Charter, three years after the foregoing descent into realism, was confessedly as happy a man as the Mid-West held. He accepted his serenity with a full knowledge of its excellence, and according to his present health and habits would not have been excited to find himself still among those present, had the curtain been lifted thirty or forty years away. In the year that followed the sanatorium experience, Charter in reality found himself. There were a few months in which work came slowly and was uncertain in quality. In his entire conception, nothing worse could happen than an abatement of mental activity, but he did not writhe, knowing that he richly deserved the perfect punishment. So slowly and deeply did physical care and spiritual awakening restore the forces of mind, however, that he did not realize an expansion of power until his first long work had received critical and popular acclaim, and he could see it, himself, in perspective. So he put off the last and toughest shackle of King Fear—the living death.
As for drinking, that had beaten him. He had no thought to re-challenge the champion. In learning that he could become abject, a creature of paralyzed will, he had no further curiosity. This much, however, he had required to be shown, and what a tender heart he had ever afterward for the Lafe Schiels of this world. There were other vivid animals, strong and agile, in his quiver of physical passions, but he discovered that these could not become red and rending without alcohol. Such were clubbed into submission accordingly. With alcohol, Charter could travel any one of seven sorry routes to the gutter; without it, none. This was his constant source of thankfulness—that he had refined his elements without abating their dynamics. The forces that might have proved so deadly in mastery, furnished a fine vitality under the lash.
All was sanative and open about him. Charter knew the ultimate dozen of the hundred and forty-four thousand rules for health—and made these his habit. The garret, so often spoken of, was the third-floor of his mother's mansion. Since he slept under the sky, his sleeping-room was also a solarium. There was a long, thickly-carpeted hall where he paced and smoked meditatively; a trophy-room and his study and library. Through books and lands, he had travelled as few men of his years, and always with an exploring mind. In far countries, his was an eye of quick familiarity; always he had been intensely a part of his present environ, whether Typee or Tibet. Then, the God-taught philosophers of Asia and Europe, and our own rousing young continent, were the well-beloved of his brain, so that he saw many things with eyes lit by their prophecies. As for money, he was wealthy, as Channing commends, rather than rich, and for this competence of late, he had made not a single concession, or subverted the least of his ideals, selling only the best of his thoughts, the expression of which polished the product and increased the capacity. He fitted nothing to the fancied needs of marketing. His mother began truly to live now, and her external nature manifested below in fine grains and finished services. Between the two, the old Charter formalities were observed. She was royal steel—this white-haired mother—and a cottage would have become baronial about her. Where she was, there lived order and silence and poise.
After this enumeration of felicitous details, one will conclude that this has to deal with a selfish man; yet his gruelling punishments must not be forgotten, nor the Quentin spirit. It is true that he had emerged miraculously unhurt from many dark explorations; but his appreciation of the innate treachery and perversion of events was sound and keen. By no means did he challenge any complication which might strip him to quivering nakedness again. Rather his whole life breathed gratitude for the goodly days as they came, and glided into untormented nights. Next in importance to the discovery that his will could be beaten was this which the drinking temperament so hesitatingly grants—that there are thrilling hearts, brilliant minds, memorable conversations, and lovely impulses among men and women who will not tarry long over the wine. Simple as this seems, it was hard for a Charter to learn.... As he contemplated the full promise of his maturity, the thought often came—indeed, he expressed it in one of the Skylark letters—that this was but a period of rest and healing in which he was storing power for sterner and more subtle trials.
Such is an intimation of the mental and moral state of Quentin Charter in his thirty-fourth year, when he began to open the Skylark letters with more than curiosity.... He knew Reifferscheid, and admired him with the familiar enthusiasm of one who has read the editor's work intermittently for years. Charter, of course, was delighted with the review of his second book. It did not occur to him that it could have been written by other than the editor himself. Reifferscheid's reply to Charter's letter of thanks for the critique proved the key to the whole matter, since it gave the Westerner both focus and dimension for his visioning.
I haven't read your book yet, old friend, but I'm going to shortly. Your fine letter has been turned over to Miss Paula Linster, a young woman who has been doing some reviews for me, of late; some of the most important, in which lot your book, of course, fell. The review which pleased you is only one of a hundred that has pleased me. Miss Linster is the last word—for fineness of mind. Incidentally, she is an illumination to look at, and I haven't the slightest doubt but that she sings and paints and plays quite as well as she writes book notices. If she liked a work of mine as well as she likes yours, I should start on a year's tramp, careless of returns from States yet to be heard from. The point that interests me is that you could do a great book about women, away off there in the Provinces—and without knowing her.You may wonder at this ebullition. Truth is, I'm backing down, firmly, forcefully, an inclination to do an essay on the subject. This is the first chance I ever had to express matters which have come forth from the Miraculous in the past year. All that she does has the ultimate feminine touch,—but I'll stop before I get my sleeves up again about this new order of being. Perhaps you deserve to know Miss Linster. You'd never be the same afterwards, so I'm not so sure whether I'd better negotiate it or not. I'm glad to see your book has left the post so perfectly. Always come to see me when in town. Yours solid, Reifferscheid.
I haven't read your book yet, old friend, but I'm going to shortly. Your fine letter has been turned over to Miss Paula Linster, a young woman who has been doing some reviews for me, of late; some of the most important, in which lot your book, of course, fell. The review which pleased you is only one of a hundred that has pleased me. Miss Linster is the last word—for fineness of mind. Incidentally, she is an illumination to look at, and I haven't the slightest doubt but that she sings and paints and plays quite as well as she writes book notices. If she liked a work of mine as well as she likes yours, I should start on a year's tramp, careless of returns from States yet to be heard from. The point that interests me is that you could do a great book about women, away off there in the Provinces—and without knowing her.
You may wonder at this ebullition. Truth is, I'm backing down, firmly, forcefully, an inclination to do an essay on the subject. This is the first chance I ever had to express matters which have come forth from the Miraculous in the past year. All that she does has the ultimate feminine touch,—but I'll stop before I get my sleeves up again about this new order of being. Perhaps you deserve to know Miss Linster. You'd never be the same afterwards, so I'm not so sure whether I'd better negotiate it or not. I'm glad to see your book has left the post so perfectly. Always come to see me when in town. Yours solid, Reifferscheid.
And so she became the Skylark to Quentin Charter, because she was lost in the heights over by the seaboard, and only her singing came out of the blue.... There were fine feminine flashes in the letters Charter received, rare exquisite matters which can be given to the world, only through the one who inspires their warm delicacy and charm. The circuit was complete, and the voltage grew mightier and mightier.
There was a royal fall night, in which Charter's work came ill, because thoughts of her monopolized. Life seemed warm and splendid within him. He turned off the electric bulb above his head, and the moonlight burst in—a hunting moon, full and red as Mars. There was thrilling glory in the purple south, and a sense of the ineffable majesty of stellar management. He banished the night panorama with the electric button again, and wrote to the Skylark. This particular letter proved the kind which annihilates all sense of separateness, save the animal heaviness of miles, and makes this last, extra carking and pitiless for the time. It may have been that Charter would have hesitated to send this letter, had he read it over again in the cool of morning, but it happened that he yearned for a walk that night—and passed a mail-box, while the witchery of the night still enchanted.
