The Silver Poppy

by Arthur Stringer

"With a snub-nosed Helen, my boy," Repellier had once said, "there would never have been a Trojan war." Hartley, valiant with the wine of his new resolve, straightway began to wonder how or why he had so recently posed as a second Schopenhauer to this same Repellier, and cried in disgust that everything had already been sufficiently cursed or sufficiently sung. His passion for work came back to him with a bound. The Cyrus of unrest that had diverted his better thoughts from their natural channel seemed to have marched on and left the Euphrates of his heart in full flood once more. He knew that his vague mental acrisia had at last come to a turn, and was to be followed by its violent fever to create, to build.

In one illuminating moment he saw that the modern life about which it was now his task to write was no less strenuous and no less varied than the life of those earlier days toward which he had fallen into the habit of looking back so regretfully. But it was in the inner rather than in the outer life, he felt, that the greater intensity and interest were now to be found. It was the mental career of men and women that was becoming more complex and more varied; and it was in this, he saw, that the broader and more enduring field of the novelist lay. At times, indeed, the alluring complexity and bewildering activity of this inner subjective world spread before him like an endless valley of untrodden twilight, shot through with some emotional golden glory of retrospection. And he longed for some fuller power to pierce into it, and grasp it, and interpret it.

With this elemental touch of rapture still clinging about him he went back to his manuscript of The Unwise Virgins. The spell of The Silver Poppy too seemed, in some way, still pregnantly close to him, and through some little trick of the hand or mind he found himself from time to time dropping into the touch of that earlier effort.

He began at the first and rewrote the entire book. Whipping his earlier erratic chapters into line, he quirted and corralled the herd of them into one unified, crowded whole. He went at his manuscript with a trace, almost, of the madman in him as he worked. Sometimes he ate, and sometimes he forgot to, or refused to spare time for it. He worked late into the night; sometimes all night long. He worked as he had seen Oxfordshire farmers working at raising bees, under stress and the cry of excitement, lifting and heaving beyond his natural strength, with an ardor that was to leave him stiff and sore, yet with the balm of knowing that one hour of exhilaration, to the artist, was worth its day of depression.

When his brain balked he lashed it on with strong coffee and stimulants, living, most of the time, on tobacco and innumerable milk-punches. He saw no one, and he wanted to see no one. It lasted two, almost three weeks; he was not sure, for toward the end he lost count of the days.

But the end came at last, and he awoke one evening and discovered that his face had been unshaved for days, that his eyes were bloodshot and sunken, that he was hollow of cheek and shaken of nerve, and that he was unspeakably hungry. His brain seemed a sponge that had been squeezed dry, to the last bitter drop, and he felt old, listless, worn out. But even through that dull pain of fatigue he felt the mysterious and inextinguishable flame of happiness, of triumph in accomplishment.

All his work, he knew, was not yet done, but the pill was there, as he put it, and the sugar coating could be applied later, and at his leisure. The structure was there; he could take his own time and go in his own way about the removal of the scaffolding. But the days of sweat and noise were done.

That was the way, he felt, that he would always have to write, racing on to the end, with the wind in his ears while it lasted. It was a costly way, perhaps, and an unsafe one; but with him it would always have to be the only way. A sense of the mystery of creation had seized him at times, the thought that the thing born of the travail of the mind came not from within, but from some unknown source without; that it was inspirational; that it was the cry of a voice not always his own.

With the hand of this mystery Hartley tried to brush away the incongruity that existed between The Silver Poppy and the character of the woman who had written it. Cordelia herself, he argued, might have known her moments of spiritual metamorphosis. Into her fingers, too, might have been thrust a tool more potent than the hand that held it. Yet he felt that his work was his own, and as his own he took an indefinable, jealous pride of ownership in it. But it had been done for another; and if in this case the tool had fallen to him and had been denied her, how little less hers than his, he tried to tell himself, were the pages before him.

Some busy little spider of delusion seemed to have woven its web across a corner of his mind, and he could not think the problem out as he wished to.