TATTERED COLORS
... We see
The sorrowing gods regretfully
Bar out the bird, but after all
How lightly song still leaps the wall!
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Lost Voice."
"But, after all, even without love, life is life," ventured Evelyn.
The older woman sighed as she answered: "Yes, it is life, my child,
but it is the axle of existence without grease."
From an unpublished manuscript of CORDELIA VAUGHAN.
Cordelia failed to understand why she should feel so nervous. She half
wished, as she climbed the long stairs leading up to Repellier's studio,
that she had kept her promise with Hartley, and spent the afternoon in
the open air, in the Park, with him. She idly wondered how many more
rides they should have together--as she pulled the dangling
rabbit's-foot which Repellier affected for a bell-rope--suddenly
whimsically curious to know if Hartley was missing her that afternoon.
The old artist himself answered the ring, greeting her with a face that
looked peculiarly aged and worn, she thought. As she stepped into the
studio, notwithstanding her desire for perfect self-control, she could
not help looking up at him with anxious and inquiring eyes--his
solemnity frightened her.
"Why, I'm the only one," she said, inadequately, glancing round the
large, airy-looking room, with its profusion of casts and sketches and
scraps of costume and old armor about the walls.
"I thought from your note, you know, that there would be--be others,"
she went on, buttoning and unbuttoning the white glove on her slender
wrist.
He asked her to be seated. "And won't you let me take your wraps?" he
said, still quite impassively.
"Thank you, no," she answered coldly. "I can stay for just a minute or
two."
"But this is important," he protested, still waiting dominantly, "and I
fear I may detain you."
She surrendered them reluctantly, and seated herself in the chair
stiffly, uncomfortably. She wondered why her heart should be beating at
such a rate. But she looked out at him with coldly inquiring eyes, and
with just a touch of indignation in the down-drawn corners of her thin
lips.
"The truth is, Miss Vaughan," he began slowly, "I want you to help me
out of a very great difficulty."
"Concerning what?" she asked nervously.
She was sitting in the full light of one of the broad-silled windows of
the studio, and the afternoon sun worried her eyes. She tried to shade
them with her daintily gloved hand.
"How long have you been writing, Miss Vaughan?"
"Almost two years; two _whole_ years, I mean. It's that long since I
really wrote my first book. Why?" Her eyebrows lifted superciliously.
"Would you mind telling me the name of that first book?"
"Of course not. It was The Silver Poppy."
The sun still worried her eyes, and she moved her chair uneasily.
"That was your only book?"
"Yes, so far."
He reached over to the table beside him.
"Did you write that book alone--I mean without help or guidance?"
"Quite alone!" she said distinctly.
He picked up a book from the table. It was Hartley's copy of The Silver
Poppy. A mounting wave of crimson swept over Cordelia's face, leaving
it, in turn, almost a dead white.
"One writes nothing quite alone," she added, smiling hastily. "I _did_
have a little help, perhaps, but it was very little!"
"That's better. Could you tell me just how much?"
"Every author, I think, absorbs things that--But am I a prisoner before
the bar?" she suddenly flashed back at him angrily. Then she saw his
quiet smile, and an answering smile came to her own pale lips. "Or is it
a--a joke?" she added.
"No," he said, "I'm afraid it's almost a tragedy."
"I don't understand," she said feebly.
"Perhaps I can help you to," he answered. "I have, for the first time,
just finished reading The Silver Poppy. Miss Vaughan, The Silver Poppy
was not written by you!"
She gave a little smothered cry of indignation, and started to her feet.
Repellier's stern eyes were looking closely, challengingly, into hers,
and she sank back in her chair again. Then she laughed a pitiable little
laugh, and a touch of color came into her pale lips.
"Mr. Repellier, I must beg of you not to play these practical jokes on
me. They are stupid, and besides, my nerves are not of the strongest.
The next thing, and you'll be declaring I have some rhetorical _alter
ego_ manufacturing my manuscripts for me!" Cordelia laughed again.
Repellier's eyes were not pleasant to look into as he gazed down at the
woman in the chair. She once more moved farther back out of the glare of
the lowering sun that still streamed irritatingly in through the window.
She opened her lips as though to speak, but remained silent. She was
thinking both hard and fast.
"This is far from a joke, Miss Vaughan. I repeat that you did not write
The Silver Poppy."
"Then--then why does it bear my name?" It seemed a fair enough question.
"Because you stole it!" he thundered at her.
"Mr. Repellier!" She drew herself up, flaming, flashing at him
unspeakable indignation.
"You--you are a coward!" she cried, as a gush of tears came to her eyes.
