Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  The old gardener bestirred himself. Slowly he gathered up his tools. He passed down the walk and out of the garden, closing the grille behind him.

  Once more the old garden was left to itself, but now there was a change: full in the centre, erect once more, stood the statue of the little Love. It was bruised and cruelly battered; an arm was broken, the round, white limbs were chipped and marred, the mark of the noisome snail was still upon its forehead. The stain of the earth was upon it. But the little Love was enthroned again upon his pedestal, back in his place once more, firm and high, dominating the whole garden, glad and strong. A smile of triumph was on his lips, a glance of command flashed from his eyes, back on his throne again, unconquered, eternal, the undisputed king — the sovereign vanquisher of the entire world.

  The sun set, the twilight came and faded into night. It was dark and very still. The fountain snared the stars within its moss-grown rim. The few faint noises of the day, the sound of footsteps, the murmur of voices, the sighing of the breeze in the old mulberry trees, were gone. Hours passed. There was not a sound anywhere. The ancient garden relapsed once more into silence.

  Ladies’ Home Journal, May, 1903.

  A LOST STORY

  AT NINE o’clock that morning Rosella arrived in her little office on the third floor of the great publishing house of Conant & Company, and putting up her veil without removing her hat, addressed herself to her day’s work. She went through her meagre and unimportant mail, wrote a few replies, and then turned to the pile of volunteer manuscripts which it was her duty to read and report upon.

  For Rosella was Conant’s “reader,” and so well was she acquainted with the needs of the house, so thorough was she in her work, and so great was the reliance upon her judgment, that she was the only one employed. Manuscripts that she “passed up” went direct to Conant himself, while the great army of the “declined” had no second chance. For the “unavailables” her word was final.

  From the first — which was when her initial literary venture, a little book of short tales of Sicily and the Sicilians, was published by the house — her relations with the Conants had been intimate. Conant believed in her, and for the sake of the time when her books could be considered safe investments was willing to lose a few dollars during the time of her apprenticeship. For the tales had enjoyed only a fleeting succés d’estime. Her style was, like her temperament, delicately constructed and of extreme refinement, not the style to appeal to the masses. It was “searched,” a little precieuse, and the tales themselves were diaphanous enough, polished little contes, the points subtle, the action turning upon minute psychological distinctions.

  Yet she had worked desperately hard upon their composition. She was of those very few who sincerely cannot write unless the mood be propitious; and her state of mind, the condition of her emotions, was very apt to influence her work for good or ill, as the case might be.

  But a succés d’estime fills no purses, and favourable reviews in the literary periodicals are not “negotiable paper.” Rosella could not yet live wholly by her pen, and thought herself fortunate when the house offered her the position of reader.

  This arrival of hers was no doubt to be hastened, if not actually assured, by the publication of her first novel, Patroclus, upon which she was at this time at work. The evening before, she had read the draft of the story to Trevor, and even now, as she cut the string of the first manuscript of the pile, she was thinking over what Trevor had said of it, and smiling as she thought.

  It was through Conant that Rosella had met the great novelist and critic, and it was because of Conant that Trevor had read Rosella’s first little book. He had taken an interest at once, and had found occasion to say to her that she had it in her to make a niche for herself in American letters.

  He was a man old enough to be her grandfather, and Rosella often came to see him in his study, to advise with him as to doubtful points in her stories or as to ideas for those as yet unwritten. To her his opinion was absolutely final. This old gentleman, this elderly man of letters, who had seen the rise and fall of a dozen schools, was above the influence of fads, and he whose books were among the classics even before his death was infallible in his judgments of the work of the younger writers. All the stages of their evolution were known to him — all their mistakes, all their successes. He understood; and a story by one of them, a poem, a novel, that bore the stamp of his approval, was “sterling.” Work that he declared a failure was such in very earnest, and might as well be consigned as speedily as possible to the grate or the waste basket.

