DESINAT IN PISCEM, MULIER FORMOSA SUPERNE
... A life
By love's black frost all blighted and foregone,
Glad that it suffers not; with sorrow in
Its poor thin laughter sadder far than tears.
Ah, more than pain in that abysmal breast
Each broken, dark, irresolute delight!
JOHN HARTLEY, "Street Dust."
To wear love's brand you must bear love's burn.--"The Silver
Poppy."
It was the second morning after Cordelia's seemingly whimsical return to
New York that Hartley awoke in an indeterminate gray vapor of impending
evil. A feeling of chill nausea crept over him as he dressed, and, in a
sudden fit of weakness, he fell back on the bed, filled with the strong
man's unreasoning, weak terror of illness.
He ate no breakfast whatever, and, as the morning wore miserably away
and his torpor of mind and body seemed to increase, he at last ventured
dizzily out into the streets, looking up and down the little
French-Canadian city for the sign-board of an English doctor. He found
one, finally; and in response to his ring a homesick young surgeon just
over from London, after cheerily pounding him about and casually
looking down his throat, handed him an antiseptic gargle for
tonsillitis, and then talked for an hour of home, of the London
music-halls, and of his hatred for the Colonies.
When Hartley made his escape from the sickeningly odorous, drug-scented
little surgery, a new irrational hatred of the subdued, bustling,
big-roomed hotel took hold of him. Following a sudden impulse, he bought
a pair of heavy walking-shoes and a little leather knapsack, madly
determined by a few days of open-air tramping through the valley of the
St. Lawrence to walk himself once more into health and strength.
He had covered five dreary miles of what seemed endless, undulating dust
and gravel when he tottered weakly to the whitewashed palings of a
_habitant's_ cottage and gave up. Crawling and staggering to the door,
he incoherently cried for water.
The swarthy, keen-eyed little French doctor who, two hours later, came
bustling to his straw-mattress bedside, grew suddenly serious as he bent
over his stalwart patient, while the patient himself, as he sank from
soft gray heights of silence into black pits of torturing desolation,
listened languidly to a thin, far-away voice that seemed to be telling
somebody that he was in a bad way, with black diphtheria, and that above
all things he must be kept quiet, and must not be moved. It was the last
declaration that left the sick man so dreamily content. He felt that he
could rest there forever, almost--that nothing better could come to him
than to lie there for countless years, resting.
* * * * *
When, three days later, the Spauldings returned to New York with no news
of Hartley or his where-abouts, Cordelia went through a second day of
silent torture. She wrote to him twice, and, receiving no reply,
telegraphed in Henry Spaulding's name to Hartley's Quebec hotel for
information. No definite news could be given her, so she wrote to him
still again, imploring him to come back at once, saying that she needed
him, that she had much to confess to him and ask of him. In the course
of a few weeks her different letters were returned to her, unopened.
In those first days of silence and suspense she vacillated miserably
between two fears: one, that Hartley had already learned the truth about
The Unwise Virgins; the other, that Repellier had at last intervened and
written to him the actual history of The Silver Poppy. But in some way,
she knew, he had found her out.
At the end of a long week of tormenting uncertainty, in sheer despair
she flung herself into the currents of activity that rose about her,
like a hundred inviting Lethes, with the first success of The Unwise
Virgins. For the triumph of that volume did not long remain a matter of
doubt. Gaily designed posters, clustering flamboyantly about bill-boards
and blind-walls, about street-cars and elevated-railway platforms,
about even urban and suburban ash-barrels, told of its merits and its
unprecedented sales. More than one of the larger department stores gave
the volume a table by itself, above which hung a huge photographic print
of the authoress, showing the frailest of white shoulders emerging from
a swathing cloud of lace-work, and above them a face with femininely
appealing eyes and the pensive shadow of a half-bitter and yet
half-girlish smile. An English edition was soon called for, and was more
than moderately successful, while even The Silver Poppy itself appeared
in a new binding, to reappear still again as a newspaper serial, and to
bring yet a little more publicity to the young authoress, in the very
heyday of a fame for which it was commonly said she was at heart most
contemptuous.
Yet Cordelia flung herself into it all as into a cooling stream,
drugging herself during the following month or two with an incessant,
opiate rush of activity that, spread thinly, might easily have irrigated
a less tumultuous lifetime. The newspapers were full of her doings; one
day she was winning the prize in a world's beauty competition; another
day she was to go on the stage and star in a dramatized version of her
new book; and at still another time she was to return to the South and
devote the rest of her life to a cycle of novels dealing comprehensively
with American national life. Hanchett was commissioned to paint a
portrait of her for the Southern Women's Club; and, while she remained a
guest in the little, yellow-tinted study on Seventy-second Street,
there was never a day when either the yellow Victoria or the more
massive brougham of the Spauldings was not in use. But she had grown
strangely averse to many of her former friends, and Mrs. Spaulding soon
realized that the older feeling no longer held them together, though,
indeed, it was not until after the first announcements of Cordelia's
proposed lecturing tour that the yellow-tinted study was actually
deserted by her. When the author of The Unwise Virgins did migrate, she
sought apartments in one of the handsomest of those lower Fifth Avenue
private hotels, consecrated, in the words of Miss Short, "to
white-gloved attendants, lap-dogs, and opulent valetudinarianism."
