The Perfect Tale

by Mary Stewart Cutting

THE PERFECT TALE

BY MARY STEWART CUTTING

 

NOËL FARINGTON sat by his office desk, his long legs stretched out, and his lean, narrow, youthful face, with its dark-lashed eyes, bent over his personal mail, which consisted that hot August morning of a returned manuscript and a letter postmarked from the mountains. He opened the manuscript first and glanced it over, although he knew it by heart. If his spirit still remained buoyant after repeated failures, it was because he believed so firmly that he had it in him to write a story some day that would touch the highest mark of success. This aspiration was to Noël what love might be to another; every definite hope and aim was in some way interwoven with it. It kept him warm when he would otherwise have been very cold.

Even in those magazines where his articles were refused it was recognized that he had genius, though his efforts were still crude. He had that curious sub-popularity which obtains in editorial offices, unknown to the public—something was expected of young Farington. He clung the closer to his dear Mistress Inspiration, because he looked forward to no other companion. Marriage was a happiness meant for other people, not for him.

At the present ration of his earnings, indeed, as he sometimes thought grimly, there could be no prospect of marrying any young woman of his own class before the age of fifty. During the latter half of his stay at college he had been attached to a girl older than himself, who had led him on and then thrown him over. The effect of this was to give him a painful inner distrust; he felt with sensitively shrinking, unvoiced humility, that there must be some lack in himself, he didn't know what, that made it impossible for a woman to really care for him; he hadn't the power other men have to inspire affection, that was all. Naturally generous and with high ideals, he was growing self-centred from a life that was lonelier than anyone knew.

There had been the usual summer strain of overwork in the office, with men off on vacations and one, unscheduled, ill. Noël had been too tired to sleep these nights—suffocating nights spent between the two long narrow walls of his room, with heavy wagons hulking over the cobble-stones until the dawn, As he looked at the rejected manuscript on his desk he realized that he had come to the end of his tether for a while.

“Take your feet out of my way,” said a fellow-clerk, stumbling over them purposely, He spoke irritatingly—tempers were going in the office.

“If you do that again. I’ll knock you down,” returned Noël with sudden, unexpected fury. He controlled himself by a great effort, and took up the letter—Lauter’s letter that he had left unopened. It was an invitation to spend the month with a party of friends in the Adirondacks. That night Noël packed his typewriter in his trunk with his other belongings, and went.

 

Noël felt in a dream-prelude to some wonderful, fairy-like existence as he sat down to dinner that first evening in the long, low, pine-built dining-room of the bungalow, decked with cedar boughs, velvety dark in the gleams of the pink-shaded candles on the table—a delightful mingling of the sylvan and the luxurious. While the forest gloomed around, the noiseless waiters served delicious dishes and poured champagne into the long, bubble-topped glasses—a change indeed to one who had eaten no food lately that hadn't a price on it. The conversation was charmingly gay and intimate, but Noël could not talk, though his worn, thin, boyish face reflected the lights and shadows of discussion, and his eyes smiled a quick response to whoever questioned them. Most of the people he knew, more or less, but far down the table beyond the pink glow of the candles the profile of a stranger occasionally gleamed into view—the delicate, spirited profile of a girl, her small head set on a long throat that rose out of a gown cut slightly square at the neck. The outlines of her velvety black hair melted into the velvety black shadows beyond, but he could see the curve of the long lashes on her olive cheek, and the sweetly set, infantine corners of her mouth. She was as silent as he, though once or twice he heard her laugh at something that was said. He felt the subtle aroma of some unknown attraction.

“Who is the girl in white?” he asked afterward of his friend Lauter. “I was presented, but I didn’t catch her name.”

“Which one? They’re most of ’em in white,” said Lauter, a jovial, youngish-elderly man, who took a semi-paternal interest in his younger guest. He laid a large, kind hand on Noël’s arm as he spoke. “Been working pretty hard, haven’t you? Well, you wait till you begin to feel the air—that’ll set you up. What girl did you say? Oh, that’s Genevieve Deering—she’s a nice child, but rather impulsive. Come outside and smoke.”

During the evening, before the early bed-hour, they all sat grouped on the piled-up cushions in the veranda of the bungalow, with the moonlight streaming down across the mountain and the motionless forest upon the waters of the lake that lapped in silver on the ivory margin. It was a scene of almost impossible beauty, whose fibres caught at the hearts, in the exhilaration of the deep surrounding silence. Some of the men began to thrum hauntingly on guitars and mandolins, at the feet of the women, whose soft cheeks had a magic sheen upon them. The air was full of the resinous perfume of the crouching pines; Noël drew a long, long, long breath of it. Genevieve Deering’s presence seemed to give an added touch to this night of enchantment, as she sat back against the heaped-up pine boughs at the other end of the group. As she glanced across the space that divided them he saw to what the attraction he had felt was due—it was because she had such happy eyes.

