THE STONIER UPLANDS
So avid of these earthly crumbs of praise,
Behold, how in her need,
From door to door of fame she crawls and prays
One crust to glut her greed.
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Mendicant."
Upward through illusion and onward through error, that is
life.--"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley was in a dilemma. He counted his money with some trepidation,
and found that he possessed, all told, just four dollars and ninety
cents, one dollar of which was to go for a month's rent of his
typewriter. Seldom before had such things troubled him. If they were
not, he felt that they ought to be, the mere accidents, the immaterial
phases, of life.
Placing the little pile of money out before him on his worn old
work-table, he realized, as he gazed down at it, that it made a very low
wall between him and starvation.
Yet he did not altogether regret his breaking away from the United News
Bureau. He had never nursed much love for that Grub Street of the New
World. He had always realized, too, that journalism in any form could
hold out no great hopes for him. He had not the news instinct, that
great gift which to an editor, he had learned, only too amply covered
the multitudinous sins of illiteracy. Nor had he that patience of spirit
which would permit of his ever becoming a humble laborer with the pen of
the "pot-boiler."
He recalled to his mind poor old Sissons, who so often had drifted into
the bureau office--who for years had written his four books a season,
under contract, for his paltry one hundred and forty dollars a volume.
Sissons? Sissons? Who was Sissons? The name had not gone ringing down
the avenues of fame, and yet few men in New York had written so much,
none so laboriously.
In his dilemma Hartley remembered that he had once before earned three
dollars a week as a super-numerary in one of the upper Broadway
theaters. If the worst came to the worst, he could go back and be a
"super"--it would be the refinement of cruelty, he thought, to be cast
for a "thinking part" in one of the drawing-room scenes in Cordelia
Vaughan's forth-coming comedy. He decided, in the end, though, that he
would prefer unloading freight on the East River wharves. Many a day he
had watched those ruddy wharf laborers, half enviously; and their lot,
to him, had seemed incomparably happier than that of the pale shadows
who shambled weakly about the broken old desks of the United News
Bureau. And since the day Stevenson's old lodging-house had been pointed
out to him he had felt a warmer feeling for both that ragged river front
and for that vanished velvet-jacketed vagabond and dreamer of great
dreams. Only--there was the inevitable "only"--only if he had never had
that intoxicating first taste of another life.
His one glimmer of hope was that Cordelia might yet be able to sell a
short story or two for him. And with that glimmer came a sudden passion
to repay her in full for anything she might do. For once, and at last,
his time and energy were his own. Remembering this, he read again his
copy of The Unwise Virgins, and before noon of his first free day he was
deep at work on his reconstruction of that halting story.
The sense of freedom that came with such work appealed to him. His
liberated mind raced like a colt up and down the unfamiliar uplands of
the imagination. For three delirious, fleeting days he struggled and
battled with the manuscript, writing late into the night, losing himself
in his work, medicining his little worries with the great balm of
creation, with the unction of tangible accomplishment.
On the morning of the fourth day--a bright September morning with the
sparrows twittering and bustling busily about the sunlit housetops, he
received an unlooked-for note from Cordelia. He turned it over many
times wonderingly, and then opened it over his modest breakfast of
coffee and oatmeal porridge. In it was a crisp, spotless check for one
hundred and ten dollars and a playfully peremptory command to send on
another story at once. She ended with a line or two of congratulations,
and casually asked when she was to see him again.
These closing sentences were skimmed over almost unnoticed by Hartley.
One hundred and ten dollars! Never before had he been paid so
handsomely. He looked at the check again, and wondered just where he
could get it cashed. And still again he held it up to the light and
looked at it, and a great content stole over him. It was the beginning.
How bright that morning the sun lay on the housetops and chimneys, and
how the elevated trains whisked and danced and frolicked past his
vibrating window! The dust that hung over the city seemed a mantle of
soft gold. The smell of the open street was a new perfume to him.
He went back to his work happy, light-hearted, assured. He felt come
over him a new sense of power and freedom. With it the fires of creation
seemed to burn and rage within him. For all time the week that followed
remained a blurred and vague memory to him--a memory of hurried and
half-eaten meals of chuck steak and strong coffee, of much
tobacco-smoke, of feverish snatches at the fresh air by night, of
unsettled sleep and an aching anxiety to be once more at work. His brain
seemed to have taken the bit in its teeth and run away with him, though
not, he knew, as Cordelia's had once bolted despairingly over the same
pages.