He felt dry, a bit burned the next morning, and saddled for a couple of hours, transferring the slight strain of nerves to his muscles. There was a note from the Skylark. She had found an old picture of his in a magazine and commented on it deliciously.... "I wonder if you think of me as I am—plain,plain?" she had asked.... No, he did not. Nor was it Reifferscheid's words to the contrary that prevented him. It is not in man to correlate plainness with a mystic attraction. She had never appeared to him as beautiful exactly, but fine, vivid, electric—a manifestation of eyes, lips, mind. All the poundage part of a human being was utterly vague in his concept of the Skylark.... Charter naturally lost his perspective and penetration in dealing with his own interlacing emotions.
The present letter thralled him. It was blithe in intent, but intuitively deep and keen. In a former letter, he had asked if there were not a strain of Irish in her lineage, so mercurial did her temperament play in all that she wrote. "No Irish," she had answered. "Dutch—straight Dutch. Always New York—always Dutch. I praise Providence for this 'monkey-wrench to hang upon my safety valve.'"
The "red moon" letter seemed to have caught her on the wing—at her highest and happiest—for she answered it in fine faith and lightness. Though it had carried her up and up; and though the singing came back from golden azure, yet she had not forgotten her humor. There was a suggestion of world-wisdom here, or was it world-wear?
For hours at a time, Charter was now stripped of his capacity for work. This is fine torment. Mostly there was a sheet in his type-mill, but his fingers only fluttered the space-bar. Let him begin a letter to the Skylark, however, and inspiration came, indeed. His thoughts marshalled like a perfect army then, and passed out from under his hand in flashing review.... He ate little, slept little, but his vitality was prodigious. A miracle matured in his breast. Had he not been more than usually stubborn, he would have granted long before, that he loved a woman for the first time in his life—and this a woman he had never seen.
By New Year's there was no dissembling. No day passed now in which he did not battle down an impulse to take a train for New York. This was real living. The destiny which had ruled him through so many dark wanderings, had waited until his soul was roused to dominance, before he was permitted to enter earth's true treasury. It was now that he remembered his past, and many a mile and many an hour he paced the dim hall—wrestling to be clean of it. This was a Soul which called. He did not dare to answer while a vestige of the old taints lingered.... He was seldom troubled that she might prove less inspiring than he pictured. He staked every reliance in that he had lived thirty-three years and encountered nothing comparable with this before. Passions, fascinations, infatuations, were long put behind; these were classed now in his mind beneath decent and frictionless partnerships between men and women.
The vision which inspired his romantic loneliness was all that Reifferscheid had suggested, and infinitely more which his own dreamings had supplied. She was an adult frankly challenged by the mysteries of creation; often shocked by its revelations, never above pity nor beneath humor, wonderful in her reality of culture, and wise above men with a woman's divination. But particularly, her ultimate meaning was forhim; his quest, she was; his crown, to be. The world had preserved her singing, until he was ready; and though singing, she must ever feel the poverty of unfulfilment in her own breast, until he came. This was the stately form of the whole enchantment.
That there existed in creation acompletingfeminine for all his lonely and divided forces; that there lived one woman who could evenly ignite his body, brain, and spirit; that there was hidden in the splendid plan of things, a Union of Two to form One; all this which had been drifting star-stuff before, became sparks now for new and terrific energies of mind; energies, however, which could be trained and directed only in her presence.
Man cannot live altogether in the altitudes. There were brief periods wherein Charter remembered the mad, drink-tainted trifler with lyrics and women. It had been a past, surely, filled with soul-murdering illusions. Those who had known him then, would have had to see him now to find faith. There had been letters about his recent books from men and women who had known him in the darker, less-spacious days. Failing to adjust this new and lusty spirit with the man they had known, they had tried to bring a laugh from him and answers to futile questions.
Charter could not forget that there come to the desk of a review-editor many personal notices concerning one whose work is being talked about. Indeed, such are handled as a matter of routine. The Skylark could not be expected always to wing aloof from these. All that was vague and indefinite did not matter; such might even be accounted as admirable specializations in life, but his acquaintance had been prodigious, and many clippings came home to him which he was not pleased to read.... Still, in the main, he relied upon Paula's solid sense of justice; and every fresh letter lifted him higher and higher. In his own letters, he did not fail to incorporate a buffer against indefinite revelations. Moreover, he had never ceased to call it wonderful—this capacity, of even the purest women, to lock the doors against the ugliest generalities of a man's past, and to reckon only with specific instances. It is here that the mother looks out through the eyes of a maid.
One April morning, he encountered a depression more formidable in vitality than ever before. Beth had just had her shoes set, and Charter tried to ride off the blue devil. He steadied his mount out of town, until she struck the ringing country road. The instant she felt her calks bite into the frosty turf, the mare flirted her head, took the bit, and became a veritable glowing battery of beautiful energy. Twelve miles he gave her, but the blue devil rode equally well and sat down again with Charter in his study. It was like a desert-island loneliness, this which beset him, as if his ship were sinking into the horizon; only it was a more poignant than physical agony—a sense of spiritual isolation.
This study had become to him the place of his dearest revelations of life. Here, of late especially, he had found refuge from every discord, and here invariably were opened the letters from the Skylark. The place of a man's work becomes a grand, quiet solace as he grows older, but calm and poise were wrested from the room to-day. He fought the depression with every trained faculty, but was whipped by it. Color and sunlight were gone from within; the zeal from future work, the warmth from every promise, the changing lustre from words, and the excellent energy of thought which impels their weaving. Twilight in mid-afternoon. He turned on the lights impatiently. Meaning and beauty were bereft from all his possessions, as buoyancy was gone from his own breast. There was something pitifully boyish in the trophies he had treasured—so much of the college cub, and the youth who refuses to permit his travels to be forgotten. He regarded his past work, as one grown out of it, regretting that it had ever attracted the materials of permanence. Smugness in his teachings; cold intellectuality brazen in all his attainments; everything about him suddenly become sinister from the old life!... He looked into the East—his country of singing, of roses, cedars, and fountains—but the gray-black twilight was a damnable intervention.... It was in this spirit, or lack of it, that he wrote the letter which revealed to Paula his inner responsiveness, as she was tossed in The High Tide.
The letter which she had written almost at the same time, reached him on the second morning thereafter; and his suffering in the interval he could only liken to one of the old sieges of reaction after dissipation. The fine, angular writing, which he never regarded without a sense of the darting swiftness of her hand; the thin, tough sheets that crinkled, came like bounty to the starving; yet he was deathly afraid.
Something of the long ago has just come to me—to my very rooms. It would not have been believed, had I sought it. I might have endured it, ifyouhad told me. It is dreadful to play with illusions. Oh, why must we keep our gods so far away—lest we lose them? Had I waited longer, I could not have written. It seems now that you have a right to know—before my pride dries up all expression. You are not to blame—except that you were very reckless in adding happinesses one upon the other. It was all quite ridiculous. I trusted my intuition—allowed myself to think of a table spread in the wilderness of the world with you. My intuitions! I used to be so proud of them. I see now that sometimes they're quite as fallible as plain thinking, after all.I always felt you alone. I seemed to know your voice after centuries. Yes, I am sure it was that which affected me so deeply in your work and made me answer your letters with such faith.I knew your voice.I thought of you alone—your spirit hungry.... It makes one feel so common, when one's intuitions betray this way. The heart for writing further is cold and heavy. Once, down the wind, came a fragrant pollen, but the blowing summer is gone from my garden....
