THE COMMONEST POSSIBLE STORY
By Bliss Perry
Philander Atkinson, bachelor of law and writer of light verse, sat one murky August evening in his hall-bedroom, with the gas turned low, wondering whether the night would be too hot for sleep. At a quarter before ten a loitering messenger-boy brought him a line from his friend Darnel: Come around at once. Just back. The very greatest news. Thereupon Atkinson discarded his smoking-jacket, reluctantly exchanged his slippers for shoes, and took the car down to Twelfth Street, remembering meanwhile that Darnel’s brief vacation from the Broadway Bank expired that day, and speculating as to the nature of the great news which the clerk had brought back from Vermont. The lawyer was a Vermonter too, and it was this fact, as well as a common literary ambition, that had drawn the young fellows together at first, long before Philander, on the strength of having two triolets paid for, had moved up to Thirty-first Street. Philander Atkinson liked Darnel, admired his feverish energy and his pluck, envied his acquaintance with books. He had always persisted in thinking that Darnel’s stories would sell, if only some magazine would print one for a starter; and he had patiently listened to most of these stories, and to some of them several times over. Yet Darnel had never had any luck; had never had even his deserts; and the sincerity of his congratulations whenever Atkinson’s verses saw the light always caused Philander to feel a trifle awkward. He knew that the indefatigable clerk had two or three manuscripts “out”—out in the mails—when the vacation began, and as he turned in at Darnel’s boarding-house he had almost persuaded himself that The Æon had accepted “Laki,” his friend’s Egyptian story. It was a long climb up to Darnel’s room, and the writer of light verse mounted deliberately, being fat with overmuch sitting in his office chair. On the third floor the air was heavy with orange-flowers and Bonsilene roses, and a caterer was carrying away ice-boxes. A whimsical rhyme came into Philander’s head, and he made a mental note of it. Just then Darnel appeared, leaning over the balustrade of the fourth-floor landing, his coat off, his collar visibly the worse for the railway journey, and an eager smile upon his thin, homely face.
“Hullo, D.,” said Philander. “Here I am. Been having a wedding here?” he added in a low voice, as he grasped Darnel’s hand.
“I believe so. I’m just back. Come in, Phil. You got my message?”
“Why else should I be here, old fellow? Is it ‘Laki,’ sure?”
Without answering, Darnel led the way into his tiny room. His trunk lay upon the floor, half-unpacked, the folding-bed was down, for the better accommodation of some of the trunk’s contents, and the desk in the corner, under the single jet of gas, was covered with piles of finely torn paper. Darnel’s manner, usually nervous and somewhat conscious, betrayed a certain exhilaration, but he was under perfect self-control.
“‘Laki?’” he said, seating himself in his revolving chair and whirling around to the desk, while Atkinson threw himself upon the bed, “‘Laki?’ Oh, I had forgotten. It’s probably here.” He pulled over the mail accumulated during his absence. “Yes.” He tore open the big envelope. “‘The editor of The Æon regrets to say,’ etc.;” and he tossed the printed slip, with the manuscript, into his waste-basket, with a laugh.
Atkinson’s heart sank. Poor Darnel; it was not a cheerful welcome home. But Darnel was busied with his letters.
“And here are the others,” he went on. “I thank the Lord none of them were accepted.”
“What!” exclaimed Philander, turning upon his elbow.
Darnel looked at him with a puzzling smile.
“That’s why I sent for you,” said he. “Phil, all that I’ve been writing here for three years is stuff, and I’ve only just found it out. I can do something different now.”
Atkinson stared. Darnel had rarely talked about his own work, and then in a scarcely suppressed fever of excitement and anxiety. Many a time had Atkinson noticed his big hollow eyes turn darker, and his sallow face grow ashy, even in reading over with a shaking voice some of that same “stuff.”
“I have learned the great secret,” Darnel added, quietly.
“You have Aladdin’s ring?” said Atkinson. “Or are you in love?”
“Both,” replied Darnel. “It is the same thing.”
Philander flung himself back upon the pillow, with a little laugh. “Go ahead, D.”
“I have found her, and myself. Let me turn down the gas a little; I see it hurts your eyes. I belong in the world now; I am in the heart of it—I said to myself coming down the river this afternoon—in the heart of the world.” He lingered over the words. “Phil,” he exclaimed, suddenly, “all the time I was trying to write I was really trying to lift myself by the boot-straps. I was laboring to imagine things and people, and to get them on paper. It was all wrong. Do you remember that French poem you read me last winter, about the idol and the Eastern princess—how she lay on her couch sleeping—the night was hot—with the bronze idol gazing at her with its porphyry eyes, while her brown bosom rose and sank in her sleep, and the porphyry eyes kept staring at her—staring—but they never saw? Well, I believe my eyes have been like that. In ‘Laki,’ now, you know I wanted to describe the exact color of the stone in the quarry, and asked the Egyptologist up at the Museum to tell me what it was? He laughed at me. Very well. It was a dull-red stone, with bright-red streaks across it; I saw the same thing in Troy this afternoon, when a hod-carrier fell five stories and they picked him up from a pile of bricks.”
“You’re getting rather realistic,” muttered Philander. Darnel was not looking at him, and went on unheeding.
“I have but to tell what I see. I have stopped imagining; my head has ached—Phil, you don’t know how it has ached—trying to imagine things. I am past that now; if you only shut your eyes and look, it is all easy. Take that old Edda story that I tried to work up, about the fellow who fought all day long against his bride’s father, and when night came the bride stole out and raised all the dead men on both sides, by magic, so that the next day, and every day, the battle raged on as before. I used to plan about the magic she used, and tried to invent a charm. Why, all she did was to pass over the battle-field at night, where the dead lay twisted in the frost, and while the wolves snarled around her and the spray from the fiord wet her cheek, she stooped to touch the dead men’s wrists; and they loosed their grip upon broken sword and split linden shield, their breath came again, soft and low like a baby’s, and so they slept till the red dawn.”
