THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODDESS
She from her rose-grown turrets came
And laughed up in his eyes;
He flushed to his pale brow with shame,
And spake unto the skies:
"To Christ this woman yet shall bow,
Or be cast down," he said,
"And where she flaunts her scarlet now
Shall float the Cross instead."
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."
Put a touch of spring in the air, the thought of a woman in the
heart, and keep from poetry if you can.--"The Silver Poppy."
For the second time Cordelia Vaughan had left Hartley stunned and
amazed. Twice since he had first met her he looked up in bewilderment
and found it necessary to readjust his estimate of her. This second
readjustment, though, was somewhat different from the first.
It was not until he had left her (receiving her homage like the
acknowledged and imperious young queen she was) that once more back in
his dingy little lodging, stiflingly squalid after the richness of the
Spauldings' crowded drawing-room, he had untied the blue silk ribbon
that so daintily bound the manuscript of her second book. To lose
himself in it would be a relief. He was glad to slip away into the
unreal world which her hand had opened up to him.
Cordelia had named her story The Unwise Virgins. With the open
manuscript once before him, Hartley read it through, from start to
finish. And it was from that reading he emerged stunned and amazed.
The Unwise Virgins was a failure, a glittering but disheartening
failure. Of that there could be no two opinions. The streets of the city
had not been so kind to Cordelia Vaughan as had the open hills of
Kentucky. Her second book had none of the power and movement of The
Silver Poppy, none of those whimsical tendernesses and quaint touches of
humor and pathos that had half muffled the razor edge of her earlier
satiric touch.
From the first Hartley had been led to regard Cordelia as a woman
without an affluent sense of humor. Then, after reading The Silver
Poppy, he had wondered if she had not drained off, as it were, her
vanished reservoirs of mirth; if her mental blitheness had not been lost
with the too labored advent of her first-born. He had heard not
infrequently of "men of one book." Could it be that Cordelia was a woman
of one supreme effort? Or was it her newer life that was so altering and
wasting and enervating her?
For, hard as he found it to confess to himself, The Unwise Virgins, as a
whole, held neither accomplishment nor hope. In fact, with his child
terror of the trite and the commonplace, and racked as he was by his
"torture of form," he found in it nothing but energy miserably
misspent. It was a heap of glittering particles that ran elusively
through the fingers, a labored thing of shreds and patches. Its
simulation of power was almost pedantry, its affectation of _finesse_
was time and time again flaccid idling with words half understood.
Each time the wings of his admiration were about to unfold, the stroke
of some little banality sent him tumbling down to earth again. Yet
through the maze of all this energy misdirected he could get glimpses of
the substantial enough central idea on which Cordelia had attempted to
build. But on it she had built nothing but a misshapen, chaotic thing
which tempted him, with his passion for form, to demolish and rebuild
after his own fashion. It stood a challenge to him.
Not that Hartley looked on himself as a master workman in this respect.
He could not pride himself on either great experience or great
accomplishment. But the enthusiasm of the true disciple was in him; a
youth of isolation had been building in him those silent fires which
smelt experience and mood into art and expression. He had been a
desultory yet rapacious reader. Through an erratic and none too studious
college course he had fed hungrily on the older literature of his own
tongue, and had also mastered the poets of a tongue which he could never
force himself to look on as dead. He had come out of these excursions
with a sensitized taste and the gift of a sort of literary bletonism,
intuitively responding to any sign of the artist beyond the effort. And
now, with the touch refined and the hand trained, he, as an artist,
stood idle, pounding the anvil of journalism when he might be wielding
the chisel of the gold-smith.
He followed his first impulse and went to Cordelia herself, at once. She
had just come in from the florist's, and she greeted him over an armful
of white roses, which she still held unconsciously before her as she let
her eyes linger for a studious minute on his face. He felt vaguely sorry
for her--there was an inalienable touch of pathos in the thought of the
stricken hand of the master. It seemed to leave her so hopeless and
alone--for all along he had more than half felt that she was not
altogether at rest in the life into which success had forced her.