Something of the long ago has just come to me—to my very rooms. It would not have been believed, had I sought it. I might have endured it, ifyouhad told me. It is dreadful to play with illusions. Oh, why must we keep our gods so far away—lest we lose them? Had I waited longer, I could not have written. It seems now that you have a right to know—before my pride dries up all expression. You are not to blame—except that you were very reckless in adding happinesses one upon the other. It was all quite ridiculous. I trusted my intuition—allowed myself to think of a table spread in the wilderness of the world with you. My intuitions! I used to be so proud of them. I see now that sometimes they're quite as fallible as plain thinking, after all.
I always felt you alone. I seemed to know your voice after centuries. Yes, I am sure it was that which affected me so deeply in your work and made me answer your letters with such faith.I knew your voice.I thought of you alone—your spirit hungry.... It makes one feel so common, when one's intuitions betray this way. The heart for writing further is cold and heavy. Once, down the wind, came a fragrant pollen, but the blowing summer is gone from my garden....
No signature.
She had not penned a skylark with a folded or broken wing. Charter sat thinking for several moments, but only because he knew there was ample time to catch the noon-train for New York. That he should do this had formed in mind before he had read five lines of the letter. This thought of action steadied him; and the proof that he had sensed her agony and reflected it throughout the past forty-eight hours made the call of the East instant and irresistible. It did not come to him at first that he was now entering the greater conflict, for which Nature had trained him in tranquillity and fed his soul unto replenishment during three years.... His first quick thought came out of old habits of mind:An hour with her, and her heart will be healed!Here was the old trifler. He suffered for this instant faltering of the brighter manhood. Man's fineness is not accentuated by the fact that a woman sacrifices her power within him, when she falls to pleading a little. Charter could have torn out the old mental fibres upon which played the thought of her swiftly renewed happiness by his presence.
The reality of her suffering slowly penetrated his mind. He perceived that she could not express the actuality; that her thoughts had winged ineffectually about the immovable disorder—like bees over the clumsy corpse of a rodent in the hive. It was not to be lifted, and the inspiration hermetically to seal the monster and resume activities as well as possible, had not yet come.... "I might have endured it, ifyouhad told me!"
He wasted no energy trying to think exactly what had happened. It was all he could bear to grasp the full meaning that this inspiring creature who had soared and sung so long, was crushed and cold. Every sentence in her letter revealed the bruise of her heart, the absence of spontaneity.... She was as different from other women he had known—the women who had been healed by his word or his caress—as he was different in this attraction. He telegraphed that he was coming, begged that she would see him the following evening, and instructed her to leave word for him at theGranville. Then he packed his bag and told his mother. She laughed quietly.
"On the spur of the moment as usual, Quentin.... It will be good for you. You've been home a long time. Are you going—beyond New York?"
"I haven't a thought now of going farther, Mother," he answered....
Again twilight in mid-afternoon—as he crossed the river from Jersey. It had been a day and night to age the soul—with its inexorable stretch of material miles. New York had a different look, a different atmosphere, than ever before. Huge and full of horrible grinding; sick with work and sick with damp—but above this, the magic of her presence was over all. It was only four in the afternoon, and he had not asked to see her until seven. Might she not have watched for him or be near him now? She would know him from his pictures, and observe him as a stranger, but he had only his visions.
On the Cross-town to theGranville, emotions played upon him of a kind that he could not have understood in another man a few months before. Moreover, he felt himself giving way before the vibrations of the big city. Harried and shrunken, he was, like a youth from the fields; and the voice he had raised so valiantly from afar against this tremendous massed soul, seemed now but the clamor of a boy in the safety of his own door. To and fro along his inflamed nerves crept the direct need of a drink and a cigarette—old wolves forever on the watch for the spent and the wounded.... Actually terrorized, he was, at the thought she might not see him; that there might be no note for him at theGranville. What a voyage in the dark.
For the time, his excellent moral balance had deserted shamelessly. An adequate perception of his own position and attitude in the eyes of high womanhood had unhelmed him, quite properly. Nature had finally found a hot retort which just fitted his case—and in he went.... No purely physical ardor could have called Quentin Charter out of his study and far across the continent. Lesser loves than this have plunged nations into war, and broken the main trend of history into pregnant digressions. The more penetratingly one regards the man in his present consuming, the more formidable becomes the conviction that the human cosmos in the beginning was cleft in twain: one to grope to the light, a male; the other to suffer the way, her burden, the curse of Eve. When these mates of fire fulfil their divided destinies and sweep into the zone of mutual attraction, woe to the satellites and asteroids in the inevitable cataclysm which follows.... Yet it is out of such solar throes that gods and prophets are born.... He gave his bag to a boy at theGranvilleentrance, and stepped forward to the desk, clearing his throat and repeating his question.... The clerk rushed through the letters in "C."
"No, Mr. Charter,—not a letter, but wait just a moment; there was a telephone-call."
A chill had swept through him as the man spoke. It had not occurred to him that the word would come in other than her handwriting. This was an unsigned note, written by the telephone-girl:
Mr. Quentin Charter: A lady who says you will understand, 'phoned that she will be home at seven to-night—if you think it wise and kind to come to her.
Mr. Quentin Charter: A lady who says you will understand, 'phoned that she will be home at seven to-night—if you think it wise and kind to come to her.
The message was dated at twoP. M.Both chill and burning were in the words. It was strangely unlike her; yet in passing through the operator's mind, it might have become routine. The word "kind" was a torturing curb. It placed him on ugly quaking ground. How weak, how ancient and commonplace, is the human lord after all, when in doubt regarding his lady's reception of him! Where is his valor now, his taking of cities, his smiling deaths for honor? Most of all times, he is man, the male; not man, the soul. Half-way out on the surface-car, he discovered one of the big "Selma Cross" bill-boards. It was intimate, startling, an evil omen—great black letters out of the deathless past.... He stood on the fourth floor of theZoroaster. The elevator-man had shown him a certain door which was slightly ajar. He was ill, breathless, and his heart sank strangely with the lights in the shaft from the descending car.... He tapped on the designated door, and a deep melodious voice, instantly identified with ancient abandonments, called gently:
"Come in!"
Charter was seized with vertigo. It was his sorry thought that the old scar-tissues, however bravely they sufficed in the days of easy-going, could not endure a crux like this. But he was wrong. It was the shock to his spirit, which made of Selma Cross a giantess of vague outlines in a room filled with swimming objects. Need for the woman of his visions had culminated in the outer hall. In the substitution there was an inner wrench, which to one of Charter's intense concentration was like a stroke; and then, too, the horrible outburst of energy in adjusting the Skylark spirit to the eminent flesh of this old plaything of his, left him drained. He steadied himself into the music-room, and sank into a deep chair, where his heart pumped furiously, but light and empty, as if it could not grip the blood locked in his veins.
