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She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort · English · Gutenberg #34825 · 566,321 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: She Buildeth Her House

Author: Will Levington Comfort

Illustrator: Martin Justice


        
Release date: January 2, 2011 [eBook #34825]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34825

Credits: Produced by David Garcia, Mary Meehan and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHE BUILDETH HER HOUSE ***




Produced by David Garcia, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)









                         She Buildeth Her House

                        By Will Levington Comfort

                  Author of "Routledge Rides Alone," etc


    With a Frontispiece By
    Martin Justice

    Philadelphia & London
    J. B. Lippincott Company
    1911

    COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

    Published May, 1911

    PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
    AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
    PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.


    A BOUGH BROUGHT WITH SINGING
          TO THE FEET OF
               HER
    WHO CROSSED THE SANDS ALONE
       IN ADORING PILGRIMAGE
            FOR HER SON


[Illustration: HE REACHED THE CURBING OF THE OLD WELL WITH HIS BURDEN]




Contents


FIRST CHAPTER. PAULA ENCOUNTERS THE REMARKABLE EYES OF HER FIRST GIANT,
AND HEARKENS TO THE SECOND, THUNDERING AFAR-OFF

SECOND CHAPTER. PAULA CONTEMPLATES THE WALL OF A HUNDRED WINDOWS, AND
THE MYSTERIOUS MADAME NESTOR CALLS AT THE ZOROASTER

THIRD CHAPTER. CERTAIN DEVELOPING INCIDENTS ARE CAUGHT INTO THE CURRENT
OF NARRATIVE--ALSO A SUPPER WITH REIFFERSCHEID

FOURTH CHAPTER. PAULA ENCOUNTERS HER ADVERSARY WHO TURNS PROPHET AND
TELLS OF A STARRY CHILD SOON TO BE BORN

FIFTH CHAPTER. PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE FURIOUS HISTORY OF SELMA CROSS
AND WRITES A LETTER TO QUENTIN CHARTER

SIXTH CHAPTER. PAULA IS CALLED TO PARLOR "F" OF THE MAIDSTONE WHERE THE
BEYOND-DEVIL AWAITS WITH OUTSTRETCHED ARMS

SEVENTH CHAPTER. PAULA BEGINS TO SEE MORE CLEARLY THROUGH MADAME
NESTOR'S REVELATIONS, AND WITNESSES A BROADWAY ACCIDENT

EIGHTH CHAPTER. PAULA MAKES SEVERAL DISCOVERIES IN THE CHARTER
HEART-COUNTRY, AND IS DELIGHTED BY HIS LETTERS TO THE SKYLARK

NINTH CHAPTER. PAULA IS DRAWN INTO THE SELMA CROSS PAST AND IS BRAVELY
WOOED THROUGH FURTHER MESSAGES FROM THE WEST

TENTH CHAPTER. PAULA SEES SELMA CROSS IN TRAGEDY, AND IN HER OWN
APARTMENT NEXT MORNING IS GIVEN A REALITY TO PLAY

ELEVENTH CHAPTER. PAULA IS SWEPT DEEP INTO A DESOLATE COUNTRY BY THE
HIGH TIDE, BUT NOTES A QUICK CHANGE IN SELMA CROSS

TWELFTH CHAPTER. CERTAIN ELEMENTS FOR THE CHARTER CRUCIBLE, AND HIS
MOTHER'S PILGRIMAGE, ACROSS THE SANDS ALONE TO MECCA

THIRTEENTH CHAPTER. "NO MAN CAN ENTER INTO A STRONG MAN'S HOUSE, AND
SPOIL HIS GOODS, EXCEPT HE WILL FIRST BIND THE STRONG MAN"

FOURTEENTH CHAPTER. THE SINGING OF THE SKYLARK CEASES ABRUPTLY; CHARTER
HASTENS EAST TO FIND A QUEER MESSAGE AT THE GRANVILLE

FIFTEENTH CHAPTER. QUENTIN CHARTER AND SELMA CROSS JOIN ISSUE ON A NEW
BATTLE-GROUND, EACH LEAVING THE FIELD WITH OPEN WOUNDS

SIXTEENTH CHAPTER. PAULA, FINDING THAT BOTH GIANTS HAVE ENTERED HER
CASTLE, RUSHES IN TUMULT INTO THE NIGHT

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER. PAULA SAILS INTO THE SOUTH, SEEKING THE HOLY MAN OF
SAINT PIERRE, WHERE LA MONTAGNE PELEE GIVES WARNING

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER. PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE RENDING FORTUNES OF SAINT
PIERRE AND THE PANTHER CALLS WITH NEW YORK MAIL

NINETEENTH CHAPTER. QUENTIN CHARTER IS ATTRACTED BY THE TRAVAIL OF
PELEE, AND ENCOUNTERS A QUEER FELLOW-VOYAGER

TWENTIETH CHAPTER. CHARTER'S MIND BECOMES THE ARENA OF CONFLICT BETWEEN
THE WYNDAM WOMAN AND SKYLARK MEMORIES

TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER. CHARTER COMMUNES WITH THE WYNDAM WOMAN, AND
CONFESSES THE GREAT TROUBLE OF HIS HEART TO FATHER FONTANEL

TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER. CHARTER MAKES A PILGRIMAGE TO THE CRATERS OF
PELEE--ONE LAST DAY DEVOTED TO THE SPIRIT OF OLD LETTERS

TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER. CHARTER AND STOCK ARE CALLED TO THE PRIEST'S HOUSE
IN THE NIGHT, AND THE WYNDAM WOMAN STAYS AT THE PALMS

TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER. HAVING TO DO ESPECIALLY WITH THE MORNING OF THE
ASCENSION, WHEN THE MONSTER, PELEE, GIVES BIRTH TO DEATH

TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER. THE SARAGOSSA ENCOUNTERS THE RAGING FIRE-MISTS
FROM PELEE EIGHT MILES AT SEA, BUT LIVES TO SEND A BOAT ASHORE

TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER. PAULA AND CHARTER IN SEVERAL SETTINGS FEEL THE
ENERGY OF THE GREAT GOOD THAT DRIVES THE WORLD

TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER. PAULA AND CHARTER JOURNEY INTO THE WEST; ONE
HEARS VOICES, BUT NOT THE WORDS OFTEN, FROM RAPTURE'S ROADWAY




She Buildeth Her House




FIRST CHAPTER

PAULA ENCOUNTERS THE REMARKABLE EYES OF HER FIRST GIANT, AND HEARKENS TO
THE SECOND, THUNDERING AFAR-OFF


Paula Linster was twenty-seven when two invading giants entered the
country of her heart. On the same day, these hosts, each unconscious of
the other, crossed opposite borders and verged toward the prepared
citadel between them.

Reifferscheid, though not one of the giants, found Paula a distraction
in brown, when she entered his office before nine in the morning, during
the fall of 1901. He edited the rather distinguished weekly book-page of
_The States_, and had come to rely upon her for a paper or two in each
issue. There had been rain in the night. The mellow October sunlight was
strange with that same charm of maturity which adds a glow of attraction
to motherhood. The wonderful autumn haze, which broods over our zone as
the spirit of ripening grains and tinting fruits, just perceptibly
shaded the vivid sky. A sentence Paula had heard somewhere in a play,
"My God, how the sun does shine!" appealed to her as particularly
fitting for New York on such a morning. Then in the streets, so lately
flooded, the brilliant new-washed air was sweet to breathe.

Paula had felt the advisability the year before of adding somewhat to
her income. Inventory brought out the truth that not one of her talents
had been specialized to the point of selling its product. She had the
rare sense to distinguish, however, between a certain joyous inclination
to write and a marked ability for producing literature; and to recognize
her own sound and sharp appreciation of what was good in the stirring
tide of books. Presenting herself to Reifferscheid, principally on
account of an especial liking for the book-page of _The States_, she never
forgot how the big man looked at her that first time over his
spectacles, as if turning her pages with a sort of psychometric faculty.
He found her possible and several months won her not a little
distinction in the work.

Reifferscheid was a fat, pondrous, heavy-spectacled devourer of work. He
compelled her real admiration--"the American St. Beuve," she called him,
because he was so tireless, and because he sniffed genius from afar.
There was something unreservedly charming to her, in his sense of
personal victory, upon discovering greatness in an unexpected source.
Then he was so big, so common to look at; kind as only a bear of a man
can be; so wise, so deep, and with such a big smoky factory of a brain,
full of fascinating crypts. Subcutaneous laughter that rested her
internally for weeks lingered about certain of the large man's sayings.
Even in the auditing of her account, she felt his kindness.

"Now here are some essays by Quentin Charter--a big man, a young man and
a slow worker," he said. "Charter's first volume was a thunderer. We
greeted it with a whoop two years ago. Did you see it?"

"No," Paula replied. "I was too strong for literary trifles then."

"Anyway, look out for Charter. He didn't start to appear until he was an
adult. He's been everywhere, read everything and has a punch like a
projectile. An effective chap, this Charter. He dropped in to see me a
few weeks after my review. He confessed the critics had made him very
glad.... 'I am doing a second book,' he confided to me. 'Down on my
knees to it. Work-shop stripped of encomiums; no more dinner-parties or
any of that fatness. Say, it's a queer thing about making a book. You
never can tell whether it's to be a boy or a girl....'"

Paula smiled reservedly.

"I asked him what his second book was to be about," Reifferscheid went
on. "'Women,' said he. 'How novel!' said I. He grinned genially.
'Reifferscheid,' he declared, in his snappy way, 'women are interesting.
They're doing the thinking nowadays. They're getting there. One of these
mornings, man will wake up to the fact that he's got to be born again to
get in a class with his wife. Man is mixed up with altogether too much
of this down-town madness. Women don't want votes, public office, or
first-hand dollars. _They want men!_' ... I always remembered that
little bit of stuff from Charter. He says the time will come when classy
girls will get their heads together and evolve this ultimatum, which
will be handed intact to adorers: 'No, boys, we can't marry you. We
haven't any illusions about celibacy. It isn't nice nor attractive, but
it's better than being yoked with hucksters and peddlers who come
up-town at night--mental cripples in empty wagons. Go away and learn
what life means, what it means to be men--_what it means to us for you
to be men_! Learn how to live--and oh, boys, hurry back!'"

"Splendid!" Paula exclaimed.

"Oh, yes, Charter is a full deck and a joker. He's lived. He makes you
feel him. His years are veritable campaigns. He has dangled in the
vortices of human action and human passion--and seemed to come out
whole!..." Reifferscheid chuckled at a memory. "'Women are interesting,'
Charter finished in his dry fashion. 'I just got to them lately. I wish
I could know them all.'"

"I love the book already," Paula said. Reifferscheid laughed inwardly at
the feminine way she held the volume in both hands, pressing it close.

"It's the only book on my table this morning that I'd like to read," he
added. "Therefore I give it to you. There's no fun in giving something
you don't want.... Are you going to hear Bellingham to-night?"

She was conscious of an unaccountable dislike at the name, a sense of
inward chill. It was almost as reckonable as the pleasure she felt in
the work and personality of Quentin Charter.

"Who's Bellingham?" Paula swallowed dryly after the first utterance of
the name.

"Mental magician. I only mentioned him, because you so seldom miss the
unusual, and are so quick to hail a new cult or odd mental specimen."

"Magician--surely?" she asked.

"He comes rather stoutly recommended as such," Reifferscheid replied,
"though personally mine is more than a healthy skepticism. There's a
notice this morning of his lectures. He recently hypnotized a man to
whom the medical profession was afraid to administer an
anaesthetic--held him painless during a long and serious operation. Then
Bellingham is the last word in alchemy, feminine emotions, causes of
hysteria, longevity, the proportions of male and female in each person;
also he renews the vital principle, advises unions, makes you beautiful,
and has esoteric women's classes. A Godey's Ladies' man. Some provincial
husband will shoot him presently."

Paula took the surface car home, because the day was so rare and the
crowd was still downward bent. The morning paper contained an
announcement of Quentin Charter's new book, and a sketch of the author.
A strange, talented figure, new in letters, the article said. The
paragraphs had that fresh glow of a publisher's perennial high hope.
Here was the book of a man who had lived; who drew not only upon art,
history, and philosophy for his prisms of thought, but who had roamed
and worked and ridden with men, keeping a sensitive finger ever at the
pulse of nature; a man who had never in the most insignificant degree
lowered the import or artificially raised the tension of his work to
adjust it to the fancied needs of the public. In spite of the
enthusiastic phrasing, everything about Charter fascinated her; even the
make-up of the unread book in her hand, and the sentences that gleamed
from the quickly turned pages.

She had ridden many squares, when the name of Dr. Bellingham stood out
before her eyes in the newspaper. The chill in her arteries was
perceptible as before, when Reifferscheid spoke the name. It was as the
latter had said--the famous healer and telepathist was to start a series
of classes for women.

Paula lived alone in a small apartment at the _Zoroaster_, "Top-side o'
Park." Few friends, many books, within a car ride of the world's best
fruition in plays, lectures, music, and painting--yet the reality of it
all was the expansion of her mind in the days and nights alone. The
subtle relations of things encroached upon her intelligence with a
steady and certain trend. She never had to pass, like so many of cruder
nature, through the horrid trials of materialism; nor to be painfully
bruised in mind from buffeting between manhandled creeds and the pure
ethics of the Lord Christ. Hers was not an aggressive masculine
originality, but the complement of it--that inspiring, completing
feminine intelligence, elastic to a man's hard-won concepts and ready
with a crown for them.

Something of this type of woman, the big-brained brothers of men have
written and chiselled, painted, sung and dreamed of, since human thought
first lifted above the appetites. There must be a bright answer for each
man's particular station of evolution in the world's dumfounding snarl
of the sexes--one woman to lighten his travail and accelerate his
passage to the Uplands. For we are but half-men, man and woman alike.
The whole is two, whose union forms One.... This is the key to Nature's
arcanum; this, the one articulate sentence from all the restless
murmuring out of the past; this, the stupendous Purpose weaving the
million thrilling and truant activities of the present hour--the clean
desire for completion--the union of two which forms One.

The search for this completing woman is the secret of man's roving in
the gardens of sense. His frequent falls into abysmal depravity are but
results incidental to the occultations of his Guide Star. From reptiles
in the foul smoke of chaos, to the lifted spines of manhood on a rising
road, Man has come; and by the interminable torture of the paths which
sink behind, he has the other half of eternity to reach the Top.

From a child whose fairies were only enchanted into books for day-time
convenience, darkness to Paula meant visions, indeed. Often now at
night, though she never spoke of it, the little apartment was peopled by
the spirits of her reading and her ideals--mystics, priests, prophets,
teachers, ascetics. To the congenial dark they came--faces unlike any
she had ever seen, but quite unmistakable in her dreamings. Once when
she pampered a natural aversion to meat for several months, soft
foot-falls and low voices (which had nothing whatever to do with her
neighbors across the hall, or the elevator-man in any passage) began to
rouse her in the night. New York is no place for such refinements of
sense, and she checked these manifestations through physical exercise
and increased diet. She was seldom afraid, but there was a tension in
all her imaginings, and she grew marvellously in this twenty-eighth
year--furnishing her mind more sumptuously than she knew. Reifferscheid
saw this in her eyes and in her work.

Throughout the swiftly passing day, Paula realized that she would go to
Prismatic Hall in West Sixty-seventh Street, where Dr. Bellingham was to
organize his lecture-course that night. Against this foreknowledge was a
well-defined distaste for the man and his work. Between the two, the
thought of the evening crowded frequently into mind until she became
impatient with herself at the importance it assumed. It was with a
certain feminine manipulation of conscience, so deft as almost to be
unconscious, that she excused her own curiosity on the ground that her
disfavor for the doctor and his message would be strengthened by the
first meeting, beyond the need of further experience.

One concession she made to her natural aversion--that of going late. She
was in a mood poignantly critical. The real Paula Linster, she fancied,
was at home, "Top-side o' Park"; here was just a sophisticated
professional surface, such as reporters carry about. The Hall was packed
with women; the young and the jaded; faces of pup-innocence; faces
bitten from terrible expeditions to the poles of sense; faces tired and
thick from the tread of an orient of emotions; slow-roving eyes which
said, "I crave--I crave! I have lost the sense of reality, but seven
sick and pampered organs crave within me!"

The thought came to Paula--to be questioned afterward--that man's evil,
after all, is rudimentary compared to a worldly woman's; man's soul not
so complicated, nor so irrevocably identified with his sensual organism.
She could not avoid pondering miserably upon woman's innate love for far
ventures into sensation, permitting these ventures to be called (if the
world would) searches for the holy grail. The inevitable attraction for
women which specialists of the body possess, actually startled her.
Bellingham was one of these. On the surface of all his sayings, and all
comment about him, was the bland, deadly insinuation that the soul
expands in the pursuit of bodily health. About his name was the mystery
of his age, whispers of his physical perfection, intimations of romantic
affairs, the suggestion of his miraculous performances upon the
emotions--the whole gamut of activities designed to make him the instant
aversion of any normal member of his own sex. Yet the flock of females
had settled about him, as they have settled about every black human
plague--and glorious messiah--since the birth of days.

The thrilled, expectant look on several faces brought to Paula's mind
the type of her sisters who relish being shocked; whose exaltations are
patently those of emotional contact; who call physical excitement the
glorifying of their spirit, and cannot be persuaded to confess
otherwise. Woman as a negation for man to play upon never distressed her
before with such direct and certain pressure. Here were women intent
upon encountering a new sensation; women who devoutly breathed the name
of Motherhood next to Godhood, and yet endured their pregnancy with
organic rebellion and mental loathing; women who could not conceive of
love apart from the embrace of man, and who imagine a "message" in
deformed and salacious novels, making such books popular; women of
gold-leaf culture whose modesty fastens with a bow--narrow temples of
infinite receptivity....

Why had they come? In the perfect feminine system of information, the
whisper had run: "Bellingham is wonderful. Bellingham tells you how to
live forever. Bellingham teaches the renewal of self and has esoteric
classes--_for the few_!" They had the sanction of one another. There was
no scandal in being there openly, nor any instinct, apparently, to warn
them that secret classes to discover how to live forever, had upon the
surface no very tonic flavor. The digest of the whole matter was that
revelations sooner or later would be made to a certain few, and that
these revelations, which would be as fine oil upon the mental surfaces
of many women near her, would act as acid upon the male mind generally.

In the sickening distaste for herself and for those who had to make no
concession to themselves for coming, inasmuch as society permitted; and
who would be heartfully disappointed in a lecture on hygiene that did
not discuss the more intimate matters of the senses, Paula did not
appraise the opposite sex at any higher value. She merely reviewed
matters which had come to her vividly as some of the crowning frailties
of her own kind. The centre of the whole affair, Dr. Bellingham, was now
introduced.

He looked like a Dane at first glance. His was the size, the dusty look
and the big bone of a Dane; the deep, downy paleness of cheek, the
tumbled, though not mussy hair. He was heavy without being adipose,
lean, but big-boned; his face was lined with years, though miraculously
young in the texture of skin. The lips of a rather small and feminine
mouth were fresh and red as a girl's. In the softness of complexion and
the faintest possible undertone of color, it was impossible not to think
of perfected circulation and human health brought to truest rhythm. The
costliest lotions cannot make such a skin. It is organic harmony.
Exterior decoration does not delude the seeing eye any more than a
powder-magazine becomes an innocent cottage because its walls are
vine-clad.... Directly behind her, Paula now heard a slow whisper:

"I knew him twenty-five years ago, and he is not a moment older to look
at."

She seemed to have heard the voice before, and though the sentence
surged with a dark significance through her mind, she did not turn.
Bellingham's words were now caressing the intelligence of his audience.
To Paula, his soft mouth was indescribably odious with cultured passion,
red with replenishment, fresh with that sinister satisfaction which
inevitably brings to mind a second figure, fallen, drained. His presence
set to quivering within her, fears engendered from the great occult
past. Strange deviltries would always be shadowed about the Bellingham
image in her mind.... Here was a man who made a shrine of his body,
invested it with a heavy hungering God, and taught others--women--to bow
and to serve.

To her the body was but a nunnery which enclosed for a time an eternal
element. This was basic, incontrovertible to her understanding. All that
placated the body and helped to make fleshly desires last long, was
hostile to the eternal element. Not that the body should be abused or
neglected, but kept as nearly as possible a clean vessel for the spirit,
brought to a fine automatic functioning. It was as clear to Paula
Linster as the faces of the women about her, that the splendid sacrifice
of Jesus was not that He had died upon the Cross, but that He put on
flesh in the beginning for the good of infant-souled men.... To eat
sparingly of that which is good; to sleep when weary; to require
cleanliness and pure air--these were the physical laws which worked out
easily for decent minds. Beyond such simple affairs, she did not allow
the body often to rule her brain. When, indeed, the potentialities of
her sex stirred within, Paula felt that it was the down-pull of the old
brood-mother, Earth, and not the lifting of wings.

