LIFE'S IRON CROWN
Deep in its ancient center we
Had dreamed its aging heart should be;
Yet there, where should have slept its soul,
Was only darkness and a hollowed bole!
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Old Yew at Iffley."
Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to
swallow.--"The Silver Poppy."
When Hartley turned the last page of The Silver Poppy he closed the book
meditatively but amazed. In it he had found the golden key to a
long-closed mystery. In it he had seen revealed the great heart and mind
of a misunderstood woman. He had caught the substance where before he
had beheld only the shadow. It was as if from the shuttered windows of
an empty house he had heard unexpected music. He had found the deeper
and truer woman. All suspicion and dread of some elusive element he had
never been able to fathom in Cordelia Vaughan at one stroke vanished
away. Thereafter he was determined to read her and accept her as she lay
revealed in the pages before him.
For he saw that into those pages had escaped some mellower, softer,
profounder part of her, a part which when face to face with her at
different times he had groped for in vain. For he could see, as plain as
his hand, that The Silver Poppy was not a book of the moment. It had in
it elements of greatness that startled him, and left him gasping. There
was a whimsical turn to its tendernesses, a quiet reserve to its humor
and pathos so adroitly blended, a quaintness and ingenuous freshness of
touch, and, above all, an impersonal, judicial aloofness from life that
spoke, at first sight, more of the hand of a man than that of a woman,
and a woman still in her youth--at any rate, in her youth as an artist
and a creator.
It was this flood of new feeling that bore him, elated and fired with
enthusiasm, to the first of Cordelia's and Mrs. Spaulding's receptions
late that afternoon. Long beforehand he had determined not to attend
this reception. Besides cutting into time which was not altogether his
own, he was beginning to see the impossibility of any further
incongruous vacillating between the sordidness of Chatham Square and the
splendor of the upper West Side; the grim irony in those contrasting
pictures of life stung him too unpleasantly. But in his hour of new
enlightenment he overcame his older scruples. He had a stern duty of
self-humiliation to perform and a once wavering integrity to redeem. And
he fell to remembering little speeches that Cordelia Vaughan once had
made, and little ways that clung to her, and the tints of her hair and
the many little variable intonations of her voice. And thinking of these
things he made his way up through the city toward her once more.
A fluttering striped awning and a strip of crimson carpet ran from the
Spauldings' doorway to the curb, where forty carriages half blocked the
street. It was clear to Hartley that Cordelia's first reception was not
to be a failure. That he came conspicuously unadorned and unknown and on
foot in no way troubled him as he made his way through the crowd of
heterogeneous loungers that fringed the strip of crimson carpet. In
other days he had been used to such things. Some touch of the scholar in
him, too, contributed to his bearing that sense of remoteness which
elevated him above such perturbations.
It was the memory for the second time of his pendulum-like alternating
between two such strangely opposing existences, and the cutting, keen
irony of the thing that heightened his color as he hurried in from
liveried servant to servant, and suddenly found himself in a crush of
flowers and waving plumes and rich gowns, with here and there the sober
black of a dissonant and desolate-looking man. And above it all the hum
of many voices and the breath of many perfumes rose and mingled.
The next moment he caught sight of Cordelia herself, where she stood
beside Mrs. Spaulding, greeting her guests one by one and smiling her
gratitude for each prettiness of speech borne to her by that tide of
new-found friends. Hartley, across the intervening crush, noticed that
she looked almost exquisite and flower-like in a gown of white stuff
that seemed to accentuate her note of frailty. She reminded him, as he
looked, of a pale yellow clicquot.
He noticed, too, that she received her homage with all the girlish
dignity of an imperious young queen, a little too coldly and too
haughtily, perhaps, and yet with a mild composure that was causing the
honest-eyed Mrs. Spaulding to turn more than once in secret wonderment,
and gaze at her admiringly. There was nothing in Cordelia's bearing to
reveal any inner ruffling of a spirit tranquil and detached--nothing
beyond the pale rose-like flush that had mounted to her softly
undulating, almost gently hollowed cheeks, and the luminosity of her
outwardly calm eyes.
Cordelia did not see Hartley in the odorous, rustling stream that was
slowly bearing him toward her until he was almost at her side. Then she
paled a little, and let her eyes rest on him keenly, speaking smilingly,
as she looked, to a florid woman confronting her.
In a minute or two he himself was before her and had taken her hand. She
had not expected him that afternoon.
"It was so charming of you to come, Mr. Hartley," she murmured. It was
the same phrase he had already heard her say at least half a dozen times
over; the formality of her welcome chilled him. He had forgotten there
were a dozen persons at his heels.
"I _had_ to come!" he confessed. Something earnest in his tone
frightened her. She showed him by her glance that there were others
hemming them in.
"Then you have read it?" she asked quickly, lowering her voice.
"Yes; and I have so much, _so_ much to tell you about it. It is all
wonderful, and all beautiful."
She looked at him, startled. Her whole rapt face caught fire, and for a
moment was suffused with a great light. Only in animals and wild things
had he ever before seen that strange phosphorescence of the eyes.
Then she looked into his face once more, and all the color went out of
her own. She saw her mistake.
"But which, _which_?" she cried in sudden anguish, under her breath. At
first he did not understand. Then slowly he came to see just what she
meant.
"The Silver Poppy," he answered her, wondering.
She put her four bent finger-tips up to her parted lips with a sudden
odd little gesture, as though she was thrusting and holding back some
involuntary small cry. It seemed a movement of both disappointment and
despair.
It was all over in a minute, and before Hartley could realize why it was
done, or what it had meant, the same stream that had borne him in to her
as relentlessly had carried him away. Ebbing into flushed but cooler
diffuseness, it left him in another room, where he beheld rustling,
laughing groups of women, and palms, and heard the sounds of muffled
music and broken snatches of talk.
He looked back toward Cordelia and tried to catch a glimpse of her, but
a sea of plumed heads waved between them.
"But life is only a vaudeville, with hunger and love for top-liners,"
he heard a gaunt tragedian disclaiming to a woman with penciled eyebrows
and obviously rouged cheeks and lips.
"Yes, but think how many times we can love!" the rouged lips laughed
back at him. Hartley moved on through the crush.
"A woman's eyes," a long-haired young man at his elbow was declaring to
a group of listening women, "a woman's eyes are the index of her soul."
An elderly lady in mauve caught him up.
"But our souls, you see, are like the magazines--they mostly come uncut.
And that's why only the paper-knife of matrimony really finds us out."
Hartley looked at the group, crestfallen, disappointed, vaguely
disgusted. Their brilliance seemed to him the brilliance of tinsel and
paper roses. And he asked himself in sudden indeterminate terror if this
was the sort of thing he was to waste his days over.