He sat in a sort of trance, glimpses of many thoughts running through his brain. He deserved punishment. That was all very well, but something was wrong here. The premonition became a reality in his consciousness that he had entered upon a great desert; that he was to endure again one of his terrible thirsts; not a throat-thirst alone, but a soul-thirst. In the atmosphere of the woman, in the very odor of the room, he felt the old impassioned lyric-maker crush back into the dominance of his mind with all the impish exultation of that lower self. Pride asserted itself now. What an idiot passage in the career of a rising writer! He should always remember with shame this coming to New York—a youthful Marius in whose veins was injected mid-summer madness—coming to this city (where dollar-work is king and plumaged-woman queen) with an abortive conception from garret dreams.... A strong white light fell upon the leather cover of her reading-table, but their faces were in shadow, like the hundred actor faces in photograph upon the wall and mantel. Selma Cross was studying him keenly. The emptiness of it all was so pervading—as his blood began to move again—that he laughed aloud.
"Do you know," Selma Cross said softly, "I thought at first you had been drinking too much. I hardly knew you otherwise, remember. Shall I tell you what added thought came to me, as you crossed the floor so unsteadily—looking so white?"
"Locomotor ataxia, I suppose. I hear it is getting quite the thing for middle-generation New Yorkers.... I expected to see you a little later in your new play, but not here—to-night——"
"That is what I thought—that incurable thing. You seem floored. I didn't know a woman could do that. In the old days, you were adaptable—if nothing else."
His collar felt tight, and he stretched it out, needing more air in his lungs and more blood in his brain. It was clear enough to him now how Skylark had been stricken. The real devastation was that she belonged to this sort of thing at all; that she could consent to this trick, this trap. It was all so different from the consummate fineness, the pervading delicacy, of all Skylark thoughts. Having consented to the trick,might she not be listening?... He did not mind her hearing; indeed, he might say things which were needful for her to know—but that she should listen! He writhed. This was not his Skylark at all.... It was hardly Charter's way now to plunge into the centre of things. There was a feline elegance in the manner and movement of Selma Cross; she seemed so delightfully at ease, that he was willing to make it a bit harder for her.
"I suppose I was more adaptable formerly," he said slowly. "It is something, however, suddenly to encounter an old friend who has made good so fearfully and tremendously in the past week. Of course, I had read all about it. Still, I repeat it was an experience to encounter your stardom actually on the boards; and more of an experience to find you here. I'm really very glad that you secured the one great vehicle. As for your work—few know its quality better than I."
She studied him long, her eyes glowing behind the narrowed lids. "As for that, you've been biting the flaky top-crust, too," she said finally. "I never doubted what you could do in your game, but I confess I feared that whiskey would beat you to it.... Do you know you are wonderfully changed—so white, so lean? Your work has come to me since you went away; what else have you been doing?—I mean, to change you so finely."
"Garret."
Her brow clouded at the word. It was as if she had expected to laugh at him long before this. "Did any woman ever tell you that you're rather a mean sort, Quentin Charter?"
"Doubtless I have deserved it," he answered. "What are you thinking?"
"I was thinking of your garret—where you gather your victims for vivisection."
"That's put very clearly."
"Do you think this is big-man stuff?"
"My case is rather an ugly one to look back upon, truly," Charter granted. "For a long time, it appeared to me that I must learn things at first-hand. With first-water talents, perhaps this is not necessary."
"A woman finally brings a man face to face," she said with sudden scorn, "and he becomes limp, agrees with everything she says.... 'Yes, it is quite true, I was an awful beast. What else, dear?'—ugh!"
Charter smiled. She was very swift and deft in supplying a man's evil motives. It is a terrible feminine misfortune—this gift of imputing—and happy women do not possess it. Few men, incidentally, are deep enough to avail themselves of all the crafts and cunnings with which they may be accredited.
"I have no intention of destroying the slightest gratification you may draw, Selma, from questioning me," he said. "If I appear limp, please remember that I'm a bit in the dark as yet. I came to this floor on a different errand. I had this errand in mind—not self-examination. However, I'll attend now in all sincerity. You were speaking of my victims for vivisection in the garret."
She appeared not to trust him in the least. "I've always wanted to know if you believed—what an apprentice I really was in love—give-and-take—when you came?"
"That was easily believed, Selma——"
"Then you grant I wasn't acting—when I gave myself to you?"
"I didn't think you were acting——"
"Thenyouwere acting, because when the time came—you dropped me quite as easily as you would drop a street-cur you had been pleased to feed."
"Just there you are a bit in error. I was furiously interested, and certainly not acting altogether, until——"
"Enter—the wine," she said with a sneer.
"Yes, if you will." He was irritated for a second, having meant to say something entirely different.
"A woman so loves to hear that a man's passion for her depends upon his drinking!"
"I have always been very fond of and grateful to you. It was the whole life that the drinking carried me into—that I had such horror for when, when I became well."
"You got well very suddenly after you left me," she told him. Her huge face was livid, and her lips dry.
"On the contrary, I was a long time ill." Her temper chilled his attempts at sincerity.
"It looked so from those first few—letters, is rather a dignified word."
"I say it with shame, I was practically unable to write. I was burnt out when I left here. I had been to Asia—gone from home seven months—and the returning fool permitted the bars to welcome him——"
"You seized a moment to dictate a letter——"
"Silence would have been far better," he said. "I see that now. My only idea was to let you hear. Writing myself was out of the question by that time."
"You wrote an article about stage people—with all the loftiness of an anæmic priest."
"That was written before I left here—written and delivered——"
"All the worse, that you could write such an article—while you were spending so much time with me."
"I have never belittled what you gave me, Selma. I could praise you, without admiring the stage. You are amazingly different. I think that's why New York is talking about you to-night. I had made many trips to New York and knew many stage people, before I met you. If you had belonged to the type familiar to me, I should have needed a stronger stimulus than drink to force an interest. Had there been others like you—had I even encountered 'five holy ones in the city'—I should not have written that stage article, or others before it."
"You were one with the Broadway Glowworms, Quentin Charter. Few of them drank so steadily as you."
"I have already told you that for a long time I was an unutterable fool. Until three years ago, I did not begin to know—the breath of life."
Selma Cross arose and paced the room, stretching out her great arms from time to time as she walked. "You're getting back your glibness," she exclaimed, "your quick little sentences which fit in so nicely! Ah, I know them well, as other women are learning them. But I have things which you cannot answer so easily—you of the garret penances.... You find a starved woman of thirty—play with her for a fortnight, showing her everything that she can desire, and seeming to have no thought, but of her. I discover that there was not a moment in which you were so ardent that you forgot to be an analyst. I forgive that, as you might forgive things in my day's work. You put on your gray garret-garb, and forget the hearts of my people, to uncover their weaknesses before the world—you, so recently one of us, and none more drunk or drained with the dawn—than you! Such preaching is not good to the nostrils, but I forgive that. You are sick, and even the drink won't warm you, so you leave me at a moment's notice——"
"There was another reason."
