THE SIGNS OF BLIGHT
Some love your songs, but I who know
The happier touch of lips whence flow
These notes that all men turn to praise
Loved you, the singer, all my days;
And longing, listening, loving, I
Have waited till the song should die--
Till you, the singer, came to bless
My lips with your own lips' caress.
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Silent Hour."
Amid all his chaff were phrases that got down the neck of one's
memory and tickled like barley-beards.--"The Silver Poppy."
"Oh, my poet, my poet, what have they been doing to you?"
It was Miss Short who spoke, looking up at Hartley with surprised and
honestly reproving eyes. They had met by accident on upper Broadway, as
he was on his way to the tea-room of a Fifth Avenue hotel. Both her tone
and manner nettled him.
"Am I so changed?" And he laughed uneasily.
"Why, yes, my poor lost hero, and you're getting fat--no, not exactly
fat, but prosperous looking. But a fat poet--it is awful! It sounds
worse than a Hercules with French heels. It's as incongruous as an angel
eating corn-mush. And who wants a fat poet? His corpulency would always
be hinting to you that he was too trimly built, too well ballasted, to
be in danger. He's too contented to be interesting. Who's going to
thrill with anxiety over a mud-scow swinging in three feet of oily
water?"
"Thank you," said Hartley coldly.
"But seriously, you haven't given up the--the open sea?" Miss Short
asked him in a softer voice. This grandiloquence of metaphor wearied
him.
"Yes, I think I have. It's all very fine out there, but it doesn't pay
for the wear and tear on the hawsers. And then there's one's bread and
butter; and in New York they can give you so many nice jams to go with
it."
"I knew it, I knew it! I never saw a boy come to this city yet who
didn't have the rose-tint taken out of his dreams about the same time
the rose-tint was taken out of his cheeks. I _said_ your accent wouldn't
be as broad when you'd finished with us--nor your views, either."
"No man can live by verse alone."
"It's not that; it's what the verse and all that stands for. You know
what The Silver Poppy says, 'A song in the heart is worth two in the
book.'"
She looked up at him with almost a kindly light on her rough, mannish
face as she said good-by.
"My poet, don't, don't let them break you on the golden wheel of their
happiness!"
Hartley did not enjoy his cup of Golden Tip that afternoon with Cordelia
and two voluminously over-dressed young ladies whom she spoke of as "the
Slater girls." Their chatter irritated him, and for once there seemed
something sickly, unnatural, exotic, about the overheated air of an
overfurnished hotel which existed, as he remembered a compatriot of his
had exclaimed, "to provide exclusiveness for the masses."
He knew that it, and all it held, stood for those very conditions of
life against which he had once rebelled so vigorously. With its glitter
and gliding, did it, he asked himself bitterly--after all, did it
represent the fulness of life?
"Why are you so quiet to-day?" Cordelia asked him, reprovingly, under
her breath. He had noticed of late a certain outward hardening about her
at times--she seemed to him like a judge steeling herself for some
impending sentence that must be passed.
"It's the ghost of a dead radical rising up against gold-leaf and cut
glass," he laughed.
"Oh, yes, you used to be an anarchist, or something like that, didn't
you?" she said wearily.
"Not _quite_ that."
"I wanted you to be nice to these two girls. I thought I told you they
were my publisher's daughters?"
She noticed his half-sinister smile.
"Some day," she said almost angrily, "you'll learn that nothing succeeds
like success, my moody young Hamlet." And for the rest of the afternoon
she avoided him.
He was not sorry when a chance came for his escape. The very stale, dull
flatness of the trite and contemptible spiritual drama in which he was
playing an involuntary leading part depressed and sickened him of it
all. It brought with it not even the consolation of largeness--it was
all flaccid, neutral, outwardly insignificant. But he felt that unseen
hands were building a wall between him and his freedom, even while, at
the core of things, some miserably minute germ seemed tainting his life.
And if he could not still have health and liberty, he would at least
have elbow-room. The startled question of Miss Short still rang in his
ears: "My poet, my poet, what have they been doing to you?"
What, indeed, had they done to him?