  When, therefore, he had permitted himself to be even enthusiastic over Patroclus, Rosella had been elated beyond the power of expression, and had returned home with blazing cheeks and shining eyes, to lie awake half the night thinking of her story, planning, perfecting, considering, and reconsidering.

  Like her short stories, the tale was of extreme delicacy in both sentiment and design. It was a little fanciful, a little elaborate, but of an ephemeral poetry. It was all “atmosphere,” and its success depended upon the minutest precision of phrasing and the nicest harmony between idea and word. There was much in mere effect of words; and more important than mere plot was the feeling produced by the balancing of phrases and the cadence of sentence and paragraph.

  Only a young woman of Rosella’s complexity, of her extreme sensitiveness, could have conceived Patroclus, nor could she herself hope to complete it successfully at any other period of her life. Any earlier she would have been too immature to adapt herself to its demands; any later she would have lost the spontaneity, the jeunesse, and the freshness which were to contribute to its greatest charm.

  The tale itself was simple. Instead of a plot, a complication, it built itself around a central idea, and it was the originality of this idea, this motif, that had impressed Trevor so strongly. Indeed, Rosella’s draft could convey no more than that. Her treatment was all to follow. But here she was sure of herself. The style could come naturally as she worked.

  She was ambitious, and in her craving to succeed, to be recognized and accepted, was all that passionate eagerness that only the artist knows. So far success had been denied her; but now at last she seemed to see light. Her Patroclus would make her claims good. Everything depended upon that.

  She had thought over this whole situation while she removed the wrappings from the first manuscript of the pile upon her desk. Even then her fingers itched for the pen, and the sentences and phrases of the opening defined themselves clearly in her mind. But that was not to be the immediate work. The unlovely bread-and-butter business pressed upon her. With a long breath she put the vision from her and turned her attention to the task at hand.

  After her custom, she went through the pile, glancing at the titles and first lines of each manuscript, and putting it aside in the desk corner to be considered in detail later on.

  She almost knew in advance that, of the thirty-odd volunteers of that day’s batch, not one would prove available. The manuscripts were tagged and numbered in the business office before they came to her, and the number of the first she picked up that morning was 1120, and this since the first of the year. Of the eleven hundred she had accepted only three. Of these three, two had failed entirely after publication; the third had barely paid expenses. What a record! How hopeless it seemed! Yet the strugglers persisted. Did it not seem as if No. 1120, Mrs. Allen Bowen of Bentonville, South Dakota — did it not seem as if she could know that the great American public has no interest in, no use for, Thoughts on the Higher Life, a series of articles written for the county paper — foolish little articles revamped from Ruskin and Matthew Arnold?

  And 1121 — what was this? The initial lines ran:

  “Oh, damn everything!” exclaimed Percival Holcombe, as he dropped languidly into a deep-seated leather chair by the club window which commanded a view of the noisy street crowded with fashion and frivolity, wherein the afternoon’s sun, freed from its enthralling mists, which all day long had jeal
ously obscured his beams, was gloating o’er the panels of the carriages of noblemen who were returning from race track and park, and the towhead of the little sweeper who plied his humble trade which earned his scanty supper that he ate miles away from that gay quarter wherein Percival Holcombe, who —

  Rosella paused for sheer breath. This sort did not need to be read. It was declined already. She picked up the next. It was in an underwear box of green pasteboard.

  “The staid old town of Salem,” it read, “was all astir one bright and sunny morning in the year 1604.” Rosella groaned. “Another!” she said. “Now,” she continued, speaking to herself and shutting her eyes— “now, about the next page the ‘portly burgess’ will address the heroine as ‘Mistress,’ and will say, ‘An’ whither away so early?’” She turned over to verify. She was wrong. The portly burgess had said: “Good-morrow, Miss Priscilla. An’ where away so gaily bedizened?” She sighed as she put the manuscript away. “Why, and, oh, why will they do it!” she murmured.