"Hear me out, first," she commanded.... "To you, it is just, 'Adios, my dear'; to me, it is an uprooting—oh, I don't mind telling you. I was overturned in that furrow, left naked for the long burning day, but I remembered my work—the work you despise! I, who had reason to know how noble your pen can be, forgave even those first paltry letters, filled with excuses such as a cheap clerk might write. I forgave the dictation, because it said you were ill—forgave the silences.... But when you came to New York six months afterwards, and did not so much as 'phone or send me a card of greeting—Selma called in her silly tears."
"It was vile ingratitude," he said earnestly. "That's where my big fault lay. I wonder if you would try to understand the only palliation. You were strangely generous and wonderful in your ways. I did not cease to think of that. Personally, you are far above the things I came to abhor. No one understands but the victim, what alcohol does to a man when it gets him down. I tried to kill myself. I became convalescent literally by force. Slowly approaching the normal again, I was glad enough to live, but the horrors never leave the mind entirely. Everything connected with the old life filled me with shuddering fear. I tell you no one hates alcohol like a drunkard fresh in his reform."
"But I did not make you drink," she said impatiently. "I'm not a drink-loving woman."
Charter's face flushed. The interview was becoming a farce. It had been agony for him to make this confession. She would not see that he realized his ingratitude; that it was his derangement caused by indulging low propensities which made him identify her with the days of evil.
"I know that very well, Selma Cross," he said wearily, "but the stage is a part of that old life, that sick night-life that runs eternally around the belt-line."
She hated him for reverting to this point. Holding fast to what she still had to say, the actress picked up a broken thread. "You said there was another reason why you left New York so suddenly."
Charter expected now to learn if any one were listening. He was cold with the thought of the interview being weighed in the balances of a third mind.
"You've made a big point of my going away," he essayed. "The other reason is not a pretty matter, and doubtless you will call any repugnance of mine an affectation——"
"Repugnance—what do you mean?" she asked savagely, yet she was afraid, afraid of his cool tongue. "I never lied to you."
"That may be true. I'm not curious for evidence to the contrary. The day before I left for the West, a friend told me that you and I were being watched; that all our movements were known. I didn't believe it; could not see the sense—until it was proved that same night by the devious walk we took.... You doubtless remember the face of that young night-bird whom we once laughed about. We thought it just one of those coincidences which frequently occur—a certain face bobbing up everywhere for a number of days. I assured myself that night that you knew nothing of this remarkable outside interest in our affairs."
Selma Cross, with swift stealth, disappeared into the apartment-hall and closed the outer door; then returned, facing him. Her yellow eyes were wide open, filled with a misty, tortured look. To Charter the place and the woman had become haggard with emptiness. He missed the occasional click of the elevator in the outer-hall, for it had seemed to keep him in touch with the world's activities. The old carnal magnetism of Selma Cross stirred not a tissue in him now; the odor of her garments which once roused him, was forbidding. He had not the strength to believe that the door had been shut for any other reason than to prevent Skylark from hearing. The actress had not minded how their voices carried, so long ashewas being arraigned.... The air was devitalized. It was as if they were dying of heart-break—without a sound.... It had been so wonderful—this thought of finding his mate after the æons, his completion—a woman beautiful with soul-age and spiritual light....
Selma Cross was speaking. Charter stirred from his great trouble. She was changed, no longer the clever mistress of a dramatic hour.... Each was so burdened with a personal tragedy that pity for the other was slow to warm between them.
"Do you mean that old Villiers paid the night-bird to watch us—to learn where we went, and possibly what we said?" she was saying hoarsely. Selma Cross felt already that her cad was exploded.
"Yes, and that was unpleasant," Charter told her. "I didn't like the feel of that procurer's eyes, but what revolted me was Villiers himself. I took pains to learn his name the next day—that last day. There isn't a more unclean human package in New York.... It was so unlike you. I couldn't adjust the two. I couldn't be where he had been. I was sick with my own degradation. I went back to my garret."
Selma Cross was crippled; she saw there was no lie in this. At what a price had been bought the restoration of faith for Paula Linster!... She had heard after their compact about Villiers' early days. There had been times when her fingers itched to tighten upon his scrawny throat. To have Quentin Charter hear this record was fire in her veins; it embraced the added horror that Stephen Cabot might also hear.... There was nothing further with which to charge the man before her. She nursed her wrath to keep from crying out.
"Was it a man's way to give me no chance to explain?" she demanded.
"Broadway knew Villiers."
"I did not!"
"Anyway, I couldn't get it straight in my mind, then," Charter said hastily. "You're no vulgar woman, mad after colors and dollars. You love your work too much to be one of those insatiable deserts of passion. Nor are you a creature of black evolution who prefers the soul, to the body of man, for a plaything.... You were all that was generous and normally fervent with me.... Let's cut the subject. It does not excuse me for not calling when I came to New York. You were nothing if not good to me."
"Then Villiers paid to find out things about us," she said slowly. "He said you bragged about such matters to your friends."
Charter shivered. "I fail to see how you troubled about a man not writing—if you could believe that about him."
"I didn't see how he could know our places of meeting—any other way. I should never have seen him again, if he hadn't made me believe this of you."
Charter scarcely heard her. The thought was inevitable now that the actress might have represented him to Skylark as one with the loathed habit of talking about women to his friends. The quick inclination to inquire could not overcome his distaste for mentioning a dear name in this room. The radiant, flashing spirit behind the letters did not belong here.... His brain ached with emptiness; he wondered continually how he could ever fill the spaces expanded by the Skylark's singing....
In the brain of Selma Cross a furious struggle was joined. Never before had she been given to see so clearly her own limitations—and this in the high light of her great dramatic triumph. Her womanhood contained that mighty quality of worshiping intellect. This, she had loved in Charter long ago; in Stephen Cabot now. The inner key to her greatness was her capacity to forget the animal in man—if he proved a brain. There is only one higher reverence—that of forgetting brain to worship soul. Perceiving the attitude of Quentin Charter to her old life, it was made clear to her that she must preserve a lie in her relation with Stephen Cabot; if, indeed, the playwright did not learn outside, as Charter had done. It was plain that he did not know yet, since he had not run from her—to a garret somewhere. What a hideous mockery was this night—begun in pride! Distantly she was grateful that Paula Linster was at hand to be restored, but her own mind was whipped and cowed by its thoughts—so there was little energy for another's romance.... Charter had made no comment on her last remark. She realized now that his thoughts were bearing him close to the truth.
"You say they forced you to cast out your enemy," she declared hoarsely. "I cast out mine of my own accord. If there is palliation for you, there should be for a woman in her first experience. You asked me to stretch my imagination about a drink-reaction making you avoid me. I ask you, how is a woman, for the first time alone with a man—to know that he is different from other men? Add to this, a woman who has come up from the dregs—for years in the midst of the slum-blooms of the chorus? What I heard from them of their nights—would have taxed the versatility of even Villiers—to make me see him lower than I expected! I ask you—how did I know he was an exception—rather than the rule among the Glowworms?"