Once out in the fresh air and alone, he felt more satisfied. Facing the
rough wind, guiding his own course through the crowds--this gave him a
flattering sense of momentary independence, a passing taste of some
liberty long proscribed. He turned up Fifth Avenue and made his way
toward the Scholar's Gate, determined to walk off the last little demon
of moroseness that hung at his heels.
It was a clear, sunny afternoon, yet with a touch of chilliness in the
air, a premonition of winter in the wind. It made people step more
briskly, and Hartley noticed that many of the women in the street, and
also those in the passing carriages that drifted up and down the Avenue
in alternate tides, were already warmly wrapped in furs. The wind was
westerly and biting, and its sudden blasts at the different cross-town
street corners sent the dust eddying up and down the crowded sidewalks.
Beyond the comparative quietness and gloom of the regular brown-stone
cañons of the upper Forties, so uniform in aspect it seemed some
mysterious fluvial erosion might have gorged them out of the one
gigantic rock-bed, Hartley could see the familiar dim blue line of the
Palisades, with the late afternoon sun dropping down crimson and big
behind them, touching softly and into a golden mist the flying dust that
hung over the city. And it could be a beautiful city, he thought, at
times, as he gazed before him at the long line of airier, lighter,
crowded architecture that overlooked the waning greenness of Central
Park.
He threw himself with delight against the buffets of the wind and the
sting of the cold. It seemed almost like an escape to that simpler and
more strenuous life for which he had looked in his earlier years--those
lost years of youth and liberalism. It brought back to his mind his many
tramps over the Oxfordshire hills, memories of journeys to Bagley Wood,
to Cumnor village and Abingdon, to Iffley, and above all to Woodstock
village, and the warmth and lights of the great hall after the hours of
mist and coldness. A momentary pang of homesickness and longing for his
beloved Oxford shot through him. The old gray city of bells and ivy
seemed calling him through the alien twilight. Some day, he thought,
should the worst come to the worst, he could creep back to the quietness
of that old college town on the Isis, where it seemed always evening,
and everything seemed always in the evening of life.
But could he ever go back? he suddenly asked himself. Could he creep
back to the gray corridors and the quiet shadows and the little gardens?
Could he, indeed, after knowing that taste of the wider and more
challenging life, after touching to his lips the intoxicating cup of the
outer world?
He walked home through the gathering dusk still unhappy, but more quiet
of mind and more resolute of spirit.
"When in doubt--work." That was what Repellier had said to him, and that
was what he did. For all the next day the quietness and loneliness of
his rooms weighed heavily upon him, but burying himself in his last
revision of Cordelia's book, he remained at his desk, stoical and
determined. Each night, though, oddly enough, before he turned out his
lights and went to bed, he wrote to Cordelia. Just why he did this he
scarcely knew. His letters were not love-letters in the strict sense of
the word, though through them ran a strain of tenderness, alternating
with a note of loneliness, that made them seem very beautiful letters to
the author of The Silver Poppy, and, perhaps, accounted for more than
one sleepless night on her part. She replied to them, sometimes almost
against her will, in a note as tender, yet quite as restrained. She
complained that she, too, was often lonely there in the Spauldings' big
house, and felt that she would not be sorry when they came back once
more. She was glad he had returned to his work. And she wanted him to
feel that she had never in any way stood between him and his great
dreams, and never willingly or knowingly would do so.
On the evening of the following Sunday Hartley was interrupted in his
task of tying together the pages of his completed manuscript by the
appearance of Repellier.
He seemed the same old Repellier to Hartley, with the same merry smile
and the quiet eyes that had always silently reminded the younger man
that he was still young and that youth can never know tranquillity. But
about the older man on this occasion, for all his quietness of demeanor,
there clung an air of unusual sternness.
"Are you busy?" he asked, as he beheld the paper-littered desk. "I only
dropped up to borrow a book of yours that you've often spoken of--The
Silver Poppy. I've been overworking, they tell me, and for the rest of
the week I'm going to loaf."
