The Silver Poppy — Reading Notes

There was a moment's silence, while Repellier seemed to be looking down at her.

"If you promise not to break his heart, Miss Vaughan."

A woman's low, quiet little laugh drifted softly through the night air. Hartley tried to look at the Great Bear, and not listen to more.

"Here's my hand on it." Then the jesting voice grew suddenly serious. "But women's hearts never break nowadays, do they? They only wither." Hartley, who had grown hot and cold through his six feet of embarrassed bone and nerve, was dimly conscious the next minute of Repellier's leading over to him a slim-looking figure in yellow.

Women accept the confusion of stalwart manhood, it has been said, as the profoundest tribute to their own power; and after Hartley had murmured something about the honor of meeting so eminent a novelist and in his honest embarrassment blurted out that he had often seen her name on the city ash-barrels, Cordelia Vaughan forgot her hazily indefinite yet deep-rooted hatred of everything English, and waited a moment for his next words.

"They've dramatized a book of mine--that explains the ash-barrels," she explained deprecatively, seeing that he stood silent, laughing at her contempt of the ash-barrels. Hartley liked her the better for that touch of modesty.

Her eyes had followed Repellier's retreating figure through the gloom. "Do you know, I always felt half afraid of Mr. Repellier, in some way? I wonder why it is?"

"We always _are_ half afraid of great men; they're so apt to be rugged and lonely."

"Yes, rugged and lonely, like lighthouses--but very useful."

Hartley waited for her voice again. By moonlight all waters and all women may look the same, but Luna had no such leveling power, he knew, with voices.

"He confessed to me you were the Hartley who wrote a study of slum life for Stetson's," the flute-like contralto was saying again. "Then you _do_ write?"

The darkness of the night made it impossible for him to catch even the slightest outline of her face, but as he listened to her gloom-encompassed voice he wondered, in a sudden inner fury, just what she had meant by calling him clean-looking. He had a sense, nevertheless, of losing himself in the sweep of eddying breakers.

"It always seemed to me," the soft contralto was murmuring once more, "that writers and artists should never be viewed at close range. They're like sugar; they should be left to sweeten life, without being put under the microscope, to show all their poor little writhing realities. So in one way it's just as well that we two _will_ never know each other when next we meet."

He felt certain, as she ended with her warm little laugh, that she was looking up at him through the darkness, and he vehemently asked himself if she was still making fun of him.

"I wonder if we two _will_ know each other again?"

"I want to, so much!" said Hartley. He was very human.

"Then you may interview me," she said gaily, infecting him with the sudden romance of the situation. "Then you can tear me to pieces afterward." And they both laughed youthfully as he told her of his last assignment, a request to demand five of New York's most eminent men to draw a pig with their eyes shut, for an illustrated page of the United News Bureau.

They grew serious once more, and he asked if there was nothing in which he _could_ help her.

"Couldn't I, in any way?" he begged, the darkness helping him out.

"Would you?" she said, quite gravely now, leaning imperceptibly closer to him in the muffling twilight. Her flash of woman's intuition had not misled her; there was much about him that she liked.

"Won't you let me?" he asked again even more earnestly. He was still half afraid it was all mere play, but his artistic soul's sense of dramatic values chained him to the part.

"Yes," she said simply, "I will." Her voice carried with it a timorous and tacit something, a something which flashed over the heads of a hundred dancing maskers in the hall of the Capulets when a young Montague first met the glance of his Juliet.

They shook hands in parting, and brief as that hand-clasp was, it appeared portentous to both of them. To Hartley himself it seemed almost as if his fingers had pressed the hidden button of an incandescent light, for, at the moment, he noticed the fleeting, half-phosphorescent luminousness of the other's eyes, even through the dusk that clung about them and divided them. Then the young woman gathered up her rustling yellow skirts and hurried down the ladder to join the others, taking themselves off by twos and threes.

THE SPIRIT OF THE CITY

All clad in mail he rode for Christ, And his strait pathway trod; Nor scorned he to be sacrificed For his most jealous God.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."

Our Manhattans of the mind always have their Boweries of the blood.--"The Silver Poppy."

