THE MILL AND ITS GRIST
She dreamed not of the fight he fought
Till lo, he crept again
To her, with all his vows forgot----
Then, then she knew his pain.
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."
Humor is the tail to the kite of affection.--"The Silver Poppy."
"Oh, I'm disgusted with myself, with everything," said Hartley,
impatiently going to his window, where through the drifting rain he
could see the misty gray Palisades of the Hudson and a little scattered
fleet of sailing craft dropping down with the tide. Then he went as
impatiently back to his chair again.
"What's gone wrong?" asked Repellier, who had run up for a few minutes
when the darkness of the day had put a stop to his work to see how
Hartley was taking to his new quarters. "Is it the engine itself out of
order? Are you feeling fit, and all that?"
"Confound it, I don't know _what_ it is!"
"You're comfortable enough here?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
"No disquieting neighbors?" asked the other, casually glancing at a new
photograph of the author of The Silver Poppy in a heavy silver frame
that stood on Hartley's mantelpiece. "You know you're too young to
indulge in the luxuries--just yet."
"How do you mean?" asked Hartley, pulling himself together.
"I thought you might be falling in love. Young men have a habit of doing
that, you know."
"No, no; it's not that."
He glanced up and caught the quizzical look in his friend's eyes. "In
love, Repellier? I--in love! I couldn't be if I wanted to. I--without a
farthing, with a name to make, and a living to make first."
"The living doesn't count; that's a mere accident--with the artist, I
mean."
"Oh, yes; you successful fellows, who have covered yourself with
glory--you find it easy enough to cover yourself with--with flannel and
fine linen."
"But work only for the glory, the flannel and fine linen will take care
of itself."
"It sounds very pretty, but it keeps one--well, rather lonely and
hungry."
"Yes, but those things are all grist to your mill in the end.
Disappointment, loneliness, sorrow, every shred of experience, if you
only look at it in the right way, it's all your grist--if you're the
bigger and truer artist." Repellier himself went to the window and
looked out for a moment before he turned and spoke again. "And, by the
way, do you know the receipt for preserving a poet? It's very simple; an
empty stomach, an empty pocketbook, and an empty bed."
"It doesn't always hold," demurred Hartley.
"No, but as a rule the less Laura and the more sonnets, my young
Petrarch."
Before Repellier's musing and kindly old eyes at that moment drifted a
hazy memory--the memory of a pale, fragile girl in a Bath chair,
listening to the English skylarks on a terraced lawn. She had been
speaking to him, tremulously yet passionately, of her young Oxford
scholar, her hero; she had been telling of her great hope in him, of her
woman's fears for him, winning a friend for him there while she already
saw before her the valley of the shadow. "Oh, be kind to him! Be kind to
him!" she had cried impulsively, with her hand on her heart and the
tears welling to her mournful eyes.
Hartley remained moodily silent, and Repellier at last went over to him.
"Now before an old David leaves this tent of Saul, my boy, let me give
you a little advice. Try hard work. It's God's own anodyne. When the
heart gets down--and it will, you know--or the head goes wrong, work.
Work, man, work; that's my doctrine. You'll do your best when you are
either very happy or very miserable. But when in doubt, work; work like
a soldier, yet remember that the artist, like the soldier, can stand for
the worst as well as the best in man."
Hartley, pacing his room alone when Repellier had taken his departure,
knew all this to be true enough. But it could not do away with the
canker of unrest and self-disgust that seemed gnawing at the core of
his brain.
A dozen times that day he sat down at his desk, ready for work; and a
dozen times he got up in despair. The mood of impotence, of
dissatisfaction, was on him, and was not to be shaken off. He tried to
tell himself that it was not of the heart, that it was not love. The
very doubt brought its own answer. Eros, he felt, had a way of always
claiming his own.
