their morning drives had become more and
more infrequent.
It was the thought of this, and the sudden pang of regret that came with
it, that took her down to breakfast with Alfred Spaulding not many days
after her first meeting with Hartley. All the way down through the
crowded, narrow cañon of lower Broadway she talked to him with a wistful
attentiveness that left him with his morning papers still contentedly
jammed down in his overcoat pocket.
As she drove home alone in the bright, glimmering little yellow-bodied
Victoria she wondered if it was the soft balminess of the September air
that was stirring in her a new sense of something that she had been
crowding out of her life. It was a morning on which one wished to be
always young.
As the little Victoria swung from Broadway into Fourth Street, she
suddenly caught sight of Hartley, and called for the coachman to pull up
at the curb. Before the young Oxonian had quite realized who it was and
before he had recovered his composure she was stretching a prettily
gloved hand down to him.
"Isn't this lucky?" she cried joyfully.
"It is, indeed," he said, taking her hand and looking into her bright
face, across which a tress or two of her hair had blown. There was
something so airy and light and buoyant about her that she seemed to him
like a bird of passage, alien to the roar and dust about her.
"Can't you steal an hour or two and run away from all this dust and
rattle and noise down here?" she asked, bending over him with her
tremulously wistful smile.
He hesitated.
"Do come, the air is so beautiful. You look worried and tired, and it'll
do you so much good. Do come!"
Still Hartley hesitated. He asked himself why it was he always hesitated
before this particular young woman. Then he looked at her again, and did
not stop to answer to that inner questioning voice. The next moment he
was sitting beside her and the carriage was bowling lightly across the
strong sunlight of Washington Square and out under the arch, where the
long undulating vista of Fifth Avenue melted into the distance.
As they passed an old studio building on the lower avenue she pointed to
one of its highest little windows.
"That's where I used to live," she said simply, and then an involuntary
sigh escaped her. "How soon we change, without knowing it!" she added.
"How?" said Hartley looking back at the window.
"Oh, we get hard and selfish and careless." There was a new note of
tenderness in her voice when next she spoke. "I wish I could learn to
love children and flowers more than I do. Haven't you ever felt that
you'd like to be able to give and suffer and endure? That you'd like to
throw something out of yourself? Well, that's how I feel sometimes when
I think how people--I mean people with ambitions--have to live for
themselves. But it can't always be helped."
He looked at her--it was a new facet to the stone.
"For instance, this very afternoon," she went on. "You know I've always
wanted to bring my poor old father up to New York to be near me. He's so
alone in the world--there's only him and old Mammy Dinah at home now;
and week by week I've been putting off seeing about the little apartment
I'm leasing for them. I promised to have it settled this afternoon, but
at two I have to be at the rehearsal of that great drama they're making
out of The Silver Poppy; at four I have to be interviewed for a Sunday
paper; at five I have a tea and two receptions; and to-night we dine at
the Carringtons."
"Let's see about the flat--is it a flat? Now, together," suggested
Hartley, with a sudden impulse to share in her mood of passing softness.
She looked at him keenly for a moment or two as he told her he would
like to feel that he was doing something for her father; the fleeting
shadow of a fear crossed her face.
"No," she said, "let's have our morning together in the Park."
There was already a premonitory touch of autumn in the bright air. They
passed through the dazzling, sunlit Plaza and entered the cool, green
quietness of the Park itself. There the noises of the city faded down to
a quiet rumble and the perfume of flowers and the smell of verdure took
the place of the drifting street dust. There was something so detached,
and pictorial, and spectacular about it that it seemed to Hartley as if
a mental tourniquet was already holding dreamily back life's wasting
energies. The _legato_ of hoofs, persistent and smooth as a waterfall,
the tinkle and clatter of chains, the gloss and luster of the rumbling
carriages, the shimmer and gleam of the flanks of perfect horses, the
passing faces--proud, young, pale, flushed, weary, eager faces of
women--the color and flash of millinery and gown against the cool dark
greenness; it seemed to him the sheltered and alluring flowering of
life, the quietness and repose of the twilight of accomplishment, never
virginal and unconscious, but studied, autumnal, attained. It seemed to
him a splendor unmellowed and unsoftened by age, not as it might have
been in his own land.
Turning to the silent girl at his side, he spoke of the difference
between Central Park and the avenues of Hyde Park of an early summer
afternoon. He tried to describe to her the forsaken aspect of London's
West End during August and the first part of September, when the
fashionable world of his own land was, as it were, closed for repairs.
He told her of the forlornness of the Drive and the Row, and how at that
season only summer tourists invaded Hyde Park, and even then only north
of the Serpentine.
Cordelia listened to him, contented and happy--listened almost raptly,
as though she was making the most of her day. It was not until he had
rambled joyously on and described to her a London summer and the advent
of what they called "the silly season" that she asked him a pointed
question or two about English scenery and English country life. She had
always been greatly puzzled about the peerage, she confessed, and wanted
to know why one was just the Countess of Somebody at one time and then
Lady Somebody at another. She had met Lady Aberdeen once, in Chicago,
she said, at an Irish-lace store there. She had been afraid to say a
word to her, she confessed prettily, because she hadn't known just how
to address her. And were all the upper classes as simple and unaffected
as Lady Aberdeen? And was London so different from New York? And would
she ever, she wondered, see the Old Country, and Oxford, and all the
other beautiful places he had spoken of? And she asked him if he could
believe that at one time she had hated England, and everything
English--hated it blindly--which is the worst of all hatreds.