She led him timidly up to the little yellow study, and waited for him to
speak. She had noticed the manuscript in his hand.
He found it very hard to begin.
"You don't like it, I know," she said, tearing a flower to pieces. She
looked up at him almost appealingly, and then went on.
"I don't like it myself. I think I've lost my grip on it. It keeps
running away from me, and throwing me out, and dragging me after it."
As he looked at her in her helplessness, he tried to tell himself that
he had been unduly harsh in his first judgment. Then he turned to her
and attempted to explain how with a possible touch or two it might be
remodeled, how splendid it would be, once it was whipped into shape.
She only shook her head dolefully.
"I'm tired of it," she said.
Hartley seemed unable to explain to himself why a mere mood of temporary
inadequacy should crush her into hopelessness.
"Then let me do it," he suggested.
"Dear friend," she said gratefully but sorrowfully, "what time have you
for such things?"
"I couldn't give my days to it, of course," he confessed. "But I have my
nights. With a couple of hours in the morning, why, a few weeks ought to
see it finished."
She shook her head with childlike dolefulness.
"Then what will you do with it?" he asked her.
The question seemed to frighten her. She scarcely knew, she said. They
had been clamoring for it so long. She thought she would put it aside
and take it up again with a fresh hand.
"Then let me take it in the meantime," Hartley pleaded.
She made a proposal to him--it seemed to come to her in the form of a
sudden inspiration.
"Let's collaborate on it," she cried.
"I would much rather simply help you a bit if I could."
"But don't you see, we can divvy--as we say over here--on the royalties.
I've refused twenty per cent and a thousand dollars down. That means
two or three thousand dollars, anyway."
Hartley would not hear of it. Cordelia hovered over him and pleaded with
him and coaxed him, but he was obdurate to the end. He dreaded to think
of that dainty little yellow study ever being converted, to him, into a
bookseller's counting-house. A sudden hot sense of dissatisfaction with
himself, and with things as they were, crept over him; he felt that he
ought to be going, wondering why, during all that visit, Cordelia
appeared so far away from him, so unreal and phantasmal.
"There was something I was going to speak to you about," she said, as he
rose to go. "You know I've done simply nothing in return for all the
things you've done for me." Then she smiled with her wistful smile. "You
know, it isn't quite playing fair. As soon as you get home I want you to
send me three or four of your short stories. Will you?"
"It's no use--they have been everywhere," said Hartley grimly.
"Perhaps they have, but I feel that I can place them for you--at least
some of them."
Hartley shook his head. "I know most of the editors here," Cordelia went
on; "there are three or four who have been bothering me for things for
months. It makes a world of difference just how a manuscript comes into
their hands; they say it doesn't, but they're human, after all. So, you
see, I may be able to say a good word or two for you."
"Thank you, no," he answered gently. "When I think of you I want it to
be in every sense but a business sense."
Her hand still remained unconsciously in his. He felt the pulsing warmth
of it, and without a word raised it to his lips and kissed it. Cordelia,
with her head turned away, gazed out of the open window. And there he
left her, and stepped out into the freedom of the open air, neither
elated nor cast down. He was thinking forlornly how month by month he
had sent out those different hopeless, useless manuscripts, and how they
had been as persistently returned to him. And still again the artist in
him cried out for its opportunity. Yet he felt, in his youthfully
candid, self-conscious way, that they were not altogether bad, those
stories of his. Perhaps it was the work of the file that they showed too
much. Perhaps it was the seriousness of purpose which pervaded them,
when everywhere the call was for the airier and lighter effort.
But he did not altogether despair. Again and again he wondered on his
way home why he had kissed her hand, and only her hand. And the nearer
he drew to Chatham Square the more he was tempted to change his mind and
send at least one manuscript to Cordelia.