"I'm rather glad you said that," Charter declared quickly. "It's a point of view I'm grateful for. Do you wonder that the life from which you have risen to one of the regnant queens has become inseparable in my mind with shuddering aversion?"
In the extremity of her suffering, her mind had reverted, as an artist's always does when desperately pressed, to thoughts of work—work, the healer, the refuge where devils truly are cast out. Even in her work she now encountered the lash, since Charter despised it. Literally, she was at bay before him.
"Always that!" she cried. "It is detestable in you always to blame my work. I broke training. I should have won without the damned angel. You degraded yourself for years in your work, but I don't hear you blaming art for your debaucheries! You have sat alone so long that you think all men outside are foul. You sit high in your attic, so that all men look like bugs below!"
"There is something in what you say," he answered, aroused by her bigness and strength. "Yet in my garret, I do not deal with rootless abstractions. Everything has its foundation in actual observation. I moved long among the play-managers, and found them men of huckster-minds—brainless money-bags, dependent upon every passing wind of criticism. I tell you, when one talked to them or to their office-apes—one felt himself, his inner-self, rushing forth as if to fill something bottomless——"
"You do not know Vhruebert——"
"Eliminate him. I am not speaking of any particular man. I do not mean all playwrights when I say that I found playwrights as a class, not literary workers—but literary tricksters. I am not speaking ofThe Thing, nor of its author, of whom I have heard excellent word—when I say that plays are not written, but rewritten by elementals, who, through their sheer coarseness, sense the slow vibrations of the mob, and feculate the original lines to suit."
"Bah—an idea from one of your nights, when you tried to drown the blue devils! It broods over all your thinking! You forget the great army, that silent army, which is continually lifting itself artistically by writing one after another—impossible plays. You forget the great hearts of the players—men and women who pull together for big results."
"I am not speaking of the vast library of manuscript failures, but of a small proportion which get into the sinister glare of Broadway——"
"My God, Broadway is not New York!"
"For which I am powerfully glad," he answered with energy. "As for warm human hearts—there is warmth and loyalty, genuine tears and decent hopes in every brothel and bar—yet the black trends of their existence course on. This was so hard for me to learn, that I have it very clearly.... I remember the opening night of Martha Boardman as a star—telegrams pouring in, critics besieging her dressing-room. Even her manager didn't know what he had, until the critics told him the play would stay in New York a year—yet his name was on the boards above the star and bigger than the author's. I watched the bleak, painted faces of the women and heard their false voices acclaiming the new star. What they had in their hearts was not praise, but envy. Their words were sham, indecency and lying. Eternally simulating—that's the stage life. Pity the women—poor Maachas, if you will—but their work is damnable, nevertheless. It is from such unhappy creatures evading motherhood that youths get the abominable notion that real manhood lies in the loins."
"Poor youths—go on! When you have finished I shall tell you something."
"Don't misunderstand me, Selma Cross. No one knows better than I—how the sexes prey upon each other—how they drag each other to the ground. Only I was thinking of the poor things in ties, canes, cigarettes and coatings—out catching!... I saw the whole horrid, empty game of the stage. You have come wonderfully and differently into the glare, but let me ask where is Martha Boardman to-night—a few short years later?"
"Yes, she was tired, her energy burned out, when she finally arrived. It's a stiff grade," Selma Cross said gently.
"I would explain it, that she was prostituted fromexcessive simulation—season after season of simulation—emotion after emotion false to herself! The Law says, 'Live your own life.' The Stage says, 'Act mine,'—so pitiably often a poor playwright's abortive sensations! What can happen to a body that continually makes of itself a lying instrument? Like the queen-bee whose whole life is made up of egg-laying—the brain of this poor purveyor of emotions becomes a waxy pulp. As for her soul—it is in God's hands—let us hope."
"It is good to laugh at you, Quentin Charter. You have another appetite. You wanted alcohol when I knew you first—now you thirst after purists and winged women. I have a lover now who can live among men, soar just as high as you do, work with just as much greatness and strength, without ever having degraded himself or believed all human creatures vile. The stage has its shams, its mockeries, but its glories, too. It is not all deranged by money-bags. The most brilliant of your writers give us our lines—the most wonderful of your mystics. It is true we simulate; true that ours is a constant giving; but call in your garret-high logic now, Sir Prophet: Look at the tired empty faces of my company, look at mine, after we have finishedThe Thing; then look at the strengthened grip on life and the lifted hopes which, each night, the multitude takes from out our breasts—and call ours a prostitution, if you can!"
Charter arose and extended his hand, which she took gracelessly, but was instantly sorry that she had misjudged his intent.
"Can't you see, Selma Cross, that you and I have no difference, no point for argument, if the general run of plays were likeThe Thing—as you make me see it? We had eliminated this from the discussion, but I have nothing but praise for Vhruebert, nothing but enthusiasm for Mr. Cabot and for you—if the combination gives the people an expansion of hope and a lifted ideal. Do that, and you need not reckon with critics."
Instantly she changed her point of view again, so that he was both chilled and puzzled. "I should have been glad to come out in any successful play," she said wearily. "The Thingjust happens to have an uplift——"
"So much is accomplished for you, then. You will never be content again with a play that has not. Oh, I don't mean ostensible good, melodramatically contrasted with obvious bad, but the subtle inspiration of real artists—that marvellous flexibility of line and largeness of meaning that fits about every life! Just as you can draw fresh strength again and again from a great poem; so, in performing a great play—one does not act, but lives!"
"Are you going?" she questioned absently.
"Yes, I confess I haven't been so consumed in years——"
She drew close to him.... "It has been dramatic, if not literary, hasn't it?" Her nostrils dilated and her lower lip was drawn back between her teeth.
He smiled.
"I feel burnt out, too," she went on softly. "It has been strange to be with you again—almost like—those early mornings.... Did you ever hear me calling you—'way off there in the West? I used to lie awake, all feverish after you went away, calling in a whisper, 'Quentin—Quentin!...' It seemed you must come, if you were alive. There were times after you went away, that I would have given this week's victory, which I saw from afar,—to have you rush in for just one hour!... In God's name," she cried suddenly, "is there really this sort of honor in living man—is it because you hate me—or do you have to drink to take a woman in your arms? You, who used to be—singing flames?"
Charter was not unattracted, but his self-command was strangely imperious. There was magnetism now in the old passion—but a flutter of wings broke the attraction.... Darkness covered the wings, and the song was stilled; yet in that faint rustling, was enchantment which changed to brute matter—these open arms and the rising breast.
"I'm afraid it is as you said—about the anæmic priest," he muttered laughingly.... And then it occurred to him that there might have been a trick to her tempting.... From this point he was sexless and could pity her, though his nerves were raw from her verbal punishments. It was altogether new in his experience—this word-whipping; and though he had not sharpened a sentence in retaliation, he could not but see the ghastly way in which a woman is betrayed by her temper, which checks a man's passion like a sudden fright. Between a woman given to rages and her lover—lies a naked sword. Consummate, in truth, is the siren who has mastered the art of silence.... Selma Cross sank back into a chair. The world's wear was on her brow and under her eyes, as she laughed bitterly.
"You always had a way of making me sick of life," she said strangely. "I wonder if ever there was a humiliation so artistically complete as mine?"
