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.