When they were all parting for the night he found himself unexpectedly standing alone near her. She hesitated for a second, and then held out her slim brown hand to him.

“Good-night,” she said with a frank cordiality, as if they had been talking for a long time before.

“Good-night,” he answered, and added, with involuntary response, familiar words, long unsaid: “Sweet dreams.”

Noël went to his room, but he could not sleep. The enchantment was still upon him. After half an hour of closed eyelids he rose, lighted the candles, partially dressed himself, and sat down by the table, where he had placed his writing materials on first unpacking. He took up the pen now, and began to write, haltingly at first, and then with a suddenly exultant power that carried him whither it would. The word and the thought became one. He hardly dared stop to think, lest the gift, so longed for, should leave him. He wrote and wrote, his mind growing clearer and clearer in this high joy of accomplishment—wrote and wrote, while the clock ticked and the wind blew ghostly past his window—wrote and wrote, with burning eye and whitening cheek, pushing sheet after sheet of paper from him, until the last line was reached. Then he leaned back in his chair, throbbing with an exultant emotion he had never known before. Short, simple, almost childlike as was the story he had finished, it held within it something indefinable—something that was divine—and true: the heart of man—the joy of life. In an overwhelming moment he realized that he had written the perfect tale!

He dragged the typewriter over to him, and set to work to copy the closely written pages, with the swiftness born of long practice. When he finished, the gray dawn was coming in at the window. He wrote a note to the editor of a famous magazine, sealed and stamped it, and then stepping out of the low window, walked around by the side of the lake to the inn post-office, pointed out to him the night before. Then he came home, and throwing himself down upon the bed, fell sound asleep at last.

It was late when he awoke, after repeated knockings at the door. The party had nearly finished breakfast as he entered, the men only waiting for him before starting off with the guides on a canoeing trip planned the evening before. The dark forest still glowed around, but the sunlight danced upon the lake, blue under a blue sky. Miss Deering was in a suit of hunter’s green, a scarlet cape hanging over her chair; her eyes were still happy. Noël felt with a thrill that the exhilaration of last night was still his.

“You look like a different person,” said Lauter heartily. “We were all worried about you yesterday, but I said—all he wants is air, and he’ll get it here. It’s a glorious day.”

“It was drizzling at four o’clock this morning,” announced Birket, a squarely built young fellow, with a heavy chin and penetrating eyes.

“Was it?” asked Noël. “I didn’t notice it; I was out at that time. That accounts, however, for the dampness of my coat,” he added, feeling it with his hand.

“What were you doing out of doors so early?” asked Mrs. Lauter, who was a cheerful, stout lady, with beautifully tailored girth.

“I went to post a manuscript I was writing all night.”

“Writing all night!” Every eye was turned on him.

“Writing what?”

“A story called ‘The Perfect Tale,’” said Noël, in a tone that he tried to make light, as he gave a brief account of the night’s performance. “It’s by far the best thing I’ve ever done—something I’ve thought of always. I could hardly believe I had accomplished it—I wanted to make sure at once.”

“That was quick work,” said Birket, staring at him, “to write and typewrite it and post it all before morning.”

“It was,” assented Noël with a slight grandiloquence.

All day on the trip he could think of nothing else in his state of exaltation, and dreamed of the future it would open to him. He counted the days until a reply could come from the magazine. A golden haze encompassed forest and stream. All he wanted was to get back to the words he had written—to pore over them, to make them his once more. But when he went to his room the manuscript was not there. He applied to Mrs. Lauter, who came to him some moments later very much distressed.

“Oh, Mr. Farington,” she said, “I hardly know how to tell you. A new maid stupidly burned up the papers in your room—they must have been blown about the floor by the wind, and she thought you had thrown them away. I wouldn’t have had it happen for the world—I blame myself dreadfully! And we were all hoping so much that you would read it to-night!”

“Ah, don’t mind so much, dear lady,” said Noël. “It was all my fault. I should have been more careful. But it doesn’t really matter in the least, the copy is safe.” He hesitated, and then added doubtfully, “Perhaps I can manage to tell the story.”

But when they were once more sitting on the veranda, with no moon this time, but with a gypsy fire sending a redly flaring light and shadow over the group, Noël began and began again, in vain. He could not tell the story.

