Hartley was in a dilemma. He counted his money with some trepidation, and found that he possessed, all told, just four dollars and ninety cents, one dollar of which was to go for a month's rent of his typewriter. Seldom before had such things troubled him. If they were not, he felt that they ought to be, the mere accidents, the immaterial phases, of life.
Placing the little pile of money out before him on his worn old work-table, he realized, as he gazed down at it, that it made a very low wall between him and starvation.
Yet he did not altogether regret his breaking away from the United News Bureau. He had never nursed much love for that Grub Street of the New World. He had always realized, too, that journalism in any form could hold out no great hopes for him. He had not the news instinct, that great gift which to an editor, he had learned, only too amply covered the multitudinous sins of illiteracy. Nor had he that patience of spirit which would permit of his ever becoming a humble laborer with the pen of the "pot-boiler."
He recalled to his mind poor old Sissons, who so often had drifted into the bureau office—who for years had written his four books a season, under contract, for his paltry one hundred and forty dollars a volume. Sissons? Sissons? Who was Sissons? The name had not gone ringing down the avenues of fame, and yet few men in New York had written so much, none so laboriously.
In his dilemma Hartley remembered that he had once before earned three dollars a week as a super-numerary in one of the upper Broadway theaters. If the worst came to the worst, he could go back and be a "super"—it would be the refinement of cruelty, he thought, to be cast for a "thinking part" in one of the drawing-room scenes in Cordelia Vaughan's forth-coming comedy. He decided, in the end, though, that he would prefer unloading freight on the East River wharves. Many a day he had watched those ruddy wharf laborers, half enviously; and their lot, to him, had seemed incomparably happier than that of the pale shadows who shambled weakly about the broken old desks of the United News Bureau. And since the day Stevenson's old lodging-house had been pointed out to him he had felt a warmer feeling for both that ragged river front and for that vanished velvet-jacketed vagabond and dreamer of great dreams. Only—there was the inevitable "only"—only if he had never had that intoxicating first taste of another life.
His one glimmer of hope was that Cordelia might yet be able to sell a short story or two for him. And with that glimmer came a sudden passion to repay her in full for anything she might do. For once, and at last, his time and energy were his own. Remembering this, he read again his copy of The Unwise Virgins, and before noon of his first free day he was deep at work on his reconstruction of that halting story.
The sense of freedom that came with such work appealed to him. His liberated mind raced like a colt up and down the unfamiliar uplands of the imagination. For three delirious, fleeting days he struggled and battled with the manuscript, writing late into the night, losing himself in his work, medicining his little worries with the great balm of creation, with the unction of tangible accomplishment.
On the morning of the fourth day—a bright September morning with the sparrows twittering and bustling busily about the sunlit housetops, he received an unlooked-for note from Cordelia. He turned it over many times wonderingly, and then opened it over his modest breakfast of coffee and oatmeal porridge. In it was a crisp, spotless check for one hundred and ten dollars and a playfully peremptory command to send on another story at once. She ended with a line or two of congratulations, and casually asked when she was to see him again.
These closing sentences were skimmed over almost unnoticed by Hartley. One hundred and ten dollars! Never before had he been paid so handsomely. He looked at the check again, and wondered just where he could get it cashed. And still again he held it up to the light and looked at it, and a great content stole over him. It was the beginning.
How bright that morning the sun lay on the housetops and chimneys, and how the elevated trains whisked and danced and frolicked past his vibrating window! The dust that hung over the city seemed a mantle of soft gold. The smell of the open street was a new perfume to him.