As the disturbing scenes of the night before kept crowding mockingly up
into the foreground of his consciousness, he tried to hug to his
remembrance some alleviating happier sense of escape that had flashed
through him at the bathetic ending of it all. He persuaded himself that
he was still heart-free; if there had been a time when he had ever
questioned his attitude toward Cordelia, that time, he insisted, was now
past. If ever he should wander again, vehemently he told himself, it
must be with his eyes open, and with no extenuating madness of romance
to break his fall.
Those hours of cold reaction chilled him into something like his
old-time austerity. He decided to write to Cordelia and make everything
plain to her. It was a wandering and incoherent little note of
contrition, the cry of a troubled Hamlet to a still trusting Ophelia. He
had been entirely to blame. He had been thoughtless. He had been, too,
ungenerous and unkind to her. He wanted only to be reinstated as her
most loyal and truest friend. He did not deserve her trust, but he
intended to show her the depths of his remorse--O repentant and
heartless Adonis, how could you!--in the only way that lay open to him,
by striving to the last for her success, by helping her in every way
that he could, by laboring as he had never labored before on what should
be her great book.
It may have been only that last sentence which saved the lady so
sorrowfully addressed from tearing his letter into shreds. And the word
"friend" had hurt her above all things. But hereafter he should be the
supplicant.
Cordelia decided not to reply to his note. Restlessly and aimlessly all
that day and all the next he waited, one moment even half hoping some
impending estrangement would shake loose those ever-tightening shackles,
which he had begun to feel weighing heavily upon him, and the next
moment half dreading that any such freedom should come to him, cast down
miserably by the thought that she had in any way passed out of his life.
While this humor of unrest still hung over him he took down his brightly
bound copy of The Silver Poppy and read it through studiously, from
first to last. The sense of its exceptional power came to him once more,
as a revelation reiterated. He found it a book where the gleaner caught
at much which the more hurried harvester must miss, a book yielding, as
he felt all good books should yield, a new and unexpected delight in its
second reading. Outside the manifest strength and movement of the story
there was the secondary charm of a quiet and masterly touch. Its satire
was delightful and insidious, and through its merriest pages he found
the Touchstone-like pensiveness of one who knew and understood a sad old
wag of a world. He found in it, too--and this puzzled him most--still
that sense of eternally saving humor of which he had seen so little in
Cordelia herself. From page to page it flashed out at him, it tripped
him up, and danced about him. He began to understand the better why The
Silver Poppy had been called one of the novels of the year, even of the
century. He thought he saw now just what Cordelia had meant when she had
timorously asked him if he thought it possible that she had written
herself out in one book. That early, crocus-like flowering of the spirit
was no less beautiful because it was already over and gone with the
April of life.
Where in that little body had such wisdom and power once been packed
away? She had always seemed such a fragile, shell-tinted thing to him,
the wonder was that she had written a book at all, that in one eloquent
interval she had found a voice, and delivered her message. But was that
one work alone to stand the key to that strangely reticent soul of hers?
Had she, as with those little East Side fruit-shops he knew so well,
ranged all her stock in trade out on the public sidewalk, and left empty
the store itself?
The thought of a bewildered but aspiring artist, caged in a body so
incongruously frail and girlish, filled him with a pity for the
sorrowing laborer struck helpless in the midst of her work--for the
writing hand fallen helpless in the midst of its dreams. He suddenly
felt that he should be willing to go through fire and water to bring one
laurel leaf to that small, proudly poised head with its profusion of
yellowish golden hair. And with this mood the grayness seemed to go out
of the world. And still again he asked himself if this could be love.
"With a snub-nosed Helen, my boy," Repellier had once said, "there would
never have been a Trojan war." Hartley, valiant with the wine of his new
resolve, straightway began to wonder how or why he had so recently posed
as a second Schopenhauer to this same Repellier, and cried in disgust
that everything had already been sufficiently cursed or sufficiently
sung. His passion for work came back to him with a bound. The Cyrus of
unrest that had diverted his better thoughts from their natural channel
seemed to have marched on and left the Euphrates of his heart in full
flood once more. He knew that his vague mental acrisia had at last come
to a turn, and was to be followed by its violent fever to create, to
build.