Cordelia felt that there must be no shadow of excuse for her
enemies--and how many of them she had!--to claim that the social tide
had turned against her. The cost of these apartments frightened her a
little at first; but until they had been well photographed and the views
in turn reproduced in the evening newspapers, with appropriate
descriptions--until, indeed, she actually started out on her hurried and
yet much-heralded lecturing tour--she kept them up sumptuously, with a
studious recklessness of expense, receiving as her guests many
long-haired men and many heavy-jawed women, bristlingly aggressive of
intellect and eminence. Yet all of them, in her heart, she knew she
despised, though again and again she found it useless to fight against
her new strange dread of old friends, bitterly realizing that once more
her tree-like growth to fame must be marked by its new and
ever-widening circle.
Then came the lecture tour itself. It was preceded by a campaign of
advertising, artfully laid out by her manager, and in the end proved so
marked a financial success that Cordelia herself was assured--whatever
else might happen--of a generous competency for the remainder of her
natural life. And many times, brooding over and making the most of this
fact, she thought of those earlier and sadly uncertain days when she had
frugally washed out her own towel and hung it to dry before her little
studio window.
If the lecture itself--prepared by an expert in the employ of her
manager, and dealing gravely, yet with flashes of facetiousness, with
The American Woman--was a somewhat qualified success in the larger
Eastern cities, effetely tending to a flippant view of life's more vital
problems, Cordelia's tour through the South, and also the West, partook
not a little of the nature of a Roman triumph.
Not that this triumph was without its trials, from the blunt suggestion
of her manager that her next lecture deal with How I Wrote My First
Novel, to the long and agonizing night of nervous collapse after the
ordeal of her first appearance on the platform. Though frail in body,
she could withstand much, and was seldom ill. But the ordeal of that
first lecture had left her white and shattered and limp; and it was
then, the first time for many a long day, that she gave herself over to
tears. She wept long and bitterly, and walked the room of her hotel
till morning. Then she sent for a doctor, and clung to that kindly eyed
man, when he came, with the pitiful forlornness of a lost and homesick
child.
In many of the towns, particularly in the West, she became the guest of
different women's clubs, and sometimes after her lecture a reception was
held, and often hundreds of admiring and anxious-eyed women would press
up to shake her hand. Through all this she carried herself well, and
with a certain dignity. But many of those who met her at once remarked
how different she was from her pictures, and asked, perhaps a little
bewildered, just how young--or how old--she was.
When she lectured at Lexington her father came in secret--for she had
written to him pleading with him not to do so--to hear his wonderful
daughter, whom even he himself had never quite understood. And when,
toward the close of the lecture, the sound of quiet sobs rose from the
back of the audience, there was a dramatic moment when the woman on the
platform stopped speaking and caught hurriedly at the little table
beside her for support.
It was in her own State, too, that she delivered her much-talked-of
address on Motherhood before the Four-O'clock Club--an address which
later appeared in a tiny _édition de luxe_, and was looked on by certain
of her admirers as the most tender and most human utterance of all her
career.
There appeared but one small cloud on the horizon of all that open
success, remarkable for the unexpected strangeness of its appearance,
and notable because of the equal abruptness of its passing.
It was during the dull and quiescent days following the alleviatingly
active weeks of the lecture tour. Cordelia felt that she would go mad if
she remained longer with nothing to take up her mind. Her restless feet
had worn a dull pathway in the pile of the over-gaudy carpet that
ornamented her soberly magnificent apartment-hotel. In despair, she
turned once more to literature, and once more alone and most bitterly
she struggled to wrest from a reluctant Muse some solitary bay-leaf of
her own, some final shred of laurel to which no other hand might lay
claim, aspiring to climb once more to the pinnacle of that most
delectable mountain about whose dangerous fringe she had now fretted for
many months.
It was a courageous struggle. But it proved a futile one. Then casting
desperately about her, in a new-born terror of helplessness, hidden away
on the obscure shelf of an obscure library she stumbled across a badly
bound, age-yellowed little volume which bore the title The Spirit Child.
It had been conceived and written by one Florence Hitch, of Boston, and
dedicated to "all seekers after Truth and the Spirit." Could there be,
Cordelia asked herself, another such book so obviously dead and
forgotten!
It had, indeed, been lost to the world, unremembered this many a year.
