Arthur Stringer

“ On that part of Division Street where the Second Avenue elevated railway curls bustlingly into Chatham Square, very much as a busy little brook curls round a bit of rock, stands one of those crowded hives of toiling men and women known as a sweat-shop. In a little back room at the top of this building Hartley subletted his New York home. The jail-like doorway of this building opened on a street of eternal twilight—a street barred above like a dungeon by the iron girders of the overhead railway, through which only the noonday sun could fret for an hour or two. ”

“ And when he had finished his article on Cordelia Vaughan he sat back in his hard chair and felt more at peace with the world and with himself. He felt, as he glanced around at his broken walls and his ragged furniture, that he had justified himself; for he was at heart still buoyant and young. It is a sorrowful day when the eyes of youth can gaze openly into the eyes of defeat.
Hartley, as a graduate of Oxford and a regenerator of mankind, could not boast unduly of his New World lodgings—he had not yet learned to speak of them as apartments. ”

“ It was this flood of new feeling that bore him, elated and fired with enthusiasm, to the first of Cordelia's and Mrs. Spaulding's receptions late that afternoon. Long beforehand he had determined not to attend this reception. Besides cutting into time which was not altogether his own, he was beginning to see the impossibility of any further incongruous vacillating between the sordidness of Chatham Square and the splendor of the upper West Side; the grim irony in those contrasting pictures of life stung him too unpleasantly. But in his hour of new enlightenment he overcame his older scruples. ”

“ He looked back toward Cordelia and tried to catch a glimpse of her, but a sea of plumed heads waved between them.
"But life is only a vaudeville, with hunger and love for top-liners," he heard a gaunt tragedian disclaiming to a woman with penciled eyebrows and obviously rouged cheeks and lips.
"Yes, but think how many times we can love!" the rouged lips laughed back at him. Hartley moved on through the crush.
"A woman's eyes," a long-haired young man at his elbow was declaring to a group of listening women, "a woman's eyes are the index of her soul." ”

“ From the shadowy quietness of his window-seat Hartley looked out on the shifting, bewildering scene before him, a panorama of movement and color and energy that seemed to lose none of its unrest as midnight approached and waned. The young Oxonian felt that it was all a more or less disturbing glimpse of a new world that was opening up before him. He seemed able to catch at no order or meaning in the trend of it. At his Old World university, and in London itself, he had come more or less in touch with many of the great men of his age. ”

“ The taste of those days when the world has failed to find youth because youth has not yet found itself is unspeakably bitter in the mouth of the young man who knows his strength. And Hartley, striding homeward through the hot, noisy, evening streets, was not altogether happy.
As he noticed, on the stroke of six, the warehouses and shops and factories of the lower East Side disgorging their tides of hurrying, bustling men and women and boys and girls, some alleviating sense of the nobility of labor crept over him, like a breath of cool air from the river front. ”

“ Spaulding to turn more than once in secret wonderment, and gaze at her admiringly. There was nothing in Cordelia's bearing to reveal any inner ruffling of a spirit tranquil and detached—nothing beyond the pale rose-like flush that had mounted to her softly undulating, almost gently hollowed cheeks, and the luminosity of her outwardly calm eyes.
Cordelia did not see Hartley in the odorous, rustling stream that was slowly bearing him toward her until he was almost at her side. ”

“ One Sunday afternoon late in October he carried the completed manuscript over to Cordelia. A recent rain had washed the streets from curb to curb, and under foot flagstone and asphalt lay clean as steel. There was a cool freshness in the air, and the vigorous exercise as he went swinging down the river front sent the blood bounding through his veins once more. He stopped to watch the sea-gulls wheeling and dipping above the gray waters of the Hudson—the sight of them filled him with a sudden restless passion for a freedom that still seemed to have eluded him. ”

“ There were men in the city, Hartley knew, who were making fortunes by their pen. But they were men who, only too often, had allowed the temporary interest to intervene, men who had sought the immediate reward of the dollar, men who put their finger, adroitly enough, on the pulse of the world and gave it what it asked for, regardless of conscience and consequence. Was he, too, to become one of these? Was this fragile and pale-faced priestess of Mnemosyne, whose friendship had promised so much for him, insidiously to forge the first link in that golden chain which was to bind him down? ”