In one illuminating moment he saw that the modern life about which it
was now his task to write was no less strenuous and no less varied than
the life of those earlier days toward which he had fallen into the habit
of looking back so regretfully. But it was in the inner rather than in
the outer life, he felt, that the greater intensity and interest were
now to be found. It was the mental career of men and women that was
becoming more complex and more varied; and it was in this, he saw, that
the broader and more enduring field of the novelist lay. At times,
indeed, the alluring complexity and bewildering activity of this inner
subjective world spread before him like an endless valley of untrodden
twilight, shot through with some emotional golden glory of
retrospection. And he longed for some fuller power to pierce into it,
and grasp it, and interpret it.
With this elemental touch of rapture still clinging about him he went
back to his manuscript of The Unwise Virgins. The spell of The Silver
Poppy too seemed, in some way, still pregnantly close to him, and
through some little trick of the hand or mind he found himself from time
to time dropping into the touch of that earlier effort.
He began at the first and rewrote the entire book. Whipping his earlier
erratic chapters into line, he quirted and corralled the herd of them
into one unified, crowded whole. He went at his manuscript with a trace,
almost, of the madman in him as he worked. Sometimes he ate, and
sometimes he forgot to, or refused to spare time for it. He worked late
into the night; sometimes all night long. He worked as he had seen
Oxfordshire farmers working at raising bees, under stress and the cry of
excitement, lifting and heaving beyond his natural strength, with an
ardor that was to leave him stiff and sore, yet with the balm of knowing
that one hour of exhilaration, to the artist, was worth its day of
depression.
When his brain balked he lashed it on with strong coffee and stimulants,
living, most of the time, on tobacco and innumerable milk-punches. He
saw no one, and he wanted to see no one. It lasted two, almost three
weeks; he was not sure, for toward the end he lost count of the days.
But the end came at last, and he awoke one evening and discovered that
his face had been unshaved for days, that his eyes were bloodshot and
sunken, that he was hollow of cheek and shaken of nerve, and that he was
unspeakably hungry. His brain seemed a sponge that had been squeezed
dry, to the last bitter drop, and he felt old, listless, worn out. But
even through that dull pain of fatigue he felt the mysterious and
inextinguishable flame of happiness, of triumph in accomplishment.
All his work, he knew, was not yet done, but the pill was there, as he
put it, and the sugar coating could be applied later, and at his
leisure. The structure was there; he could take his own time and go in
his own way about the removal of the scaffolding. But the days of sweat
and noise were done.
That was the way, he felt, that he would always have to write, racing on
to the end, with the wind in his ears while it lasted. It was a costly
way, perhaps, and an unsafe one; but with him it would always have to be
the only way. A sense of the mystery of creation had seized him at
times, the thought that the thing born of the travail of the mind came
not from within, but from some unknown source without; that it was
inspirational; that it was the cry of a voice not always his own.
With the hand of this mystery Hartley tried to brush away the
incongruity that existed between The Silver Poppy and the character of
the woman who had written it. Cordelia herself, he argued, might have
known her moments of spiritual metamorphosis. Into her fingers, too,
might have been thrust a tool more potent than the hand that held it.
Yet he felt that his work was his own, and as his own he took an
indefinable, jealous pride of ownership in it. But it had been done for
another; and if in this case the tool had fallen to him and had been
denied her, how little less hers than his, he tried to tell himself,
were the pages before him.
Some busy little spider of delusion seemed to have woven its web across
a corner of his mind, and he could not think the problem out as he
wished to.
Then the reaction set in. He went out into the freshness of the night
air, hoping to brush away that tenuous film of doubt and bewilderment
that still teased his thoughts. His face was flushed and hot, but a
chill, beginning in his limbs, had seized his body, and tingling little
feet of ice seemed running up and down his back. He sniffed at the fresh
river air, and remembered that he had taken no exercise of late, that
the engine, as Repellier called it, had been overdriven and neglected.
