In mid-afternoon Paula obeyed an impulse to call upon Madame Nestor. She wanted to talk with the only human being in New York who could quite understand. Madame's room was west of Eighth Avenue in Forty-fourth Street—the servant's quarter in a squalid suite, four flights up. The single window opened upon a dim shaft, heavy with emanations from many kitchens. There was not even a closet. Madame's moulted plumage was hung upon the back of the outer and only door. Books were everywhere, on the floor, in boxes, on the cot.
"My dear Paula, you felt the need of me?... I should have come to you. This does very well for me, but I dislike my poverty to be known, dear. It is not that I am the least proud, but the psychic effects of pity are depressing."
"Please, Madame Nestor, don't think of me pitying anybody! I did feel the need of you. The day has been horrible. But first, I want to tell you that I am very sorry for what I said—when you were in my rooms the other day——"
The elder woman leaned forward and kissed Paula's dress at the shoulder. There was something sweet and mild and devotional in the action, something suggestive of a wise old working-bee pausing an instant to caress its queen.
"You have been impelled to go to him, Paula?"
"Yes. It came over me quite irresistibly. I could not have been altogether myself.... I think I shall leave the city!"
Madame Nestor asked several questions, bringing out all she cared to know of Paula's experience that day. Her eyes became very bright as she said:
"I dare not advise younotto go away. Still, don't you see it—how wonderful was your victory to-day?"
"I can't always defeat him!" Paula cried. "His power comes over me and I move toward him—just as reptiles must follow a blind impulse started from without. Each time I follow, I must be weaker."
"But, Paula, each time something happens to restore you to yourself, thwarting his purpose, his projections are weakened."
"But if I should go far away?"
"He could only put it in your mind to return."
When Paula remembered the accidents which had preserved her, even when in the same city with the Destroyer, she could not doubt the salvation in putting a big stretch of the planet's curve between her and this dynamo.... Certain unfinished thinking could only be cleared through a friend like Madame Nestor.
"This physical consciousness which he has made me feel seems indescribably more sinister in erect human beings than the mating instinct in animals and birds," Paula declared with hesitation. "Can it be that women in general encounter influences—of this kind?"
"It is man's fault that women have broken all seasons," the Madame said bitterly. "Man has kept woman submerged since the beginning of time. Always eager to serve; and blest—or cursed—with the changeless passion to beallto one man—her most enduring hope to hold the exclusive love of one man—woman has adapted herself eagerly to become the monogamic answer to man's polygamic nature. Bellingham is but the embodiment of a desire which exists in greater or less degree in every man. This desire of man has disordered women. We have lost the true meaning of ourselves—I mean, as a race of women—and have become merely physical mates."
"I can hardly believe it—that even women of the streets should ever be degraded by such a horrible force," Paula said desperately. "And the sweet calm faces of some of the women we know——"
"Behind the mask of innocence, often, is a woman's terrible secret, Paula. For most women obey. Even the growth of the maid is ruthlessly forced by hot breaths of passion, until motherhood—so often a domestic tragedy—leaves the imprint of shame in her arms. The man of unlit soul has made this low play of passion his art. Woman as a race has fallen, because it is her way to please and obey. Man has taught us to believe that when he comes to our arms, we are at our highest.... And, listen, Paula, certain men of to-day, a step higher in evolution, blame woman because she has not suddenlyunlearnedher training of the ages—lessons man has graven in the very bed-rock of her nature. In the novelty of their new-found austerity, they exclaim: 'Avoid woman. She is passion rhythmic. It is she who draws us down from our lofty regions of endeavor.'"
Terrific energy of rebellion stirred Paula's mind. "But the promise is that woman's time shall come!" she exclaimed. "The Child, Jesus, said to his Mother, 'Thy time is not yet come,' but it is promised that the heel of woman shall crush the head of the Serpent. We have always borne the sin, the agony, the degradation, but our time must be close at hand! I think this is the age—and this the country—of the Rising Woman!"