Bellingham's voice correlated itself, not with the eyes and brow, but
with the Lilith mouth--that strangely unpunished mouth. It was soft,
suave. There was in it the warmth of breath. The high white forehead and
the tousled brown hair, leonine in its masculinity--seemed foreign as
another man's. She hearkened to the voice of a doctor used to women; one
who knows women without illusion, whom you could imagine saying, "Why
bless you, women never say 'no.'"

The eyes were blue-gray, but toned very darkly. The iris looked small in
contrast to the expanse of clear white. They were fixed like a bird's in
expression, incapable of warming or softening, yet one did not miss the
impression that they could brighten and harden, even to shining in the
dark. Heavy blonde brows added a look of severity.

Paula's spirit, as if recognizing an old and mortal enemy, gathered
about itself every human protecting emotion. Frankly hateful, she
surveyed the man, listening. He talked marvellously; even in her
hostility, she had to grant that. The great sunning cat was in his
tones, but the words were joined into clean-thought expression, rapid,
vivid, unanswerable. He did not speak long; the first meeting was
largely formative. Paula knew he was studying his company, and watched
him peer into the faces of the women. His mouth occasionally softened in
the most winsome and engaging way, while his words ran on with the
refined wisdom of ages. And always to her, his eyes stood out cold,
hard, deadly.

Finally, she was conscious that they were roving near her; moving left
to right, from face to face, as a collection-plate might have been
passed. Her first thought was to leave; but fear never failed to arouse
an impulse to face out the cause. The second thought was to keep her
eyes lowered. This she tried. His words came clearly now, as she stared
down into the shadow--the perfectly carved thoughts, bright and swift
like a company of soldiers moving in accord. As seconds passed, this
down-staring became insufferable as though some one were holding her
head. She could not breathe under repression. Always it had been so; the
irresistible maddened the very centres of her reason--a locked room, a
hand or a will stronger than her own.

Raising her head with a gasp, as one coming to the surface from a great
depth of water, she met Bellingham's glance unerringly as a shaft of
light. He had waited for this instant. The eyes now boring into her own,
seemed lifted apart from all material things, veritable essences of
light, as if they caught and held the full rays of every arc-lamp in the
Hall. Warmth and smiling were not in them; instead, the spirit of
conquest aroused; incarnate preying-power, dead to pity and humor. Here
was Desire toothed, taloned, quick with every subtle art of nature.
Something at war with God, his eyes expressed to her. Failing to master
God, failing to foul the centres of creative purity, this Something
devoured the souls of women. Continually his voice sought to drug her
brain. The fine edge was gone from her perceptions; dulled, she was, to
all but his sayings. There was a chill behind and above her eyes; it
swept backward and seemed to converge in the coarser ganglia at the base
of her brain. Once she had seen a bird hop and flutter lower and lower
among the branches of a lilacbush. On the ground below was a cat with
head twisted upward--its vivid and implacable eyes distending. Paula
could understand now the crippling magnetism the bird felt.... Finally
she could hear only the words of Bellingham, and feel only his power.
What he was saying now to her was truth, the unqualified truth of
more-than-man.

When his eyes turned away, she felt ill, futile, immersed in an
indescribable inner darkness. Her fingers pained cruelly, and she
realized she had been clutching with all her strength the book in her
hand--Quentin Charter's book--which she had begun since morning. She
could not remember a single one of his sentences which had impressed
her, for her brain was tired and ineffectual, as after a prolonged
fever, but she held fast to the bracing effect of an optimistic
philosophy. Then finally out of the helplessness of one pitifully
stricken, a tithe of her old vitality returned. She used it at once,
rose from her seat to leave the Hall. Into the base of her brain again,
as she neared the door, penetrated the protest of his eyes. Had she been
unable to go on, she would have screamed. She felt the eyes of the
women, too; the whole, a ghastly experience. Once outside, she wanted to
run.

Not the least astonishing was the quick obliteration of it all. This was
because her sensations were the result of an influence foreign to her
own nature. In a few moments she felt quite well and normal again, and
was conscious of a tendency to make light of the whole proceeding. She
reached home shortly after ten, angered at herself--inexplicable
perversity--because she had taken Bellingham and the women so
seriously.... That night she finished one of the big books of her
life--Quentin Charter's "A Damsel Came to Peter." When the dawn stole
into the little flat, her eyes were stinging, and her temples felt
stretched apart from the recent hours.




SECOND CHAPTER

PAULA CONTEMPLATES THE WALL OF A HUNDRED WINDOWS, AND THE MYSTERIOUS
MADAME NESTOR CALLS AT THE _ZOROASTER_


Paula had never felt such a consciousness of vitality as the next
forenoon, after three or four hours' sleep. She was just _un_rested
enough to be alive with tension. Her physical and mental capacities
seemed expanded beyond all common bounds, and her thoughts tumbled about
playfully in full arenic light, as athletes awaiting the beginning of
performance. She plunged into a tub of cool water with such delight as
thoroughly to souse her hair, so it became necessary to spend a
half-hour in the sunlight by the open window, combing and fanning, her
mind turning over wonderful things.

If you ever looked across a valley of oaks and maples and elms in the
full morning glow of mid-October, you can divine the glory of red and
brown and gold which was this fallen hair. One must meditate long to
suggest with words the eyes of Paula Linster; perhaps the best her
chronicler can do is to offer a glimpse from time to time. Just now you
are asked for the sake of her eyes to visualize that lustrous valley
once more--only in a dusk that enriches rather than dims. A memorably
beautiful young woman, sitting there by the open window--one of the
elect would have said.

The difficulty in having to do with Linster attractions is to avoid
rising into rhapsody. One thinks of stars and lakes, angels and autumn
lands, because his heart is full as a country-boy's, and high
clean-clipped thinking is choked. Certainly, once having known such a
woman, you will never fall under the spell of Weininger, or any other
scale-eyed genius. There is an inspiring reach to that hard-handled
word, Culture, when it is used about a woman like this. It means so pure
a fineness as neither to require nor to be capable of ostentation; and
yet, a fineness that wears and gives and associates with heroisms. You
think of a lineage that for centuries has not been fouled by brutality
or banality, and has preserved a glowing human warmth, too, to retain
the spirit of woman. When men rise to the real and the worthy, one by
one, each will find his Paula Linster, whom to make happy is happiness;
whose companionship inevitably calls forth his best; whom to be with
constantly means therefore that all within him, not of the best, must
surely die. Clearly when a man finds such a woman, all his roads are
closed, save one--to the Shining Heights! And who can say that his royal
mate will not laughingly unfold wings for him, when they stand together
in the radiant altitude?

She was thinking of Charter's book as she brushed her hair dry. His
sentences played brightly in her mind, fastening themselves to comment
of her own for the review. Deep was the appeal of the rapt, sunlit face,
as she looked away across the rear-court. The colored hall-boy of her
own house might have missed the exquisite lines of lip, eyelid, nostril,
brow, temple and chin, but his head uncovered in her presence, and the
choicest spirit of service sprang within him. In all about her,
to an enlightened vision, was the unconscious repression of
beauty--art-stirring lines of mental and spiritual awakening; that look
of deep inner freshness and health, the mere sight of which disgusts a
man with all he has done to soil and sicken his body. Full and easily
she breathed, as one who relishes sweet air like the taste of pure
water. You could imagine Paula exclaiming with joy at the tonic delight
of a wind from the sea, but not from the steaming aroma of a grill. It
was all an aesthetic attraction--not an over-rounded arc, not a tissue
stretched shiny from uneven plumpness, not a drowsy sag or fold to
suggest the easy content of a mere feeding and breeding animal.

The rear-view of a great granite-ridge of rooming-houses across the
court had often fascinated her with the thought of the mysteries within.
Once she had spoken to Reifferscheid about the splendid story of New
York yet to be written by someone who watched, as she often did, one of
these walls of a hundred windows.

"Yes," he had said. "It's great to be poor. Best blood of New York is in
those back rooms. Everyone needs his poverty-stage of growth--about
seven years will do. It teaches you simplicity. You step into your
neighbor's room and find him washing his stockings with shaving-soap. He
explains that it is better than tooth-powder for textile fabrics. Also,
he intimates that he has done a very serious thing in wetting down these
small garments, having looked in his bag since, and learned that he has
not another pair. However, he wrings them very tight and puts them on
with the remark that this is a certain way to prevent shrinkage."

Even now, a man stood by his window in a sleeveless garment and a ruff
of lather, shaving with a free hand, and a song between strokes. His was
a shining morning face, indeed.... A bare feminine arm leaped quickly
forth from behind a tightened curtain nearby and adjusted a flower-pot
better to the sunlight. From somewhere came a girlish voice in Wagner's
_Walkure Call_. There was not a thought of effort in her carrying that
lofty elaborate music--just a fine heart tuned to harmony on a rare
morning. The effect is not spoiled by the glimpse of a tortured feminine
face igniting a cigarette over a gas-flame that has burned all night.
The vibrations of New York are too powerful for many, but there is more
of health and hope than not.... A good mother cleanses a sauce-pan from
her water-pitcher and showers with the rinsing a young heaven-tree far
below. Then she lifts in a milk-bottle from the stone ledge--and blows
the dust from the top....

Often at night when Paula awakened she could hear the drum of a
typewriter winging across the precipice--one of the night-shift helping
to feed the insatiable maw of print. Had New York called him? Would the
City crush him into a trifler, with artificial emotions, or was this a
Daniel come to interpret her evil dreams?... In a corner-room with two
windows, sat a lame young man before an easel. Almost always he was
there, when there was light. Heaven be with him, Paula thought, if his
picture failed.... And in one of the least and darkest, an old man sat
writing. Day after day, he worked steadily through the hours. To what
god or devil had he sold his soul that he was thus condemned to eternal
scrivening? This was the harrowing part. The back-floors of New York are
not for the old men. Back-rooms for the young men and maidens, still
strong in the flight of time and the fight of competition--back-rooms
for young New York. Nature loses interest in the old. Civilization
should be kinder.

From an unseen somewhere a canary poured out a veritable fire-hose
torrent of melody; and along one of the lower window ledges opposite, an
old gray cat was crouched, a picture of sinister listening. Here was a
dragon, indeed, for small, warm birds.

Directly opposite a curtain was lifted, and a woman, no longer young,
appeared to breathe the morning. Many New Yorkers knew this woman for
her part in children's happiness. There was a whisper that she had once
been an artist's model--and had loved the artist.... There was one woman
long ago--a woman with a box of alabaster--who was forgiven because she
loved much.... The lady across the way loved children now, children of
most unhappy fortunes. To those who came, and there were many, she gave
music lessons; often all day long helping grimy fingers to falter over
the keys. So she awakened poetry and planted truth-seedlings in shaded
little hearts. To the children, though the lady was poor as any--in
spite of her piano and a wall of books--she was Lady Bountiful,
indeed.... Paula smiled. Two windows, strangely enough side by side,
were curtained with stockings out to dry. In one, there were
many--cerise and lavender, pink and baby blue. In the next there were
but two pair, demurely black. What a world of suggestion in the
contrast!... So it was always--her wall of a hundred windows, a changing
panorama of folly, tragedy, toil that would not bow to hopelessness,
vanity, art, sacrifice. Blend them all together above the traffic's
roar--and you have the spirit of young New York.

She put on the brass kettle at length, crossing the room for an
occasional glance into the mirror as she finished her hair.... The
strange numbing power she had felt the night before crept suddenly back
from her eyes now to the base of her brain, striving to cripple her
volition. Bellingham was calling her.... The sunlight was gone. There
was a smell of hot metal in the air, as if some terrific energy had
burned out the vitality. Her heart hurt her from holding her breath so
long. Beyond all expression she was shocked and shamed. The mirror
showed now a spectral Paula with crimson lips and haggard eyes.... An
indescribable fertility stirred within her--almost mystic, like a
whisper from spiritland where little children play, waiting to be born.
She could have fallen in a strange and subtle thrall of redolent
imaginings, except that thought of the source of it all, the
occultist--was as acid in her veins.

She drank tea and crossed the street to the Park for an hour. The
radiance of autumn impressed her rarely; not as the death of a year, but
rather as a glorious pageant of evening, the great energies of nature
all crowned with fruition and preparing for rest. Back in her room, she
wrote the Charter critique, wrote as seldom before. The cool spirit of
the essayist seemed ignited with a lyric ardor. In her momentary power
she conceived a great literary possibility of the future--an effulgent
Burns-vine blossoming forth upon the austere cliff of a Carlyle. She had
finished, and it was dusk when Madame Nestor called.

For several years, at various philosophical gatherings and brotherhoods,
Paula, invariably stimulated by the unusual, had encountered this
remarkable woman. Having very little to say as a rule, Madame Nestor was
a figure for comment and one not readily forgotten because of occasional
memorable utterances. In all the cults of New York, there was likely no
individual quite so out of alignment with ordinary life. Indefinitely,
she would be called fifty. Her forehead was broad, her mouth soft. The
face as a whole was heavy and flour-white. There was a distention of
eyeballs and a pulpy shapelessness to her body which gave the impression
of advanced physical deterioration--that peculiar kind of breaking down,
often noticeable among psychics of long practice. Her absolute
incapacity to keep anything of value was only one characteristic of
interest. Madame Nestor's record of apparently thoughtless generosity
was truly inspiriting.

"I had to see you to-day," she said, sinking down with a sigh of relief.
"I sat behind you last night in Prismatic Hall."

The younger woman recalled with a start--the whisper she had heard. She
leaned forward and inquired quickly: "So it was you, Madame Nestor, who
knew--this Bellingham"--she cleared her throat as she uttered the
name--"as he is now--a quarter of a century ago?"

"Yes. How very strange that you should have heard what I said.... You
will join one of his classes, I presume?"

"I can imagine doing no such thing."

"Dear Paula, do you think it will really turn out--that you are to have
no relation with Bellingham?"

Paula repressed the instant impulse to answer sharply. The fact that she
had already felt Bellingham's power made the other's words a harsh
irritation.

"What relation could I have? He is odious to me."

"I suppose I should have been a cinder long since, dear, if these were
days for burning witches," Madame Nestor said. "When I saw Bellingham's
eyes settle upon you last night--it appeared to me that you are to know
him well. I came here to give you what strength I could--because he is
the chief of devils."

"I'm only one of the working neuters of the human hive," Paula managed
to declare.

The elder woman said a strange thing: "Ah, no. The everlasting feminine
is alive in your every movement. A man like Bellingham would cross the
world for you. Some strong-souled woman sooner or later must encompass
his undoing, and last night it came to me in a way to force my
conviction--that you are the woman."

Paula bent toward her. Darkness covered the centres of her mind and she
was afraid. She could not laugh, for she had already met the magician's
will. "But I loathe him," she whispered. "About the very name when I
first heard it yesterday was an atmosphere which aroused all my
antagonism."

"Even that--he has overcome, but it may help you to endure."

"What does the man want?"

"He wants life--life--floods of young, fine vitality to renew his own
flesh. He wants to live on and on in the body which you have seen. It is
all he has, for his soul is dead--or feeble as a frog's. He fears death,
because he cannot come back. He renews his life from splendid sources of
human magnetism--such as you possess. It is Bellingham's hell to know
that, once out of the flesh, he has not soul enough, if any, to command
a human body again. You see in him an empty thing, which has lived, God
knows how many years, hugging the warmth of his blood--a creature who
knows that to die means the swift disintegration of an evil principle."

"Do you realize, Madame Nestor," Paula asked excitedly, "that you are
talking familiarly of things which may exist in books of ancient wisdom,
but that this is New York--New York packed about us? New York does not
reckon with such things."

"The massed soul of this big city does not reckon with such things,
Paula. That is true, but we are apart. Bellingham is apart. He is wiser
than the massed soul of New York."

"One might believe, even have such a religious conviction, but you speak
of an actual person, the terrible inner mystery of a man, whom we have
seen--a man who frightened me hideously last night--and to-day! You
bring the thing home to a room in a New York apartment ... Can't you see
how hard to adjust, this is? I don't mean to stop or distract you, but
this has become--you are helping to keep it so--such an intimate,
dreadful thing!"

Madame Nestor had been too long immersed in occultism to grasp the
world's judgment of her sayings. "Listen, Paula, this that I tell you is
inherent in every thinking man. You are bewildered by the personal
nature it has assumed.... To every one of us shall come the terrible
moment of choice. Man is not conceived blindly to be driven. Imagine a
man who is become a rapidly evolving mind. On the one side is the
animal-nature, curbed and obedient; on the other, his gathering
soul-force. The mind balances between these two--soul and body. The time
has come for him to choose between a lonely path to the Heights, or the
broad diverging highway, moving with pomp, dazzling with the glare of
vain power, and brooded over by an arrogant materialism which slays the
soul.... The spirit of man says, 'Take the rising road alone.' The old
world-mother sings to him from the swaying throng, 'Come over and be my
king. Look at my arts, my palaces, my valiant young men and my glorious
women. I will put worship in the hearts of the strong--for you! I will
put love in the hearts of the beautiful--for you! Come over and be my
king! Later, when you are old and have drunk deep of power--you may take
the rising road alone.'"

Paula invariably qualified a dogmatic statement as a possibility in her
own mind; but something of this--man reaching a moment of choice--had
always appealed to her as a fundamental verity. Man must conquer not
only his body, but his brain, with its subtle dreams of power, a more
formidable conflict, before the soul assumes supremacy in the mind, and
man's progress to the Uplands becomes a conscious and glorious ascent.

"You put it with wonderful clearness, Madame Nestor," she said.

"I am an old woman who has thought of these things until they are clear.
This is the real battle of man, beside which victory over mere appetites
of the body is but a boyish triumph. The intellect hungers for power and
possession; to hold the many inferior intellects in its own despotic
destiny. Against this glittering substance of attraction is the still
intangible faith of the soul--an awful moment of suspense. God or
Mammon--choose ye!... Listen, Paula, to New York below--treading the
empty mill of commerce----"

"New York has not chosen yet?"

"No, dear, but hundreds, thousands, are learning in preparation for that
moment of choice--the falseness and futility of material possessions."

"That is a good thought--an incorruptible kind of optimism!" Paula
exclaimed.... "You think this Bellingham has made the evil choice?"

"Yes. Long ago."

"Yet to have arisen to the moment of choosing, you say he must have
conquered the flesh."

"Yes."

"But you depict him--I find him--Desire Incarnate!"

"Exactly, Paula, because he has reverted. _The animal controls his mind,
not the soul._ Bellingham is retracing his way back to chaos, with a
human brain, all lit with magic! Out of the gathered knowledge of the
ages, he has drawn his forces, which to us are mystery. He uses these
secret forces of Nature to prolong his own life--which is all he has.
The mystic cord is severed within him. He is a body, nothing but a
body--hence the passion to endure. Out of the craft of the past, he has
learned--who knows how long ago?--to replenish his own vitality with
that of others. He gives nothing, but drains all. Ah, Paula, this I know
too well. He is kin with those creatures of legend, the _loup-garou_,
the vampire. I tell you he is an insatiable sponge for human magnetism."

"Past all doubt, can't Bellingham turn back?" Paula asked tensely. "With
all his worldly knowledge, and knowing his own doom, can he not turn
back--far back, a lowly-organized soul, but on the human way?"
Hopelessness, anywhere, was a blasting conception to her.

"No. I tell you he is a living coffin. There is nothing in him to
energize a pure motive. He might give a fortune to the poor, but it
would be for his own gain. He could not suffer for the poor, or love
them. Dead within, he is detached from the great centres of virtue and
purity--from all that carries the race forward, and will save us at the
last. You see his frightful dependence upon this temporal physical
instrument, since all the records of the past and the unwritten pages of
the future are wiped out? Isn't it a sheer black horror, Paula,--to know
that from the great tide of hopeful humanity, one is set apart; to know
that the amazing force which has carried one from a cell in the ooze to
thinking manhood must end with this red frightened heart; to be forced,
for the continuance of life, to feed upon the strength of one woman
after another--always fairer and finer----" The look of hatred in the
speaker's face had become a banner of havoc.

"Can he not stop that kind of devouring?" Paula exclaimed. "Would there
not be hope--if he battled with that--put _that_ vampirism behind?"

Madame Nestor regarded the other steadily, until all distortion of
feature had given away to her accustomed mildness. Then she uttered an
unforgettable question:

"_Can a tiger eat grains?_"

Vast ranges of terrible understanding were suggested.

"It is my duty, if I ever had a duty," the caller went on, "to make you
know Bellingham as I know him. You must have no pity."

"Is there really no fact by which his age can be determined?"

"None that I know. Twenty-five years ago, when he left me hideously wise
and pitifully drained, he looked as he does now."

"But why, oh why, do you always think of me with Bellingham?" Paula
asked hopelessly.