"Wonderful, isn't it?" cried Hartley, leaning out of the wide-silled studio window where Repellier sat smoking wearily. He sniffed eagerly at the warm night air, with its mingled odors of asphalt and dust and cooling masonry.

The last of the evening's guests were gone. Hartley had been only too glad to linger on for a while with Repellier alone, seizing as an excuse the chance for one last look at his Motherhood picture, which was to be carried off to Paris by the next steamer. It was a canvas in the artist's newest style, a Hester Street mother suckling her child in the dusk of a little shaded doorstep, brooding there grave-eyed, deep-bosomed, and calm-souled, while the turgid life of the slums flowed back and forth about her, unfelt, unthought of, unseen.

Now they both looked down in silence to where the city lay beneath them, a garden of glimmering lights--pearl and opal and amethyst, with a flickering ruby or two in the remoter velvety blackness.

"Yes," said the older man, "it _is_ wonderful."

"And what a place you have here to work! Where one can be alone, and yet dip into life, just as one would dip one's wrist into a stream."

The dull sounds of the midnight streets, broken, as they looked, by the sharp clanging of an ambulance bell, the rumbling of car-wheels mingled with the rattle of a pavement sweeper and the intermittent patter of hoofs on the asphalt came up faintly through the odorous, calm air. There was a mysterious charm about the great, incongruous, huddled city, picturesque in its very defiance of symmetry and beauty.

"That's Broadway, isn't it," said Hartley, pointing with his finger, "still looking like a Milky Way of lights?"

"Yes; and those glowing crowns of light are the roof-gardens; and there's Fifth Avenue, spangled with its twin rows of white electric globes, for all the world like a double thread of pearls hanging down the breast of the city. Those crawling snakes with the golden scales are the L trains. That cobweb of light is Brooklyn Bridge, and those little ruby fireflies are the ferries on the North River."

"And that crown of old gold and rose stands over Brooklyn, I know, and the lower bay."

An unknown city had always held vague terrors for Hartley; once, even, as a child, he had burst into sudden tears over an old atlas of the world; "it was so big and lonesome," he had tried to tell his uncomprehending nurse. But now, as he followed Repellier's finger with his eyes, he was dimly conscious of that sense of fugitive terror lifting and drifting away from the sea of scattered lights beneath him. For a moment he felt more drawn toward the city than of old, though his first vivid, photographic impression of it floated mockingly back through his mind.

The smell of the willows of the Isis and the hyacinths of Holywell had scarcely fallen from him as he walked those first few miles of the New World--a New World which seemed to his timid and homesick eyes to be but streets of chaotic turbulence through which pulsed the ceaseless cry of Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! He recalled the blind beggar with his quick, shrill cry of "Please help the blind! Please help the blind!" tapping hideously along the crowded pavement. He remembered the groups of sallow-faced men, young, yet already old, lounging about the entrances of what seemed countless hotels; the cluster of swarthy, foreign-looking workmen tearing up the asphalt under the strong glare of gasoline torches; the cars and hansoms that rattled past; the two express-wagons that crashed together and locked wheels amid curses and loud cries; the pedlers and news-boys and fruit-venders barking and crying through the streets; the bilious-hued moon shining brokenly down through air heavy with dust; the serrated line of the distant sky-scrapers that seemed to bite up at the darkness like teeth; and the white glare of the electric lights bunched so alluringly about the gilt-lettered, gaudy-faced corner saloons. It was not until afterward that he found he had traversed but one rough rind of the city itself; but it had all seemed so glaring, so blatant, so hopelessly unlovely to his bewildered eyes, that with the bitterness of a second Job he had asked: Is this, then, the soul of their republicanism? Is this the America of which the Old World had dreamed such envious, foolish, happy dreams?

Leaning there out of the lofty studio window, the young alien sighed with the burden of his youthful disappointments and his great things still undone. He looked less hopelessly down at the lights of a city which he had grown, in a softer mood, to think of as more beautiful.

Then he glanced at Repellier once more. This quiet man beside him, he felt, must have dreamed his way even more slowly into the heart of that turbulent life. For from a withered old hack writer on his news bureau Hartley had picked up a fragmentary story to the effect that Repellier had first come to New York a broken-hearted man, in search of a runaway sister. She had killed herself, he remembered the story went, when Repellier had tried to take her home, for she had passed through things that are seldom forgiven, and never forgotten. Recalling this, Hartley peered through the gloom at the other man, as though to read his face more closely. But the past seemed to have left no trace.

