The Silver Poppy by Stringer Arthur

Author:Stringer, Arthur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, novel, romance
Publisher: Distributed Proofreaders Canada
Published: 1903-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

CHAPTER XV

THE MILL AND ITS GRIST

She dreamed not of the fight he fought

Till lo, he crept again

To her, with all his vows forgot——

Then, then she knew his pain.

John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."

Humor is the tail to the kite of affection.—"The Silver Poppy."

* * *

"Oh, I'm disgusted with myself, with everything," said Hartley, impatiently going to his window, where through the drifting rain he could see the misty gray Palisades of the Hudson and a little scattered fleet of sailing craft dropping down with the tide. Then he went as impatiently back to his chair again.

"What's gone wrong?" asked Repellier, who had run up for a few minutes when the darkness of the day had put a stop to his work to see how Hartley was taking to his new quarters. "Is it the engine itself out of order? Are you feeling fit, and all that?"

"Confound it, I don't know what it is!"

"You're comfortable enough here?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"No disquieting neighbors?" asked the other, casually glancing at a new photograph of the author of The Silver Poppy in a heavy silver frame that stood on Hartley's mantelpiece. "You know you're too young to indulge in the luxuries—just yet."

"How do you mean?" asked Hartley, pulling himself together.

"I thought you might be falling in love. Young men have a habit of doing that, you know."

"No, no; it's not that."

He glanced up and caught the quizzical look in his friend's eyes. "In love, Repellier? I—in love! I couldn't be if I wanted to. I—without a farthing, with a name to make, and a living to make first."

"The living doesn't count; that's a mere accident—with the artist, I mean."

"Oh, yes; you successful fellows, who have covered yourself with glory—you find it easy enough to cover yourself with—with flannel and fine linen."

"But work only for the glory, the flannel and fine linen will take care of itself."

"It sounds very pretty, but it keeps one—well, rather lonely and hungry."

"Yes, but those things are all grist to your mill in the end. Disappointment, loneliness, sorrow, every shred of experience, if you only look at it in the right way, it's all your grist—if you're the bigger and truer artist." Repellier himself went to the window and looked out for a moment before he turned and spoke again. "And, by the way, do you know the receipt for preserving a poet? It's very simple; an empty stomach, an empty pocketbook, and an empty bed."

"It doesn't always hold," demurred Hartley.

"No, but as a rule the less Laura and the more sonnets, my young Petrarch."

Before Repellier's musing and kindly old eyes at that moment drifted a hazy memory—the memory of a pale, fragile girl in a Bath chair, listening to the English skylarks on a terraced lawn. She had been speaking to him, tremulously yet passionately, of her young Oxford scholar, her hero; she had been telling of her great hope in him, of her woman's fears for him, winning a friend for him there while she already saw before her the valley of the shadow.

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