Hartley tried to paint before her eyes the panorama of London from
Waterloo Bridge, with its imperial sweep and mass of river front
huddling from the Houses of Parliament to the Tower. He tried to make
her feel the sober, low-hung English sky, the softened lights, and the
more ordered and solemn lines of London's architecture, where New York's
almost universal newness of things was not to be found, and where the
dry, hard tones of the New World's brown-stone fronts were likewise
happily absent.
She listened intently, and some of her questions were so innocently
childlike, and were asked with such a winning ingenuousness that he
laughed now and then. It was not until he had finished that she
confessed the real cause of her dilemma.
"You see, the book I've been working on so long is partly laid in
London, and of course I've never been there. And when you haven't even
passed through a place on a train it's pretty hard to get the right
local color, isn't it?"
Hartley assumed that it was.
"And I've tried reading it up, but it's no use. I'm afraid I haven't the
absorbent mind; some people come out of a book, you see, like a spaniel
out of water, scattering a shower of ideas all over you. Well, I can't
do that; and what makes it so much harder for me," she added
plaintively, "I've known so few nice Englishmen."
Hartley was studying Cleopatra's Needle. As some remote mental vision of
the Old Serpent of the Nile drifted through his mind he thought how few
nice Americans he had met before.
"That's where they're so ready to catch me up--the critics, you know,"
she went on.
She looked very pretty and flower-like under her big hat.
"You can imagine how hard it is, can't you?" she added.
He turned to her with a sudden great purpose in his face. The thought of
it warmed and glowed through him like wine.
"Why couldn't I help you with it?" he asked eagerly.
Her fluttering eyes rested on him warmly, but only for a moment. Then
she shook her head plaintively. "That's _too_ much," she murmured.
But he asked her again, humbly.
Unconsciously her gloved fingers touched his arm; there was a confession
of deeper things in the movement.
"Would you?" she asked in her soft contralto.
Hartley tried to tell her how happy and proud it would make him. He
wondered at the note of humility in her voice, at her half-tristful
hesitancy.
"I should love to think it was you who had helped me in a thing like
that," she said gratefully. And he could see by the luminous eyes that
it was true, and for the rest of that drive no sunlight had sifted
through more golden air, no flowers had ever been so odorous, and no
green had ever looked so deep to him.
Cordelia insisted that he should drive back and meet Mrs. Spaulding. If
he cared to, he could get her own copy of The Silver Poppy and also the
manuscript of her new book. She had rather, she said, that he went over
the manuscript alone; in that way he could judge it more impartially.
And she turned homeward, feeling that her day was over and done.
Mrs. Spaulding greeted Hartley with an effusiveness that almost
bewildered that somewhat dignified young man, particularly as he could
detect in it no lack of genuineness. She had been told what a promising
man he was, and how he was going to write a great book some day. She
understood he was a great friend of Mr. Repellier's, and she hoped he
would make a regular home of their house, and drop in whenever he felt
like it. She pressed him to remain for luncheon, "for pot-luck," she
called it, but as he was unable to do that she genially brought down a
box of her husband's cigars and protested that both she and Cordelia
loved smoke.
Hartley--dare it be confessed--was all this time hoping against hope
that she was not noticing the too-often clipped fringe about his trouser
heels. And the truth was this shrewd and sharp-eyed lady had noticed the
tell-tale fringe, but she also had seen a clean-limbed and
clear-featured young man, who carried himself with an air of quiet
dignity that was well worth studying, and that would look uncommonly
well in a theater-box.
It all ended in a promise from him that he would run up some morning and
exercise one of her horses with Cordelia. Cordelia, standing silent and
aloof, remembered what Hartley had said during their drive about
English reticence, and threw him a glance which he could see was meant
as a silent palliation of what she could not prevent. For a moment it
awoke in him an inner voice of distrust, of perplexity, that left him
with the feeling that a softening veil had been lifted from between
them. It was as though some hand had shaken a shower of petals from the
blossoming tree of enchantment and left it half bare and empty.
As he said good-by, depressed in spirits and scarcely understanding why
it was, Cordelia slipped into his hand a delicately perfumed package
tied with blue silk ribbon, together with a copy of The Silver Poppy.
"I want you to keep this; it was the first copy from the press," she
told him. And she added that she hoped he wouldn't waste too much of his
time over the manuscript. She knew he would find it all wrong, that
there would be a thousand things to disappoint him. And she begged him
to make whatever changes he would; she trusted him implicitly.
"I'm afraid you'll not like it," she said timidly, coming with him to
the door. She had slipped one of Mrs. Spaulding's hothouse rosebuds into
his button-hole, and she touched it with her fingers with a gesture that
meant much. He would have taken her hand, but she drew it back quickly.
"It's been so hard for me to write things this time," she lamented. "I
feel that it's all going to fall flat. But whatever happens," and her
eyes were eloquent with something more than gratitude, "I've had the
happiest morning of my life."
And she closed the door quietly, and left him there. As he stepped out
into the hard light of noonday, once more he felt that vague impression
of unrest, that reaction of despondency which he had often enough felt
when emerging from the music and romance of a theater and passing out
into the garish lights and noises of a workaday world. He, too, felt
that his day was over and done.