"That disorderly, happy-go-lucky tangle and snarl of lights on your left," his companion was saying quietly, "is your East Side, and that sinister scar of brighter light across it like a sword-gash is the Bowery itself. You can see how different they are to these prim rows on the West Side!"

"Which stand for happiness, and, accordingly, more or less for dulness."

"There's a good deal of nonsense talked and written about the slums, Hartley, and they're wept and prayed and shuddered over, through lorgnettes, but, after all, you hear about as much laughing on Hester Street as you do on West End Avenue."

Hartley recalled the sounds that crept up to his little tenement room of a hot midsummer night. "And quite as much weeping."

"Perhaps a little more, for the Submerged Tenth has never been taught to nurse its sorrows in silence. But it's all taught me one big lesson--it's a truth so obvious that it puzzles me to think it should come so late in life. Wherever it beats," and here the older man's voice dropped into a sudden deeper tone of earnestness, "the old unchanging human heart runs with the same old unchanging human blood, and aches with the same old unchanging human aches. It's such a simple old truth, though, the world never accepts it."

The younger man shook his head in vague dissent. The even, dispassionate tones of this man who had looked deep into life fell like a cold hand on the throat of his lighter-pinioned ideality.

"The slum sins most," he protested, "and therefore suffers most."

"It sins openly, and suffers openly."

The younger man, looking down over the dim city, with his chin on his hand, did not reply. He was saying to himself that they had not taught them these things over in Oxford, and was wondering how often, ages and ages ago, in old Athenian gardens, some young Platonist and some aged Aristotelian had wrangled over the same ancient problem. Through the murmurous night air he dreamily noted the creeping hansoms and the crawling L trains and the street-cars, the minute corpuscles of the now languid life-blood with which the huge city would soon run so feverishly.

The unrest, the haste, the movement of the momentarily lulled life beneath him took on a strangeness, a mystery, an inscrutable element that filled him with a wordless disquiet. What was the end of it all? And what did it all stand for? And whither was it trending? His mind went back to one calm night when he and another stood under the white Italian stars, up under the olives and chestnuts of Fiesole, and asked the same questions of life. Then his thoughts drifted again to his last days in Oxford, when he and a young scholar of Magdalen went out by night to Boars Hill to listen to the nightingales. From the shadowy hillside of the quiet wood they had watched the lights of Oxford swarming luminously in the dark little valley of the Isis below, glimmering through the humid English spring night like pearls in a goblet of wine. How strangely full and deep and good life had seemed to them that lyric night, as they walked home through the moonlight, with all the world before them!

But to Hartley the great restless New World city seemed so bewilderingly different. The spirit of it was so elusive! It so engulfed one with its passionate movement! It made man such a microscopic unit! It held life so cheap, and youth so lightly! He had been nearly four months in New York; it had swallowed him up as a maelstrom might, and he had accomplished nothing, or what stood as good as nothing. He remembered half bitterly how he had broken disconsolately away from the twilight languor of his sleepy old university town, and with his few carefully hoarded pounds had turned to America, young yet already old, hopeful and yet already heart-weary, in search of more strenuous effort and struggle. That London evening paper which at times printed his copy, he recalled, had rather grandiloquently announced that Mr. John Hartley, M.A., was to do for the East Side of New York what Besant had done for the East Side of London, and even ventured to prophesy that a great number of Mr. Hartley's friends and admirers would await his book with interest. From the first he felt that there had been something ominous in that initial deception. And now he had foundered in the very sea from which he was to sweep both gold and glory--even, as he told himself, after tossing overboard his jetsam of undergraduate dreams. Now, indeed, he was thankful enough for his daily bread; and there were, he knew, hundreds and thousands like him--thousands of aspiring men and women whom the great city had called from the towns and farms of the West, from the wide Dominion above the Lakes, from the South, from the Old World itself.

As he gazed wonderingly down through the darkness he thought of the friendlier, more intimate voice that had groped out through the housetop gloom to him that night. He wondered into what corner of the sleeping vastness of the city that wistful voice had crept. The mere thought and memory of it seemed to give a warm spot to the meaningless, shadowy solitude beneath him, like one small ember in a waste of ashes.

