"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.