“ It had been a day full of quiet happiness for both of them, and a feeling of vague regret, of languid sorrow, fell over them, as they stood in silence, looking on the beauty of river and foot-hill and mountain bathed in autumnal silence and gold.
"Oh, if we never grew old!" Cordelia said, with a wistful little shake of the head, drawing closer to Hartley, and slipping her hand through his arm.
He looked down at her with a strange sternness that was not all sternness in his eyes. She turned away, gazing across the wide stretch of river dotted with its shifting opals and pearls. ”

“ Again Hartley vacillated between gratitude and doubt, hating to impose on her what might be the penalty for a moment's too generous impulse. As he hesitated before her Cordelia looked at him studiously, taking note that there was something challengingly dominant and robust about the still boyish stranger whom many such meetings might bring so intimately into her life. He possessed an incipient strength that appealed to her, while at heart she remained half in fear of it. She had always held in her own hands the reins of her destiny. ”

“ For little as she had ever shown any sign of sacrificing her artistic aspirations in the rose-grown temple of matrimony, the hunger of the unmated and maturing animal, the wavering passion that arises at times involuntarily in the breast of the coldest priestess amid her coldest marbles, quiescent, but quiescent only as a tiger sleeping in its noonday cave, was now not unknown to the heart of Cordelia Vaughan. She wanted to be loved ”

“ Cordelia, however, had hungered for a little of the fulness of life. Her earlier New York existence, bright and attractive as it had seemed to the outer eye, had been an unutterably lonely and hollow one. Life in a Washington Square boarding-house had proved no better than a more irregular existence in a dilapidated old studio on lower Fifth Avenue, where for several months she invariably burned her own toast and regularly boiled her own tea, and where her callers were equally divided between overinquisitive reporters and impoverished authors looking for assistance. ”

“ At one moment, indeed, Cordelia Vaughan reminded Hartley of an old-fashioned tea-rose, quaintly anachronistic in her modish twentieth-century gown; at another moment she brought insistently to his mind the thought of a piece of fragile chinaware with which the slag of every-day life had not yet been infused, sadly to convert it into the ironstone of ordinary mortality.
"I find I am not very strong," she had confessed to him. "My work seems to take a great deal out of me." ”

“ Spaulding, in turn, was not ungrateful for what she considered Cordelia's good offices in this case. She even confessed to her young ward the timid fear that a great artist like Repellier, reproducing on his canvas feature by feature the very face in which a vast but heroically hidden passion burned, might some day read the soul of the picture, where the soul of the woman had passed unnoticed. Cordelia agreed that such cases were not unknown, but honorably kept her own counsel in the matter and even bravely fought down within herself the last inner voice of flippancy. ”

“ As they passed an old studio building on the lower avenue she pointed to one of its highest little windows.
"That's where I used to live," she said simply, and then an involuntary sigh escaped her. "How soon we change, without knowing it!" she added.
"How?" said Hartley looking back at the window.
"Oh, we get hard and selfish and careless." There was a new note of tenderness in her voice when next she spoke. "I wish I could learn to love children and flowers more than I do. Haven't you ever felt that you'd like to be able to give and suffer and endure? ”

“ For with all her activity and with all the attention she seemed to receive, Cordelia's life was still a desolately lonely one. An early girlish pose of protesting a fear of men had crystallized into a habit of evading them, except in not infrequent cases of late where they stepped before her as instruments of literary destiny. Good men, she had once said, are like good roads: made for walking over. As the belle of her little Kentucky town she had held herself proudly above each and all of her young suitors. ”

“ It was Miss Short who spoke, looking up at Hartley with surprised and honestly reproving eyes. They had met by accident on upper Broadway, as he was on his way to the tea-room of a Fifth Avenue hotel. Both her tone and manner nettled him.
"Am I so changed?" And he laughed uneasily.
"Why, yes, my poor lost hero, and you're getting fat—no, not exactly fat, but prosperous looking. But a fat poet—it is awful! It sounds worse than a Hercules with French heels. It's as incongruous as an angel eating corn-mush. And who wants a fat poet? ”

“ That speech and that moment had marked the turning of all her life's tide. She was no longer the happy and petted belle of a little Kentucky village. She was a woman with aspirations toward the larger world of which he seemed a harbinger, of the knowledge and power of which he seemed an apostle. From that day innocence and content fell from her, leaf by leaf. Yet she remembered how she had clung to the lonely invalid, how for weeks together they had wandered about that far-away land of clover meadows and blue-tinted grasses, and sunsets made golden with gentle frosts. ”