"Then I am mistaken?" he asked, icily, but more quietly.
"It is all too ridiculous," she said brokenly, over her handkerchief.
"You are more than mistaken. But I should like to know whether you mean
this for a joke, or an insult!"
"And on your word of honor as a woman, The Silver Poppy is your rightful
property?"
"It is my rightful property."
"And you wrote it out of your own head, with your own hand?"
"I wrote every word of it," was the low response.
"Would you mind telling me, please, just where and at what time you did
so?" he asked.
Cordelia rose to her feet impatiently.
"I did not come here, Mr. Repellier, to go into a criminal's
witness-box," she said tremulously, "and I cannot stay to answer
questions that are neither courteous nor rational. I'm afraid that I
really must be going."
She swept to the door.
"One moment, I beg of you, Miss Vaughan," cried Repellier after her. She
turned and faced him.
"You are misunderstanding me entirely. I haven't the slightest wish to
hurt or offend you in any way. I only want to clear up this mystery, so
that my knowledge of the facts may be a protection to you yourself,
should the occasion arise."
"A protection to _me_?"
"Yes, to you," he repeated. He motioned her toward the chair again. She
hesitated.
"Couldn't you write this to me? Couldn't you put it down on paper, and
then I could answer it in the same way. I hate mysteries, and I'm tired
this afternoon."
She looked at him almost appealingly.
"It will have to be talked over by us, face to face," he replied. And
there was nothing for her to do but to go back to her chair once more.
"Will you let me explain away the mystery as clearly and frankly as I
can?" he asked her.
"Certainly!"
Repellier, seating himself opposite her and still looking closely into
her face, could see the pupils of the now pale-green eyes contract
oddly.
"Three years ago one of the brightest and most scholarly editorial
writers on all Park Row was practically thrown into the street by the
paper for which he wrote, simply because they regarded him as a man who
had gone stale, who had written himself out. To his paper he was a
sucked lemon--a squeezed sponge. He was careless, good-natured, and
easy-going; and when he came to me for my advice I asked him: Why not
make a plunge, and write a book? He was not strong, however; in fact, I
had always suspected that he was consumptive, and before his book was
half written I saw clearly enough that he could not last long--at least
not here in the East. So I, among others, persuaded him to go
South--indeed, his doctor and his friends had to _drive_ him away. So
off the lonely, broken fellow went to a little town in Kentucky to
finish his beloved book. Ah, I see you follow me! I myself was on the
point of sailing for Europe--I had to go--and was abroad for over a
year. But during that last night we were together in New York he read to
me what he had already written of his Great Work. I remember it more or
less well--certain things about it stand out distinctly. Long before I
came back to New York he was dead, poor fellow. I always thought that
his book had died with him. For the first time yesterday I read The
Silver Poppy."
He paused, and looked at her searchingly.
"Miss Vaughan, this dead man's book and The Silver Poppy are one and the
same creation!"
Her eyes were luminous, and were riveted on his face. All color had
faded out of her cheek, and in the dim light her skin looked
greenish-yellow and dead. She did not speak for several minutes.
So it was all to end like this! That was the thought which pirouetted
insanely up and down the foreground of her consciousness.
"You--you don't mean," she cried huskily, "you can't mean that you
believe I--I stole this book?"
"You have refused to let me believe anything else," he answered, without
a trace of feeling in his voice.
"But you would not--you dare not make any such--any such absurd belief
public!" she cried, leaning closer toward him. The room grew unendurably
hot and close, and the walls seemed reeling and swaying about her.
"You would not!" she cried again, in a higher key, putting her hand up
to her head.
Their eyes met. She saw but one thing, and that thing was that there
dwelt no touch of kindness or commiseration on his face.
"I have my duty to the dead to perform!"
"But they're lies, all lies!" she cried shrilly.
"That, you will have every chance to show when the time comes!"
"They are lies!" she echoed, dazed.
For just a moment he hesitated, perplexed, perhaps almost doubting. He
stood before her with a face almost as white as her own.
"Will you swear before God, your Maker, that this is the truth, and
nothing but the truth?"
She stood before him, with her eyes still fixed on his.
"I swear before God, my Maker, that this is the--No! No! I will _not_!"
she cried hysterically. "I will not! It is all some trick, some cowardly
trap! Who are you--who _are_ you, to degrade me in this way? Who are
you, that I must answer to you as to a judge? You are detaining me here;
you are holding me a prisoner against my will!"
He held up his hand restrainingly.
