“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——”