"I watched his face when he regarded you last night. I knew the look."

"What is to prevent me from never seeing him? He cannot force himself
upon me here--in the flesh.... Certainly you would not tell him where I
am, where I go--if I begged you not to!"

Madame Nestor shuddered. "No, Paula. It is because you are frightened
and tormented that such a thought comes. It is I who am showing you the
real Bellingham. He menaces my race. None but big-souled women are
useful to him now. He is drawn to them, as one hungry, as one always
hungry. It is he first who is drawn. Then they begin to feel and respond
to his occult attraction. The time might have come when you would
worship him--had I not warned you. I did. I was quite his--until I
learned. A woman knows no laws in the midst of an attraction like this.
No other man suffices----"

"But why--why do you prepare _me_? Do you think I cannot resist?" Paula
asked furiously. She felt the bonds about her already. The blood rose
hot and rebellious at the thought of being bound. It was the old hideous
fear of a locked room--the shut-in horror which meant suffocation.

"If I thought you could not resist, Paula," Madame Nestor said, "I
should advise you to flee to the remotest country--this moment. I should
implore you never to allow from your side your best and strongest
friend. But I have studied your brain, your strength, your heart. I love
you for the thought that has come to me--that it is you, Paula Linster,
who is destined to free the race from this destroyer."

Often in the last half-hour had come a great inward revolt against the
trend of her caller's words. It passed through Paula again, yet she
inquired how she could thus be the means.

"By resisting him. Bellingham once told me--trust him, this was after I
was fully his--that if I had matched his force with a psychic resistance
equally as strong--it would mortally have weakened him. So if he seeks
to subvert your will and fails, this great one-pointed power of his,
developed who knows how long--will turn and rend itself. This is an
occult law."

Paula could understand this--the wild beast of physical desire rending
itself at the last--but not the conception of hopelessness--Bellingham
cut off from immortality. The woman divined her thoughts.

"Again I beg of you," she said in excitement, "not to let a thought of
pity for him insinuate itself in your brain--not the finest point of it!
Think of yourself, of the Great Good which must sustain you, of the
benefit to your race--think of the women less strong! Fail in this, and
Bellingham will absorb your splendid forces, and let you fall back into
the common as I did--to rise again, ah, so bitterly, so wearily!... But
I cannot imagine you failing, you strong young queen, and the women like
me, the legion of emptied shells he has left behind--we shall canonize
you, Paula, if you shatter the vampire's power."

Thoughts came too fast for speech now. They burned Paula's mind--a
destructive activity, because ineffectual. She wanted to speak of the
shameful experience of the morning, but she could not bring the words to
confession.

"I had almost forgotten," she said lightly at length, "that it is well
for one to eat and drink. Stay, won't you please, and share a bite of
supper with me, Madame Nestor? We'll talk of other things. I am deadly
tired of Bellingham."

A hungry man would have known no repletion from the entire offering
which sufficed for these two, forgotten of appetite. Wafers of dark
bread, a poached egg, pickles, a heart of lettuce and a divided melon,
cake and tea--yet how fully they fared!... They were talking about
children and fairy tales over the teacups, when Paula encountered again
that sinister mental seizure--the occultist's influence creeping back
from her reason to that part of the brain man holds in common with
animals.... The lights of the room dimmed; her companion became
invisible. Bellingham was calling: "Come to me--won't you come and help
me in my excellent labors? Come to me, Paula. We can lift the world
together--you and I. Wonderful are the things for me to show you--you
who are already so wise and so very beautiful. Paula Linster,--come to
me!"

Again and again the words were laid upon her intelligence, until she
heard them only. All the rest was an anterior murmuring, as of wind and
rivers. The words were pressed down upon the surfaces of her brain, like
leaf after leaf of gold-beaters' film--and hammered and hammered
there.... He was in a great gray room, sitting at a desk, but staring at
her, as if there were no walls or streets between--just a little bit of
blackness.... She seemed to know just where to go. She felt the place
for her was there in the great gray room--a wonderful need for her
there.... But a door opened into the room where he sat--a door she had
not seen, for she had not taken her eyes from his face. A woman came in,
a pale woman, a shell of beauty. The huge tousled head at the desk
turned from her to the woman who entered. Paula saw his profile alter
hideously....

Her own bright room filled her eyes again, and the ashen horror on the
countenance of Madame Nestor, who seemed vaguely to see it all.

"I think I should have gone to him," Paula murmured, in the slow, flat
tone of one not yet quite normally conscious.

"There is but one way, you poor distressed child--to build about you a
fortress of purity--which he cannot penetrate----"

"I think I should have known the car to take--the place to enter," Paula
went on, unheeding, "the elevator entrance--the door of the room----"

Madame Nestor continued to implore her to pray. Paula shivered finally,
and stared at the other for a few seconds, as if recalling the words the
visitor had spoken, and the past she had lived with Bellingham. Her
terrible rage toward herself spread and covered Madame Nestor. Did not
the latter still dip here, there, and everywhere in the occult and
weird? Might she not have something to do with the projectiles of
Desire?

"I think I'd better be alone now," she said hoarsely. "One does not feel
like invoking the Pure Presence--when one is chosen for such
defilement."




THIRD CHAPTER

CERTAIN DEVELOPING INCIDENTS ARE CAUGHT INTO THE CURRENT OF
NARRATIVE--ALSO A SUPPER WITH REIFFERSCHEID


In the week that followed, Paula's review of Quentin Charter's new book
appeared. As a bit of luxury reading, she again went over "A Damsel Came
to Peter." It stood up true and strong under the second reading--the
test of a real book. The Western writer became a big figure in her mind.
She thought of him as a Soul; with a certain gladness to know that he
was Out There; that he refused to answer the call of New York; that he
had waited until he was an adult to make his name known, and could not
now be cramped and smothered and spoiled. There was a sterilized purity
about parts of his work--an uncompromising thunder against the fleshly
trends of living--to which she could only associate asceticism,
celibacy, and mystic power. He was altogether an abstraction, but she
was glad that he lived--in the West and in her brain.

Also her mind was called to lower explorations of life; moments in which
it seemed as if every tissue within her had been carried from arctic
repressions to the springing verdures of the Indies. A sound, an odor, a
man's step, the voice of a child, would start the spell, especially in
moments of receptivity or aimless pondering. Thoughts formed in a lively
fascinating way, tingling dreamily over her intelligence, dilating her
nostrils with indescribable fragrance, brushing her eyelids
half-closed,--until she suddenly awoke to the fact that this was not
herself, but Bellingham's thirst playing upon her. Beyond words dreadful
then, it was to realize this thing in her brain--to feel it spread
hungrily through her veins and localize in her lips, her breast, and the
hollow of her arms. Bellingham crushed the trained energies of his
thought-force into her consciousness, rendering her helpless. Though he
was afterward banished, certain physical forces which he aroused did not
fall asleep.... Frequently came that malignant efflorescence. Her name
was called; the way shown her. Once when she was summoned to the 'phone,
she knew that it was he, but could not at first resist. Reason came at
the sound of her own hoarse and frightened voice. Again one night,
between nine and ten, when Bellingham was in power, she had reached the
street and was hurrying toward the surface-car in Central Park West. Her
name was jovially called by Reifferscheid. He accompanied her through
the Park and back to her door. He said he thought that she was working
too hard, confessed himself skeptical about her eating enough.

One thought apart from these effects, Paula could not shake from her
mind: Were there human beings with dead or dying souls? Did she pass on
the street men and women in whom the process of soul-starvation was
complete or completing? Could there be human mind-cells detached from
hope, holiness, charity, eternity, and every lovely conception; infected
throughout with earth's descending destructive principle? The thought
terrorized her soul, so that she became almost afraid to glance into the
face of strangers. To think of any man or woman without one hope! This
was insufferable. Compared with this, there is no tragedy, and the
wildest physical suffering is an easy temporal thing. She felt like
crying from the housetops: "Listen to pity; love the good; cultivate a
tender conscience; be clean in body and humble in mind! Nothing matters
but the soul--do not let that die!"

Then she remembered that every master of the bright tools of art had
depicted this message in his own way; every musician heard it among the
splendid harmonies that winged across his heaven; every prophet stripped
himself of all else, save this message, and every mystic was ordered up
to Nineveh to give it sound. Indeed, every great voice out of the
multitude was a cry of the soul. It came to her as never before, that
all uplift is in the words, _Love One Another_. If only the world would
see and hear!

And the world was so immovable--a locked room that resisted her
strength. This was her especial terror--a locked room or a locked
will.... Once when she was a little girl, she released a caged canary
that belonged to a neighbor, and during her punishment, she kept
repeating:

"_It has wings--wings!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

Liberty, spaces of sky, shadowed running streams, unbroken woods where
the paths were so dim as not to disturb the dream of undiscovered
depths--in the midst of these, Paula had found, as a girl, a startling
kind of happiness. She was tireless in the woods, and strangely slow to
hunger. No gloomy stillness haunted her; the sudden scamper of a
squirrel or rabbit could not shake her nerves, nor even the degraded
spiral of a serpent gliding to cover. Her eyelids narrowed in the midst
of confinements. School tightened her lips; much of it, indeed, put a
look of hopeless toleration in her eyes, but the big, silent woods
quickly healed her mind; in them she found the full life.

At one time, her father essayed to lock her in a closet. Paula told him
she would die if he did, and from the look upon the child's face, he
could not doubt.... He had directly punished her once, and for years
afterward, she could not repress a shudder at his touch. She would serve
him in little things, bring him the choicest fruits and flowers; she
anticipated his wants in the house and knew his habits as a caged thing
learns the movements of its keepers; invariably, she was respectful and
apt--until her will was challenged. Then her mother would weaken and her
father passed on with a smile. "Paula does not permit me to forget that
I have the honor to be her father," he once said.

Reading grew upon her unconsciously. There was a time when she could not
read, another when she could. She did not remember the transition, but
one afternoon, when she was barely five, she sat for hours in the parlor
still as a mole, save for the turning leaves--sat upon a hassock with
Grimm. It was _The Foster Brother_ which pioneered her mind. That
afternoon endured as one of the most exquisite periods of her life. The
pleasure was so intense that she felt she must be doing wrong.

Grimm explained the whole world, in proving the reality of fairies. The
soul of the child had always been awake to influences her associates
missed. Wonderful Grimm cleared many mysteries--the unseen activities of
the woods, the visitors of the dark in her room before she was quite
asleep; the invisible weaving behind all events. Later, books inevitably
brought out the element of attraction between man and woman, but such
were the refinements of her home that nothing occurred to startle her
curiosity. It was left to the friendly woods to reveal a mystery and
certain ultimate meanings.... She was sick with the force of her
divining; the peace and purity of her mind shattered. The accruing
revelations of human origin were all that she could bear. She rebelled
against the manner of coming into the world, a heaven-high rebellion.
Something of pity mingled with her reverence for her mother. For years,
she could not come to a belief that the Most High God had any interest
in a creature of such primal defilement. Queerly enough, it was the
great preparer, Darwin, who helped her at the last. Man having come up
through dreadful centuries from an earth-bent mouth and nostril, to a
pitying heart and a lifted brow--has all the more hope of becoming an
angel....

There was something of the nature of a birthmark in Paula's loathing for
the animal in man and woman. Her mother had been sheltered in girlhood
to such an extent that the mention of a corsage-ribbon would have
offended. Very early, she had married, and the first days of the
relation crushed illusions that were never restored. The birth of Paula
ended a period of inordinate sorrow, which brought all the fine threads
of her life into wear, gave expression to the highest agony of which she
was capable, and ravelled out her emotions one by one. As a mother, she
was rather forceless; the excellent elements of her lineage seemed all
expended in the capacities of the child. Her limitations had not widened
in the dark months, nor had her nature refined. It was as if the heart
of the woman had lost all its color and ardor. The great sweep of
Paula's emotions; her strangeness, her meditative mind and heart-hunger
for freedom; her love for open spaces, still groves and the prophylactic
trends of running water--all expressed, without a doubt, the mysterious
expiration of her mother's finer life. But something beyond heredity,
distances beyond the reach of human mind to explain, was the lofty
quality of the child's soul. Very old it was, and wise; very strange and
very strong.

Paula never failed afterward in a single opportunity to spare younger
girl-friends from the savagery of revelation, as it had come to her. The
bare truth of origin, she made radiant with illimitable human
possibilities.... Her dream beyond words was some time to give the world
a splendid man or woman. Loving, and loved by a strong-souled,
deep-thinking man; theirs the fruit of highest human concord; beautiful
communions in the midst of life's nobilities, and the glory of these on
the brow of their child--such was her dream of womanhood, whitened
through many vicissitudes.

Her mother died when Paula was twenty. The call came in the night. In
the summons was that awful note which tells the end. Her mother was on
the border and crossing swiftly. Paula screamed.

There was no answer, but a faint ruffle on the brow that had been
serene.

"Mother!... Mother!" a last time--then the answer:

"Don't--call--me,--Paula! Oh, it--hurts--so--to be--called--back!"

After that, the dying was a matter of hours and great pain. Had she come
to her in silence, the tired spirit would have lifted easily. So Paula
learned, by terrible experience, the inexpressible value of silence in a
room with death. She had been very close to the mystery. Holding her
mother's hand and praying inaudibly at the last, she had felt the final
wrench to the very core of her being.... Departure, indeed; Paula was
never conscious of her mother's spirit afterward. It is probably futile
to inquire if a child of one's flesh is invariably one's spiritual
offspring.... An ineffectual girl, the mother became a hopeless woman.
In the interval, out of the grinding of her forces, was produced a
fervent heat.... Did blind negative suffering make her receptive to a
gifted child, or did Paula's mother merely give, from her own lovely
flesh, a garment for a spirit-alien from a far and shining country?

       *       *       *       *       *

Three or four mornings after the Charter critique, Paula brought further
work down-town. Reifferscheid swung about in his chair and stared at her
fully thirty seconds. Then he spoke brusquely, possibly to hide his
embarrassment:

"Take these three books home, but don't bother with them to-day. I want
you back here at four o'clock. You are to go out to supper with me."

The idea was not exactly pleasant. She had seen Reifferscheid only a few
times apart from his desk, where she liked him without reservation. She
had always pictured him as a club-man--a typically successful New
Yorker, with a glitter of satire and irreverent humor about all his
sayings. The thought of a supper with Reifferscheid had a bit of supper
heaviness about it. The club type she preferred to know from a sort of
middle distance....

"Won't you, please?"

His change of manner was effective. All brusqueness was gone. Paula saw
his real earnestness, and the boyish effort of its expression. There was
no reason for her to refuse, and she hesitated no longer. Yet she
wondered why he had asked her, and searched her mind to learn why she
could not see him at leisure, apart from a club-window's leather chair;
at some particular table in a grill or buffet, or enlivening a game of
billiards with his inimitable characterizations. One of the finest and
most effective minds she had ever contacted belonged to this editor. His
desk was the symbol to her of concentrated and full-pressure
strenuousness; in his work was all that was sophisticated and
world-weathered, but she could neither explain nor overcome the
conviction that his excellence was in spite of, rather than the result
of his life outside.... She met him on the stroke of four in the
entrance to _The States_ building, and he led the way at once to South
Ferry, where they took the Staten Island boat. She felt that he was not
at ease in the crowds, but it was a fact, also, that he did not appear
so huge and froggy in the street, as in the crowded office she knew so
well.

"Yes, I live over yonder," he said, drawing two stools to the extreme
forward of the deck. "I supposed you knew. The nearest way out of New
York, this is. Besides, you get full five cents' worth of sea voyage,
and it's really another country across the bay. That's the main
thing--not a better country, but different."

Little was said on the boat. It was enough to breathe the sea and
contemplate the distances. She scarcely noticed which of the
trolley-cars he helped her into at the terminal; but they were out of
town presently, where there were curving country roads, second-growth
hills, and here and there a dim ravine to cool the eye. Then against the
sky she discovered a black ribbon of woods. It was far and big to her
eyes, full of luring mysteries that called to her--her very own
temples.... Turning to Reifferscheid, she found that he had been
regarding her raptly. He coughed and jerked his head the other way,
delightfully embarrassed.

"Guess you like it here," he said after a moment. "I knew you would. I
knew I ought to make you come, somehow. You see, you're a little too
fit--drawn just a trifle too fine. It isn't that you're out of
condition; just the contrary. When one's drawn so fine as you are, one
wears--just from living at joy speed.... We get off here."

"It's incredible that you should have a house all to yourself!"

They were walking on the grass that edged the road. It had taken an hour
and a half to come. Dusk was beginning to crowd into the distances.
Ahead on either side of the road were a few houses with land between.

"Whatever you call it," said Reifferscheid, "it's all in one piece.
There it is yonder--'A wee cot, a cricket's chirr--Sister Annie and the
glad face of her----'"

"A little white house under big trees!" Paula exclaimed joyously. "And
what's that big dug-out thing behind?"

Reifferscheid chuckled. "Dug-out is excellent. That's the aquarium and
the lily-lakes. I made those Sierras and clothed their titanic flanks
with forests of sod."

"Don't ask me to speak.... All this is too wonderful for words...." To
think that she had imagined this man-mammoth sitting in a club-window.
In truth, she was somewhat perturbed for wronging him, though delighted
with the whole expedition. Sister Annie was startling, inasmuch as her
face was as fresh and wholesome as a snow-apple, and yet she could not
leave her invalid's chair unassisted. She was younger than
Reifferscheid.

"I'm so glad to have you come, Miss Linster," she said. "Tim was really
set upon it. He speaks of you so frequently that I wanted to meet you
very much. I can't get over to the city often."

"Tim." This was the name of names. Paula had known nothing beyond "T.
Reifferscheid." One after another, little joys like this unfolded.

"It will be too dark after supper," the sister added. "Tim won't be
content until you see his system of ponds. You better go with him now."

Reifferscheid already filled the side-door. Evidently inspection was the
first and only formality demanded of the guest at the cottage. Paula
followed him up a tiny gravel path to the rim of the top pond--a saucer
of cement, eighteen inches deep and seven or eight feet across. It was
filled with pond-weed and nelumbo foliage. Gold fish and stickle-backs
played in the shadowed water.

"It isn't the time of year, you know," he said apologetically. "The
lilies are through blossoming, and in a week or two, I'll have to take
my fishes back to winter-quarters. You see my water supply comes from
Silver Lake. The great main empties here." (Paula followed his finger to
the nozzle of a hose that hung over the rim of cement on the top pond.)
"The stream overflows in Montmorency Falls yonder,"--(this, a trickle
down the gravel to the second pond)--"from which, you can hear the roar
of the cataracts into the lower lake, which waters the lands of plenty
all about."

His look of surprise and disappointment at her laughter was
irresistible.

"The saurians are all in the depths, but you can see some of my snails,"
he went on. "You'd be surprised how important my herd of snails is in
the economy of this whole lake country."

He picked up a pebble from the edge of the water, pointing out the green
slime that covered it. "These are spores of a very influential
vegetable, called _algae_, which spreads like cholera and vegetates
anywhere in water that is not of torrential temperament. Without my
snails, the whole system would be a thick green soup in a month. It's
getting a little dark to see the stickle-back nests. They domesticate
very curiously. Next year, I'll have a fountain.... The second-tank
contains a frail, northern variety of water-hyacinths, some rock bass,
and a turtle or two. Below are the cattails and ferns and mosses. In the
summer, that lower pond is a jungle, but the lilies and lotuses up here
are really choice when in blossom. The overflow of water rejoices the
bugs and posies generally. Annie likes the yard-flowers."

Paula would not have dared to say how enchantingly these toy-lakes and
lily-beds had adjusted, in her mind, to the nature of the big man beside
her, whose good word was valued by every sincere and important literary
worker in the country. Tim Reifferscheid turning out his tremendous
tasks in New York, would never be quite the same to her again, since she
had seen him playing with his hose in his own back yard, and heard him
talk about his snails and lilies, and the land posies that Sister Annie
liked. Down-town, he had always stimulated her, but here with his
toy-engineering and playful watersheds, he was equally bracing and just
as admirable.

Darkness was covering them. "I must see it all again," she said. "I want
to come when the lilies are blossoming. I could watch the fishes and
things--for hours. Really, I will never call it a dug-out again."

She saw him grinning in the dusk.

"Come in to supper," he said. "You see, anything smaller than a Staten
Island back-yard would hardly do for me to play in. Then there's a
stillness about here that I like. It makes your ears ache a little at
first. You wake up in the middle of the night and think you're under the
earth somewhere, or disembodied. Finally it comes to you that there's
nothing to be afraid of except the silence. A man's head gets to need it
after a time. As a matter of fact, there's no place across the bay for a
fat man after working hours."

"Miss Linster," called Sister Annie as they entered.

Paula followed the voice into a speckless spare room.