“It’s all so elusive—indicated more than told; one word suggests another, and I can’t seem to find the words now—I wrote so quickly that they’ve left no trace,” he said earnestly. “It’s the same as it would be with a long poem that you tried to remember—a bare outline would mean nothing, even if you could give an outline. I can feel the whole thing more and more—it’s as real to me as your faces—but I can’t formulate it. I can’t reduce it to details. The only thing that stands out quite clearly in my mind is the part—just before the wonderful climax—where the heroine reaches out her arms to Ralph as she stands in a shaft of sunlight, and says: ‘I believe you!’”

“My word,” said Birket in an undertone, after a pause, “he thinks no end of himself, doesn’t he?”

“Hush,” murmured Frances Remer, a light, white young woman, with a hard expression, in spite of her dimples. “You’ve no romance in you.”

“It’s too, too bad you can’t remember it,” said Mrs. Lauter, settling herself back comfortably in her cushions.

There was a cheerful murmur of regret from everyone. The conversation began again, and the guitars and mandolins commenced to thrum softly and hauntingly as on the night before. Only Genevieve Deering, her scarlet cape half over one shoulder, and half over the velvety blackness of her hair, leaned toward Noël across the ruddy, flickering shadow, with dark, pleading eyes.

“Oh, I wish you could have gone on!” she said.

 

“Haven’t you heard from the Idealist yet, Mr. Farington?” Mrs. Lauter spoke. It was three weeks later, and this time some of the party were stationed on a little cleared space on a mountain-summit; the tree-tops were at their feet; the sun shone through a white haze that thinly veiled the world below. Noël sat at the feet of Mrs. Lauter, his cap on the sward beside him, his thick hair back from his forehead. Two of their number had just strolled away, and Noël and Mrs. Lauter had smiled a mutual recognition of the unconscious coupling of some of the others: Birket and Miss Remer—pretty, sensible Ethel Gray and ardent young Porter. With the age of youth, which is far greater than the age of the really old, Noël felt a high, protecting, brotherly pleasure in the contemplation of those who were lovers; it seemed something right, and charming.

“Why, no,” he said aloud in answer to her question. “It is time I heard from them. But summer is a bad season to get a quick decision—so many men are off on vacations. I’m looking for an answer any day now.”

“Yes,” agreed Birket, “Allis says that Sanford—the editor—has been in Maine. Where is Allis? He was here just now.”

“Oh, he and Emma have gone off together—to talk about furniture, I suppose,” said Ethel Gray. “If it’s as prosaic as that to be engaged, I never want to be.”

“There can be a good deal of romance in furniture when it’s for two,” stated Mrs. Lauter sagely.

“Well, you wouldn’t want to marry without it,” said Frances Remer. She looked at Birket with her ironic, dimpling smile. “Honestly, I never could see why it should be considered more interesting to go without things after you are married than before. I’d hate it. if I’m not comfortable I’m downright disagreeable, that’s all—most people are.”

“What do you say, Miss Gray?” asked young Porter anxiously.

“Well,” said Miss Gray slowly—she leaned her sensible little square face on her hand—“I don’t think I’d mind beginning plainly—I’d sort of like to keep a place in order and make nice little dishes if I thought I shouldn’t have to do it always. I shouldn’t want to be really poor—would you, Genevieve?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t care,” said Genevieve.

She lay on the mountain-top facing the others, her chin propped up by her slim brown hand—her young, reclining figure, with its dark head and scarlet-draped shoulder, half outlined by the green sward, half by the blue sky. The corners of her infantine mouth smiled, but her eyes were serious. Noël watched her with the frank admiration a man may feel in the sight of a beautiful girl; there was a charm about her beyond the ostensible charm, like that of a field of crimson clover with the wind blowing over it, or the reflection of green fluttering leaves in still water. “I shouldn’t care how poor I were, if I were really fond of some one,” she said.

“My dear child, you’d care soon enough,” said Mrs. Lauter compassionately.

“No, I shouldn’t!” said Genevieve, shaking her head. “Don’t you see?—you can have chairs and tables and clothes and servants, with your sister, or your uncle, or your grandfather—but that isn’t love! Love is when you have to be with a person, no matter what you go without. If I loved anybody very much, I could live anywhere and be glad, if there was anything to live on at all. I’d be happy to cook for him, happy to work for him.”

“In two rooms over the elevated road,” supplemented Birket.

“Yes, in two rooms over the elevated road,” said Genevieve defiantly. “I’d have scarlet geraniums on the fire escapes, and when he came home at night he’d forget it was a fire-escape over the elevated road—he’d only see over the tops of the houses to the cloud mountains beyond.”

