"Now before an old David leaves this tent of Saul, my boy, let me give you a little advice. Try hard work. It's God's own anodyne. When the heart gets down—and it will, you know—or the head goes wrong, work. Work, man, work; that's my doctrine. You'll do your best when you are either very happy or very miserable. But when in doubt, work; work like a soldier, yet remember that the artist, like the soldier, can stand for the worst as well as the best in man."
Hartley, pacing his room alone when Repellier had taken his departure, knew all this to be true enough. But it could not do away with the canker of unrest and self-disgust that seemed gnawing at the core of his brain.
A dozen times that day he sat down at his desk, ready for work; and a dozen times he got up in despair. The mood of impotence, of dissatisfaction, was on him, and was not to be shaken off. He tried to tell himself that it was not of the heart, that it was not love. The very doubt brought its own answer. Eros, he felt, had a way of always claiming his own.
As the disturbing scenes of the night before kept crowding mockingly up into the foreground of his consciousness, he tried to hug to his remembrance some alleviating happier sense of escape that had flashed through him at the bathetic ending of it all. He persuaded himself that he was still heart-free; if there had been a time when he had ever questioned his attitude toward Cordelia, that time, he insisted, was now past. If ever he should wander again, vehemently he told himself, it must be with his eyes open, and with no extenuating madness of romance to break his fall.
Those hours of cold reaction chilled him into something like his old-time austerity. He decided to write to Cordelia and make everything plain to her. It was a wandering and incoherent little note of contrition, the cry of a troubled Hamlet to a still trusting Ophelia. He had been entirely to blame. He had been thoughtless. He had been, too, ungenerous and unkind to her. He wanted only to be reinstated as her most loyal and truest friend. He did not deserve her trust, but he intended to show her the depths of his remorse—O repentant and heartless Adonis, how could you!—in the only way that lay open to him, by striving to the last for her success, by helping her in every way that he could, by laboring as he had never labored before on what should be her great book.
It may have been only that last sentence which saved the lady so sorrowfully addressed from tearing his letter into shreds. And the word "friend" had hurt her above all things. But hereafter he should be the supplicant.
Cordelia decided not to reply to his note. Restlessly and aimlessly all that day and all the next he waited, one moment even half hoping some impending estrangement would shake loose those ever-tightening shackles, which he had begun to feel weighing heavily upon him, and the next moment half dreading that any such freedom should come to him, cast down miserably by the thought that she had in any way passed out of his life.
While this humor of unrest still hung over him he took down his brightly bound copy of The Silver Poppy and read it through studiously, from first to last. The sense of its exceptional power came to him once more, as a revelation reiterated. He found it a book where the gleaner caught at much which the more hurried harvester must miss, a book yielding, as he felt all good books should yield, a new and unexpected delight in its second reading. Outside the manifest strength and movement of the story there was the secondary charm of a quiet and masterly touch. Its satire was delightful and insidious, and through its merriest pages he found the Touchstone-like pensiveness of one who knew and understood a sad old wag of a world. He found in it, too—and this puzzled him most—still that sense of eternally saving humor of which he had seen so little in Cordelia herself. From page to page it flashed out at him, it tripped him up, and danced about him. He began to understand the better why The Silver Poppy had been called one of the novels of the year, even of the century. He thought he saw now just what Cordelia had meant when she had timorously asked him if he thought it possible that she had written herself out in one book. That early, crocus-like flowering of the spirit was no less beautiful because it was already over and gone with the April of life.
Where in that little body had such wisdom and power once been packed away? She had always seemed such a fragile, shell-tinted thing to him, the wonder was that she had written a book at all, that in one eloquent interval she had found a voice, and delivered her message. But was that one work alone to stand the key to that strangely reticent soul of hers? Had she, as with those little East Side fruit-shops he knew so well, ranged all her stock in trade out on the public sidewalk, and left empty the store itself?
The thought of a bewildered but aspiring artist, caged in a body so incongruously frail and girlish, filled him with a pity for the sorrowing laborer struck helpless in the midst of her work—for the writing hand fallen helpless in the midst of its dreams. He suddenly felt that he should be willing to go through fire and water to bring one laurel leaf to that small, proudly poised head with its profusion of yellowish golden hair. And with this mood the grayness seemed to go out of the world. And still again he asked himself if this could be love.