Madame Nestor arose from the cot and stood before Paula, her eyes shining with emotion.
"Bless you, my beloved girl, my whole heart leaps to sanction that! I have symbolized the whole struggle of our race in your personal struggle—don't you see this, Paula?... Bellingham is the concentrate of devourers—and you the evolved woman who overcomes him! My hope for the race lies in you, and your victory to-day has filled my cup with happiness!... You say you do not dare to pray. I tell you, child,—the God of women gave you strength to-day. He is close to harken unto your need—for you are among the first of the elect to bring in the glory of the new day!... The animal in man has depleted the splendid energies of the Spirit. Passions of the kind you defeated to-day are overpowering women everywhere at this hour—lesser passions of lesser Bellinghams. Man's course to God has been a crawl through millenniums, instead of a flight through decades, because woman has bowed—obeyed. God is patient, but woman is aroused!... Above the din of wars, the world has heard the wailing of the women; out of the ghostly silence of famine and from beneath the debris of fallen empires—always the world has heard her cry for pity—her cry for pity nowbecome a Voice of Power! All her tortured centuries have been for this—and the signs are upon us! Woman's demand for knowledge, her clamor for suffrage, her protest against eternally paying for man's lust with unblessed babes—all these are signs! But you, Paula Linster,—and what I know of this day—is the most thrilling sign of all to me!... Ah, woman is evolving; she is aroused! How shall she repay man for brutalizing her so long?"
"By bringing him back to God!" Paula answered.
They wept together and whispered, while the night fell about and covered the squalid room.
It was one of her emancipated nights. Paula's spirit poured out over the city, for her mind was lit with thoughts of the ultimate redemption of her race. Bellingham could not have found her in his world that hour.... Emerging from Broadway to Forty-fourth Street, at eight in the evening, she passed under the hot brilliance of a famous hotel-entrance. As it never would have occurred to her to do in a less exalted moment, Paula glanced at a little knot of men standing under the lights. The eyes of one were roving like an unclean hand over her figure. Suddenly encountering her look, a bold, eager, challenge stretched itself upon his face. In the momentary panic, her glance darted to the others instinctively for protection—and found three smiling corpses.... Here were little Bellinghams; here, the sexual drunkenness which has made Man's course "a crawl through millenniums" to God, instead of a flight through decades. What a pitiless revelation!... She clung to her big Ideal in the West. It came to her for a second like a last and single hope—that Charter was not like that.... "God is patient and woman is aroused!" she whispered.
And farther up, a little way into Forty-seventh, Paula found a Salvation Army circle under the torch. A man with a pallid, shrunken face turned imploring eyes from one to another of the company, exclaiming: "I tell you, man's first work here below is to save his soul! I pray you—men and women, here to-night—to save your souls!"
Paula tossed her purse upon the big drum, as she passed swiftly. Luckily there was carfare in her glove, for she had not thought of that. Never before had she felt in such fullness her relation to the race....
A hansom-cab veered about the edge of the Salvation circle, swift enough to attract her eye. The horse had started before the driver was in the seat. The latter was fat and apoplectic. It was all he could do to regain his place, so that the reins still dangled. The possibility of a cab-horse becoming excited held only humor for the crowd, which parted to let the vehicle by. The horse, feeling his head, started to run just as the driver seized one of the lines and jerked his beast into the curb. There was an inhuman scream. A strange, boneless effigy of a man with twisted, waving arms—went down before the plunging horse, so suddenly swerved.... A hush seemed to have fallen upon the noisy Broadway corner. Paula was not blind in the brief interval which followed, but the world seemed gray and still, like a spectral dawn, or the unearthly setting of a dream.
"The shaft bored into him, and the horse struck him after he fell," a voice explained.