"Yes, who are you?" she went on wildly, catching ludicrously at
ineffectual trifles, as the drowning do. "Who, indeed, _are_ you? You,
with your pharasaical long face and your own underhand schemes? You,
closeted alone with married women--with a woman who has made a fool of
herself for you, who can't even hide her infatuation! Who are you, who
have come into a home and stolen an honorable wife's love away from her
husband--who are you to sit up and prate of honor and honesty?"
Again he threw up his hand, as though to ward back her termagancy, but
she was not to be stopped.
"Yes, who are you to sit in judgment on me, a woman, alone in the world,
a woman who has asked nothing of you! If you are so immaculate," she
mocked, "if you are so above suspicion, denounce me as the thief you
have said I am! Denounce me; but do not forget that you yourself will
soon stand before the world in your true colors!"
He tried to silence her, but her passionate torrent was not to be
stayed.
"No, of course not," she went on in her fury. "Of course it hurts when
it's the other way! But when you strike at _my_ name you plume yourself
on being a hero, and prate about your debt to the dead!"
She stopped, at last, panting, out of breath. Her thin hands were
shaking with the paroxysm of her fury, and her lips were bloodless. "Oh,
if I were a man!" she cried at him. Then she sank into her chair, still
breathing heavily, scarcely knowing where her fierce torrent of
vituperation had left her.
"But you wouldn't do this wrong, you wouldn't?" she almost pleaded,
holding her hand over her heart. "You don't know how hard I've struggled
for my place in the world; you don't know what I've gone through; what I
have suffered and known! Do you--do you think I would give that all up
now, lightly, and without a word--and for an empty mistake? Do you
think," she cried with a rising and more defiant voice as her strength
came back to her again, "do you think that I would let any one come and
rob me of this, without fighting them to the end? Do you think that
because I'm a woman I can't fight? that you can throw me down in the
dirt and walk over me, without a word? Do you? _You fool!_"
Through that turbulent darkness a far-away glimmer of light came to her,
and she clutched at it eagerly.
"Now I will tell you the truth," she cried. "I will give you the truth
about your dead man and his book. It was I who worked and slaved for
that dead man. Without me his book would never have been written. While
you, who call yourself his friend, who rant about being his defender,
were loitering about the continent, I was at his bedside, tending him
and watching him, wearing myself out for him, and keeping the life in
him hour by hour. And it was to me, on his last day, that he gave the
book, with his own hands made me take it, what there was of it. It was
as much mine as his, he declared, and he gave it to me with his own
hand. Do you hear?--with his own hand! And it was I who worked over it,
and rewrote it word for word, and took it and made it my own!"
Repellier looked at her in silence for many minutes.
"But why did you take it?" he asked.
"It was mine! I had earned it!" Her eyes shone out at him hatefully. "I
had earned it, I tell you!"
Repellier seemed deep in thought; then a new firmness came about the
lines of his mouth, and he looked up at her.
"What new insult now?" she cried, tauntingly.
"It may be too late to repair the injustice to the dead, Miss Vaughan;
but I can and will at least step in to save the living!"
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean Hartley! Have you ever stopped to think how you're ruining that
man's life?"
"Ruined?--_his_ life ruined?"
"Yes, or it soon will be! And for his sake, remember, for his sake alone
I can make one final proposal to you. It is the only thing to do, and it
is very simple. I can offer you the choice of giving up Hartley, of
releasing him absolutely and completely, on the one hand, or of giving
up The Silver Poppy, and all it stands for, on the other!"
She caught desperately at her last straw.
"I would," she said. "I would--and could do it, but he--_he_ may refuse
to accept his freedom!"
"You must take the one or the other. As for Hartley himself, I think
when everything is laid before him plainly, he will see just how to
act!"
"You," she cried in horror, "you wouldn't do that? You wouldn't tell him
this--this lie?"
"I should have to; you have made it necessary."
"Him! Tell _him_!" she repeated, dazed. "You don't know how much he is
to me," she added wistfully. It was no longer the face of a girl that
looked up at Repellier. It was that of a woman, touched with age and
sorrow.
"That is no reason why _his_ life should be soured and broken, no reason
why he should go on in the way he has been doing."
"But they're lies! He would know they were lies!" she cried, her anger
seizing her once more.
"He would know they were lies! He knows and believes in me! He loves me!
If I told him, he would _kill_ you! But you wouldn't tell him--you
wouldn't tell _him_!" she cried again, reading nothing but
relentlessness in the other's face.
Repellier turned away from her, sick of it all, degraded by it, demeaned
by her very passionate mendaciousness, but still resolute.
"I will give you two days to think it over," he said wearily, "and
then--then I'll act on your decision!"
And she knew that he was in earnest.