"Supper will be served in a moment," the other said. "I just wanted to
tell you--Tim will take you back to the city to-night, grateful for the
chance, but do you really have to go? This little room is yours, and you
can go over together in the morning. Then a night in this stillness will
calm you back into a little girl. Tim doesn't know I'm asking you.
Please do just as you want----"

Paula didn't have the heart to drag the big brother back to town.

"Why," she said laughingly, "I'd much rather stay than not. Think how
good this all is to me! I didn't have an idea when he asked me, other
than a restaurant somewhere in New York."

"I am so glad.... Tim----"

He tried not to look relieved at the announcement. "Really, I didn't put
Annie up to this, but if you are content to stay, I think it will smooth
you out a bit."

After supper the three sat out in the yard. There was a heavy richness
in the air, a soft sea-wind flavored with wood-fires and finished
fields. Reifferscheid smoked his pipe and did most of the talking.

"I glanced over Bertram Lintell's new book--out to-day," he said. "It
sort of hurts. Two or three months ago, I dropped in on him while he was
doing it.... I have always had a certain interest in Lintell because I
accepted his first story seven or eight years ago, as a magazine
reader.... You may not know that nine-tenths of the unsolicited fiction
material in a magazine's mail is a personal affront to intelligence at
large. Nowhere does a man show the youth of his soul so pitifully as
when first alone with white paper and an idea. He shakes down a crow's
rookery and believes in his heart it's an eagle's nest. That there are
men in the world paid to open his package, inspect and return same
respectfully--and do it again--is an uncommercial peculiarity of a most
commercial age. Editors rely upon the more or less technically flawless
products of the trained, the "arrived"; writers who have forgotten their
dreams--rung the bell once or twice--and show a willingness to take
money for the echoes.

"An expensive reading staff is not necessary for these contributors;
their stuff goes to the heart of things at once. But what sorry caravans
halt in the outer courts of a magazine-office; what sick, empty,
unwashed confusion is impounded there! Yet a company of men moves ever
through and about, peering into the unsightly, unsavory packs--ever
ordering away, ever clearing the court, lest the mess rise to heaven....
But perfect pearls have been found in these restless, complaining
trash-heaps, and will be found again. Men are there to glance at all,
because one of these pearls is worth a whole necklace of seconds.
There's no way out of it. To make lasting good in the literary game, one
must be steeled to reverses--long, ugly corroding reverses. This is the
price which a man pays for the adjustment of his brain and hand to the
needs of the time. As flesh needs bone, he needs these reverses. They
clear the fat from the brain; increase the mental circuits, and lend to
the fibres that firm delicacy which alone can carry live hot emotions
without blowing out, and big voltage ideas swift and true to their
appointed brilliance of expression.

"I'm gabbing a lot, but I was going to tell you about Bertram Lintell. I
was first in the office to get his manuscript, and I raised the cry of
'Pearl.' It was faulty, but full of the arrogance of unhurt youth. The
face of Twenty-one with all its unlined audacity stared out from the
pages, and every page was an excursion. Here was a true subconscious
ebullition--a hang-over from a previous incarnation, like as not. It was
hard, glassy, but the physical prowess of it stimulated. Frank, brutal
boyishness--that was the attraction. I shouldn't have taken it."

"You what?" Paula asked.

"It was a shame to take it," Reifferscheid mused, "but someone else--the
next man, would have. You see, he needed buffeting--seven years at
least. I knew he didn't have the beam and displacement to stand making
good so young. It was doing him an evil turn, but we sent him the brass
tag that shines like gold. Lintell was not adult enough to twig the
counterfeit, not mellowed enough to realize that nothing is so sordid,
nothing labeled so securely to Failure, as conscious success. As I say,
I saw him at work two or three months ago. He was a patch-haired, baby
lion still, dictating stories first draft to a stenographer, supplying
demand like a huckster--the real treasure-house of his soul locked for
life and the key thrown away.... Even money turns the head of the
multitude, but money is small beer compared to the fiery potential wine
of literary recognition. Long hammering, refining reverses, alone
prepare a man for this. Quentin Charter said something of the kind: that
a young writer should live his lean years full length, and if he really
craters the mountain, he will praise every god in the Pantheon because
his achievements were slow.

"Lintell's present stuff is insufferable. The point is he may have had
in the beginning no less a gift than Charter's. That's why the new book
sickens me so.... By the way, I got a letter from Charter this
afternoon. I meant to bring it along, but I'll pass it over to you in
the morning. It's yours, Miss Linster, though he did me the honor to
think that I had written his critique. He says you crawled right inside
his book. We don't usually answer letters of this kind. There are
writers, you know, glad to turn a review office into an Admiration
Exchange. But you'll want to write to Charter, I'm sure. He's different."

Paula did not answer, but she was pleased and excited that her review
had been a joy to this thunderer of the West, and that he had answered
her tidings of high hope for the future.




FOURTH CHAPTER

PAULA ENCOUNTERS HER ADVERSARY WHO TURNS PROPHET AND TELLS OF A STARRY
CHILD SOON TO BE BORN


Paula went upstairs to the editorial rooms with Reifferscheid the
following morning for Charter's letter. This she carried into the
city-office to be alone. Forenoon is the dead time of a morning
newspaper. The place seemed still tired from the all-night struggle to
spring a paper to the streets. She thrust up a window for fresh air and
sat down in a reporter's chair to read.... The letter was big with
boyish delight. "When a man spends a couple of years growing and
trimming a pile of stuff into a sizable book," he had written, "and the
first of the important reviews comes in with such a message of
enthusiasm, it is the heart's 'well-done' long waited for." Beyond this,
there was only a line or two about the book. It had been in the
publisher's hands six months, and he was cold to it now. _The States_
had interested him, however, because there was an inclination in the
article to look at his work to come. In fact, some of the thoughts of
the reviewer, he wrote, were sympathetic with the subject-matter
simmering in his mind. Naturally, the coincidence had thrilled him.
Charter, believing that Reifferscheid had done the work, wrote with
utmost freedom. This attracted Paula, as it gave her a glimpse of a
certain fineness between men who admire each other. The issue was not
closed.... She wanted to answer the letter then and there at the
reporter's desk, but Reifferscheid knew she had not gone. He might come
in--and laugh at her precipitation.

After a night of perfect rest, Paula's mind was animated with thoughts
of work--until she reached the _Zoroaster_. Something of Bellingham's
tormenting energy was heavy in the atmosphere of her rooms. When passing
the full-length mirror, she turned her face away in fear. Impatiently
she caught up one of the new books (and Charter's letter for a marker),
and hurried across to the Park. The fall days were still flawless.

It was not yet ten in the morning, and few people were abroad. She sat
down upon one of the weathered knobs of Manhattan rock which had worn
through the thin skin of soil, and allowed herself to think of the
formidable affliction. To all intents, the magician had dispossessed her
of the rooms, identified for years with her personality and no other.
She could not put away the truth that the full forces of her mind were
at bay before the psychic advances of the dreadful stranger. This was
not long to be endured. Inasmuch that his power did not harmlessly
glance from her, she felt that there must be great potentialities of
evil within herself. This conviction made her frightened and desperate.
She should have known that it was her inner development, her
sensitiveness which had made her so potent an attraction for Bellingham.
The substance of her whole terror was that there had been moments under
his spell, when she had not been at all the mistress of her own will.

The suggestions which he projected had seemed to her the good and proper
actions. She knew it as a law--that every time her own divine right to
the rule of her faculties was thus usurped by an evil force, her
resistance was weakened. Yet there was a shocking unfairness in the
thought that she was not given a chance. In the throne-room of her mind,
she was not queen. All the sacred fortifications of self seemed broken,
even the soul's integrity debased, when Bellingham crushed his way in
and forced her to obey. This is the great psychological crime. When one
has broken into the sacred precincts, the door is left open for other
malignant, earth-bound entities foully to enter and betray....

There was no one in whom she could confide, but Madame Nestor. Almost
any professional man, a physician especially, would have called her
revelations hysterical.... Her constant and growing fear was of the time
when she should be called by Bellingham--and nothing would supervene to
save her. Some time the spell might not be broken. She became ill with
tension and shame as this unspeakable possibility seethed through her
mind.... Better death than to continue in being passion-ridden by this
defiler, in the presence of whom she became so loathsome in her own
sight--that she dared not pray....

Somewhere far off children were talking. Their voices warmed and
cleansed her mind. There was a stimulating thud of hoofs on the
turf-roads. She tried to read now. Her eyes travelled dutifully along
the lines of her book, without bringing forth even the phase of a
thought from the page of print. A swift step drew her glance down the
foot-path. Bellingham was approaching. His shoulders were thrown back,
his long arms swinging so that every muscle was in play, striding
forward at incredible speed. He filled his lungs with every cubic inch
of morning air they could contain, and expelled the volume with gusto.
She had once seen a rugged Englishman take his exercise as seriously as
this, on the promenade of an Atlantic liner before the breakfast-gong.
To all appearances, Bellingham did not have a thought apart from his
constitutional.

Paula sat very still on the rock. Her slightest movement now would
attract his attention. It occurred to her afterwards that she had been
like a crippled squirrel huddled in the fork of a tree--the hunter and
his dog below....

At the point where the path was nearest her, he halted. The thing
happened exactly as she might have conceived it in a story. For a moment
he seemed to be searching his mind for the meaning of his impulse to
stop. An unforgettable figure, this, as he stood there with lifted head,
concentrating upon the vagary which had brought him to a standstill....
Paula may have been mistaken in her terror, but she never relinquished
the thought that her proximity was known to him--before his face turned
unerringly to the rock and his bright gray eyes filled with her
presence.

"You are Miss Linster?" he asked, smiling agreeably.

She nodded, not trusting her voice.

"You attended the first of my Prismatic Hall lectures ten days ago?... I
seldom forget a face, and I remember asking one of my committee your
name."

Paula found it rather a unique effort to hold in mind the truth that she
had never spoken to this man before. Then the whole trend of her mental
activity was suddenly complicated by the thought that all her past
terrors might be groundless. Possibly Madame Nestor was insane on this
subject. "It may be that her mad words and my stimulated imagination
have reared a monster that has no actuality."

The bracing voices of the children, the brilliance of mid-forenoon, the
man's kingly figure, agreeable courtesy, and commanding health--indeed,
apart from the eyes in which she hardly dared to glance, there was
nothing to connect him even vaguely with the sinister persecutions which
bore his image. The whole world-mind was with him. What right had she to
say that the world-mind was in error and she normal--she and the
unreckonable Madame Nestor?... Paula recalled the strange intensity of
her mental life for years, and the largeness of her solitudes. The
world-mind would say she was beside herself from much study.... More
than all, no power was exerted upon her now. Who would believe that this
Bellingham, with miles of the metropolis between them, had repeatedly
over-ridden her volition, when she felt no threatening influence at the
present moment, almost within his reach--only the innate repulsion and
the fear of her fears?

"I hope to see you again at the meetings, Miss Linster."

"They do not attract me."

"That is important, if unpleasant to learn," he remarked, as if
genuinely perturbed. "I have been studying for a long time, and perhaps
I have taken a roundabout road to discovery. It is quite possible that
the values of my instruction are over-estimated by many.... Do you mind
if I sit down a moment? I have walked a hundred squares and will start
back from here." From his manner it was impossible to imagine irony
covert in his humbleness.

"Certainly not, though I must return to my apartment in a moment.... I
did not like the atmosphere--the audience--that first night," Paula
added.

"Nor did I, altogether," he said quickly. "But how can one choose the
real, if all are not admitted at first? With each lecture you will find
a more select company, and there will be very few when the actual
message is unfolded."

He glanced away as if to determine the exact point through the trees
from which the children's voices came. His profile was unquestionably
that of an aristocrat. The carriage of his head, the wonderful
development of his figure, his voice and the gentle temper of his
answers, even the cut of his coat and the elegance of his shoes
suggested an unconscious and invariable refinement which controverted
the horror he had once seemed.

"It may be that I am not quite like other people," she said, "but I
cannot think of physical perfection as the first aim in life."

"Nor can I," he answered; "still I think that after the elimination of
poisons from the physical organism, one's mental and spiritual powers
are quickened and freer to develop."

"Do you always shape your philosophy to meet the objections of your
disciples--so?"

"You are stimulating, Miss Linster, but I have made no concession to
adapt myself to your views. I only declared that I weed out my classes
before real work begins, and that physical disease retards mental
growth. I might add that I do not lecture for money."

"Why do you teach only women?"

"There are several reasons," he replied readily enough. "I have found
that a mixed audience is not receptive; there is a self-consciousness,
sometimes worse, something of a scoffing spirit, which breaks the point
of my appeal. Women are aroused to interest when a man appeals directly
to them. They do not like to betray a profound interest in any subject
apart from the household--when their lords are present. Man
instinctively combats any source which tends toward mental emancipation
on the part of women. It is only a few decades ago that women were
forced to abide entirely within their domestic circle. Instead of using
a superior physical strength now to keep her there, man's tendency is to
ridicule her outside interests. So I have found that women prefer to
study alone."

Bellingham answered thus circuitously, but his manner suggested that he
was grateful for the inquiry, since it gave him an opportunity to
express matters which had only been half-formed in his mind. Paula,
whose every question had come from an inclination to confound him, began
to realize that the spirit was unworthy and partook of impertinence.

"I believe in automatic health," she said impatiently. "It seems to me
that refinement means this: that in real fineness all such things are
managed with a sort of unconscious art. For instance, I should not have
health at the price of walking twice a hundred blocks in a forenoon----"

"The point is eminently reasonable, Miss Linster," Bellingham remarked
with a smile. "But what I find it well to do, I rarely advise for
others. I am from a stock of powerful physical men. My fathers were
sailors and fishermen. They gave me an organism which weakens if I
neglect exercise, and I seem to require about five times as much
physical activity as many men of the present generation. I have
absolutely no use for this tremendous muscular strength; in fact, I
should gladly be less strong if it could be accomplished without a
general deterioration. The point is, that a man with three or four
generations of gentle-folk behind him, can keep in a state of glowing
health at the expense of about one-fifth the physical energy that I
burn--who come from rough men of mighty outdoor labors."

This was very reasonable, except that he seemed far removed in nature
from the men of boats and beaches. She had dared to glance into his face
as he spoke, and found an impression from the diamond hardness of his
eyes, entirely different from that which came through listening merely.
But for this glance, it never would have occurred to her, that her
questions had stretched his faculties to the slightest tension. She
would have arisen to go now, but he resumed:

"I cannot bear to have you think that my energies are directed entirely
in the interests of lifting the standards of health, Miss Linster.
Really, this is but a small part of preparation. It was only because I
felt you ready for the important truths--that I regretted your absence
after the first night. Do you know that we live in the time of a
spiritual high-tide? It is clear to me that the whole race is lifting
with a wonderful inner animation. In the next quarter of a century great
mystic voices shall be heard. And there shall be One above all.... I
tell you people are breaking down under the tyranny of their material
possessions. After desire--comes the burden of holding. We are
approaching the great _ennui_ which Carlyle prophesied. There is no
longer a gospel of materialism. The great English and German teachers
whose work was regarded as supreme philosophy by the people ten years
ago, are shown to be pitiful failures in our colleges to-day--or at
best, specialists of one particular stage of evolution, who made the
mistake of preaching that their little division in the great cosmic line
was the whole road. Materialism died out of Germany a few years
ago--with a great shock of suicide. The mystics are teaching her now. I
assure you the dawn is breaking for a great spiritual day such as the
world has never seen. Soon a great light shall cover the nations and
evil shall crawl into the holes of the earth where it is dark.... There
is shortly to be born into the world--a glorious Child. While He is
growing to celestial manhood--New Voices shall rise here and everywhere
preparing the way. One of these New Voices--one of the very least of
these--is Bellingham to whom you listen so impatiently."

Every venture into the occult had whispered this Child-promise in
Paula's ears. There was such a concerted understanding of this
revelation among the cults, that the thought had come to her that
perhaps this was a delusion of every age. Yet she had seen a Hindu
record dated a hundred years before, prophesying the birth of a Superman
in the early years of the Twentieth Century. There was scarcely a
division among the astrologers on this one point. She had even been
conscious in the solitudes of her own life of a certain mystic
confidence of such a fulfillment.... She dared not look into
Bellingham's face at such a moment. The ghastly phase of the whole
matter was to hear this prophecy repeated by one to whom the illustrious
prospect (if he were, as she had believed) could become only an awful
illumination of the hell to which he was condemned. It was--only
unspeakably worse--like hearing a parrot croak, "Feed our souls with the
bread of life!..." Paula stirred in her seat, and Charter's letter
dropped from the book in her lap. She seized it with a rush of grateful
emotion. It was a stanchion in her mind now filled with turbulence.

"There never was a time when woman's intelligence was so eager and
rational; never a time," Bellingham went on, "when men were so tired of
metals and meals and miles. The groan for the Absolutely New, for the
utmost in sense and the weirdest of sensations, for speed to cover
distances and to overcome every obstacle, even thin air--all these
express the great weariness of the flesh and make clear to the prophetic
understanding that man is nearing the end of his lessons in three
dimensions and five senses. There is a stirring of the spirit-captive in
the worn mesh of the body."

The woman traced her name with her forefinger upon the cover of the book
in her lap; again and again, "Paula--Paula--Paula." It was a habit she
had not remembered for years. As a little girl when she fought against
being persuaded contrary to her will, she would hold herself in hand
thus, by wriggling "Paula" anywhere. All that Bellingham said was
artfully calculated to inspire her with hope and joy in the world. So
marvelously were the words designed to carry her high in happiness, that
there was a corresponding tension of terror in remembering that
Bellingham uttered them. Yet she would have felt like a lump of clay had
she not told him:

"What you say is very wonderful to me."

"And it is the women who are most sensitive to the Light--women who are
already unfolding in the rays, yet so far-flung and dim." Bellingham's
voice was a quick emotionless monotone. "Perhaps you have noted the
great amalgamation of clubs and classes of women which each year turns
its power to more direct effort and valuable study. Another thing, let
the word Genius be whispered about any child or youth, and he becomes at
once the darling of rich matrons. What does this mean--this desire of
woman to bring out the latent powers of a stranger's child? This veiled,
beautiful quality is the surest sign of all. It is the spirit of
Rebecca--which, even in the grief for her own dead babe, turns
thrillingly to mother a wayfarer's Starry Child. Verily, when a woman
begins to dream about bringing prophets into the world--the giants of
those other days are close to her, crowding closer, eager to be born
again."

Paula turned to him and arose. His face was not kindled. It was as if he
were an actor reading lines to memorize, not yet trying to simulate the
contained emotions. There is a glow of countenance where fine
thought-force is in action, but Bellingham's face was not lit with the
expiration of mind-energy, though his eyes glittered with set, bird-like
brightness.

"I must hurry away now," she told him hastily. "I must think upon what
you have said."

"I truly wish," he added softly, and with a kindness she felt, because
her eyes were turned from him, "that you would join one of my wiser
classes. You would be an inspiration. Besides, the little things that
have been given me to tell--should be known by the very few who have
reached your degree of evolution."

"Thank you," she faltered. "I must think."

"Good-by, Miss Linster."

Reaching the street in front of her apartment house, she turned just in
time to see him disappear among the trees. He strode forward as if this
were his world, and his days had been a continuous pageant of
victories.... Her rooms were all cleared of disorder, her mind refreshed
and stimulated.... That night between eleven and twelve she was writing
to Charter. There were a half dozen penned pages before her, and a smile
on her lips. She poured out a full heart to the big Western figure of
cleanliness and strength--wrote to the man she wanted him to be.... The
day had been strange and expanding. She had suffered no evil. The
thoughts remaining with her from the talk in the Park were large with
significance, and they had cleared slowly from the murkiness of their
source. These, and the ideal of manhood she was building out of
Charter's book and letter and Reifferscheid's little sketch of him, had
made the hours rich with healing. She was tired but steady-nerved as she
wrote.... There was a faint tapping at her hall-door.




FIFTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE FURIOUS HISTORY OF SELMA CROSS AND WRITES A
LETTER TO QUENTIN CHARTER


Paula thrust the sheets of the letter in her desk drawer and admitted
Selma Cross, an actress whose apartment was across the hall. These two
had chatted together many times, sometimes intimately. Each had found
the other interesting. Hints of a past that was almost classic in the
fury of its struggle for publicity, had repeatedly come to Paula's ears,
with other matters she greatly would have preferred not to hear. Selma
Cross was huge to look upon, and at first thought without grace. There
was something uncanny in her face and movements, and an extraordinary
breadth between her yellow eyes which were wide-lidded, slow-moving and
ever-changing. She was but little past thirty, yet the crowded traffic
of her years was intricately marked.

"I saw the light under your door, and felt like coming in for a few
minutes," she said. "I must talk to some one and my maid, Dimity, is
snoring. You see, I'm celebrating for two reasons."

"Tell me, so I can help," Paula answered.