But it still remained the first-born of that aspiring heart which had
once conceived and laid it in the lap of unapproving mankind. When, in
the despair on her new-found sterility, Cordelia made not ungenerous use
of that faded and grotesquely bound little volume, during the creation
of her own remarkable spiritualistic story which appeared in one of the
Sunday papers under the title of A Daughter of Dream, the fair
snapper-up of unconsidered trifles had anticipated no slightest word of
reproof. But that elderly maiden lady, Miss Florence Hitch, at once
beheld and recognized her first-born, stripped as it was of its original
swaddling-clothes, and with a maternal and quite natural fury proceeded
to fight to the end for her own. It was a spirited and moving struggle,
in which the daily press at once took issue, and though Miss Hitch
mysteriously and unexpectedly subsided at the end of a two-weeks'
warfare, and in carefully dictated phrases attempted to explain away the
entire matter as a singular and interesting example of literary
parallelism, lingering echoes of that disturbing explosion came to
Cordelia from quarters least expected. And those were most unhappy days,
when she sat waiting for her daily envelope of carefully labeled
articles and news items from her clipping agency, among which she
lingered for hours, like a pale dryad amid the thickly falling leaves of
autumn.
One November night of constant rain, when she could not sleep, her
brooding fancy half conceived the thing she was. John Hartley had once
told her of that strangest of sights, a salmon-run. She felt that she
must live a life like one of those poor creatures, that she must fight,
and push, and shoulder, and battle ever up some dark river whose tide
was ever against her--must struggle madly on, day by day, losing day by
day a little of herself, shoal by shoal and rapid by rapid shedding a
little of what had been best and beautiful in her, still panting and
pushing on for those unknown and cruelly distant head waters of peace,
into which she might finally creep a tattered and half-naked, hideous
thing, stripped to the vertebra, a toy of a passionate instinct stronger
than her own will, and sweeter, perhaps, than her own life.
Yet rest and peace was the one thing which she reached out for, in those
troubled days, with thin and futile arms, feeling, even as she did so,
that it could never be attained.
She at last determined, in a sudden fury of daring, that she would
endure it all no longer, crying out within herself that life owed her
more than it was giving. As a result of that new spirit of
audaciousness, she appeared early the next day at the studio of
Repellier; yet even as she stepped into the familiar, high-ceilinged
room she quailed inwardly, and found herself with little to say. She was
dressed in a tightly fitting whip-cord gown--her eye for outward apparel
had in no way dimmed--and on her breast she wore a huge bunch of English
violets. Repellier's quick eye noticed that her cheeks were rouged, and
that a touch of crimson had been added to her usually pale lips. During
all her brief visit she appeared ill at ease--so ill at ease that the
kind-hearted old Repellier did not have the courage to speak of anything
but the lightest commonplaces, even showing her his newer canvases and,
from his windows, pointing out to her the city muffled in rain.
When she rose to say good-by he went with her to the door, wondering why
she had not spoken, and marveling at the change in her. From his open
door he gazed after her, musingly. It was at the top of the stairs that
she turned hesitatingly back.
"Mr. Repellier!"
He waited for her to speak, though some subterranean medium seemed to
carry her words to him before they were uttered.
"Do you ever," she hesitated, "I mean have you ever heard anything
of--of Mr. Hartley?"
The picture of a humbled and half-wistful supplicant, of a woman
withered and broken, weighed down by the monotony and starvation of an
empty life, yet consumed by a still insatiable greed, of a being who had
grown old unwillingly, clinging there weakly to his baluster-rail and
looking back at him through the half-light of a gloomy hallway,
photographed itself indelibly on Repellier's memory, as there flashed
over him the incongruous image of Hanchett's new portrait of her, hung
but a week before in the hall of the Southern Women's Club, where, he
knew, she was to look down for all time from her great gilt frame,
beautiful to the eye, frail and tender, mysteriously seductive, the
drooping eyes luminous and mutely pleading, the mouth pensive, almost
pathetically weak in its excess of timorous femininity, the proudly
poised head weighed down with its heavy burden of golden-red hair, the
whole figure touched with a fervor hinting at the inner fire consuming
the all too frail flesh. It was Æschylean, Repellier felt, in its
piercing irony.
"Yes, I have heard from Hartley," he answered, slowly, as she raised a
suddenly vivid face to him. "He has been ill, and alone, for weeks."
"Ill!" she cried, in a hard, thin voice; and a baffled life seemed to
ebb away with that one little cry. Through the half-lights the woman did
not move.
"For six weeks the poor fellow lay ill with malignant diphtheria, in a
_habitant's_ cottage, below Quebec," Repellier went on, more
compassionately. "His strength did not come back to him, so they advised
him to take the sea voyage, on a freighter, round to New York. They had
a rough time of it, and they landed him here a little worse than when he
crawled aboard."
"And then?"
"He's been strengthening up in a Brooklyn hospital--only last week he
sent for me. I might as well tell you, Miss Vaughan, that he wrote to
you three times, from Canada, and that only yesterday, on his way to his
rooms to pack up his things, he picked up a copy of The Unwise Virgins!"
"And then--then you told him everything?" she whispered, tensely.
The old artist went over to her, and placed a hand gently on her arm.
"I told him only what I had to; the rest, I fear, he guessed." She drew
back from him quickly.
"It was better for you both, I know now," he said, with his hand still
touching her rigid arm. "And some day I think you will both forgive me
for it!"
She turned from him where he stood, and groped her way blindly down the
long stairs, her brain reeling with the mockery of it all, while her
heart still cried blindly out for the man who had crowned her with his
love, as she frantically told herself that she must still find him, and
that in some devious way it might not yet be too late.