He confessed, as Hartley gladly enough produced the volume, that he had
never as yet read it--his days had all been so taken up that he got
little time for the newer fiction. But only that morning he had picked
up an old newspaper notice of the dramatized story and had been
unusually interested by it.
"It's rather clever?" Repellier asked, taking the book and skimming
through it where he stood. Something in his question seemed almost
laughable to the younger man.
"It will open your eyes," was all he said, however.
"I hope it will," said Repellier, slowly closing the volume and
slipping it meditatively into his pocket. Then he looked at the still
smiling man and asked:
"Are you writing any short stories now?"
"Not now; but I want to."
"Any verse?"
"No--nothing worth while."
"Novels?"
"Not quite."
"Would you like a good plot for one?"
"That all depends," answered Hartley, motioning his visitor to an
armchair.
"Well, let me tell it to you, anyway. Then you can think it over by
yourself and see if there's anything in it. May I?"
"Indeed, yes."
"This story that I've picked up begins rather oddly, but it runs this
way: On an island--I think it's called Muciana, at the mouth of the
Amazon, a surveying party found a mysterious skeleton, or rather
portions of a mysterious skeleton, half buried in a sand-bar. This
skeleton puzzled biologists very much; it seemed to indicate there was
some possibility that the once mythical creature known as the man-eating
vampire really existed--that somewhere about the head waters of the
Amazon actually lived or had lived pterodactyli of enormous size, much
larger than the common enough blood-sucking bats of the lower
river--which to-day, as you know, rather relish a sip or two of any
warm-blooded animal. Many of these bones were strangely human in
appearance, but attached to what remained of the skeleton were a pair
of powerful and perfectly formed pterodactyl wings. All efforts to piece
together this strange creature were a failure, and in the end it was
given up as impossible. But am I boring you?"
"No; it's interesting."
"Well, now we have to go back to the beginning of our story, and perhaps
to the most interesting part of it. We find a professor of zoology--a
German--somewhere up about the head waters of that mysterious river.
Devotion to his beloved science has brought him to that dark corner of
the globe. We find him drifting happily about the twilight forests in
search of the man-eating vampire about which he must have heard strange
rumors from the natives of the lower Amazon. We find him alone in a
small boat, making his desolate way along some unknown tributary of the
upper river. I needn't stop to describe his loneliness or the hardships
and suffering and days of doubt through which he passed. But finally in
some dark and undiscovered land of solitude he and his vampire came face
to face. They closed in on one another, and he in the end captured it,
though only after a bitter struggle. Yet, gently as he had treated his
foe in that struggle, he could not help injuring it a little--in fact,
it _had_ to be subdued. His one object then was to get down to the
seacoast and back to the world with his prize, of course, while it was
still alive. And his one fear was that it would die on his hands. He
took it in his little boat with him and treated its wounds and fed it,
and together the strange couple made their way down the river. But the
journey was a long one. Before it was half over his provisions began to
give out. He had not counted on the vampire, you see. But still he kept
on, hoping against hope that he would reach help in time. His one dread
still was that his prize would die. So day by day he ate a little less
and gave a little more to his prize. But day by day his strength was
failing him, and day by day, I suppose, he grew more afraid of the
vampire. Then the time came when he had to decide whether he or the
other should have the last scrap of his food. Finally he flung it to the
Vampire. Then, in some way, he knew that he was no longer master; from
that hour he was the captive. There was a brief, and I suppose, a bitter
struggle. The man could no longer control that winged Hunger. It broke
the cords that held it down, the two bat-like wings opened wide, and
when they came together they enclosed the still struggling man. In that
last battle for life the little boat was overturned. The two went down
under the yellow water, and their descent, we'll say, was marked by
nothing more than a line of bubbles. But even in death the wings of that
man-eating creature did not draw back from the bones of its victim.
Locked together, the two of them were washed down to the sea. The
current carried them up on a sand-bar, and there they rested. There they
found them, years afterward, I suppose it was, and when men tried to
piece together what was left of the strange bones they failed. It was,
as you know, not altogether either man or vampire."
There was a moment of unbroken silence.
"That's all," said the older man, getting up.
It was Hartley who spoke next.
"What the devil are you driving at, anyway?"