"Vhruebert has taken a play for me. You know, I've been begging him to
for months. The play was made for me--not that it was written with me in
mind, but that I just suit it. Selma Cross is to be carved in light over
a theatre-entrance, twenty seconds from Broadway--next April. It will be
at the _Herriot_--Vhruebert's theatre. We run through Hartford,
Springfield, Rochester and that string of second cities earlier in the
Spring."

Paula rose and gave both her hands.

"Oh, I'm so glad for you," she said. "I know something about how you
have worked for this----"

"Yes, and the play is _The Thing_. I am an ugly slaving drudge, but have
all the emotions that the sweet _ingenue_ of the piece should have, and
the audience watches me deliver. Yes, I've waited long for this, and yet
I'm not so glad as I thought I should be. I've been pretty sure of it
for the last year or two. I said I was celebrating for two things----"

"Pray, what is the other?"

"I forget that it might not interest you--though it certainly does me,"
Selma Cross said with a queer, low laugh.... "He wasn't ugly about it,
but he has been exacting--ugh! The fact is, I have earned the privilege
at last of sleeping in my own respectable apartment."

Paula couldn't help shivering a bit. "You mean you have left your----"

"Oh, he wasn't my husband.... It's such a luxury to pay for your own
things--for your own house and clothes and dinners--to earn a dollar for
every need and one to put away.... You didn't think that I could get my
name above the name of a play--without an angel?"

"I didn't know," Paula said, "I saw you with him often. It didn't
exactly occur to me that he was your husband, because he didn't come
here. But do you mean that now when you don't need him any longer--you
told him to go away?"

"Just that--except it isn't at all as it looks. You wouldn't pity old
man Villiers. Living God, that's humorous--after what I have given.
Don't look for wings on theatrical angels, dear."

It was plain that the woman was utterly tired. She regarded Paula with a
queer expression of embarrassment, and there was a look of harsh
self-repression under the now-drooped eyelids.

"I don't apologize," she went on hastily. "What I have done, I would do
again--only earlier in the game, but you're the sort of woman I don't
like to have look at me that--I mean look down upon me. I haven't many
friends. I think I must be half wild, but you make the grade that I
have--and you pay the price.... You've always looked attractive to
me--so easy and finished and out of the ruck."

There was a real warming sincerity in the words. Paula divined on the
instant that she could forever check an intimacy--by a word which would
betray the depth of her abhorrence for such a concession to ambition,
and for the life which seems to demand it. Selma Cross was sick for a
friend, sick from containing herself. On this night of achievement there
was something pitiful in the need of her heart.

"New York has turned rather too many pages of life before my eyes,
Selma, for me to feel far above any one whose struggles I have not
endured."

The other leaned forward eagerly, "I liked you from the first moment,
Paula," she said. "You were so rounded--it seemed to me. I'm all
streaky, all one-sided. You're bred. I'm cattle.... Some time I'll tell
you how it all began. I said I would be the greatest living
tragedienne--hurled this at a lot of cat-minds down in Kentucky fifteen
years ago. Of course, I shall. It does not mean so much to me as I
thought, and it may be a bauble to you, but I wanted it. Its
far-awayness doesn't torture me as it once did, but one pays a ghastly
price. Yes, it's a climb, dear. You must have bone and blood and
brain--a sort of brain--and you should have a cheer from below; but I
didn't. I wonder if there ever was a fight that can match mine? If so,
it would not be a good tale for children or grown-ups with delicate
nerves. Little women always hated me. I remember, one restaurant cashier
on Eighth Avenue told me I was too unsightly to be a waitress. I have
done kitchen pot-boilers and scrubbed tenement-stairs. Then, because I
repeated parts of plays in those horrid halls--they said I was crazy....
Why, I have felt a perfect lust for suicide--felt my breast ache for a
cool knife and my hand rise gladly. Once I played a freak part--that was
my greater degradation--debased my soul by making my body look worse
than it is. I went down to hell for that--and was forgiven. I have been
so homesick, Paula, that I could have eaten the dirt in the road of that
little Kentucky town.... Yes, I pressed against the steel until
something broke--it was the steel, not me. Oh, I could tell you
much!..."

She paused but a moment.

"The thing so dreadful to overcome was that I have a body like a great
Dane. It would not have hurt a writer, a painter, even a singer, so
much, but we of the drama are so dependent upon the shape of our bodies.
Then, my face is like a dog or a horse or a cat--all these I have been
likened to. Then I was slow to learn repression. This is a part of
culture, I guess--breeding. Mine is a lineage of Kentucky poor white
trash, who knows, but a speck of 'nigger'? I don't care now, only it
gave me a temper of seven devils, if it was so. These are some of the
things I have contended with. I would go to a manager and he would laugh
me along, trying to get rid of me gracefully, thinking that some of his
friends were playing a practical joke on him. Vhruebert thought that at
first. Vhruebert calls me _The Thing_ now. I could have done better had
I been a cripple; there are parts for a cripple. And you watch, Paula,
next January when I burn up things here, they'll say my success is
largely due to my figure and face!"

As she looked and listened, Paula saw great meanings in the broad big
countenance, a sort of ruffian strength to carry this perfecting
instrument of emotion. The great body was needed to support such
talents, handicapped by the lack of beauty. Selma Cross fascinated her.
Paula's heart went out to the great crude creature she had been--in pity
for this woman of furious history. The processes by which her brain and
flesh had been refined would have slain the body and mind of an ordinary
human. It came to Paula that here was one of Mother Nature's most
enthralling experiments--the evolution of an effective instrument from
the coarsest and vaguest heredity.

"They are all brainless but Vhruebert. You see, unless one is a beauty,
you can't get the support of a big manager's name. I mean without
money--there are managers who will lend their name to your stardom, if
you take the financial risk. Otherwise, you've got to attract them as a
possible conquest. All men are like that. If you interest them
sexually--they will hear what you have to say----"

"Isn't that a reckless talk?" Paula asked, pale from the repulsiveness
of the thought. "You say it without a single qualification----"

Selma Cross stared at her vacantly for a few seconds, then laughed
softly. "You don't actually believe--to the contrary?"

"Let's pass it by. I should have to be changed--to believe that!"

"I hope the time will never come when you need something terribly from a
strange man--one upon whom you have no hold but--yourself.... Ah, but
you--the brighter sort would give you what you asked. You----"

"Please don't go on!" Paula whispered. "The other part is so
interesting."

Selma Cross seemed to stir restlessly in her loose, softly-scented
garments. "I suppose I'm too rough for you. In ninety-nine women out of
a hundred, I'd say your protest was a cheap affectation, but it isn't so
with you...."

"It's your set, smothery pessimism that hurts so, Selma," Paula declared
intensely. "It hurts me most because you seem to have it so locked and
immovable inside.... You have been so big and wonderful to win against
tremendous obstacles--not against ugliness--I can't grant that. You
startled me, when I saw you first. I think women have held you apart
because you were uncommon. You show a strange power in your movements
and expression. It's not ugliness----"

"That's mighty rare of you. I haven't had the pleasure of being defied
like that before. But you are not like other people--not like other
women."

"You will meet many real men and women--wiser and kinder than I am. I
think your pessimism cannot endure--when you look for the good in
people----"

"The kind I have known would not let me. They're just as hateful now--I
mean the stuffy dolls of the stage--just as hateful, calling me 'dear'
and 'love' and saying, 'How tremendous you are, Selma Cross!....'
Listen, it is only a little while ago that the same women used to ask me
to walk on Broadway with them--to use me as a foil for their baby faces!
Oh, women are horrible--dusty shavings inside--and men are of the same
family."

"You poor, dear unfortunate--not to know the really wonderful kind! You
are worn to the bone from winning your victory, but when you're rested,
you'll be able to see the beautiful--clearly."

"One only knows as far as one can see."

This sentence was a shock to Paula's intelligence. It was spoken without
consciousness of the meaning which drove so deep into the other's mind.
It suggested a mind dependent altogether upon physical eyes. Paula
refused to believe that this was the key to the whole matter.

"They have been so cruel to me--those female things which bloom a year,"
Selma Cross continued. "Flesh-flowers! They harried me to martyrdom. I
had to hate them, because I was forced to be one with them--I, a big
savage, dreaming unutterable things. It's all so close yet, I haven't
come to pity them.... Maybe you can tell me what good they are--what
they mean in the world--the shallow, brainless things who make the stage
full! They are in factories, too, everywhere--daughters of the coolies
and peasants of Europe--only worse over here because their fathers have
lost their low fixed place in society, and are all mixed in their dim,
brute minds. They have no one to rule them. You will see a family of
dirty, frightened, low-minded children--the eldest, say a girl of
fifteen. A dog or a cat with a good home is rich beside them. Take this
eldest girl of a brood--with all the filth of foreign New York in and
about her. She is fifteen and ready for the streets. It is the year of
her miracle. I've seen it a score of times. You miss her a few months
and she appears again at work somewhere--her face decently clean, her
eyes clear, a bit of bright ribbon and a gown wrung somewhere from the
beds of torture. It is her brief bloom--so horrid to look at when you
know what it means. All the fifteen years of squalor, evil, and
low-mindedness for this one year--a bloom-girl out of the dirt! And the
next, she has fallen back, unwashed, high-voiced, hardening,
stiffening,--a babe at her breast, dull hell in her heart. All her
living before and to come--for that one bloom year. Maybe you can tell
me what the big purpose of it all is. Earth uses them quite as
ruthlessly as any weed or flower--gives them a year to bloom, not for
beauty, but that more crude seeds may be scattered. Perpetuate! Flowers
bloom to catch a bug--such girls, to catch a man--perpetuate--oh God,
what for? And these things have laughed at me in the chorus, called me
'Crazy Sal,' because I spoke of things they never dreamed."

"Yes," Paula said quickly, "I've seen something like that. How you will
pity them when you are rested! It is hard for us to understand why such
numbers are sacrificed like a common kind of plants. Nietzsche calls
them 'the much-too-many.' But Nietzsche does not know quite so much as
the Energy that wills them to manifest. It is dreadful, it is pitiful.
It would seem, if God so loved the world--that He could not endure such
pity as would be His at the sight of this suffering and degradation....
But you have no right to despise them--you, of all women. You're
blooming up, up, up,--farther and farther out of the common--your
blooming has been for years because you have kindled your mind. You must
bloom for years still--that's the only meaning of your strength--because
you will kindle your soul.... A woman with power like yours--has no
right but to love the weak. Think what strength you have! There have
been moments in the last half-hour that you have roused me to such a
pitch of thinking--that I have felt weak and ineffectual beside you. You
made me think sometimes of a great submarine--I don't know just
why--flashing in the depths."

"I don't think you see me right," Selma Cross said wearily. "Many times
I have been lost in the dark. I have been wicked--hated the forces that
made me. I have so much in me of the peasant--that I abhor. There have
been times when I would have been a prostitute for a clean house and
decent clothes to cover me, but men did not look at _The Thing_--only
the old man, and one other!" Her eyes brightened, either at the memory
or at the thought that she was free from the former.... "Don't wince and
I'll tell you about that angel. You will be wiser. I don't want you for
my friend, if I must keep something back. It was over three years ago,
during my first real success. I was rather startling as Sarah Blixton in
Heber's _Caller Herrin_. It was in that that I learned repression. That
was my struggle--to repress.... Old man Villiers saw me, and was wise
enough to see my future. 'Here's a girl,' I can imagine him saying, 'who
is ugly enough to be square to one man, and she's a comer in spite of
her face.' He showed where his check-book could be of unspeakable
service. It was all very clear to me. I felt I had struggled enough, and
went with him.... Villiers is that kind of New Yorker who feels that he
has nothing left to live for, when he ceases to desire women. In his
vanity--they are always vain--he wanted to be seen with a woman
mentioned on Broadway. It was his idea of being looked up to--and of
making other men envious. You know his sort have no interest--save where
they can ruin.

"Then for two winter months, Villiers and I had a falling out. He went
South, and I remained here to work. During this time I had my first real
brush with love--a young Westerner. It was terrific. He was a brilliant,
but turned out a rotten cad. I couldn't stand that in a young man....
You can pity an old man, much the worse for living, when he is brazenly
a cad--doesn't know anything else.... When Villiers came back from the
South I was bought again. I put it all nakedly, Paula, but I was older
than you are now, when that sort of thing began with me. Remember that!
Still, I mustn't take too much credit, because I didn't attract men....
If you don't abhor me now, you never will, little neighbor, because you
have the worst.... Sometime I'll tell you a real little love story--oh,
I'm praying it's real! He's a hunch-back, Paula,--the author of _The
Thing_.... Nobody could possibly want a hunch-back but me--yet I'm not
good enough. He's so noble and so fine!... The past is so full of
abominations, and I'm not a liar.... I don't think he'd want me--though
I could be his nurse. I could _carry him_!... Then there is a long-ago
promise.... Oh, I know I'm not fit for that kind of happiness!..."

There was an inspiration in the last. It was strong enough to subvert
Paula's mind from the road of dreary degradation over which she had been
led. From rousing heights of admiration to black pits of shame, she had
fallen, but here again was a tonic breath from clean altitudes. The
picture in her mind of this great glowing creature tenderly mothering
the poor crippled genius of _The Thing_--was a thrilling conception.

"There is nothing which cannot be forgiven--save soul-death!" Paula said
ardently. "What you have told me is very hard to adjust, but I hope for
your new love. Oh, I am glad, Selma, that the other is all behind! I
don't know much of such things, but it has come to me that it is easier
for a man to separate himself from past degradations and be clean--than
a woman. This is because a man gives--_but the woman receives her sin_!
That which is given cannot continue to defile, but woman is the
matrix.... Still, you do not lie. Such things are so dreadful when
matted in lies. We all carry burdensome devils--but few uncover them, as
you have done for me. There is something noble in looking back into the
past with a shudder, saying,--'I was sick and full of disease in those
days,' but when one hugs the corrosion, painting it white all
over--there is an inner devouring that is never appeased.... All our
sisters are in trouble. I think we live in a world of suffering
sororities. You are big and powerful. Your greater life is to come.... I
am glad for what you have put behind. You will progress farther and
farther from it. I am glad you are back across the hall--alone!"

       *       *       *       *       *

For many moments after Selma Cross had gone, Paula sat thinking under
the lamp. At last she drew the sheets of the letter to Charter from the
desk-drawer, and read them over. The same rapt smile came to her lips,
as when she was writing. It was a letter to her Ideal--the big figure of
cleanness and strength, she wanted this man to be. Even a line or two
she added. No one ever knew, but Paula.... At length, she began tearing
the sheets. Finer and finer became the squares under her tense
fingers--a little pile of _confetti_ on the desk at last--and brushed
into a basket.... Then she wrote another letter, blithe, brief,
gracious--about his book and her opinion. It was a letter such as he
would expect....




SIXTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS CALLED TO PARLOR "F" OF THE _MAID-STONE_ WHERE THE BEYOND-DEVIL
AWAITS WITH OUTSTRETCHED ARMS


Paula felt singularly blessed the next morning wondering if ever there
existed another woman into whose life-channel poured such strange and
torrential tributaries. The current of her mind was broadening and
accelerating. She was being prepared for some big expression, and there
is true happiness in the thought. Reifferscheid, since her pilgrimage to
Staten Island, had become a fixture of delight. Selma Cross had borne
her down on mighty pinions to the lower revelations of the City, but had
winged her back again on a breeze of pure romance. Madame Nestor had
parted the curtains, which shut from the world's eye, hell unqualified,
yet her own life was a miracle of penitence. Not the least of her
inspirations was this mild, brave woman of the solitudes. Then, there
was the commanding mystery of Bellingham, emerging in her mind now from
the chicaneries of the past ten days; rising, indeed, to his own
valuation--that of a New Voice. Finally, above and before all, was the
stirring figure of her Ideal--her splendid secret source of
optimism--Charter, less a man than a soul in her new dreams--a name to
which she affixed, "The Man-Who-Must-Be-Somewhere."

Just once, the thought came to Paula that Bellingham had designed a
meeting such as took place in the Park to soften her aversion and clear
from her mind any idea of his abnormality. She could not hold this
suspicion long. Attributing evil strategies to another was not easy for
Paula. The simpler way now was to give him every benefit, even to regard
the recent dreadful adventures with an intangible devil--as an outburst
of her neglected feminine prerogatives, coincident with the stress of
her rather lonely intellectual life. As for Madame Nestor, might she not
have reached a more acute stage of a similar derangement? Paula was not
unacquainted with the great potentialities of fine physical health, nor
did she miss the fact that Mother Nature seldom permits a woman of
normal development to reach the fourth cycle of her years, without
reckoning with the ancient reason of her being.

She now regarded early events connected with Bellingham as one might
look back upon the beginning of a run of fever.... Could he be one of
the New Voices?

Paula loved to think that Woman was to be the chief resource of the
Lifting Age. Everywhere among men she saw the furious hunger for
spiritual refreshment. Words, which she heard by mere chance from
passers-by, appalled her. It was so tragically clear to her how the life
led by city men starves their better natures--that there were times when
she could hardly realize they did not see it. She wanted someone to make
the whole world understand--that just as there are hidden spaces between
the atoms of steel which made radioactivity possible, so in the human
body there is a permeating space, in which the soul of man is built day
by day from every thought and act; and when the worn-out physical
envelope falls away--there it stands, a record to endure.... She wanted
to believe that it was the office of woman to help man make this record
beautiful. Just as the old Anglo-Saxon for "lady" means "giver of
bread," so she loved to think that the spiritual loaf was in the keeping
of woman also.

Paula could not meditate without ecstasy upon the thought that a great
spiritual tide was rising, soon to overflow every race and nation. The
lifting of man from greedy senses to the pure happiness of brotherhood,
was her most intimate and lovely hope. Back of everything, this lived
and lit her mind. There were transcendent moments--she hardly dared to
describe or interpret them--when cosmic consciousness swept into her
brain. Swift was the visitation, nor did it leave any memorable
impression, but she divined that such lofty moments, different only in
degree, were responsible for the great utterances in books that are
deathless. The shield was torn from her soul, leaving it naked to every
world-anguish. The woman, Paula Linster, became an accumulation of all
suffering--desert thirsts, untold loves, birth and death parturitions,
blind cruelties of battle, the carnal lust of Famine (that soft-treading
spectre), welted flesh under the screaming lash, moaning from the
World's Night everywhere--until the impassioned spirit within rushed
forth to the very horizon's rim to shelter an agonizing people from an
angry God. Such is the genius of race-motherhood--the ineffable spirit
of mediation between Father and child.

One must regard with awe the reaction which follows such an outpouring.

These are the wilderness-wrestlings of the great-souled--the
Gethsemanes. Out of the dream, would appear the actual spectacle of the
City--human beings preying one upon the other, the wolf still frothing
in man's breast--and then would crush down upon her with shattering pain
the realization of her own hopeless ineffectuality. To a mind thus
stricken and desolated often, premonitions of madness come at
last--madness, the black brother of genius. There is safety alone in a
body strong and undefiled to receive again the expanded spirit. From how
many a lustrous youth--tarrying too long by the fetid margins of
sense--has the glory winged away, never to return to a creature fallen
into hairy despoliation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Paula had returned from down-town about noon. Reifferscheid, who had a
weakness for Herman Melville, and annually endeavored to spur the
American people into a more adequate appreciation of the old sea-lion,
had ordered her to rest her eyes for a few days in _Moby Dick_. With the
fat, old fine-print novel under her arm, Paula let herself into her own
apartment and instantly encountered the occultist's power. She sank to
the floor and covered her face in the pillows of the couch. In the past
twenty-four hours she had come to believe that the enemy had been put
away forever, yet here in her own room she was stricken, and so
swiftly.... Though she did not realize it at once, many of the thoughts
which gradually surged into her mind were not her own. She came to see
Bellingham as other women saw him--as a great and wise doctor. Her own
conception battled against this, but vainly, vaguely. It was as if he
held the balance of power in her consciousness. Without attempting to
link them together, the processes of her mind quickly will be set into
words.

Her first thought, before the tightening of Bellingham's control in her
brain, was to rush into his presence and fiercely arraign him for the
treachery he had committed. After blaming Madame Nestor and deforming
her own faculties to clear him from evil, the devilishness of the
present visitation overwhelmed. And how infinitely more black and
formidable now was his magic--after the utterances in the Park! This was
her last real stand.... A cry of hopelessness escaped her lips, for the
numbness was already about her eyes, and creeping back like a pestilence
along the open highways of her mind.

"Come to me. The way is open. I am alone. I am near.... Come to me,
Paula Linster, of plentiful treasures.... Do you not see the open
way--how near I am? Oh, come--now--come to me now!"