He had a sudden desire to get away from the quietness and loneliness
that hung about him. He wanted to get down into the thick of the city
and feel life pressing against his sides.
The wind chilled him, so he turned southward and walked aimlessly down
through what had ever seemed to him the veritable backyard of all New
York. The desolation of those quiet streets drove him Eastward, and
dragging his way down the light-spangled, wave-like rise and fall of
Amsterdam Avenue, he plodded onward until the flaring sign of a
restaurant caught his eye. He went inside and sat down at a little
table, and there he ate ravenously--he scarcely remembered what.
Then his spirit of unrest came over him again, and as he wore his way
southward he felt that he should like to see Chatham Square once more; a
caprice to smell the air of the slums came over him. But his old
quarters, he remembered, were too far away to be seen that night. So he
turned down into lower Fifth Avenue, and wandered idly on, gazing at
times up at the quiet stars, and the great white cross of light that
shone from the Mission House, over the Arch and tangled tree tops of
Washington Square. Then the lure of lights to the south caught his eye,
and he drifted into Thompson Street, turning once more erratically
eastward, while for a moment a sudden dizziness came over him and he had
to lean against an iron railing for support. Before him the clustered
globes of an Italian music-hall chanced to flare its invitation to all
passers-by, and he stumbled in, glad of an opportunity to rest. He
groped his way to the half-underground ill-smelling bar and asked for
wine. There he drank three glasses of acid and biting Chianti, and felt
better. He was still weak and dazed, however, so he stepped into the
crowded music-hall at the rear, and sank limply into one of the vacant
chairs.
The odor of tobacco and garlic reeked in the air, and an orchestra of a
half-dozen pieces was crashing out a medley of operatic selections.
Olive-skinned venders of fruit, stoop-shouldered ragpickers, hard-handed
organ-grinders, all sat and looked with rapt faces toward the diminutive
proscenium-arch at the end of the hall, beyond which was a lurid
painting of the Bay of Naples. When Signorina Elisa Venezia came to the
footlights and sang a Venetian boat-song--it took Hartley back to the
night of Repellier's birthday party--a low-browed Neapolitan sitting
next to him pounded on the table with his beer-glass, and the sudden
applause and shouting was deafening, volcanic. He wondered at the fire
of their Latin enthusiasm. An ape-like old man tottered and mumbled
through the gesticulating crowd, selling meal-cakes. When a corpulent
woman in a tawdry yellow costume, swaying her huge body to the throb of
the music, sang an Italian love-song that seemed familiar to the crowd,
the ape-like old man crouched down on the edge of his blackened basket
and listened to the end, with fixed, filmy, eager eyes.
The scene of a sordid and toil-hardened people finding solace in music
brought home to Hartley how much he himself had been missing from life;
how narrow, of late, his days had grown to be. The chance to wring out
of existence its richest wine was before him, had been thrust upon him,
and he had neglected it.
As he walked wearily home through the cold night air he determined, with
a sudden passionate clutching of his hands, to take what was his due, to
grasp at what lay before him in life. He was tired of all empty and
enslaving work; the tide had met its turn. A Nietzsche-like madness to
throw open his man's arsenal of instinct, a longing to fling his weight
against every iron law that seemed, at the moment, to choke and overrun
and stultify life, filled him with a sense of tingling opposition. To
battle Byronic-like against convention, to ride the whirlwind like the
old gods of life, but to fight always, and for all things--that seemed
to him life, and the best of life.
And in something that was almost delirium, in one white flash of
inspirational, subliminal clearness, came to him the first ideas of his
poem on War--a poem which he worked out feverishly, yet not unhappily,
during the next few days of culminating weariness and illness, little
dreaming of the part it was soon to play in lives other than his own.