“You are very romantic,” said Mrs. Lauter indulgently.

“No,” said Genevieve, “I’m quite practical.” Her lips still smiled, but her eyes took sweet counsel from within. “Wasn’t it Hawthorne’s wife—and they were very poor!—who said that she passed her days in a ‘dream of bliss’? Well, if I am married and haven’t the outside things I’ll just dream them into my life—I’ve always done it! There’s only one thing you can’t dream into it—you can’t! And that’s love.”

She rose as she spoke, and stood, her arms hanging down, facing the little circle—then she turned, and disappeared through the trees, as an Indian maiden might. Noël hesitated for an instant, stooped to arrange Mrs. Lauter’s cushions anew for her, and then, jumping up, followed the glint of the scarlet cloak down the trail.

“Do you know,” said Noël, as they walked with light steps that swayed together in unison. “Do you know when you were speaking just now you touched on one theme of my story?—it came before me for a moment with extraordinary vividness. I have so often tried to remember it as it was written, but all my life it has been this way with me: Very great events seem to blot out sensation—I can’t go back and take up the details. And it was such a strange power that came to me that night—such divination of life!”

 

“If an angel spoke
In thunder, should we haply know much more
Than that it thundered?”

 

quoted Genevieve softly.

“How you understand,” said Noël. “It is when with you that the thought of ‘The Perfect Tale’ comes to me most clearly. I can almost see it all before me again with that beautiful climax that I can never quite get. Some times I’ve wondered whether I really wrote as I thought, or whether my imagination has gilded it since. But there is one assurance I return to every time: Everything—the grass, the sky, the world itself, has been changed for me. I feel that I live now to accomplish great things—for there’s a beauty in existence I never felt before.”

“Oh,” said Genevieve, her frank eyes alight, “I’ve felt that, too! Don’t you think you can tell when beautiful thoughts are near you? When people are in a room with you, you can know whether they’re bothered or discontented or happy without their speaking. Why couldn’t one feel something beautiful—like what you wrote? There’s so much more to living than what you see!”

“Have you learned that too?” asked Noël.

“Yes,” said Genevieve. She added in a shy voice: “I’ve had to dream things into my life, I’ve had to believe in what I don’t see, because—” She stopped, and then went on resolutely. “You know I’m not a rich girl, like the others— When I finished school and my cousin told me I had to go back there and teach—I—cried. And the Principal of the school—I have never told anybody else before——”

“Is he unkind to you?” asked Noël in a voice that startled himself.

“Oh, no, no, he’s very kind—too kind,” said Genevieve. A crimson wave reached to her black hair; she looked at him with piteous eyes. “He has a mouth like a fish,” she whispered painfully.

“He must be a villain,” said Noël with a cold, unreasoning anger.

She gave him a grateful glance. After a moment’s silence she murmured: “Now you see why I’ve learned to dream into my life. Mrs. Lauter was telling me some things about you, and I thought I’d like you to know some things about myself.”

“I thank you very, very much,” said Noël gently. Yet his thoughts were not gentle; it came upon him with a strange unsettling force that while he had been wrapped in his own plans she had been living somewhere near, and that those soft hands that he had held in his were toiling and must toil still.

They walked on in another silence, till they neared the.little cabin where the rest of the party awaited them with the guide.

“1 am going away this afternoon to the Warren’s camp for a week’s visit,”" said Genevieve suddenly.

“I did not know that! Why, you will come back then only just before I leave here myself,” returned Noël. He was disgusted, annoyed, he knew not why. “At any rate, I shall surely have news of ‘The Perfect Tale’ for you by that time!”

The next day a heavy rain settled down, and Noël felt a fathomless depression, and a consuming anxiety to hear news of his story. The day after, amid a wet, cold fog that clung to the ground, he wrote to the Idealist. The weather cleared afterward, but there was a chill in the air, and he was restless and solitary in the midst of this group, with their pleasant family ties, their pleasant sweethearts.

The week was not yet at an end when the longed-for letter arrived. No manuscript with it! That was as it should be. His heart beat with triumph. Another moment and he was standing before Lauter, deathly pale, in the long room where the men were sitting. “Listen to this!” he said:

 

“Dear Mr. Farington—Your letter was received yesterday. In reply we would state that no such manuscript as you mention has been received here; there is no record of it, and a thorough search has failed to bring it to light. It must have been inadvertently sent to some other periodical, or lost in transmission. We regret very much not having had the opportunity to examine it.

“Very truly yours, ⁠
“George Sanford.”

 

“Well!” said Lauter.