“ The mare's speed did not yield one stride to her frantic pull at the bit. At a glance Hartley realized that it was a runaway.
He remembered, to his sudden horror, that Cordelia was not the best of horsewomen. But still, he felt, with the open stretch that lay before them there might be no immediate danger. The danger lay ahead, in the winding roadway, the brushwood and trees, the all too many overhead bridges.
Hartley did not hesitate when he realized what these might mean. A dozen times before that day he had shown his powerful roan to be the fleeter animal. ”

“ For a releasing moment or two the young man basked in the sunlight of the tawny gold hair and the half-pleading eyes, wondering the while why her face should be so wistfully melancholy. It had its allurements, this finding in a great city a strange girl ready to take an interest in one's secret aspirations, a being willing to repose in one such immediate woman's faith. Hartley's four months of loneliness and solitude had been weighing heavily on his exuberant young soul. ”

“ Spaulding's one romance—wilful and unreasonable, yet none the less golden. Wealth had brought her many things, but out of the midst of her opulence she reached eagerly for the unattainable—seeking, without knowing it, for life's relieving burden of sorrow, for her woman's due heritage of tears.
"You ought to be happy," Cordelia one day had said to her; "you get everything you want." She had been trying to scold Cordelia out of a passing mood of discontent. ”

“ Yet they were eyes that looked out on the world with quiet, brooding melancholy, wistful in repose, with some fugitive sadness—eyes that suggested, to the young poet at least, some wayward note of autumn, of twilight, of woodland loneliness. They seemed to betoken the dreamer in life more than the pioneer and the actor, in periods of weariness taking on a heavy, languorous, indolent look of half-careless defiance, like a tired and wilful child's. ”

“ It was not until he had left her (receiving her homage like the acknowledged and imperious young queen she was) that once more back in his dingy little lodging, stiflingly squalid after the richness of the Spauldings' crowded drawing-room, he had untied the blue silk ribbon that so daintily bound the manuscript of her second book. To lose himself in it would be a relief. He was glad to slip away into the unreal world which her hand had opened up to him.
Cordelia had named her story The Unwise Virgins. With the open manuscript once before him, Hartley read it through, from start to finish. ”

“ Repellier, in his lighter moods, had an affectionate and quite fatherly way about him that was all-conquering. He penitently pinned a long-stemmed American Beauty rose on her wine-tinted gown, and shaking his head dolefully over the color combination, replaced it with a cluster of gardenias. She fluttered femininely to a mirror, to view the result of the added touch, and then bowed her gratitude with arch solemnity. She was not slow to realize the lighter mood in Repellier, and was glad of it. ”

“ When Repellier called that afternoon he found Cordelia down in the Spauldings' commodious kitchen, a cook and two busy maids about her.
"I had to call you down, it smells so fine," she cried happily, thrusting before his astonished nose a pan of sizzling English pheasant, which, after a long and tiring hunt throughout the city, she confided to him, she had found somewhere in cold storage.
"How domestic we are, and how charming we look!" said Repellier in reply, noting her bright eyes and flushed face. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Olive-skinned venders of fruit, stoop-shouldered ragpickers, hard-handed organ-grinders, all sat and looked with rapt faces toward the diminutive proscenium-arch at the end of the hall, beyond which was a lurid painting of the Bay of Naples. When Signorina Elisa Venezia came to the footlights and sang a Venetian boat-song—it took Hartley back to the night of Repellier's birthday party—a low-browed Neapolitan sitting next to him pounded on the table with his beer-glass, and the sudden applause and shouting was deafening, volcanic. ”

“ And she stirred her coffee with the vigor with which she had once dreamed to stir the social world.
"And you can hold people and make them like you," she went on. "And you aren't afraid to show people that you care for them."
It was Cordelia's turn to drive trouble from a softly rebellious breast.
"If he only guessed how sweet and good you are, some wise man I know would surely come and run off with you."
Mrs. Spaulding looked at her tragically and heaved a ponderous sigh. Then her American saving sense of humor came to her rescue and she clung to it, like the drowning to a raft. ”

“ There was a whimsical turn to its tendernesses, a quiet reserve to its humor and pathos so adroitly blended, a quaintness and ingenuous freshness of touch, and, above all, an impersonal, judicial aloofness from life that spoke, at first sight, more of the hand of a man than that of a woman, and a woman still in her youth—at any rate, in her youth as an artist and a creator. ”