"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, calledalgæ, 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.
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 Stateshad 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 theZoroaster. 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 greatennuiwhich 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.
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 theHerriot—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 isThe Thing. I am an ugly slaving drudge, but have all the emotions that the sweetingenueof 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 meThe Thingnow. 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 atThe 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'sCaller 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 ofThe 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 couldcarry 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 ofThe 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 ofconfettion 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....
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 inMoby 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 ofThe 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 toThe 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.