“Well,” repeated Noël. The veins stood out on his forehead. “I did send it to the Idealist, and it was not lost in transmission. I put extra stamps on it to make sure; I posted it myself. They’ve lost it with their damned carelessness! It’s an outrage! I’ll take the first train I can get this afternoon, I’ll make them hunt it up!”

“It’s too bad,” said Lauter sympathetically, but Noël had gone off unheeding. He sat down on his bed with his head in his hands, trying to think. Then he got up and started out again. As he came around the corner near the window where the men were sitting, Birket’s words caught his ear:

“I don’t believe Farington ever wrote that story at all!”

“Oh, see here,” expostulated Lauter.

“Well, consider the facts! He says he wrote it in a magically short time and there’s not a vestige of it to show.”

“The maid burned up the copy,” said Lauter.

“She burned up some papers, but who knows what was on them? And he can’t remember a word—is that rational? He thinks he wrote it, all square enough, but the thing’s absurd—I’ve always known it.”

“His clothes were damp from going out to post it that morning,” argued Lauter, yet evidently wavering.

“Exactly, and he may have walked in his sleep or anything else,—I don’t pretend to explain what. But you may be sure of one fact—there’ll never be any more of that impossibly perfect tale than there is now—and that’s nothing! Porter thinks so, too, and so does Frances Remer.”

“Well, perhaps not,” said Lauter with an easy laugh. “Poor Farington!”

Noël turned and went off into the forest, the enshrouding forest, dark with the weight of centuries, through whose branches the late afternoon sun could hardly penetrate to the thick carpet of pine-needles below. Everything else had failed him—had this failed too? An awful, suffocating doubt clung to him, a devil-tentacled doubt, created by that deadening disbelief of others, from which his soul strove desperately to free itself. If they were right, why, then—! There was no one to uphold him. To be true to the truth we know of ourselves, in spite of the judgment of the wise—that is a vital attitude, though it may take the loneliest struggle of all to maintain it. The very crucial need of effort now weighted him in the endeavor to stand upright. There are some hurts that drown remembrance, and others that give fresh wounding power to every other hurt that has ever been. He heard those carts hulking over the stones in the long, lonely, hot nights, into the fetid dawn.… He was a child again, who needed comfort.… He saw the tears of that bright-winged creature, compelled to drudge unwillingly for hire.… Men with fish-mouths gaped at him from behind every tree!

He held on to the low branch of a cedar and rested his forehead against its trunk. As he lifted his eyes again, a slant of that late afternoon sunshine fell athwart the trail, through which came the figure of Genevieve Deering, her scarlet cloak over one shoulder, slipping between the tree trunks with the light, free step of an Indian maiden, her eager eyes searching into the gloom before them. As she saw him she ran forward.

“You!” he said, and taking the hand she held out to him, clasped it in both his own, with a miraculous lightening of the heart.

“Yes,” said Genevieve, a glow on her olive cheek below the curving black lashes, “I came home a day too soon, I couldn’t wait. It has been such a strange, dreary week—so different from the rest.”

He made a gesture of assent. “Yes! I was sure you would feel it, too. I could not think why it was, but now I know it was the presage of misfortune. Did you hear——?”

“Yes,” said Genevieve, forestalling him. “They told me at the house, and I ran to find you, to say——”

“No,” he interrupted, “you haven’t heard the rest.” His face stiffened, his proud eyes questioned hers with a defiant hardness. “They say I’m a self-deluded fraud and that I never wrote that story at all—that I only dreamed that I did!”

“Oh!” she cried, “how could they hurt you so!” Her tone had a passionate, indignant, yearning sympathy in it. She moved instinctively toward him with a lovely, maternal gesture, as if she would thrust her body between him and the world. “How cruel, how cruel! You must never, never think that! Never!”

“Genevieve!” said Noël, “Genevieve!” He pressed the hand he still held, and the color rushed back to his face. “How you divine me—how you divine! It’s wonderful!” He stopped to control his voice that trembled. “I want to tell you now that story was sent—it was made from the fibres of my heart and of my brain—these fingers held the pen that wrote it, these eyes beheld the written words. It was as real as you and I!”

“Oh,” said Genevieve, her beautiful, heartful eyes upraised to his, “why do you tell this to me? I would believe in you against the whole world—I would believe in you even against yourself.”

She made a swift step nearer to him—he felt the warm comfort of her tender arms around him as he held her—his lips rested on the soft joy of hers.

“Ah,” breathed Noël, lifting his head as one who awakens, with the thrill of an ecstasy far greater than that lost one in his voice. “I remember it all, now. This is the Perfect Tale!”