  The next one, 1123, was a story “Compiled from the Memoirs of One Perkin Althrope, Esq., Sometime Field-Coronet in His Majesty’s Troop of Horse,” and was sown thick with objurgation— “Odswounds!”

  “Body o’ me!”

  “A murrain on thee!”

  “By my halidom!” and all the rest of the sweepings and tailings of Scott and the third-rate romanticists.

  “Declined,” said Rosella firmly, tossing it aside. She turned to 1124:

  About three o’clock of a roseate day in early spring two fashionables of the softer sex, elegantly arrayed, might have been observed sauntering languidly down Fifth Avenue.

  “Are you going to Mrs. Van Billion’s musicale to-night?” inquired the older of the two, a tall and striking demi-brunette, turning to her companion.

  “No, indeed,” replied the person thus addressed, a blonde of exquisite colouring. “No, indeed. The only music one hears there is the chink of silver dollars. Ha! ha! ha! ha!”

  Rosella winced as if in actual physical anguish. “And the author calls it a ‘social satire’!” she exclaimed. “How can she! How can she!”

  She turned to the next. It was written in script that was a model of neatness, margined, correctly punctuated, and addressed, “Harold Vickers,” with the town and state. Its title was The Last Dryad, and the poetry of the phrase stuck in her mind. She read the first lines, then the first page, then two.

  “Come,” said Rosella, “there is something in this.” At once she was in a little valley in Boeotia in the Arcadian day. It was evening. There was no wind. Somewhere, a temple, opalescent in the sunset, suggested rather than defined itself. A landscape developed such as Turner in a quiet mood might have evolved, and with it a feeling of fantasy, of remoteness, of pure, true classicism. A note of pipes was in the air, sheep bleated, and Daphne, knee deep in the grass, surging an answer to the pipes, went down to meet her shepherd.

  Rosella breathed a great sigh of relief. Here at last was a possibility — a new writer with a new, sane view of his world and his work. A new poet, in fine. She consulted the name and address given — Harold Vickers, Ash Fork, Arizona. There was something in that Harold; perhaps education and good people. But the Vickers told her nothing. And where was Ash Fork, Arizona; and why and how had The Last Dryad been written there, of all places the green world round? How came the inspiration for that classic paysage, such as Ingres would have loved, from the sagebrush and cactus?

  “Well,” she told herself, “Moore wrote Lalla Rookh in a back room in London, among the chimney pots and soot. Maybe the proportion is inverse. But, Mr. Harold Vickers of Ash Fork, Arizona, your little book is, to say the least, well worth its ink.”

  She went through the other manuscripts as quickly as was consistent with fairness, and declined them all. Then settling herself comfortably in her chair, she plunged, with the delight of an explorer venturing upon new ground, into the pages of The Last Dryad.

  Four hours later she came, as it were, to herself, to find that she sat lax in her place, with open, upturned palms, and eyes vacantly fixed upon the opposite wall. The Last Dryad, read to the final word, was tumbled in a heap upon the floor. It was past her luncheon hour. Her cheeks flamed; her hands were cold and moist; and her heart beat thick and slow, clogged, as it were, by its own heaviness.

  But the lapse of time was naught to her, nor the fever that throbbed in her head. Her world, like a temple of glass, had come down dashing about her. The future, which had beckoned her onward — a fairy in the path wherein her feet were set — was gone, and at the goal of her ambition and striving she saw suddenly a stranger stand, plucking down the golden apples that she so long and passionately had desired.

  For The Last Dryad was her own, her very, very own and cherished Patroclus.

  That the other author had taken the story from a different viewpoint, that his treatment varied, that the approach was his own, that the wording was his own, produced not the least change upon the final result. The idea, the motif, was identical in each; identical in every particular, identical in effect, in suggestion. The two tales were one. That was the fact, the unshakable fact, the block of granite that a malicious fortune had flung athwart her little pavilion of glass.

