THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODDESS
She from her rose-grown turrets came
And laughed up in his eyes;
He flushed to his pale brow with shame,
And spake unto the skies:
"To Christ this woman yet shall bow,
Or be cast down," he said,
"And where she flaunts her scarlet now
Shall float the Cross instead."
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
Put a touch of spring in the air, the thought of a woman in the heart, and keep from poetry if you can.—"The Silver Poppy."
For the second time Cordelia Vaughan had left Hartley stunned and amazed. Twice since he had first met her he looked up in bewilderment and found it necessary to readjust his estimate of her. This second readjustment, though, was somewhat different from the first.
It was not until he had left her (receiving her homage like the acknowledged and imperious young queen she was) that once more back in his dingy little lodging, stiflingly squalid after the richness of the Spauldings' crowded drawing-room, he had untied the blue silk ribbon that so daintily bound the manuscript of her second book. To lose himself in it would be a relief. He was glad to slip away into the unreal world which her hand had opened up to him.
Cordelia had named her story The Unwise Virgins. With the open manuscript once before him, Hartley read it through, from start to finish. And it was from that reading he emerged stunned and amazed.
The Unwise Virgins was a failure, a glittering but disheartening failure. Of that there could be no two opinions. The streets of the city had not been so kind to Cordelia Vaughan as had the open hills of Kentucky. Her second book had none of the power and movement of The Silver Poppy, none of those whimsical tendernesses and quaint touches of humor and pathos that had half muffled the razor edge of her earlier satiric touch.
From the first Hartley had been led to regard Cordelia as a woman without an affluent sense of humor. Then, after reading The Silver Poppy, he had wondered if she had not drained off, as it were, her vanished reservoirs of mirth; if her mental blitheness had not been lost with the too labored advent of her first-born. He had heard not infrequently of "men of one book." Could it be that Cordelia was a woman of one supreme effort? Or was it her newer life that was so altering and wasting and enervating her?
For, hard as he found it to confess to himself, The Unwise Virgins, as a whole, held neither accomplishment nor hope. In fact, with his child terror of the trite and the commonplace, and racked as he was by his "torture of form," he found in it nothing but energy miserably misspent. It was a heap of glittering particles that ran elusively through the fingers, a labored thing of shreds and patches. Its simulation of power was almost pedantry, its affectation of finesse was time and time again flaccid idling with words half understood.
Each time the wings of his admiration were about to unfold, the stroke of some little banality sent him tumbling down to earth again. Yet through the maze of all this energy misdirected he could get glimpses of the substantial enough central idea on which Cordelia had attempted to build. But on it she had built nothing but a misshapen, chaotic thing which tempted him, with his passion for form, to demolish and rebuild after his own fashion. It stood a challenge to him.
Not that Hartley looked on himself as a master workman in this respect. He could not pride himself on either great experience or great accomplishment. But the enthusiasm of the true disciple was in him; a youth of isolation had been building in him those silent fires which smelt experience and mood into art and expression. He had been a desultory yet rapacious reader. Through an erratic and none too studious college course he had fed hungrily on the older literature of his own tongue, and had also mastered the poets of a tongue which he could never force himself to look on as dead. He had come out of these excursions with a sensitized taste and the gift of a sort of literary bletonism, intuitively responding to any sign of the artist beyond the effort. And now, with the touch refined and the hand trained, he, as an artist, stood idle, pounding the anvil of journalism when he might be wielding the chisel of the gold-smith.
He followed his first impulse and went to Cordelia herself, at once. She had just come in from the florist's, and she greeted him over an armful of white roses, which she still held unconsciously before her as she let her eyes linger for a studious minute on his face. He felt vaguely sorry for her—there was an inalienable touch of pathos in the thought of the stricken hand of the master. It seemed to leave her so hopeless and alone—for all along he had more than half felt that she was not altogether at rest in the life into which success had forced her.
She led him timidly up to the little yellow study, and waited for him to speak. She had noticed the manuscript in his hand.
He found it very hard to begin.
"You don't like it, I know," she said, tearing a flower to pieces. She looked up at him almost appealingly, and then went on.
"I don't like it myself. I think I've lost my grip on it. It keeps running away from me, and throwing me out, and dragging me after it."
As he looked at her in her helplessness, he tried to tell himself that he had been unduly harsh in his first judgment. Then he turned to her and attempted to explain how with a possible touch or two it might be remodeled, how splendid it would be, once it was whipped into shape.
She only shook her head dolefully.
"I'm tired of it," she said.
Hartley seemed unable to explain to himself why a mere mood of temporary inadequacy should crush her into hopelessness.
"Then let me do it," he suggested.
"Dear friend," she said gratefully but sorrowfully, "what time have you for such things?"
"I couldn't give my days to it, of course," he confessed. "But I have my nights. With a couple of hours in the morning, why, a few weeks ought to see it finished."
She shook her head with childlike dolefulness.
"Then what will you do with it?" he asked her.
The question seemed to frighten her. She scarcely knew, she said. They had been clamoring for it so long. She thought she would put it aside and take it up again with a fresh hand.
"Then let me take it in the meantime," Hartley pleaded.
She made a proposal to him—it seemed to come to her in the form of a sudden inspiration.
"Let's collaborate on it," she cried.
"I would much rather simply help you a bit if I could."
"But don't you see, we can divvy—as we say over here—on the royalties. I've refused twenty per cent and a thousand dollars down. That means two or three thousand dollars, anyway."
Hartley would not hear of it. Cordelia hovered over him and pleaded with him and coaxed him, but he was obdurate to the end. He dreaded to think of that dainty little yellow study ever being converted, to him, into a bookseller's counting-house. A sudden hot sense of dissatisfaction with himself, and with things as they were, crept over him; he felt that he ought to be going, wondering why, during all that visit, Cordelia appeared so far away from him, so unreal and phantasmal.
"There was something I was going to speak to you about," she said, as he rose to go. "You know I've done simply nothing in return for all the things you've done for me." Then she smiled with her wistful smile. "You know, it isn't quite playing fair. As soon as you get home I want you to send me three or four of your short stories. Will you?"
"It's no use—they have been everywhere," said Hartley grimly.
"Perhaps they have, but I feel that I can place them for you—at least some of them."
Hartley shook his head. "I know most of the editors here," Cordelia went on; "there are three or four who have been bothering me for things for months. It makes a world of difference just how a manuscript comes into their hands; they say it doesn't, but they're human, after all. So, you see, I may be able to say a good word or two for you."
"Thank you, no," he answered gently. "When I think of you I want it to be in every sense but a business sense."
Her hand still remained unconsciously in his. He felt the pulsing warmth of it, and without a word raised it to his lips and kissed it. Cordelia, with her head turned away, gazed out of the open window. And there he left her, and stepped out into the freedom of the open air, neither elated nor cast down. He was thinking forlornly how month by month he had sent out those different hopeless, useless manuscripts, and how they had been as persistently returned to him. And still again the artist in him cried out for its opportunity. Yet he felt, in his youthfully candid, self-conscious way, that they were not altogether bad, those stories of his. Perhaps it was the work of the file that they showed too much. Perhaps it was the seriousness of purpose which pervaded them, when everywhere the call was for the airier and lighter effort.
But he did not altogether despair. Again and again he wondered on his way home why he had kissed her hand, and only her hand. And the nearer he drew to Chatham Square the more he was tempted to change his mind and send at least one manuscript to Cordelia.