This was another facet to the prism of the woman. Charter could not be quite certain as to her present intent, so frequently alternating had been the currents of her emotion during the interview. Typically an actress, she had run through her whole range of effects. He was not prepared yet to say which was trick, which reality; which was the woman, Selma Cross, or the tragedienne. He did not miss the thought that his theory was amazingly strengthened here—the theory that moral derangement results from excessive simulation.
"You—would—not—kiss—me," she repeated. "For my own sake, I'd like to believe—that you're trying to be true to some one,—but it's all rot that there are men like that! It's because I no longer tempt you—you spook!"
"You said you had a lover——"
She shivered. "You left me unfinished." There was a tragic plaint in her tone, and she added hastily, "There was a reason for my trying you.... I think the most corroding of the knives you have left in me to-night, is that you have refused to ask why I brought you here—refused even to utter the name—of the woman you expected to see—in my presence.... You may be a man; you may be a cad; you may be a new appetite, or a God resurrected out of a Glowworm. I either hate or love you—or both—to the point of death! Either way—remember this—I'll be square as a die—to you and to my friend. You'll begin to see what I mean—to-morrow, I think...."
He was at the door. "Good-night," he said and touched the signal for the elevator.
She called him back, "Come and see me—at my best—at theHerriot—won't you?"
"Yes——"
"But tell me what performance—and where your seat is——"
"... Good-night."
The car stopped at the floor.
It was after eight that Sunday night, when Paula emerged from the elevator in the upper-hall of theZoroaster, and noted that the door of the Selma Cross apartment was ajar.... The interval since she had parted from the actress the evening before had been abundant with misery. Almost, she had crossed the bay to visit the Reifferscheids; would have done so, indeed, had she been able to 'phone her coming. Her rooms had become a dismal oppression; Bellingham haunted her consciousness; there were moments when she was actually afraid there alone.
All Saturday night she had sleeplessly tossed, knowing that Quentin Charter was speeding eastward, and dreading the moment when he should arrive in the city and find no welcoming note from her. She dared not be in her rooms after he was due to reach theGranville, lest he call her by telephone or messenger—and her purpose of not seeing him be destroyed by some swift and salient appeal. She had waited until after the hour in which he had asked to call, to be sure that this time he would have given up all hope of seeing her. The prospect now of entering her apartment and remaining there throughout the night, challenged every ounce of will-force she possessed....
Battling with loneliness and bereavement, as she had been for hours, Paula was grateful to note, by the open door, that the actress was at home, even though she had left her the evening before, hurt and disappointed by the other's swift change of manner upon learning that Quentin Charter was to be in New York to-day.... It was with a startling but indefinable emotion that she heard the man's voice now through the open door. Stephen Cabot was there, she thought, as she softly let herself in to the place of ordeals, which her own flat had become.
In the dark and silence of the inner hall, the old enemy swept into her consciousness—again the awful localizations of the preying force! The usual powers of mind scattered, as in war the pith of a capital's garrisons rush forth to distant borders. By habit, her hand was upon the button, but she did not turn on light. Instead, she drew back, steeling her will to remember her name, her place in the world, her friends. Harshly driven, yet Paula repressed a cry, and fought her way out into the main hall—as from the coiling suction of a maelstrom. Even in her terror, she could not but repress a swift sense of victory, in that she had escaped from the vortex of attraction—her own rooms.
The man's voice reached her again, filled her mind with amazing resistance—so that the point of the occultist's will was broken. Suddenly, she remembered that she had once heard Stephen Cabot, protesting that he was quite well—at the end of the first New York performance ofThe Thing, and that his tones were inseparably identified with his misfortune. The voice she heard now thrilled her like an ancient, but instantly familiar, harmony. It was not Stephen Cabot's. She stood at the open door, when the vehemence of Selma Cross, who was now speaking, caused her to refrain from making her presence known. The unspeakable possibility, suddenly upreared in her mind, banished every formality. The full energies of her life formed in a prayer that she might be wrong, as Paula peered through the inner hall, and for the first time in the flesh glimpsed Quentin Charter.
She was standing before the elevator-shaft and had signaled for the car eternities ago. Selma Cross was moving up and down the room within, but her words though faintly audible, had no meaning to the woman without. Paula's mind seemed so filled with sayings from the actress that there was no room for the interpretation of a syllable further. One sentence of Charter's startled her with deadly pain.... She could wait no longer, and started to walk down. Half-way to the main-floor, the elevator sped upward to answer her bell.... She was very weak, and temptation was fiercely operative to return to her rooms, when she heard a slow, firm step ascending the flight below. She turned from the stairs on the second floor, just as the huge, lean shoulders of Bellingham appeared on the opposite side of the elevator-shaft.
The two faced without words. His countenance was livid, wasted, but his eyes were of fire. Paula lost herself in their power. She knew only that she must return with him. There was no place to go; indeed, to return with him now seemed normal, rational—until the brightly-lit car rushed down and stopped before them.
"Excuse me for keeping you waiting, Miss Linster," the elevator-man said, "but I had to carry a message to the rear."
In the instantaneous break of Bellingham's concentration, Paula recovered herself sufficiently to dart into the car.
"Down, if you please," she said hoarsely. "The gentleman is going up."
Bellingham, who had started to follow, was stopped by the sliding-door. The conductor called that he would be back directly, as his car slid down.... In the untellable disorganization of mind, Paula knew for the moment only this: she must reach the outer darkness instantly or expire. In that swift drop to the main floor, and in the brief interval required to stop the car and slide the door, she endured all the agony of tightened fingers upon her throat. There was an ease in racing limbs, as she sped across the tiles to the entrance, as a frightened child rushes from a dark room. She would die if the great door resisted—pictured it all before her hand touched the knob. She would turn, scream, and fall from suffocation. Her scream would call about her the horror that she feared.
The big door answered, as it seemed, with a sort of leisurely dignity to her spasm of strength—and out under the rain-blurred lamps, she ran, ready to faint if any one called, and continually horrified lest something pluck at her skirts—thus to Central Park West. An Eighth Avenue car was approaching, half a square above. To stand and wait, in the fear lest Bellingham reach the corner in time for the car, assailed the last of her vitality. It was not until she had boarded it, and was beyond reach of a pedestrian on Cathedral Way, that she breathed as one who has touched shore after the Rapids. Still, every south-bound cab renewed her panic. She could have made time to South Ferry by changing to the Elevated, but fear of encountering the Destroyer prevented this. Fully three-quarters of an hour was used in reaching the waiting-room, where she was fortunate in catching a Staten Island boat without delay. Every figure that crossed the bridge after her, until the big ferry put off, Paula scrutinized; then sank nearly fainting into a seat.