Again and again the little sentences fell upon her mind, until its
surface stirred against reiteration, as one, thoroughly understanding,
resents repeated explanations.... It was right now for her to go. She
had been rebellious and headstrong to conjure such evils about the name
of a famous physician. The world called him famous. Only she and Madame
Nestor had stood apart, clutching fast to their ideas of his deviltry.
He had taken the trouble to call her to him--to prove that he was good.
The degradation which she had felt at the first moment of his
summons--was all from her own perversity.... Clearly she saw the street
below, Cathedral Way; a turn north, then across the Plaza to the brown
ornate entrance of _The Maidstone_.... There was no formality about the
going. Her hat and coat had not been removed.... She was in the hall;
the elevator halted at her floor while the man pushed a letter and some
papers under the door of the Selma Cross apartment.... In the street,
she turned across the Plaza from Cathedral Way to _The Maidstone_. The
real Paula Linster marshalled a hundred terrible protests, but her voice
was muffled, her strength ineffectual as Josephine's beating with white
hands against the Emperor's iron door. Real volition was locked in the
pitiless will of the physician, to whom she hastened as one hoping to be
saved.

She inquired huskily of the man at the hotel-desk.

"The Doctor is waiting on the parlor-floor--in F," was the answer.

Paula stepped from the elevator, and was directed to the last door on
the left.... The sense of her need, of her illness, hurried her forward
through the long hall. Sometimes she seemed burdened with the body of a
woman, very tired and helpless, but quite obedient.... The figure "F" on
a silver shield filled her eyes. The door was ajar. Her entrance was not
unlike that of a lioness goaded with irons through a barred passage into
an arena. She did not open the door wider, but slipped through sideways,
gathering her dress closely about her.... Bellingham was there. His face
was white, rigid from long concentration; yet he smiled and his arms
were opened to her.... The point here was that he so marvelously
understood. His attitude to her seemed that of a physician of the soul.
She could not feel the fighting of the real woman.... Dazed and broken
for the moment, she encountered the soothing magnetism of his hands.

"How long I have waited!" he quietly exclaimed. "Hours, and it was
bitter waiting--but you are a wreath for my waiting--how grateful you
are to my weariness!... Paula Linster, Paula Linster--what deserts of
burning sunshine I have crossed to find you--what dark jungles I have
searched for such fragrance!"

His arms were light upon her, his voice low and lulling. He dared not
yet touch his lips to her hair--though they were dry and twisted with
his awful thirst. Craft and patience altogether feline was in the art
with which he wound and wove about her mind thoughts of his own,
designed to ignite the spark of responsive desire.... And how softly he
fanned--(an incautious blast would have left him in darkness
altogether)--until it caught.... Well, indeed, he knew the cunning of
the yet unbroken seals; and better still did he know the outraged forces
hovering all about her, ready to defeat him for the slightest error--and
leave him to burn in his own fires.

"This is peace," he whispered with indescribable repression. "How soft a
resting-place--and yet how strong!... Out of the past I have come for
you. Do you remember the rock in the desert on which you sat and waited
long ago? Your eyes were weary when I came--weary from the blazing light
of noon and the endless waning of that long day. On a great rock in the
desert you sat--until I came, _until I came_. Then you laughed because I
shut the feverish sun-glow from your strained eyes.... Remember, I came
in the skin of a lion and shut the sunset from your aching eyes--my
shoulders darkening the west--and we were alone--and the night came
on...."

Clearly was transferred to hers, the picture in his own brain. One of
the ancient and mystic films of memory seemed brought after ages to the
light--the reddening sands, the city far behind, from which she had fled
to meet her hero, deep in the desert--the glow of sunset on his
shoulders and in his hair, tawny as the lion's skin he wore.... The
heart quickened within her; the savage ardor of that long-ago woman grew
hot in her breast. Strong as a lion he was, this youth of the Sun, and
fleet the night fell to cover them. She ate the dried grapes he gave
her, drank deep from his skin of wine, and laughed with him in the swift
descending night.... She felt his arms now, her face was upraised, her
eyelids tensely shut. Downward the blood rushed, leaving her lips icy
cold. She felt the muscles of his arms in her tightening fingers, and
her breast rose against him. This was no Twentieth Century magician who
thralled her now, but a glorious hero out of the desert sunset;--and the
woman within her was as one consuming with ecstasy from a lover's last
visit....

And now Bellingham changed the color and surface of his advances. It was
his thought to make such a marvellous sally, that when he retired and
the mistress once again commanded her own citadel, she would perceive
the field of his activities strewn, not with corpses, but with garlands,
and in their fragrance she must yearn for the giant to come yet again.
The thing he now endeavored to do was beyond an ordinary human
conception for devilishness; and yet, that it was not a momentary
impulse, but a well considered plan, was proven by the trend of his talk
of the day before.... The flaw in his structure was his apparent
forgetting that the woman in his arms breathing so ardently, in her own
mind was clinging to a youth out of the sunset--a youth in the skin of a
lion.

"Wisdom has been given to my eyes," Bellingham resumed with surpassing
gentleness. "For years a conception of wonderful womanhood has lived and
brightened in my mind, bringing with it a promise that in due time, such
a woman would be shown to me. The woman, the promise and the miracle of
its later meaning, I perceived at last were not for my happiness, but
for the world's awful need. You are the fruits of my wonderful
vision--you--Paula Linster. You are the quest of my long and weary
searching!"

His utterance of her name strangely disturbed her night-rapture of the
desert. It was as if she heard afar-off--the calling of her people.

"On the night you entered the Hall," he said, and his face bent closer,
"I felt the sense of victory, before these physical eyes found you. My
thoughts roved over a world, brightened by a new hope, fairer for your
presence. And then, I saw your fine white brow, the ignited magic of
your hair and eyes, your frail exquisite shoulders.... It seemed as
though the lights perished from the place--when you left."

The word "magic" was a sudden spark around which the thoughts of the
woman now groped.... She had lost her desert lover, passion was drained
from her, and there was a weight of great trouble pressing down ...
"Magic"--she struggled for its meaning.... She was sitting upon a rock
again, but not in the desert--rather in a place of cooled sunlight,
where there were turf roads and grand, old trees--a huge figure
approaching with a powerful swinging stride--yesterday, Bellingham, the
Park--the Talk!... Paula lifted her shoulders, felt the binding arms
around them and heard the words uttered now in the meridian of human
passion:

"Listen, Paula Linster, you have been chosen for the most exalted task
ever offered to living woman. The Great Soul is not yet in the world,
and He must come soon!... It is you who have inspired this--you, of
trained will; a mind of stirring evolution, every thought so essentially
feminine; you of virgin body and a soul lit with stars! You are brave.
The burden is easy to one of your courage, and I should keep you free
from the world--free from the burns and the whips of this thinking
animal, the world. All that I have won from the world, her mysteries,
her enchantments, I shall give you, all that is big and brave and wise
in song and philosophy and nature, I shall bring to your feet, as a
hunter with trophies to his beloved--all that a man, wise and tender,
can think and express to quicken the splendor of fertility----"

Paula was now fully conscious--her self restored to her. The Yesterday
and the To-day rose before her mind in startling parallel. Her primary
dread was that she might lose control again before Bellingham was put
away. The super-devilishness of his plan--hiding a blasphemy in the
white robe of a spiritual consecration--had changed him in her sight to
a ravening beast. The thing which he believed would cause her eagerly to
bestow upon him the riches of her threefold life had lifted her farther
out of his power that moment, than even she realized. Bellingham had
over-reached. She was filled with inner nausea.... The idea of escape,
the thought of crippling the magician's power over her forever--in the
stress of this, she grew cold.... She was nearest the door. It stood
ajar, as when she had entered.

"Meditation--in the place I have prepared," he was whispering,
"meditation and the poetic life, rarest of fruits, purest of white
garments--cleansed with sunlight and starlight, you and I, Paula
Linster,--the sources of creation which have been revealed to me--for
you! Wonderful woman--all the vitalities of heaven shall play upon you!
We shall bring the new god into the world----"

She pushed back from his arms and faced him--white-lipped and loathing.

"You father a son of mine," she said, in the doorway. "You--are
dead--the man's soul is dead within you--you whited sepulchre!"

His face altered like a white wall which an earthquake disorders at the
base. White rock turned to blown paper; the man-mask rubbed out; Havoc
featured upon an erect thing, with arms pitifully outstretched.

       *       *       *       *       *

Paula, alone in the long hall, ran to the marble stairs, hurried down
and into the street--swiftly to her house. There, every thread of
clothing she had worn was gathered into a pile for burning. Then she
bathed and her strength returned.




SEVENTH CHAPTER

PAULA BEGINS TO SEE MORE CLEARLY THROUGH MADAME NESTOR'S REVELATIONS,
AND WITNESSES A BROADWAY ACCIDENT


In mid-afternoon Paula obeyed an impulse to call upon Madame Nestor. She
wanted to talk with the only human being in New York who could quite
understand. Madame's room was west of Eighth Avenue in Forty-fourth
Street--the servant's quarter in a squalid suite, four flights up. The
single window opened upon a dim shaft, heavy with emanations from many
kitchens. There was not even a closet. Madame's moulted plumage was hung
upon the back of the outer and only door. Books were everywhere, on the
floor, in boxes, on the cot.

"My dear Paula, you felt the need of me?... I should have come to you.
This does very well for me, but I dislike my poverty to be known, dear.
It is not that I am the least proud, but the psychic effects of pity are
depressing."

"Please, Madame Nestor, don't think of me pitying anybody! I did feel
the need of you. The day has been horrible. But first, I want to tell
you that I am very sorry for what I said--when you were in my rooms the
other day----"

The elder woman leaned forward and kissed Paula's dress at the shoulder.
There was something sweet and mild and devotional in the action,
something suggestive of a wise old working-bee pausing an instant to
caress its queen.

"You have been impelled to go to him, Paula?"

"Yes. It came over me quite irresistibly. I could not have been
altogether myself.... I think I shall leave the city!"

Madame Nestor asked several questions, bringing out all she cared to
know of Paula's experience that day. Her eyes became very bright as she
said:

"I dare not advise you _not_ to go away. Still, don't you see it--how
wonderful was your victory to-day?"

"I can't always defeat him!" Paula cried. "His power comes over me and I
move toward him--just as reptiles must follow a blind impulse started
from without. Each time I follow, I must be weaker."

"But, Paula, each time something happens to restore you to yourself,
thwarting his purpose, his projections are weakened."

"But if I should go far away?"

"He could only put it in your mind to return."

When Paula remembered the accidents which had preserved her, even when
in the same city with the Destroyer, she could not doubt the salvation
in putting a big stretch of the planet's curve between her and this
dynamo.... Certain unfinished thinking could only be cleared through a
friend like Madame Nestor.

"This physical consciousness which he has made me feel seems
indescribably more sinister in erect human beings than the mating
instinct in animals and birds," Paula declared with hesitation. "Can it
be that women in general encounter influences--of this kind?"

"It is man's fault that women have broken all seasons," the Madame said
bitterly. "Man has kept woman submerged since the beginning of time.
Always eager to serve; and blest--or cursed--with the changeless passion
to be _all_ to one man--her most enduring hope to hold the exclusive
love of one man--woman has adapted herself eagerly to become the
monogamic answer to man's polygamic nature. Bellingham is but the
embodiment of a desire which exists in greater or less degree in every
man. This desire of man has disordered women. We have lost the true
meaning of ourselves--I mean, as a race of women--and have become merely
physical mates."

"I can hardly believe it--that even women of the streets should ever be
degraded by such a horrible force," Paula said desperately. "And the
sweet calm faces of some of the women we know----"

"Behind the mask of innocence, often, is a woman's terrible secret,
Paula. For most women obey. Even the growth of the maid is ruthlessly
forced by hot breaths of passion, until motherhood--so often a domestic
tragedy--leaves the imprint of shame in her arms. The man of unlit soul
has made this low play of passion his art. Woman as a race has fallen,
because it is her way to please and obey. Man has taught us to believe
that when he comes to our arms, we are at our highest.... And, listen,
Paula, certain men of to-day, a step higher in evolution, blame woman
because she has not suddenly _unlearned_ her training of the
ages--lessons man has graven in the very bed-rock of her nature. In the
novelty of their new-found austerity, they exclaim: 'Avoid woman. She is
passion rhythmic. It is she who draws us down from our lofty regions of
endeavor.'"

Terrific energy of rebellion stirred Paula's mind. "But the promise is
that woman's time shall come!" she exclaimed. "The Child, Jesus, said to
his Mother, 'Thy time is not yet come,' but it is promised that the heel
of woman shall crush the head of the Serpent. We have always borne the
sin, the agony, the degradation, but our time must be close at hand! I
think this is the age--and this the country--of the Rising Woman!"

Madame Nestor arose from the cot and stood before Paula, her eyes
shining with emotion.

"Bless you, my beloved girl, my whole heart leaps to sanction that! I
have symbolized the whole struggle of our race in your personal
struggle--don't you see this, Paula?... Bellingham is the concentrate of
devourers--and you the evolved woman who overcomes him! My hope for the
race lies in you, and your victory to-day has filled my cup with
happiness!... You say you do not dare to pray. I tell you, child,--the
God of women gave you strength to-day. He is close to harken unto your
need--for you are among the first of the elect to bring in the glory of
the new day!... The animal in man has depleted the splendid energies of
the Spirit. Passions of the kind you defeated to-day are overpowering
women everywhere at this hour--lesser passions of lesser Bellinghams.
Man's course to God has been a crawl through millenniums, instead of a
flight through decades, because woman has bowed--obeyed. God is patient,
but woman is aroused!... Above the din of wars, the world has heard the
wailing of the women; out of the ghostly silence of famine and from
beneath the debris of fallen empires--always the world has heard her cry
for pity--her cry for pity now _become a Voice of Power_! All her
tortured centuries have been for this--and the signs are upon us!
Woman's demand for knowledge, her clamor for suffrage, her protest
against eternally paying for man's lust with unblessed babes--all these
are signs! But you, Paula Linster,--and what I know of this day--is the
most thrilling sign of all to me!... Ah, woman is evolving; she is
aroused! How shall she repay man for brutalizing her so long?"

"By bringing him back to God!" Paula answered.

They wept together and whispered, while the night fell about and covered
the squalid room.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was one of her emancipated nights. Paula's spirit poured out over the
city, for her mind was lit with thoughts of the ultimate redemption of
her race. Bellingham could not have found her in his world that hour....
Emerging from Broadway to Forty-fourth Street, at eight in the evening,
she passed under the hot brilliance of a famous hotel-entrance. As it
never would have occurred to her to do in a less exalted moment, Paula
glanced at a little knot of men standing under the lights. The eyes of
one were roving like an unclean hand over her figure. Suddenly
encountering her look, a bold, eager, challenge stretched itself upon
his face. In the momentary panic, her glance darted to the others
instinctively for protection--and found three smiling corpses.... Here
were little Bellinghams; here, the sexual drunkenness which has made
Man's course "a crawl through millenniums" to God, instead of a flight
through decades. What a pitiless revelation!... She clung to her big
Ideal in the West. It came to her for a second like a last and single
hope--that Charter was not like that.... "God is patient and woman is
aroused!" she whispered.

And farther up, a little way into Forty-seventh, Paula found a Salvation
Army circle under the torch. A man with a pallid, shrunken face turned
imploring eyes from one to another of the company, exclaiming: "I tell
you, man's first work here below is to save his soul! I pray you--men
and women, here to-night--to save your souls!"

Paula tossed her purse upon the big drum, as she passed swiftly. Luckily
there was carfare in her glove, for she had not thought of that. Never
before had she felt in such fullness her relation to the race....

A hansom-cab veered about the edge of the Salvation circle, swift enough
to attract her eye. The horse had started before the driver was in the
seat. The latter was fat and apoplectic. It was all he could do to
regain his place, so that the reins still dangled. The possibility of a
cab-horse becoming excited held only humor for the crowd, which parted
to let the vehicle by. The horse, feeling his head, started to run just
as the driver seized one of the lines and jerked his beast into the
curb. There was an inhuman scream. A strange, boneless effigy of a man
with twisted, waving arms--went down before the plunging horse, so
suddenly swerved.... A hush seemed to have fallen upon the noisy
Broadway corner. Paula was not blind in the brief interval which
followed, but the world seemed gray and still, like a spectral dawn, or
the unearthly setting of a dream.

"The shaft bored into him, and the horse struck him after he fell," a
voice explained.

They lifted him. There was particular dreadfulness in the quantity of
fluid evenly sheeted on the pavement as from a pail carefully
overturned. Startling effrontery attached to the thought of man's
heaven-aspiring current swimming like this upon a degraded city road.
The horse, now held by the bit, snorted affrightedly at the odor. They
had carried the unfortunate to the sidewalk under the lights of a
tobacco-shop window. The upper part of his head and face was indefinite
like a crushed tin of dark paint. But mouth and nose and chin of the
upturned face left an imperishable imprint upon her mind. It was
Bellingham.... Paula fled, her lips opening in a sick fashion. It seemed
hours before she could reach the sanctuary of her room, where she sobbed
in the dark.




EIGHTH CHAPTER

PAULA MAKES SEVERAL DISCOVERIES IN THE CHARTER HEART-COUNTRY, AND IS
DELIGHTED BY HIS LETTERS TO THE SKYLARK


The morning paper stated that Dr. Bellingham had suffered a fracture of
the skull and internal injury, but might live. A note to Paula from
Madame Nestor late the next day contained the following paragraph: "I
called at the hospital to inquire. A doctor told me that the case is
likely to become a classic one. Never in his experience, he stated, had
he witnessed a man put up such a fight for life. It will be long,
however, before he is abroad again. He must have been following you
quite madly, because there never was a man more careful in the midst of
city-dangers than Bellingham. Why, a scratched finger completely upset
him--in the earlier days. Inscrutable, but thrilling--isn't it, my dear
Paula?"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Did you follow _Moby Dick's_ whale tracks around the wet wastes of the
world?" Reifferscheid asked several mornings later, as Paula entered.

Her face was flushed. A further letter from Quentin Charter had just
been tucked into her bag. "Yes, and Mr. Melville over trans-continental
digressions," she answered. "He surely is Neptune's own _confrere_."

"Did you get the leviathan alongside and study the bewildering chaos of
a ninety-foot nervous system?" Reifferscheid went on with delight.

"Exactly, and colored miles of sea-water with the emptyings of his vast
heart. Then, there was an extended process of fatty degeneration, which
I believe they called--blubber-boiling."

They laughed together over the old whale-epic.

"They remember Melville up in Boston and Nantucket," he added, "but he's
about as much alive as a honey-bee's pulse elsewhere. The trouble is,
you can't rectify this outrage by law. It isn't uxoricide or
sheep-stealing--not to know Melville--but it's the deadly sin of
ingratitude. This is a raw age, we adorn--not to rock in the boat of
that man's soul. Why, he's worthy to stand with the angels on the point
of the present."

The big editor always warmed her when he enthused. Here, in the midst of
holiday books pouring in by scores, he had time to make a big personal
and public protest against a fifty-year-old novel being forgotten.

"But isn't Melville acknowledged to be the headwaters of inspiration for
all later sea-books?" Paula asked.

"Yes, to the men who do them, he's the big laughing figure behind their
work, but the public doesn't seem to know.... Of course, Herman has
faults--Japan currents of faults--but they only warm him to a white
man's heart. Do you know, I like to think of him in a wide, windy room,
tearing off his story long-hand, upon yard square sheets, grinning like
an ogre at the soul-play, the pages of copy settling ankle-deep upon the
floor. There's no taint of over-breeding in the unborn thing, no curse
of compression, no aping Addison--nothing but Melville, just blown in
with the gale, reeking with a big story which must be shed, before he
blows out again, with straining cordage booming in his ears. He
harnesses Art. He man-handles Power, makes it grovel and play circus.
'Here it is,' he seems to say at the end. 'Take it or leave it. I'm
rotting here ashore.'"

"You ought to dictate reviews like that, Mr. Reifferscheid," Paula could
not help saying, though she knew he would be disconcerted.

He colored, turned back to his work, directing her to take her choice
from the shelf of fresh books.... On the car going back, Paula opened
Charter's letter. Her fingers trembled, because she had been in a happy
and daring mood five or six days before when she wrote the letter to
which this was the reply.

     ... Do you know, I really like to write to you? I feel
     untrammelled--turned loose in the meadows. It seems when I
     start an idea--that you've grasped it as soon as it is clear to
     me. Piled sentences after that are unnecessary. It's a real joy
     to write this way, as spirits commune. It wouldn't do at all
     for the blessed multitude. You have to be a mineral and a
     vegetable and an animal, all in a paragraph, to get the whole
     market. But how generous the dear old multitude is--(if the
     writer has suffered enough)--with its bed and board and
     lamplight....

     I have been scored and salted so many times that I heal like an
     earth-worm. Tell me, can scar-tissue ever be so fine?
     Fineness--that's the one excellent feature of being human!
     There's no other reason for being--no other meaning or reason
     for atomic affinity or star-hung space. True, the great
     Conceiver of Refining Thought seems pleased to take all
     eternity to play in....