  At first she jumped to the conclusion of chicanery. At first there seemed no other explanation. “He stole it,” she cried, rousing vehemently from her inertia— “mine — mine. He stole my story.”

  But common sense prevailed in the end. No, there was no possible chance for theft. She had not spoken of Patroclus to anyone but Trevor. Her manuscript draft had not once left her hands. No; it was a coincidence, nothing more — one of those fateful coincidences with which the scientific and literary worlds are crowded. And he, this unknown Vickers, this haphazard genius of Ash Fork, Arizona, had the prior claim. Her Patroclus must remain unwritten. The sob caught and clutched at her throat at last.

  “Oh,” she cried in a half whisper— “oh, my chance, my hopes, my foolish little hopes! And now this! To have it all come to nothing — when I was so proud, so buoyant — and Mr. Trevor and all! Oh, could anything be more cruel!”

  And then, of all moments, ex machina, Harold Vickers’s card was handed in.

  She stared at it an instant, through tears, amazed and incredulous. Surely someone was playing a monstrous joke upon her to-day. Soon she would come upon the strings and false bottoms and wigs and masks of the game. But the office boy’s contemplation of her distress was real. Something must be done. The whole machine of things could not indefinitely hang thus suspended, inert, waiting her pleasure.

  “Yes,” she exclaimed all at once. “Very well; show him in”; and she had no more than gathered up the manuscript of The Last Dryad from the floor when its author entered the room.

  He was very young — certainly not more than twenty-three — tall, rather poorly dressed, an invalid, beyond doubt, and the cough and the flush on the high cheek bone spelled the name of the disease. The pepper-and-salt suit, the shoe-string cravat, and the broad felt hat were frankly Arizona. And he was diffident, constrained, sitting uncomfortably on the chair as a mark of respect, smiling continually, and, as he talked, throwing in her name at almost every phrase:

  “No, Miss Beltis; yes, Miss Beltis; quite right, Miss Beltis.”

  His embarrassment helped her to her own composure, and by the time she came to question him as to his book and the reasons that brought him from Ash Fork to New York, she had herself in hand.

  “I have received an unimportant government appointment in the Fisheries Department,” he explained, “and as I was in New York for the week I thought I might — not that I wished to seem to hurry you, Miss Beltis — but I thought I might ask if you had come to — to my little book yet.”

  In five minutes of time Rosella knew just where Harold Vickers was to be placed, to what type he belonged. He was the young man of great talent who, so far from being discovered by the outside world, had not even discovered himself. He would be in two
minds as yet about his calling in life, whether it was to be the hatching of fish or the writing of Last Dryads. No one had yet taken him in hand, had so much as spoken a word to him. If she told him now that his book was a ridiculous failure, he would no doubt say — and believe — that she was quite right, that he had felt as much himself. If she told him his book was a little masterpiece, he would be just as certain to tell himself, and with equal sincerity, that he had known it from the first.

  He had offered his manuscript nowhere else as yet.

  He was as new as an overnight daisy, and as destructible in Rosella’s hands.

  “Yes,” she said at length, “I have read your manuscript.” She paused a moment, then: “But I am not quite ready to pass upon it yet.”

  He was voluble in his protestations.

  “Oh, that is all right,” she interrupted. “I can come to the second reading in a day or two. I could send you word by the end of the week.”

  “Thank you, Miss Beltis.” He paused awkwardly, smiling in deprecatory fashion. “Do you — from what you have seen of it — read of it — do you — how does it strike you? As good enough to publish — or fit for the waste basket?”

  Ah, why had this situation leaped upon her thus unawares and all unprepared! Why had she not been allowed time, opportunity, to fortify herself! What she said now would mean so much. Best err, then, on the safe side; and which side was that? Her words seemed to come of themselves, and she almost physically felt herself withdraw from the responsibility of what this other material Rosella Beltis was saying.