Bellingham's plot was clear to her mind, as well as certain elements of his craft to obviate every possibility of failure. He had doubtless seen her enter the house, and timed his control to dethrone her volition as she reached her rooms. Since the elevator-man would not have taken him up, without word from her, Bellingham had hastened in and started up the stairs when the car was called from the main floor. His shock at finding her in the second-hall was extraordinary, since he was doubtless struggling with the entire force of his concentration, to hold her in the higher apartment and to prepare her mind for his own reception. It was that moment that the elevator-man had saved her; yet, she could not forget how the voice of Quentin Charter had broken the magician's power a moment before; and it occurred to her now how wonderfully throughout her whole Bellingham experience, something of the Westerner's spirit had sustained her in the crises—Quentin Charter's book that first night in Prismatic Hall; Quentin Charter's letter to which she had clung during the dreadful interview in the Park....
As for Quentin Charter rushing immediately to the woman of lawless attractions, because he had not received the hoped-for note at theGranville—in this appeared a wantonness almost beyond belief. Wearily she tried to put the man and his base action entirely out of mind. And Selma Cross, whose animation had been so noticeable when informed of Charter's coming, had fallen beneath the reach of Paula's emotions.... She could pity—with what a torrential outpouring—could she pity "that finest, lowest head!"
She stepped out on deck. The April night was inky-black. All day there had been a misty rain from which the chill of winter was gone. The dampness was sweet to breathe and fresh upon her face. The smell of ocean brought up from the subconscious, a thought already in tangible formation there. The round clock in the cabin forward had indicated nine-forty-five. It seemed more like another day, than only an hour and a half ago, that she had caught the Eighth Avenue car at Cathedral Way. The ferry was nearing the Staten slip. In a half-hour more, she would reach Reifferscheid's house. Her heart warmed with gratitude for a friend to whom she could say as little or as much as she pleased, yet find him, heart and home, at her service. One must be terrified and know the need of a refuge in the night to test such values. A few hours before, she had rejected the thought of going, because a slight formality had not been attended to. Hard pressed now, she was seeking him in the midst of the night.... At the mention of the big man's name, the conductor on the Silver Lake car took her in charge, helped her off at the right road, and pointed out the Reifferscheid light. Thus she felt her friend's kindness long before she heard the big elms whispering over his cottage. The front-window was frankly uncurtained, and the editor sat within, soft-shirted and eminently comfortable beside a green-shaded reading-lamp. She even saw him drop his book at her step upon the walk. A moment later, she blinked at him laughingly, as he stood in the light of the wide open doorway.
"Properly 'Driven From Home,' I suppose I should be tear-stained and in shawl and apron," she began.
He laughed delightedly, and exclaimed: "How could Father be so obdurate—alas, a-a-las! Lemme see, this is a fisherman's hut on the moors, or a gardener's lodge on the shore. Anyway, it's good to have you here.... Annie!"
He took her hat and raincoat, wriggling meanwhile into a coat of his own, arranged a big chair before the grate, then removed her rubbers. Not a question did he ask, and Sister Annie's greeting presently, from her chair, was quite the same—as if the visit and the hour were exactly in order.
"You'll stay a day or two, won't you?" he asked. "Honestly, I don't like the way they treat you up there beyond the Park.... It will be fine to-morrow. This soft rain will make Mother Earth turn over and take an eye-opener——"
"The truth is, I want to stay until there's a ship for the Antilles," she told him, "and I don't know when the first one goes."
"I hope it's a week at least," he said briskly. "The morning papers are here with all the sailings. A sea-voyage will do you a world of good, and Europe doesn't compare with a trip to the Caribbean."
"Just you two—and one other—are to know," Paula added nervously.
Reifferscheid had gathered up a bundle of papers, and was turning pages swiftly. "There isn't a reason in the world why everybody should know," he remarked lightly, "only you'd better be Lottie or Daisy Whats-her-name, as the cabin lists of all outgoing ships are available to any one who looks."
"Tim will be delighted to make everything easy for you," Sister Annie put in.
Thus mountains dissolved. The soulful accord and the instant sympathy which sprang to meet her every word, and the valor behind it all, so solid as to need no explanation—were more than Paula could bear.... Reifferscheid looked up from his papers, finding that she did not speak, started with embarrassment, and darted to the buffet. A moment later he had given her a glass of wine and vanished from the room with an armful of newspapers. The door had no sooner closed upon him than Paula discovered the outstretched arms of Sister Annie. In the several moments which followed her heart was healed and soothed through a half-forgotten luxury....
"The twin-screw liner,Fruitlands,—do you really want the first?" Reifferscheid interrupted himself, when he was permitted to enter later.
"Yes."
"Well, it sails in forty-eight hours, or a little less—Savannah, Santiago de Cuba, San Juan de Porto Rico—and down to the little Antilles—Tuesday night at ten o'clock at the foot of Manhattan."
"That will do very well," Paula said, "and I'd like to go straight to the ship from here—if you'll——"
"Berth—transportation—trunks—and sub-let your flat, if you like," Reifferscheid said as gleefully as a boy invited for a week's hunt. "Why, Miss Linster, I am the original arrangement committee."
"You have always been wonderful to me," Paula could not help saying, though it shattered his ease. "This one other who must know is Madame Nestor. She'll take care of my flat and pack things for me—if you'll get a message to her in the morning when you go over. I don't expect to be gone so long that it will be advisable to sub-let."
"Which is emphatically glad tidings," Reifferscheid remarked hastily.
"You'll want all your summer clothes," said Sister Annie. "Tim will see to your trunks."
"Sometime, I'll make it all plain," Paula tried to say steadily. "It's just been life to me—this coming here—and knowing that I could come here——"
"Miss Linster," Reifferscheid broke in, "I don't want to have to disappear again. The little things you need done, I'd do for any one in the office. Please bear in mind that Sister Annie and I would be hurt—if you didn't let us do them. Why, we belong—in a case like this. Incidentally, you are doing a bully thing—to take a sail down past that toy-archipelago. They say you can hear the parakeets screeching out from the palm-trees on the shore, and each island has a different smell of spice. It will be great for you—rig you out with a new set of wings. You must take Hearn along. I've got his volume here on the West Indies. He'll tell you the color of the water your ship churns. Each day farther south it's a different blue——"
So he jockeyed her into laughing, and she slept long and dreamlessly that night, as she had done once before in the same room.... The second night following, Reifferscheid put her aboard theFruitlands.
"It's good you thought of taking your cabin under a borrowed name, Miss—er—Wyndam—Miss Laura Wyndam," he said in a low voice, for the passengers were moving about. "I'll write you all about it. You have famous friends. Selma Cross, who is playing at theHerriot, wanted to know where you were. I thought for a minute she was going to throw me down and take it away from me. Quentin Charter, by the way, is in town and asked about you. Seemed depressed when I told him you were out of town, and hadn't sent your address to me yet. I told him and Miss Cross that mail for you sent toThe Stateswould get to you eventually. Both said they would write—so you'll hear from them on the ship that follows this." He glanced at her queerly for a second, and added, "Good-by, and a blessed voyage to you, Tired Lady. Write us how the isles bewitch you, and I'll send you a package of books every ship or two——"
"Good-by—my first of friends!"
Two hours afterward Paula took a last turn on deck. The spray swept in gusts over theFruitlands'sdipping prow. The bare masts, tipped with lights, swung with a giant sweep from port to starboard and back to port again, fingering the black heavens for the blown-out stars. She was lonely, but not altogether miserable, out there on the tossing floor of the Atlantic....