     You've made me think of you out of all proportion. I don't want
     to help it. I'm very glad we hailed each other across the
     distance. There's something so entirely blithe and wise and
     finished about the personality I've builded from three little
     letters and a critique--that I refresh myself very frequently
     from them.... I think we must be old playmates. Perhaps we
     plotted ghost-stories and pegged oranges at each other in
     Atlantean orchards millenniums ago. I begin to feel as if I
     deserve to have my playmate back.... Then, again, it is as
     though these little letters brought to my garret window the
     Skylark I have heard far and faintly so long in the higher
     moments of dream. Just a note here and there used to come to me
     from far-shining archipelagoes of cloud-land. I listen now and
     clearly understand what you have sung so long in the
     Heights.... You are winged--that's the word! Wing often to my
     window--won't you? Life is peppering me with good things this
     year, I could not be more grateful.

Letters like these made Paula think of that memorable first afternoon
with Grimm; and like it, too, the joy was so intense as to hold the
suggestion that there must be something evil in it all. She laughed at
this. What law, human or divine, was disordered by two human grown-ups
with clean minds communing together intimately in letters? Quentin
Charter might have been less imperious, or less precipitous, in writing
such pleasing matters about herself, but had he not earned the boon of
saying what he felt? Still, Paula would not have been so entirely
feminine, had she not repressed somewhat. She even may have known that
artful repression from without is stimulus to any man. Occasionally,
Charter forgot his sense of humor, but the woman five years younger,
never. The inevitable thought that in the ordinary sequence of events,
they should meet face to face, harrowed somewhat with the thought that
she must keep his ideals down--or both were lost. What could a mind like
his _not_ build about months of communion (eyes and ears strained toward
flashing skies) with a Skylark ideal?... She reminded Charter that
skylarks are little, brown, tame-plumaged creatures that only sing when
they soar. She could not forbear to note that he was a bit sky-larky,
too, in his letters, and observed that she had found it wise, mainly to
keep one's wings tightly folded in New York. She signed her next letter,
nevertheless, with a small pen-picture of the name he had given
her--full-throated and ascending. Also she put on her house address.
Some of the paragraphs from letters which came in the following weeks,
she remembered without referring to the treasured file:

     ... Bless the wings! May they never tire for long--since I
     cannot be there when they are folded.... Often, explain it if
     you can, I think of you as some one I have seen in Japan,
     especially in Tokyo--hurrying through the dusk in the
     Minimasakurna-cho, wandering through the tombs of the
     Forty-seven Ronins. or sipping tea in the Kameido among the
     wistaria blooms. Some time--who knows? I have made quite a
     delightful romance about it.... Who is so wise as positively to
     say, that we are not marvellously related from the youth of the
     world? Who dares declare we have not climbed cliffs of Cathay
     to stare across the sky-blue water, nor whispered together in
     orient casements under constellations that swing more
     perilously near than these?... We may be a pair of foolish
     dreamers, but Asia must have a cup of tea for us--Asia, because
     she is so far and so still. We shall _remember_ then....

     And so you live alone? How strange, I have always thought of
     you so? From the number, I think you must overlook the
     Park--don't you?... It may strike you humorously, but I feel
     like ordering you not to take too many meals alone. One is apt
     to be neglectful, and women lose their appetites easier than
     men. I used to be graceless toward the gift of health. Perhaps
     I enjoy perfectly prepared food altogether too well for one of
     inner aspirations. The bit of a soul in which you see such
     glorious possibilities, packs rather an imperious animal this
     trip, I fear. However, I don't let the animal carry _me_--any
     more.

     I see a wonderful sensitiveness in all that you write--that's
     why I suggest especially that you should never forget fine food
     and plentiful exercise. Psychic activity in America is attained
     so often at the price of physical deterioration. This is an
     empty failure, uncentering, deluding. Remember, I say in
     America.... Pray, don't think I fail to worship
     sensitiveness--those high, strange emotions, the sense of
     oneness with all things that live, the vergings of the mind
     toward the intangible, the light, refreshing sleep of
     asceticism, subtle expandings of solitude and the mystical
     launchings,--anything that gives spread of wing rather than
     amplitude of girth--but I have seen these very pursuits carry
     one entirely out of rhythm with the world. The multitudes
     cannot follow us when there are stars in our eyes--they cannot
     see.

     A few years ago I had a strange period of deep-delving into
     ancient wisdom. A lot of big, simple treasures unfolded, but I
     discovered great dogmas as well--the steel shirts, iron
     shields, mailed fists and other junk which lesser men seem
     predestined to hammer about the gentle spirit of Truth. I
     vegetarianed, lived inside, practiced meditate, and became a
     sensitive, as it seems now, in rather a paltry, arrogant sense.
     The point is I lost the little appeal I had to people through
     writing. It came to me at length with grim finality that if a
     man means to whip the world into line at all, he must keep a
     certain brute strength. He must challenge the world at its own
     games _and win_, before he can show the world that there are
     finer games to play. You can't stand above the mists and call
     the crowd to you, but many will _follow_ you up through
     them.... I truly hope, if I am wrong in this, that you will see
     it instantly, and not permit the edge and temper of your
     fineness to be coarsened through me. You are so animate, so
     delicately strong, and seem so spiritually unhurt, that it
     occurs to me now that there may be finer laws for you, than are
     vouchsafed to me. I interpreted my orders--to win according to
     certain unalterable rules of the world. Balzac did that. I
     think some Skylark sang to him at the last, when he did his
     Seraphita....

     I cannot help but tell you again of my gratitude. I am no
     impressionable boy. I know what the woman must be who writes to
     me.... Isn't this an excellent world when the finer moments
     come; when we can think with gentleness of past failures of the
     flesh and spirit, and with joy upon the achievements of others;
     when we feel that we have preserved a certain relish for the
     rich of all thought, and a pleasure in innocence; when out of
     our errors and calamities we have won a philosophy which makes
     serene our present voyaging and gives us keen eyes to discern
     the coast-lights of the future?... With lifted brow--I harken
     for your singing.

Paula knew that Quentin Charter was crying out for his mate of fire. She
remembered that she had strangely felt his strength before there were
any letters, but she could not deny that it since had become a greater
and more intimate thing--her tower, white and heroic, cutting clean
through the films of distance, and suggesting a vast, invisible city at
its base. That she was the bright answer in the East for such a tower
was incredible. She could send a song over on the wings of the
morning--make it shine like ivory into the eyes of the new day, but she
dared not think of herself as a corresponding fixture. A man like
Charter could form a higher woman out of dreams and letter-pages than
the world could mold for him from her finest clays. Always she said
this--and forgot that the man was clay. A pair of dreamers, truly, and
yet there was a difference in their ideals. If Charter's vision of her
lifted higher, it was also flexible to contain a human woman. As for
hers--Paula had builded a tower. True, there were moments of flying fog
in which she did not see it, but clean winds quickly brushed away the
obscurations, and not a remnant clung. When seen at all, her tower was
pure white and undiminished.

Of necessity there were reactions. His familiarity with the petty
intensities of the average man often startled her. He seemed capable of
dropping into the parlance of any company, not as one who had listened
and memorized, but as an old familiar who had served time in all
societies. In the new aspect of personal letters, his book revealed a
comprehension of women--that dismayed. Of course, his printed work was
filled with such stuff as her letters were made of, but between a book
and a letter, there is the same difference of appeal as the lines read
by an actor, however gifted, are cold compared to a friend's voice.
Though she wondered at Charter giving his time to write such letters to
her, this became very clear, if his inclination were anything like her
own to answer them. All the thinking of her days formed itself into
compressed messages for him; and all the best of her sprang to her pen
under his address. The effort then became to repress, to keep her pages
within bounds, and the ultimate effort was to wait several days before
writing again. His every sentence suggested pleasure in writing; and as
a matter of fact, he repressed very little.... Was it through letters
like hers in his leisure months that Charter amassed his tremendous
array of poignant details; was it through such, that he reared his
imposing ranges of feminine understanding? This was a question requiring
a worldlier woman than Paula long to hold in mind. In the man's writing,
regarded from her critical training, there was no betrayal of the
literary clerk dependent upon data.

"I am no impressionable boy. I know what the woman must be who writes to
me." There was something of seership in his thus irrevocably affixing
his ideal to the human woman who held the pen.... His photograph was
frequently enough in the press--a big browed, plain-faced young man with
a jaw less aggressive than she would have imagined, and a mouth rather
finely arched for a reformer who was to whip the world into line. And
then there was a discovery. In a magazine dated a decade before, she ran
upon his picture among the advertising pages. Verses of his were
announced to appear during the year to come. He could not have been over
twenty for this picture, and to her it was completely charming--a boy
out of the past calling blithely; a poetic face, too, reminding her of
prints she had seen of an early drawing of Keats's head now in
London--eager, sensitive, all untried!... It was not without resistance
that she acknowledged herself _closer to the boy_--that something of the
man was beyond her. There was a mystery left upon the face by the
intervening years, "while the tireless soul etched on...." Should she
ever know? Or must there always be this dim, hurting thing? Was it all
the etching of the _soul_--that this later print revealed?... These were
but bits of shadow--ungrippable things which made her wings falter for a
moment and long for something sure to rest upon, but Reifferscheid's
first talk about Charter, the latter's book, and the letters--out of
these were reconstructed her tower of shining purity.

There were times when Paula's heart, gathering all its tributary
sympathies, poured out to the big figure in the West in a deep and
rushing torrent. Her entire life was illuminated by these moments of
ardor. Here was a giving, in which the thought of actual possession had
little or no part. Her finest elements were merged into one-pointed
expression. It is not strange that she was dismayed by the triumphant
force of the woman within her, nor that she recalled one of the first of
Madame Nestor's utterances, "Nonsense, Paula, the everlasting feminine
is alive in every movement of you." Yet this outpouring was lofty, and
noon-sky clear. An emotion like this meant brightness to every life that
contacted it.... But ruthlessly she covered, hid away even from her own
thoughts, illuminations such as these. Here was a point of tragic
significance. Out of the past has come this great fear to strong
women--the fear to let themselves love. This is one of the sorriest
evolutions of the self-protecting instinct. So long have women met the
tragic fact of fickleness and evasion in the men of their majestic
concentrations--that fear puts its weight against the doors that love
would open wide.

Almost unconsciously the personal tension of the correspondence
increased. Not infrequently after her letters were gone, Paula became
afraid that this new, full-powered self of hers had crept into her
written pages with betraying effulgence, rising high above the light
laughter of the lines. How she cried out for open honesty in the world
and rebelled against the garments of falsity which society insists must
cover the high as well as the low. Charter seemed to say what was in his
heart; at least, he dared to write as the woman could not, as she dared
not even to think, lest he prove--against the exclaiming negatives of
her soul--a literary craftsman of such furious zeal that he could tear
the heart out of a woman he had not seen, pin the quivering thing under
his lens, to describe, with his own responsive sensations.

So the weeks were truly emotional. Swiftly, beyond any realization of
her own, Paula Linster became full-length a woman. Reifferscheid found
it harder and harder to talk even bossily to her, but cleared his voice
when she entered, vented a few booky generalities, and cleared his voice
when she went away. Keen winter fell upon his system of emptied lakes;
gusty winter harped the sound of a lonely ship in polar seas among the
naked branches of the big elms above his cottage; indeed, gray winter
would have roughed it--in the big chap's breast, had he not buckled his
heart against it.... For years, Tim Reifferscheid had felt himself aloof
from all such sentiment. Weakening, he had scrutinized his new assistant
keenly for the frailties with which her sex was identified in his mind.
In all their talks together, she had verified not one, so that he was
forced to destroy the whole worthless edition. She was a discovery,
thrillingly so, since he had long believed such a woman impossible. Now
he felt crude beside her, remembered everything that he had done amiss
(volumes of material supposed to be out of print). Frankly, he was
irritated with any one in the office who presumed to feel himself an
equal with Miss Linster.... But all this was Reifferscheid's, and no
other--as far from any expression of his, as thoughtless kisses or
thundering heroics.




NINTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS DRAWN DEEPER INTO THE SELMA CROSS PAST AND IS BRAVELY WOOED
THROUGH FURTHER MESSAGES FROM THE WEST


Selma Cross frequently filled the little place of books across the hall
with her tremendous vibrations before the trial trip of her new play on
the road. Paula liked to have her come in, delighted in the great
creature's rapture over the hunch-back, Stephen Cabot, author of _The
Thing_. There was an indescribably brighter luster in the waxing and
waning of romantic tides, than the eyes of Paula had ever before
discovered, so that the confidences of the other were of moment. Selma
was terrified by some promise she had made years before in Kentucky. It
was gradually driven deep into the listener's understanding that no
matter how harsh and dreadful the intervening years had been, here was a
woman to whom a promise meant a promise. Paula was moved almost to tears
by the other's description of Stephen Cabot, and the first time she saw
him.

"I wonder if the long white face with the pain-lit eyes could ever mean
to any one else what it does to me?" Selma whispered raptly when they
talked together one Sunday night. "Why, to see him sitting there before
me at rehearsal--the finest, lowest head in all the chairs--steadies,
exalts me! I hold fast to repression.... It It was Vhruebert who brought
me to him, and the first words Stephen said were: 'Your manager is a
wizard, Miss Cross, to get you for this. Why, you are the woman I wrote
about in _The Thing_!'"

"Tell me more," Paula had whispered.

"We met in Vhruebert's office and forgot the manager entirely. I guess
two hours passed, as we talked, and went over the play together that
first time. Vhruebert sent in his office-boy finally to remind us that
he was still in the building. How we three laughed about it!... Then as
we started out for luncheon together, Stephen and I, Vhruebert took his
place at the door before us, and delivered himself of something like
this:

"'You two listen to the father of what you are to be,'" Selma Cross went
on, roughening her voice and tightening her nasal passages, to imitate
the old Hebrew star-maker. "'Listen to the soulless Vhruebert, who
brudalizes the great Amerigan stage. You two are Art. Very well, listen
to Commerce. It took me twenty-five years to learn that there must be
humor in a blay. This _T'ing_ would not lift the lip of a ganary-bird.
It took me twenty-five years to learn there must be joy at the end of a
blay--and wedding-bells. This _T'ing_ ends just about--over the hills to
the mad-house. Twenty-five years proved to me what I know the first
day--that women of the stage must be beautiful. Miss Gross is not. I say
no more. Here I have neither dramatist nor star. I could give the blay
by Gabot to Ellen Terry--or to Miss Gross, if Ibsen write it. As it is,
I have no name. There are five thousand people in this country writing
blays with humor and habby endings. There are ten thousand beautiful
women exbiring to spend it on the stage. Yet you two are the chosen of
Vhruebert. When you look into each other's eye and visper how
von-der-ful you are, with rising inflection; and say, "To hell with
Gommerce and the Binhead Bublic!" remember Vhruebert who advances the
money!'"

"And did you remember Vhruebert in that fairy luncheon together?" Paula
asked happily.

"No, I only saw the long white face of Stephen Cabot. I wanted to take
him in my arms and make him whole!"

For ten weeks Bellingham lay in one of the New York hospitals. "A woman
attends him," Madame Nestor informed. "She is young and has been very
beautiful. How well do I know her look of impotence and apathy--that
look of unresisting obedience." To Paula, the magician seemed back among
the dead ages, although Madame Nestor did not regard the present lull
without foreboding. Paula could not feel that her real self had been
defiled. The dreadful visitations were all but erased, as pass the
spectres of delirium. What was more real, and rocked the centres of her
being, was the conception of this outcast's battle for life. She could
not forget that it was in pursuing her, that he had been injured. Facing
not only death, but extinction, this idolater of life had, as one
physician expressed it, held together his shattered vitality by sheer
force of will, until healing set in. The only thought comparable in
terror to such a conflict, had to do with the solitudes and abject
frigidity of inter-stellar spaces.

The Skylark Letters, as she came to call them, were after all, the
eminent feature of the fall and winter weeks. There was a startling
paragraph in one of the December series: "I think it is fitting for you
to know (though, believe me, I needed no word regarding you from
without), that I am not entirely in the dark as to how you have
impressed another. I know nothing of the color of your hair or eyes,
nothing of your size or appearance,--only just how you _impressed
another_. This information, it is needless to say, was unsolicited...."
Just that, and no further reference. It was as though he had felt it a
duty to incorporate those lines. Portions of some of the later letters
follow:

     Did you know, that without the upward spread of wings--there
     can be no song from the Skylark? This, for me, has a fragrant
     and delicate significance. It is true that the poor little
     caged-birds sing, but how sorry they are, since they have to
     flutter their wings to give forth sound, and cling with their
     claws to the bars to hold themselves down!... I think you must
     have been a little wing-weary when you wrote your last letter
     to me. Perhaps the dusk was crowding into the Heights. No one
     knows as I do how the Skylark has sung and sung!... You did
     not say it, but I think you wanted the earth-sweet meadows. It
     came to me like needed rain--straight to the heart of mine that
     little plaint in the song. It made me feel how useless is the
     strength of my arms.... You see, I manage pretty well to keep
     you up There. I must. And because you are so wonderful, I
     can.... An enthralling temperament rises to me from your
     letters. I love to let it flood through my brain....

     I do not feel at all sure that you know me truly. What a man's
     soul appears to be, through the intimations of his higher
     moments, is not the man altogether that humans must reckon
     with. Nor must they reckon with the trampling violences of
     one's past. I truly believe in the soul. I believe it is an
     essence fundamentally fine; that great mothers brood it
     beautifully into their babes; that it is nourished by the good
     a man does and thinks. I believe in the ultimate victory of the
     soul, against the tough, twisted fibres of flesh which rise to
     demand a thousand sensations. I would have you think of me as
     one _lifting_; happy in discoveries, the crown of which you
     are; conscious of an integrating spirit; that sometimes in my
     silences I answer your song as one glorified. But then, I
     remember that you must not judge me by the brightest of my
     work. Such are the trained, tense bursts of speed--the swift
     expiration of the best. I think a man is about half as good as
     his best work and half as bad as his most lamentable leisure.
     Midway between his emotions and exaltations--is indicated his
     valuation.... All men clinging to the sweep of the upward
     cycle, must know the evil multitude at some time. Perhaps few
     men have met and discarded so many personal devils as I, in a
     single life. But I say to you as I write to-night, those devils
     cast out seem far back among cannibal centuries. I worship the
     fine, the pure,--thoughts and deeds which are expanded and
     warmed by the soul's breath. And you are the anchorage of this
     sweeter spirit which is upon me. Now, out of the logic which
     life burns into the brain, comes this thought: (I set it down
     only to fortify the citadel of truth in which our momentous
     relation alone can prosper.) Are there fangs and hackles and
     claws which I have not yet uncovered? Am I given the present
     serenity as a resting-time before meeting a more subtle and
     formidable enemy? Has my vitality miraculously been preserved
     for some final battle with a champion of champions of the
     flesh? Is it because the sting is gone from my scar-tissues
     that I feel so strong and so white to-night? I cannot think
     this, because I have heard--because I still hear--my Skylark
     sing.

The personal element of the foregoing and the hint of years of "wrath
and wanderings," which she saw in his second photograph, correlated
themselves in Paula's mind. They frightened her cruelly, but did not put
Charter farther away. Remembering the effect of the passion which
Bellingham had projected into her own brain, helped her vaguely to
understand Charter's earlier years. His splendid emancipation from past
evils lifted her soul. And when he asked, if his present serenity might
not be a preparation for a mightier struggle, the serious reflection
came--might she not ask the same question of herself? The old
Flesh-Mother does not permit one to rest when one is full of
strength.... Paula perceived that Quentin Charter was bravely trying to
get to some sort of rational adjustment her ideal of him and the blooded
reality--and to preserve her from all hurt. Doubts could not exist in a
mind besieged by such letters.... One of her communications must have
reflected something of her terror at the vague forms of his past, which
he partially unveiled, for in answer he wrote:

     Do not worry again about the Big Back Time. Perhaps I was over
     assertive about the shadowed years. The main thing is that this
     is the wonderful present--and you, my white ally of nobler
     power and purpose. A gale of good things will come to
     us--hopes, communions and inspirations. We shall know each
     other--grow so fine together--that Mother Earth at last will
     lose her down-pull upon us--as upon perfumes and sunbeams. You
     have come with mystical brightening. You are the New Era. There
     is healing in Gethsemanes since you have swept with grace and
     imperiousness into possession of the Charter heart-country so
     long undiscovered. The big area is lit, redeemed from chaos. It
     is thrilling--since you are there. Never must you wing away....
     Sometime you shall know with what strength and truth and
     tenderness I regard you. The spirit of spring is in my veins.
     It would turn to summer if we were together, but there could be
     no reacting winter because you have evolved a mind and a
     soul.... Body and mind and soul all evenly ignited--what a
     conception of woman!