When several days later he received a plaintive little note from that
lady herself, it remained unnoticed. Little Pietro Salvatore crept
timidly up to see him, but was not admitted. He could give no time to
the empty graces and accidents of life. He was in the world of the
spirit. The man in him flickered and went out; and the creator, the
artist, awoke, and taking possession of his soul, claimed its own.
How long this mood, or madness--he did not stop to ask which it
was--might have lasted he could never tell. But early one day a sharp
pounding on his door angered him unreasonably. When it had sounded for
the third time he answered it, and found a uniformed messenger-boy with
a note from Cordelia. He tossed it aside, and plunged once more into his
work. But three hours later he was interrupted again. This time it was a
telegram. He opened it belligerently and read it. It was from Cordelia.
He remembered that her note had asked something about when he could get
up to see her. Now she had wired, "You must come at once."
Hartley sighed wearily. Then he walked his room resentfully. Then, like
one awakening from a long sleep, he rubbed his eyes and looked
abstractedly up and down his litter of manuscript and notes. He tried to
go back to them, but some hand seemed leashing in his whimpering ideas.
The spell was broken. He sat back in his chair and stretched himself
wearily. He pictured a pale oval face, with its abundance of massed
golden-yellow hair like a great crown, and remembered the little hands
that seemed to flutter about like butterfly wings. And all at once his
room stood before him an unspeakably squalid and lonely place. He
wondered why he had been penning himself up for so long.
That afternoon, being unable to work, he walked twelve long miles and
blistered his feet and tired his legs. He was in bed, weary of both mind
and body before it was dark, and the sun was high before he wakened next
morning. The world seemed gray and flat. The singing April of
inspiration had passed. But he knew that he had broken the back of his
work. The foundations of his labor had been laid, and thereafter he felt
his toil on those half-completed twenty chapters of The Unwise Virgins
must be that work which is done in cold blood, critical, calculating,
dispassionate. But the thread of creation was snapped.
* * * * *
"I thought you were never coming," Cordelia lamented in her
unconsciously soft contralto, as he stepped into the Spauldings' large,
softly lighted library.
He laughed good-naturedly--he felt that a week of brain-work had burned
out of him some excess of solemnity--and with boyish precipitancy thrust
his twenty rough chapters of The Unwise Virgins into her arms.
"Behold my redemption!" he cried gaily, and felt that he should like to
follow the twenty chapters and be held there as she held the crumpled
leaves to her breast.
She had been waiting for him, and was dressed in a gown of old gold with
yellow roses at her throat and in her hair. He threw his admiration of
the picture she made into the glance he let linger abstractedly on her
face. For the first time he noticed some touch of trouble about her
quiet lips, a new tiredness about the pleading eyes.
"Why didn't you come?" she repeated, looking down as though half ashamed
of a weakness she could not conceal.
"Upon my honor," he laughed back at her, "I don't believe I should have
appeared within a month if it hadn't been for your message."
"How could you!" she said reprovingly.
"Well, a madness for work got hold of me, and I was up in the clouds. I
always have to gallop through things--that's why I didn't want to break
into the mood while it lasted."
"And it lasted?"
"Yes, until your wire came. Then I dropped down, I don't know how, with
a bump. It confronted me with the fact that I was still a human being;
it revitalized me, as it were, and reminded me that the softest voice in
all the world had been calling for me, and the sweetest eyes in all the
world had been looking for me."
Cordelia shrank back from him; he thought for a moment that he had
wounded her. The widened pupils of her eyes had grown smaller again, and
the shadow of something fugitive and far away flitted across her face.
Was she, he wondered, still so afraid of love?
"Then, you didn't finish the story?" she asked diffidently. It seemed
the first time that she had shown a desire to repel him.
He had stepped closer to her, warm with a feeling he tried neither to
fathom nor withhold. At this change in her he stopped short, bewildered.
"No." He tried to explain to her. "You said that I _must_ come."
"Oh!" said Cordelia coldly, vaguely; and all that evening Hartley
wondered what unknown trouble was weighing upon her spirit. As at other
times when similar inscrutable phases of her character had flashed
before him, he let the teasing little mystery of the moment pass without
attempting to probe more deeply into it. For he remembered that the real
key to her inner and truer self lay between the covers of her first
book, The Silver Poppy.