WAS EVER POETESS THUS MADE?
My astral messenger then turned her eyes
In sad tranquillity unto that night
Wherein the temple of the summit lies,
And spake unto my ear:
"'Tis more the fight
Than all the idle guerdons to be won;
It is the worship though the gods be mute;
So keep thou still thy face unto the sun,
Since art is not the goal, but the pursuit."
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Goddess Speaks."
Art is the china of sentiment packed in the sawdust of sense.--"The
Silver Poppy."
"How would you like to make two hundred and fifty dollars this
afternoon?" asked Cordelia calmly, as she stood before Hartley,
comfortably muffled in her new chinchilla hat and coat.
"Oh, don't tempt me," he laughed, as he deferentially enthroned her in
that great green-backed library chair, which by perhaps its mere
voluminous somberness always seemed to touch her strangely into a new
youth.
"But what would you do for it?" she asked teasingly, yet with a tacit
seriousness of mind, for she felt that his new manner of life was more
and more bringing about the necessity for a larger income.
"Do for it? I should be ashamed to say," he laughingly confessed,
wondering at the troubled brow and the cold, judicial sobriety of her
eyes.
She handed him a typewritten note, waiting in silence until he had
finished reading it, and had looked up at her with an inquiring glance.
The letter was a hastily written request from the editorial office of
one of New York's most variedly sensational newspapers, urgently asking
for a few hundred words from the author of The Silver Poppy on the
Influence of War. The newspaper in question had of late essayed to carry
on what had become a somewhat heated controversy as to the relation
between war and religion, while its eloquent young editor daily
expounded his conviction that in the present corrupt condition of
mankind war was not only quite reconcilable with true Christianity, but
was actually a remedial agent, tending toward progress and civilization.
He conceded that it might be an evil, yet was not evil.
"Now let me explain," broke in Cordelia. "This afternoon I suddenly
remembered that you had just the thing they wanted--you brought it up
and read it to me the other Sunday after we'd had dinner at the Casino."
He winced at the little irony of accident, yet remembering consolingly
that even a Horace had framed his bucolic idyls sipping Falernian in
citied ease within a stone's throw from the Palatine, he waited in
silence for her to continue.
"I mean those lines, of course--I think you called them The Need of
War--where you say collision is a law of progress and all life is
warfare and that we're perpetually fighting, although we never dream it,
and even our bodies themselves are eternal battle-grounds."
"But that thing would never do," he cried in astonishment.
"Oh, yes, it would," she answered easily. "All it needs is a change or
two at the beginning, and perhaps a line here and there to make it more
specifically local, or rather, American, in application."
"But it's not what newspapers print or care to print."
"It's a beautiful thing," she cried. "They'd jump at it." And then she
added, as an after-thought, "If it had been written by any one with a
name."
"That's just it," he explained. "The offer hasn't been made to me, you
see."
"Yes, I know," she began. "And that's why I hesitated about suggesting
the thing."
He seemed to be weighing the matter, and she waited for him to speak.
"Of course it's awfully good of you to extend the offer to me at the
last moment, and all that sort of thing. But I know well enough this
paper would never think of offering _me_ any such sum for the lines."
She looked at him steadily.
"They would if it appeared over my name."
"But I couldn't ask you to do that--and for a mere matter of money," he
cried.
"I would gladly, for you."
"But it would scarcely be fair, either to you or to me."
She almost hated him, she felt, when he stood so proudly behind that
old-time integrity of character of his. Even as she argued, though, she
secretly hoped against hope that he would hold out, that he would defeat
her where she stood. Then remembering again more than one scene of
inward humiliation over what he seemed to have accepted as her womanly
proneness to tangle the devious skeins of ethics and expediency, a touch
of the tyrant came to her once more.
"I _want_ you to have this money," she pleaded. "It's only right that
you should. You need it--_I_ have made you need it."
He turned to her suddenly as he paced up and down the room.
"Isn't there any possible way of obviating the--the deception?" he
asked.
The mere utterance of that question told her that the problem had been
solved. Perhaps the quiet and businesslike manner in which it had been
presented to him had robbed it of its more abstract significance, had
enabled it to be smuggled into him in the sheep's clothing of a
commercial commonplace. Perhaps he was more embarrassed--in a financial
way--than she had dreamed, and now that he had sunned himself on the
warm sands of respectability, dreaded another plunge into the chilly
depths of a second poverty.
"I don't see any way out of it," she answered. "I suppose, unless you
have an inkling of newspaper ways, such things have a tendency to shock
you?"
"I know a _little_ of their ways that are dark," he interpolated,
thinking at the moment of the United News Bureau.
"But this is only one of the thousand and one tricks of a very tricky
trade. And it really amounts to about the same thing as the signed
article young reporters write for an illiterate prize-fighter or a
rather stupid prima donna. At any rate, is it any worse?"
"But would there be any means of finally correcting the--the error of
authorship?" he asked.
"Is it the loss of the poem?" she began.
"In one way it is, perhaps, and in another way it isn't."
But was this ethical Cæsarean section, he wondered, the only means of
bringing his belated offspring to light?
"I can understand that; it's a beautiful thing."
"But if I have written one I still have the power to write another." It
was the master losing himself in the message, the parent dying for the
child.
"Of course, but you mustn't--_please_ don't think for one moment that I
want to lay claim to it, now or at any time. I'm not a poetess, as you
know, and never could be one."
He fell to pacing the room once more.
"I was only thinking," she went on with slightly compressed lips, "of
you when I came to suggest the thing."
"I know, and it was very generous of you," he answered, as he began
rummaging through his manuscripts for the lines.
"You've written this thing, and, as you say, it lies in your power to
write something as good, or better. You've confessed you see no way of
getting rid of it, so, after all," she said wearily, "it's only a matter
of two hundred and fifty dollars."
Hartley looked up at her coldly.
"No, it's a great deal more than that," he said gravely, turning away
from her again. "Much more. But to be candid, just at the present moment
I am painfully in need of--of money. And I don't feel like arguing the
ethics of it all out to-day as I ought to do." Then he sighed heavily,
and added, "But I wish I were free."
So the offer was accepted and Cordelia carried away with her the
manuscript of The Need of War, troubled and weighed down with an
indeterminate sense of humiliation, yet feeling that out of the ashes of
that humiliation might ultimately rise the towers of a new strength.
As for the poem itself, she thought little about it; she was no lover of
blank verse. Her one consolation seemed to be a feelings--tragically
feminine--that she had drawn down to her a figure that before had always
seemed to shadow and chill her with its shadowy immaculacy.