The Silver Poppy.

by Arthur Stringer.

CHAPTER I

THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT

From her dark towers she lightly threw To him three roses red; He spake no word, but pale he grew, And bowed his troubled head.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."

To make your heart, you must first break your heart!

"The Silver Poppy."

It was a warm, humid evening of early September, and every window and skylight of Repellier's huge studio was open its widest. Between the m.u.f.fled rhythm and beat of an orchestra the sound of laughter and merriment, and the murmur of many voices, floated out on the hot night air.

Of a sudden the throb of the music and the hum of voices ceased, expectantly, for it had been whispered from group to group that the supreme event of an evening of surprises was about to occur.

Then out from its hiding-place behind a bank of azaleas there floated into the crowded, hushed studio a Venetian gondola of black and gold.

Three slim young girls, in the brightest of red and yellow silk, reclined with studied languor on the boat's curved prow, and to the music of guitars suddenly broke out into an Italian boat-song. The strange craft, piloted with much skill by Hanchett, the portrait-painter, glided slowly up and down the great, high-ceilinged room with its rows of canvases and tapestries and Daghestan rugs, with its methodic litter of small-arms and casts and trophies and costumes, cruising cautiously in and out over a flashing, many-tinted course of applauding men and women.

It was not until the barcarole had all but come to a close that the gondola was discovered to be nothing more than Mrs. Alfred Spaulding's motor runabout, deftly enclosed in a canvas-covered framework. And although, at the last, something went wrong with the steering-gear and the automobile had to be shouldered ignominiously back into its corner, it was unhesitatingly agreed that its short-lived cruise had been a triumph of novelty. The patter of a hundred clapping hands showed, indeed, that the _bizarrerie_ of Repellier's _entr' acte_ was a success, and a success with an audience sadly used to novelties.

For of those who stood about and approved so applaudingly many had that day come down from Newport, or reluctantly forsaken the coolness of Sound and seash.o.r.e, while a diplomat or two--who chanced to have been friends of Repellier abroad--had even journeyed up through the heat from Washington. Yet no one who knew Repellier cared to miss one of this old artist's birthday gatherings. Many among the crowds that swarmed and buzzed about the studio, it is true, were artists and workers whom the fall of the first leaf had brought flocking back to the city, and actresses and leading men whom the rise of the first curtain had brought scurrying back from Europe, though that vaguely denominated element Society itself was not averse to come panting up Repellier's long stairs with a secret sense of bravado in what seemed a decorous enough ascent into the bewildering freedom of Bohemianism.

"But poets are my penchant!" a florid woman with a mannish but kindly face, that blossomed incongruously out of a gown of turquoise-blue, was declaring to John Hartley, who as a young man fresh from Oxford had been brought over to the corner wherein she held sway. It had startled her a little, obviously, to learn that this wide-shouldered young giant was a disciple of what she knew to be an exigent master, the ink-pot.

"But not in the wild state," parried the young man, who still wore his metrical spurs somewhat awkwardly. That night he had felt for the first time that poetry was a thing to be lived down.

"That's just it!" lamented the lady in turquoise-blue. "We can't get at you wild--you're all as unsatisfying as--as the caribou up in the Park.

You either get blue-penciled out of existence or pink-teaed and petted out of decency!"

The group of men cl.u.s.tered about Miss Short laughed encouragingly, for she was both well known and well liked, a personage most outspoken of opinion and most prodigal of epigram, relishing not a little her undisputed reputation for bluntness, lamenting even more her lapses into a quixotic soft-heartedness which left her the easy prey of those fellow-workers in a profession where mendicancy is not unheard of. Yet among those who knew her best her flashing wit seemed to save her to the last, for it was, to her, a sort of spade-bayonet with which she in some way entrenched herself when not piercing her enemy.

"You're like our California plums," she went on genially; "you have all the bloom rubbed off before we can get hold of you."

"But that's the trouble with genius in our age," interrupted Henry Slater, who declared himself to be a publisher and therefore to know whereof he spoke; "it has to be picked green, like watermelons, so as not to spoil on the market."

"Still, I don't believe you're spoiled yet, Mr. Hartley. That's why I believe I'm going to like you," Miss Short added, with even more disconcerting candor. "And that's why I'm going to take you off and give you some good advice." There was a murmur of simulated jealousy.

"The first of which should be a word or two about wearing the hair longer," said a tired-looking young man with a Turkish cigarette.

"Right enough, Wheelock," said the publisher. "Heaven has given the snake his rattles, and the poet his hair. So that when we hear the one, Miss Short, and see the other, we all know what to do!"