He turned to Repellier.

"Who is Cordelia Vaughan?" he asked.

Repellier drew back from the window and stood in the dim light of the studio lamps.

"Miss Vaughan--Cordelia Vaughan--is a young Kentucky woman who writes books, and I understand one of her dramatized novels is soon to be put on the stage. People are petting her--petting her a good deal too much, this season--but still, she seems to stand it well."

"I suppose she has written quite a bit?" Hartley casually inquired.

"I've known her only since last year, and I don't read, you know. But they tell me she's clever--when she writes, I mean, for most of these bookish women, unfortunately, are trimmed back and stunted for the sake of the fruit."

Hartley looked round at Repellier, missing from the other's voice some note of enthusiasm which he had expected to be there. The older man's succeeding question, however, bridging as it apparently did some disrupted line of thought, adequately accounted for his judicial coldness of tone.

"Are you getting broken in to work over here, Hartley--to good, hard work?"

The younger man smiled. With him Euterpe and Eros, obviously, must not house together.

"Jolly well broken in," was all he answered.

"Work is our eternal redemption," Repellier said, with his hand on the younger man's shoulder. Then he sighed wearily. "But to a good many of us Americans a life of hurry, I guess, has become the only life of ease."

AN INTERLUDE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The lute forgetful of its note; The wing remembering not to fly In some sweet flight's mad ecstasy; The heart that failed to carve the form Since once the musing soul grew warm With love for her who sat for him Of too alluring moonbeam limb.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Lost Voice."

"The defeated heart," sighed the woman in black, "has the habit of burying its own dead!"--"The Silver Poppy."

For one virtue alone Cordelia Vaughan was looked on as a rare acquisition by Mrs. Alfred Spaulding. That virtue was her young ward's punctilious attention to all those social duties with regard to which she herself was prone to be deplorably careless. With the accession of Cordelia, therefore, she reveled in a vicarious ceremoniousness that wiped out many discomforting memories, ranging all the way from forgotten dinners to neglected dentist's engagements.

It was but a little after eleven, on the morning following Repellier's birthday gathering, when Cordelia Vaughan alighted from the Spauldings' brougham and once more climbed the long stairs to the old artist's studio. Both she and Mrs. Spaulding had begged to come and help Repellier "clear up." Mrs. Spaulding, however, no longer dazzled by the glow that radiated, to her eyes, from the brow of that great artist, found in the depths of a soft pillow and a darkened room that the spirit was willing but the flesh lamentably weak. She told Cordelia to run along by herself; she had a headache to sleep off.

And as Cordelia mounted lightly to the upper regions of Repellier's workrooms she felt in no way sorry for the promise. Some rudimentary simplicity in her character could always blithely sweep away the cobwebs of either propriety or impropriety--cobwebs so potentially tantalizing to one less ingenuous. Her late hours, too, seemed to have left no depression of spirits, no reaction of _ennui_, and she floated in before Repellier bright, buoyant, smiling, like a breath of the open morning itself, a confusion of mellow autumnal colors in her wine-colored gown and hat of roses and mottled leaves.

But before she had so much as drawn off her gloves--and they were always the most spotless of white gloves--she glanced about in mock dismay and saw that the last of the righting-up had already been done. There was not even a book for her to replace, or a plaque to tuck away. She pouted at this, prettily and girlishly; she had hurried away from her coffee and rolls just to help him.

Repellier, in his lighter moods, had an affectionate and quite fatherly way about him that was all-conquering. He penitently pinned a long-stemmed American Beauty rose on her wine-tinted gown, and shaking his head dolefully over the color combination, replaced it with a cluster of gardenias. She fluttered femininely to a mirror, to view the result of the added touch, and then bowed her gratitude with arch solemnity. She was not slow to realize the lighter mood in Repellier, and was glad of it. Then, talking the while of the night before, she went over to his book-table, and hovered restlessly over the different volumes scattered about, scarcely knowing just how to wear the conversation through its tides of change into that particular slip where it was to be hawsered. To Repellier she seemed like a humming-bird darting about a little high-walled garden, ready to be off like a flash when the last flower had been rifled.