“Look here,” said Atkinson, sitting up very straight, “you’ve been reading ‘The Finest Story in the World,’ and it has turned your head.”
“Oh, the London clerk who was conscious of pre-existences, and forgot them all when he fell in love? I could have told Rudyard Kipling better than that myself.” Darnel gave an impatient whirl to the revolving chair.
“You mean you think you can,” replied Atkinson, sharply.
“As you like.” He spoke dreamily, and Atkinson dropped back on the pillow again, watching his friend as narrowly as the dim light would allow. Hard work and unearthly hours had told on Darnel; he certainly seemed light-headed.
“Sickening heat—black frost—” he was murmuring; “marching, stealing, fighting, toiling—joy, pain—the life of the race—is a man to grow unconscious of these things in the moment that he really enters the life of the race, that he feels himself a part of it? What do you think, Phil?”
“I think,” was the slow reply, “that whatever has happened to you in Vermont has shaken you up pretty well, old fellow. They say that when someone asked Rachel how she could play Phèdre so devilishly well, she just opened her black Jewish eyes and said, ‘I have seen her.’ And I think, in the mood you’re in now, you can see as far back as Rachel or anybody else. It’s like being opium-drunk; if you could keep so, and put on paper what you see, you could beat Kipling and all the rest of them. But you can’t keep drunk, and you can’t write prose or verse on love-delirium. It’s been tried.”
“Suppose Rachel had said, ‘I am Phèdre?’”
Atkinson lifted his stout shoulders, laughing uneasily. “So much the worse. I should say, the less pre-existence of that sort the better. You might as well tell me the whole story, D. What is her name?”
“In a moment. She loves me, Phil. She is waiting for me in her little house among the hills. I left her only this morning, and soon I shall go back and leave New York forever. I can write the story up there—the story I have dreamed of writing—for I shall always have the secret of it. I have but to shut my eyes and tell what I see; and it is because she loves me. All the life of all the past—I can call that ‘A Story of the Road.’ Then there will be the future to write of—the men and women that are to come; for we shall have children, Phil, and in them——”
“You’re making rapid progress,” ejaculated Philander.
“——I shall know the story of the future. Even now I know it; I do not simply foresee it, I see it. Why not ‘A Story of the Goal!’ For I belong to it—do you not understand? Yet, after all, what is that compared with the present? It shall be ‘A Story of the March!’ Look there!”
He threw his eyes up to the ceiling, which was brightened for an instant by the headlight of an elevated train as it rushed past.
“Do you know what that engineer was really thinking of as he went by? That would be story enough. Or what was in the heart of the bride to-night, down on the third landing—you smelled the orange-flowers as you came up? To feel that your heart is in them, and theirs in you——”
But Philander Atkinson was not listening to the lover’s rhapsody. He was thinking of a certain summer when he, too, had had strange fancies in his head; when his thoughts played backward and forward with swift certainty; when he had grown suddenly conscious of great desires and deep affinities, and for a space of some three months he had dreamed of being something more than a mere verse-maker, a master of the file. Then—whether it was that she grew tired of him, or they both realized that some dull mistake had been made—it was all over. There was still in his drawer a package of manuscript he had written that summer; in blank verse, none too noble a form for the high thoughts which then filled him; in a queer new rhythm, too, the secret of whose beat he had caught at and then lost, for the lines read harshly to him now. He looked these things over occasionally, as a sort of awful example of himself to himself; though he had gone so far as to borrow some of their imagery, not without a certain shame, to adorn his light verse. His card-house had fallen, but some of the colored pasteboard was pretty enough to be used again. Curiously, he found that he could cut pasteboard into more ingenious shapes than ever since his brief experience in piling it; fancy served him better after imagination left him; his triolets were admirably turned, and his luck with the magazines began. Altogether it had been an odd experience; half those crazy ideas of Darnel had been his two years before, but he was quite over them—yes, quite—and now it was D.’s turn. He listened again to something that Darnel was murmuring.
“And she is an ordinary woman, one would say; a common woman. That is the mystery and the glory of it. I do not know that she is even beautiful. There must be thousands of women like her; I can see it plainly enough, that there must be thousands of women in the world like her.” There was a reverent hush in his voice.
Atkinson choked back an exclamation. Was D.’s head really turned? “A common woman”—“not know whether she is beautiful?” A face rose before him, unlike any face in all the world: eyes with the blue of Ascutney, when you look at it through ten miles of autumn haze; hair brown as the chestnut leaf in late October; mouth——
Philander trembled slightly, and rising to his feet, stood looking down at Darnel, haggardly. It was quite over, that experience of two summers before, but while it lasted he had at least never dreamed that there were thousands of women in the world like her.
“Sit down, Phil, I am almost through. A woman like other women, and the story, when I write it, a common story. It will be the commonest possible story; common as a rose, common as a child. I am going back to Vermont, where I was born, and where I have been born anew. There will be plenty of time for the story—years, and years, and years. I have only to close my eyes some day, and she will write down all I tell her, and I shall call the story hers and mine.”
But Atkinson still stood, his hands in his pockets, his heavy figure stooping, the lines hardening in his face, while he watched the rapt gaze of Darnel, and drearily reflected how strange it was that a woman should open all the gates of the wonder-world to one man’s imagination, and that some other woman should close those secret gates, quietly, inexorably, upon that man’s friend.
“Wait,” said Darnel. “Must you go back to your triolets? Let me show you her picture first.” He turned the gas up to its fullest height, and held out a photograph.
It was the same woman.