"And you might drop a hint about the Mills House often being the avenue to the Hall of Fame." It was Clive Hodge, the dramatist, speaking in his startlingly thin and girlish voice.

"And why not a word about sneaking back to London and landing on us again in velvet and ruffles and a pre-Raphaelite get-up--with a hint to the reporters beforehand?"

"And a warning, a sorrowful warning, Miss Short, to cultivate the camel-like capacity for hoofing the Desert of Dreams on, say, three square meals a week."

Miss Short turned and looked at them scornfully.

"All acidulated nonsense, my dears--and there are too many little home-made Aristophaneses running around America already."

Then she turned back, good-naturedly, to Hartley, who had been puzzled just how to take it all. It was, in a way, the first time he had seen Celebrity on parade. There was a self-consciousness and a somewhat bewildering flashiness about it that he had not counted on. He was most eager to appear among them anything but ponderous, yet he felt some insurmountable paling of prejudice to be shutting him out from them.

"I guess that's what you Oxford men call ragging," his champion went on conciliatingly. "But I suppose you've been taught not to take New Yorkers too seriously long before this. You see, we Americans have never learned to irrigate the alkali out of our humor."

She bore him away, like a harbor-tug swinging out a liner, and looked with him from one of the broad-silled studio windows. Hartley was half afraid of women; they saw it, and liked him for it. "It's so much keener chasing the bee than having the bee chase you," the Dean of Worcester's daughter had confessed one afternoon--for now and then the children of wisdom are given to wilfulness--after four fruitlessly challenging hours with him in a punt on the Cherwell.

"Mr. Repellier tells me he knew you in Oxford--he hopes you're going to do something worth while."

Hartley flushed youthfully. He was becoming de-anglicized with difficulty; he was still of that nation where reticence is a convention.

"Yes, I believe I was pointed out to him by the master of my college as the man who was sure to make a mess of life."

Miss Short raised her bushy eyebrows interrogatively.

"He said I had an overdose of ideality to work off, and was hard-headed enough to declare that epicureanism on one hundred and fifteen pounds a year was an absurdity."

"And to show him how wrong he was you're flinging yourself into this silly settlement work over here? Well, I don't see why you crawl into America by our back door!"

Hartley hesitated about explaining that to the dest.i.tute this back door came cheaper, for even the one hundred and fifteen pounds were now a thing of the past.

"I'm not really doing settlement work," he corrected, however. "It turned out that I wasn't orthodox enough for our East London Anglican Order to make room for me. Your own university settlement shut its doors on me as an outlander, and the only public inst.i.tution that offered to take me in was a convalescent home in Harlem; they wanted a janitor. It would never have done, of course, to turn tail at the last moment, so I made the plunge alone. And now I'm simply trying to look at life in the raw; to get near it, you know; and understand it; and make the most of it."

He spoke lightly, but there was an undertone of bitterness in his words, a hint of the claws under the velvet of unconcern. For the first time Miss Short forgot the broad shoulders, and noticed the unlooked-for sternness about the young man's mouth, the hitherto uncaught thin chiseling of the ascetic nose and the puzzling dreaminess of the calm eyes. He was a man who had not found himself.

"But I could never see the use of going about being a student of evil,"

she said gently enough. "For I a.s.sure you you'll never do our East Side any good--though, perhaps, in another way, it _may_ do you a lot of good. Tell me, though, what started you at it?"

"Repellier, more than any one else, I think. He told me to get Americanized, to come out of the mud-pond and get into the rapids. He suspected, you know, that all I did was loaf about Oxford and write radical verse."

"Well, perhaps it's best you did give up your poetry, and all that. We haven't much time for mooning over here, and if you'd come among us with the writing habit you'd soon have seen what a pitiful, pot-boiling lot we are, and you'd have got soured, and gone on one of the dailies, or dropped into translating, or drifted into a syndicate, and ended up by being still another young Israelite looking for an impossible promised land of American literature!"

Hartley winced a little and remained silent.

"It wouldn't have taken you long to find out what a lot of fakirs we are. Don't look shocked--fakirs is the only word; I'm one myself."

"But a fakir never confesses, does he?"

"Fifteen years ago I was earnest, ambitious, penniless, and proud-spirited. I imagined I was going to write the great American novel. Now I'm a silly, egotistical, spoiled old woman, writing advertis.e.m.e.nts for a Brooklyn soap-maker, publishing Sunday-school stories under seven different names, grinding out short stories and verses that I despise, and concocting a novel now and then that I abominate! That is the crown of thorns the city puts on your head. If I'd only stayed out in my little Wisconsin village, and gone hungry, and been unhappy, and waited, some day I might have written my great book!"

"Then why not go back, and wait, and be unhappy, and hungry, even, and write it?"