Paula begged him not to try to fit such an ideal of the finished
feminine to a little brown tame-plumaged skylark. Since they might some
time meet, she wrote, it was nothing less than unfair for his mind,
trained to visualize its images so clearly, to turn its full energies
upon an ideal, and expect a human stranger--a happening--in the workaday
physical vesture (such as is needed for New York activities) to
sublimate the vision. She told him that he would certainly flee away
from the reality, and that he would have no one but himself to blame.
Visions, she added, do not review books nor write to authors whom they
have not met. All of which, she expressed very lightly, though she could
not but adore the spirit of ideality to which she had aroused his
faculties.

At this time Paula encountered one of the imperishable little books of
the world, bracing to her spirit as a day's camp among mountain-pines.
Nor could she refrain from telling Charter about "The Practice of the
Presence of God," as told in the conversations of Brother Lawrence, a
bare-footed Carmelite of the Seventeenth Century. "No wilderness
wanderings seem to have intervened between the Red Sea and the Jordan of
his experience," she quoted from the preface, and told him how simple it
was for this unlearned man to be good--a mere "footman and soldier"
whose illumination was the result of seeing a dry and leafless tree in
mid-winter, and the thought of the change that would come to it with the
Spring. His whole life thereafter, largely spent in the monastery
kitchen--"a great awkward fellow, who broke everything"--was conducted
as if God were his constantly advising Companion. It was a life of
supernal happiness--and so simple to comprehend. Charter's reply to this
letter proved largely influential in an important decision Paula was
destined to make.

     Yes, I have communed with Brother Lawrence--carried the little
     volume with me on many voyages. I commend a mind that is fine
     enough to draw inspiration from a message so chaste and simple.
     You will be interested to hear that I have known another
     Brother Lawrence--a man whose holiness one might describe as
     "humble" or "lofty," with equal accuracy. This man is a
     Catholic priest, Father Fontanel of Martinique. His parish is
     in that amazing little port, Saint Pierre--where Africa and
     France were long ago transplanted and have fused together so
     enticingly. Lafcadio Hearn's country--you will say. I wonder
     that this inscrutable master, Hearn, missed Father Fontanel in
     his studies.... I was rough from the seas and a long stretch of
     military campaigning, when my ship turned into that lovely
     harbor of Saint Pierre. Finding Father Fontanel, I stayed over
     several ships, and the healing of his companionship restores me
     even now to remember.

     We would walk together on the _Morne d'Orange_ in the evening.
     His church was on the rise of the _morne_ at the foot of _Rue
     Victor Hugo_. He loved to hear about my explorations in books,
     especially about my studies among the religious enthusiasts. I
     would tell him of the almost incredible austerities of certain
     mystics to refine the body, and it was really a sensation to
     hear him exclaim in his French way: "Can it be possible? I am
     very ignorant. All that I know is to worship the good God who
     is always with me, and to love my dear children who have so
     much to bear. I do not know why I should be so happy--unless it
     is because I know so very little. Tell me why I live in a state
     of continual transport...." I can hear his gentle Latin tones
     even now at night when I shut my eyes--see the lights of the
     shipping from that cliff road, hear the creoles' moaning songs
     from the cabins, and recall the old volcano, _La Montagne
     Pelee_, outlined like a huge couchant beast against the low,
     northern stars.

     Father Fontanel has meant very much to me. In all my thinking
     upon the ultimate happiness of the race, he stands out as the
     bright achievement. At the time I knew him, there was not a
     single moment of his life in which the physical of the man was
     supreme. What his earlier years were I do not know, of course,
     but I confess now I should like to know.... The presence of God
     was so real to him, that Father Fontanel did not understand at
     all his own great spiritual strength. Nor do his people quite
     appreciate how great he is among the priests of men. He has
     been in their midst so long that they seem accustomed to his
     power. Only a stranger can realize what a pure, shining garment
     his actual _flesh_ has become. To me there was healing in the
     very approach of this man.

     Dear Father Fontanel! All I had to do was to substitute "Higher
     Self" for "God" and I had my religion--the Practice of the
     Presence of the Higher Self. Does it not seem very clear to
     you?... To me, God is always an abstraction--something of
     vaster glory than the central sun, but one's Spiritual Body,
     the real being, integrated through interminable lives, from the
     finest materials of thought and action--this Higher Self is the
     Presence I must keep always with me, and do I not deserve that
     It should stand scornfully aloof, when, against my better
     knowledge, I fall short in the performance?... I think it is
     his Higher Self which is so lustrous in Father Fontanel, and
     the enveloping purity which comes from you is the same. About
     such purity there is nothing icy nor fibrous nor sterile....
     You are singing in my heart, Skylark.

The picture Charter had drawn of Father Fontanel of Saint Pierre
appealed strongly to Paula; and her mind's quick grasp of the Charter
religion--the Practice of the Presence of the Higher Self--became one of
her moments of illumination. This was ground-down simplicity. True,
every idea of Charter's was based upon reincarnation. Indeed, this
seemed so familiar to him, that he had not even undertaken to state it
as one of his fundamentals. But had she cared, she could have discarded
even that, from the present concept. So to live that the form of the
best within be not degraded; the days a constant cherishing of this
Invisible Friend; the conduct of life constantly adjusted to please this
Companion of purity and wisdom--here was ethics which blew away every
cloud impending upon her Heights. Years of such living could not but
bring one to the Uplands. As to Charter, God had always been to her The
Ineffable--source of solar, aye, universal energy--the Unseen All.
"Walking with God," "talking with God," "a personal God," "presence of
God,"--these were forms of speech she could never use, but the Higher
Self--this white charioteer--the soul-body that rises when the clay
falls--here was a Personal God, indeed.




TENTH CHAPTER

PAULA SEES SELMA CROSS IN TRAGEDY, AND IN HER OWN APARTMENT NEXT MORNING
IS GIVEN A REALITY TO PLAY


Selma Cross did not reach New York until the morning of the opening day
at the _Herriot Theatre_. She was very tired from rehearsals and the
try-outs along the string of second cities. There had been a big
difference of opinion regarding _The Thing_, among what New Yorkers are
pleased to call the provincial critics. From the character of the first
notices, on the contrary, it was apparent that the townsmen were not a
little afraid to trust such a startling play to New York. Mid-forenoon
of an early April day, the actress rapped upon Paula's door.

"I have seen the boards," Paula exclaimed. "'Selma Cross' in letters big
as you are; and yesterday afternoon they were hanging the electric sign
in front of the _Herriot_. Also I shall be there to-night--since I was
wise enough to secure a ticket ten days ago. Isn't it glorious?"

"Yes, I am quite happy about it," Selma Cross said, stretching out upon
the lounge. "Of course, it's not over until we see the morning papers. I
was never afraid--even of the vitriol-throwers, before. You see, I have
to think about success for Stephen Cabot, too."

"Is he well?" Paula asked hastily.

"Oh yes, though I think sometimes he's a martyr. Oh, I have so much to
say----"

"You said you would tell me some time how Vhruebert first decided to
take you on," Paula urged.

"Before I got to the gate where the star-stuff passes through?" Selma
Cross answered laughingly. "That was four years ago. I had been to him
many times before he let me in. His chair squeaked under him. He looked
at me first as if he were afraid I would spring at him. I told him what
I could do, and he kept repeating that he didn't know it and New York
didn't know it. I said I would show New York, but unfortunately I had to
show him first. He screwed up his face and stared at me, as if I were
startlingly original in my ugliness. I know he could hear my heart beat.

"'I can't do anything for you, Miss Gross,' he said impatiently, but in
spite of himself, he added, 'Come to-morrow.' You see, I had made him
think, and that hurt. He knew something of my work all right, and
wondered where he would put a big-mouthed, clear-skinned, yellow-eyed
amazon. The next day, he kept me waiting in the reception-room until I
could have screamed at the half-dressed women on the walls.

"'I don't know exactly why I asked you to come again,' was his greeting
when the door finally opened to me. 'What was it, once more, that you
mean to do?'

"'I mean to be the foremost tragedienne,' I said.

"'Sit down. Tragedy doesn't bay.'

"'I shall make it pay.'

"'Um-m. How do you know? Some brivate vire of yours?'

"'I can show you that I shall make it pay.'

"'My Gott, not here! We will go to the outskirts.'

"And he meant it, Paula. It was mid-winter. He took me to a little
summer-theatre up Lenox way. The place had not been open since
Thanksgiving. Vhruebert sat down in the centre of the frosty parquet,
shivering in his great coat. You know he's a thin-lipped, smile-less
little man, but not such a dead soul as he looks. He leaks out
occasionally through the dollar-varnish. Can you imagine a colder
reception? Vhruebert sat there blowing out his breath repeatedly,
seemingly absorbed in the effect the steam made in a little bar of
sunlight which slanted across the icy theatre. That was my try-out
before Vhruebert. I gave him some of Sudermann, Boker, and Ibsen. He
raised his hand finally, and when I halted, he called in a bartender
from the establishment adjoining, and commanded me to give something
from Camille and Sapho. I would have murdered him if he had been fooling
me after that. The bartender shivered in the cold.

"'What do you think of that, Mr. Vite-Apron?' Vhruebert inquired at
length. He seemed to be warmer.

"'Hot stuff,' said the man. 'It makes your coppers sizzle.'

"The criticism delighted Vhruebert. 'Miss Gross, you make our goppers
sizzle,' he exclaimed, and then ordered wine and told me to be at his
studio to-morrow at eleven. That was the real winning," Selma Cross
concluded. "To-night I put the crown on it."

Paula invariably felt the fling of emotions when Selma Cross was near.
The latter seemed now to have found her perfect dream; certainly there
was fresh coloring and poise in her words and actions. It was
inspiriting for Paula to think of Selma Cross and Stephen Cabot having
been accepted by the hard-headed Vhruebert--that such a pair could eat
his bread and drink his wine with merry hearts. It was more than
inspiriting for her to think of this vibrant heart covering and
mothering the physically unfortunate. Paula asked, as only a woman
could, the question uppermost in both minds.

"Love me?" Selma whispered. "I don't know, dear. I know we love to be
together. I know that I love him. I know that he would not ask me to
take for a husband--a broken vessel----"

"But you can make him know that--to you--he is not a broken vessel!...
Oh, that would mean so little to me!"

"Yes, but I should have to tell him--of old Villiers--and the other!...
Oh, God, he is white fire! He is not the kind who could understand
that!... I thought I could do anything, I said, 'I am case-hardened.
Nothing can make me suffer!... I will go my way,--and no man, no power,
earthly or occult, can make me alter that way,' but Stephen Cabot has
done it. I would rather win for him to-night, than be called the
foremost living tragedienne.... I think he loves me, but there is the
price I paid--and I didn't need to pay it, for I had already risen out
of the depths. That was vanity. I needed no angel. I didn't care until I
met Stephen Cabot!"

"I think--I think, if I were Stephen Cabot, I could forgive that," Paula
said slowly. She wondered at herself for these words when she was alone,
and the little place of books was no longer energized by the other's
presence.

Selma started up from the lounge, stretched her great arm half across
the room and clutched Paula's hand. There was a soft grateful glow in
the big yellow eyes. "Do you know that means something--from a woman
like you? Always I shall remember that--as a fine thing from my one fine
woman. Mostly, they have hated me--what you call--our sisters."

"You are a different woman--you're all brightened, since you met Stephen
Cabot. I feel this," Paula declared.

"Even if all smoothed out here, there is still the old covenant in
Kentucky," Selma said, after a moment, and sprang to her feet, shaking
herself full-length.

"Won't you tell me about that, too?"

"Yes, but not now. I must go down-town. There is a dress-maker--and _we_
breakfast together.... Root for me--for us, to-night--won't you, dear
girl?"

"With all my heart."

They passed out through the hall together--just as the elevator-man
tucked a letter under the door.... Alone, Paula read this Spring
greeting from Quentin Charter:

     I look away this morning into the brilliant East. I think of
     you there--as glory waits. I feel the strength of a giant to
     battle through dragons of flesh and cataclysms of Nature....
     Who knows what conflicts, what conflagrations, rage in the
     glowing distance--between you and me? Not I, but that I have
     strength--I do know.... By the golden glory of this wondrous
     Spring morning which spreads before my eyes a world of work and
     heroism blessed of the Most High God, I only ask to know that
     you are there--_that you are there_.... While eternity is yet
     young, we shall emerge out of time and distance; though it be
     from a world altered by great cosmic shattering--yet shall we
     emerge, serene man and woman.

     You are there in the brilliant East. In good time I shall go to
     you. Meanwhile I have your light and your song. The dull dim
     brute is gone from me, forever. Even that black prince of the
     blood, Passion, stands beyond the magnetic circle. With you
     _there_, I feel a divine right kingship, and all the black
     princes of the body are afar off, herding with the beasts. I
     tell you, since I have heard the Skylark sing--there is no
     death.

That day became a vivid memory. Charter reached the highest pinnacle of
her mind--a man who could love and who could wait. The message from the
West exalted her. Here, indeed, was one of the New Voices. All through
the afternoon, out of the hushes of her mind, would rise this paean from
the West--sentence after sentence _for her_.... No, not for her alone.
She saw him always in the midst of his people, illustrious among his
people.... She saw him coming to her over mountains--again and again,
she caught a glimpse of him, configured among the peaks, and striding
toward her--yet between them was a valley torn with storm.... It came to
her that there must be a prophecy in this message; that he would not be
suffered to come to her easily as his letters came. Yet, the strength he
had felt was hers, and those were hours of ecstasy--while the gray of
the Spring afternoon thickened into dark. Only _The Thing_ could have
called her out that night; for once, when it was almost time to go, the
storm lifted from the valley between them. She saw his path to her, just
for an instant, and she longed to see it again....

Paula entered the theatre a moment before the curtain rose, but in the
remaining seconds of light, discovered in the fourth aisle far to the
right--"the finest, lowest head" and the long white face of Stephen
Cabot. If a man's face may be called beautiful, his was--firm, delicate,
poetic,--brilliant eyes, livid pallor. And the hand in which the thin
cheek rested, while large and chalky-white, was slender as a girl's....
In the middle of the first act, a tall, elderly man shuffled down the
aisle and sank into the chair in front of Paula, where he sprawled,
preparing to be bored. This was Felix Larch, one of the best known of
the metropolitan critics, notorious as a play-killer.


The first-night crowd can be counted on. It meant nothing to Vhruebert
that the house was packed. The venture was his up to the rise of the
curtain. Paula was absorbed by the first two acts of the play, but did
not feel herself fit to judge. She was too intensely interested in the
career of Selma Cross; in the face of Stephen Cabot; in the attitudes of
Felix Larch, who occasionally forgot to pose. It was all very big and
intimate, but the bigger drama, up to the final curtain, was the battle
for success against the blase aspirations of the audience and the
ultra-critical enemy personified in the man before her.

The small and excellent company was balanced to a crumb. Adequate
rehearsals had finished the work. Then the lines were rich, forceful and
flowing--strange with a poetic quality that "got across the footlights."
Paula noted these exterior matters with relief. Unquestionably the
audience forgot itself throughout the second act. Paula realized, with
distaste, that her own critical sense was bristling for trouble. She had
hoped to be as receptive to emotional enjoyment as she imagined the
average play-goer to be. Though she failed signally in this, her
sensibilities were in no way outraged, nor even irritated. On the
contrary, she began to rise to the valor of the work and its
performance. The acting of Selma Cross, though supreme in repression,
was haunting, unforgettable. Felix Larch had twice disturbed her by
taking his seat in the midst of the first and second acts. She had heard
that he rarely sat out a whole performance, and took it therefore as a
good omen when he returned, in quite a gentlemanly fashion, as the final
curtain rose.

By some new mastery of style, Selma Cross had managed, almost
throughout, to keep her profile to the audience. The last act was half
gone, moreover, before the people realized that there were qualities in
her voice, other than richness and flexibility. She had held them thus
far with the theme, charging the massed consciousness of her audience
with subtle passions. Now came the rising moments. Full into the light
she turned her face.... She was quite alone with her tragedy. A gesture
of the great bare arm, as the stage darkened, and she turned loose upon
the men and women a perfect havoc of emptiness--in the shadows of which
was manifesting a huge unfinished human. She made the people see how a
mighty passion, suddenly bereft of its object, turns to devour the brain
that held it. They saw the great, gray face of _The Thing_ slowly rubbed
out--saw the mind behind it, soften and run away into chaos. There was a
whisper, horrible with exhaustion--a breast beaten in the gloom.

Felix Larch swore softly.... _The Thing_ was laughing as the curtain
crawled down over her--an easy, wind-blown, chattering laugh....

The critic grasped the low shoulders of a bald, thin-lipped
acquaintance, exclaiming:

"Where did you get that diadem, Lucky One?"

Paula heard a hoarse voice, but the words of the reply were lost.

"Come over across the street for a minute. I want a stimulant and a talk
with you," Felix Larch added, wriggling into his overcoat.

There was a low, husky laugh, and then plainly these words: "She makes
your goppers sizzle--eh?... Wait until I tell her she has won and I'll
go with you," added the queer little man, whom Paula knew now to be
Vhruebert....

The latter passed along the emptied aisle toward Stephen Cabot, who had
not left his seat. Paula noted with a start that the playwright's head
had dropped forward in a queer way. Vhruebert glanced at him, and
grasped his shoulder. The old manager then cleared his throat--a sound
which apparently had meaning for the nearest usher, who hurried forward
to be dispatched for a doctor. It was very cleverly and quietly done....
Stephen Cabot, who could see more deeply than others into the art of the
woman and the power of his own lines, and possibly deeper into the big
result of this fine union of play and player--had fainted at the
climacteric moment.... A physician now breasted his way through the
crowd at the doors, and _The Thing_ suddenly appeared in the nearest box
and darted forward like a rush of wind. She gathered the insensible one
in her arms and repeated his name low and swiftly.

"Yes," he murmured, opening his eyes at last.

They seemed alone.... Presently Stephen Cabot laughingly protested that
he was quite well, and disappeared behind the scenes, assisted by the
long, bare arm that had so recently hurled havoc over the throng. Paula
waited for a few moments at the door until she was assured.

Driving home through the Park, she felt that she could not endure
another emotion. For a long time she tossed restlessly in bed, too tired
to sleep. A reacting depression had fallen upon her worn nerves. She
could not forget the big structure of the day's joy, but substance had
dropped from it.... The cold air sweeping through her sleeping-room
seemed to come from desolate mountains. Lost entirely was her gladness
of victory in the Selma Cross achievement. She called herself spiteful,
ungrateful, and quite miserably at last sank into sleep....

She was conscious at length of the gray of morning, a stifling pressure
in her lungs, and the effort to rouse herself. She felt the cold upon
her face; yet the air seemed devitalized by some exhausting voltage, she
had known before. There was a horrid jangle in her brain, as of two
great forces battling to complete the circuit there. A face imploring
from a garret-window, a youth in a lion's skin, a rock in the desert and
a rock in the Park, the dim hotel parlor and the figure of yesterday
among the mountain-peaks--so the images rushed past--until the tortured
face of Bellingham (burning eyes in the midst of ghastly pallor), caught
and held her mind still. From a room small as her own, and gray like her
own with morning, he called to her: "Come to me.... Come to me, Paula
Linster.... I have lived for you--oh, come to me!"

She sprang out of bed, and knelt. How long it was before she freed
herself, Paula never knew. Indeed, she was not conscious of being
actually awake, until she felt the bitter cold and hurried into the
heated room beyond. She was physically wretched, but no longer
obsessed.... She would not believe now that the beyond-devil had called
again. It was all a dream, she told herself again and again--this rush
of images and the summons from the enemy. Yesterday, she had been too
happy; human bodies cannot endure so long such refining fire; to-day was
the reaction and to-morrow her old strength and poise would come again.
Quite bravely, she assured herself that she was glad to pay the price
for the hours of yesterday. She called for the full series of morning
papers, resolving to occupy her mind with the critical notices of the
new play.

These were quite remarkable in the unanimity of their praise. The
Cross-Cabot combination had won, indeed, but Paula could extract no
buoyancy from the fact, nor did black coffee dispel the vague
premonitive shadows which thickened in the background of her mind. The
rapping of Selma Cross upon her door was hours earlier than ever before.
She, too, had called for the morning papers. A first night is never
finished until these are out. Paula did not feel equal to expressing all
that the play had meant to her. It was with decided disinclination that
she admitted her neighbor.

Selma Cross had not bathed, nor dressed her hair. She darted in
noiselessly in furry slippers--a yellow silk robe over her night-dress.
Very silken and sensuous, the huge, laughing creature appeared as she
sank upon the lounge and shaded her yellow eyes from the light. So
perfect was her health, and so fresh her happiness, that an hour or two
of sleep had not left her eyes heavy nor her skin pallid. There was an
odor of sweet clover about her silks that Paula never sensed afterward
without becoming violently ill. She knew she was wrong--that every fault
was h

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