They lifted him. There was particular dreadfulness in the quantity of fluid evenly sheeted on the pavement as from a pail carefully overturned. Startling effrontery attached to the thought of man's heaven-aspiring current swimming like this upon a degraded city road. The horse, now held by the bit, snorted affrightedly at the odor. They had carried the unfortunate to the sidewalk under the lights of a tobacco-shop window. The upper part of his head and face was indefinite like a crushed tin of dark paint. But mouth and nose and chin of the upturned face left an imperishable imprint upon her mind. It was Bellingham.... Paula fled, her lips opening in a sick fashion. It seemed hours before she could reach the sanctuary of her room, where she sobbed in the dark.
The morning paper stated that Dr. Bellingham had suffered a fracture of the skull and internal injury, but might live. A note to Paula from Madame Nestor late the next day contained the following paragraph: "I called at the hospital to inquire. A doctor told me that the case is likely to become a classic one. Never in his experience, he stated, had he witnessed a man put up such a fight for life. It will be long, however, before he is abroad again. He must have been following you quite madly, because there never was a man more careful in the midst of city-dangers than Bellingham. Why, a scratched finger completely upset him—in the earlier days. Inscrutable, but thrilling—isn't it, my dear Paula?"
"Did you followMoby Dick'swhale tracks around the wet wastes of the world?" Reifferscheid asked several mornings later, as Paula entered.
Her face was flushed. A further letter from Quentin Charter had just been tucked into her bag. "Yes, and Mr. Melville over trans-continental digressions," she answered. "He surely is Neptune's ownconfrère."
"Did you get the leviathan alongside and study the bewildering chaos of a ninety-foot nervous system?" Reifferscheid went on with delight.
"Exactly, and colored miles of sea-water with the emptyings of his vast heart. Then, there was an extended process of fatty degeneration, which I believe they called—blubber-boiling."
They laughed together over the old whale-epic.
"They remember Melville up in Boston and Nantucket," he added, "but he's about as much alive as a honey-bee's pulse elsewhere. The trouble is, you can't rectify this outrage by law. It isn't uxoricide or sheep-stealing—not to know Melville—but it's the deadly sin of ingratitude. This is a raw age, we adorn—not to rock in the boat of that man's soul. Why, he's worthy to stand with the angels on the point of the present."
The big editor always warmed her when he enthused. Here, in the midst of holiday books pouring in by scores, he had time to make a big personal and public protest against a fifty-year-old novel being forgotten.
"But isn't Melville acknowledged to be the headwaters of inspiration for all later sea-books?" Paula asked.
"Yes, to the men who do them, he's the big laughing figure behind their work, but the public doesn't seem to know.... Of course, Herman has faults—Japan currents of faults—but they only warm him to a white man's heart. Do you know, I like to think of him in a wide, windy room, tearing off his story long-hand, upon yard square sheets, grinning like an ogre at the soul-play, the pages of copy settling ankle-deep upon the floor. There's no taint of over-breeding in the unborn thing, no curse of compression, no aping Addison—nothing but Melville, just blown in with the gale, reeking with a big story which must be shed, before he blows out again, with straining cordage booming in his ears. He harnesses Art. He man-handles Power, makes it grovel and play circus. 'Here it is,' he seems to say at the end. 'Take it or leave it. I'm rotting here ashore.'"
"You ought to dictate reviews like that, Mr. Reifferscheid," Paula could not help saying, though she knew he would be disconcerted.
He colored, turned back to his work, directing her to take her choice from the shelf of fresh books.... On the car going back, Paula opened Charter's letter. Her fingers trembled, because she had been in a happy and daring mood five or six days before when she wrote the letter to which this was the reply.
... Do you know, I really like to write to you? I feel untrammelled—turned loose in the meadows. It seems when I start an idea—that you've grasped it as soon as it is clear to me. Piled sentences after that are unnecessary. It's a real joy to write this way, as spirits commune. It wouldn't do at all for the blessed multitude. You have to be a mineral and a vegetable and an animal, all in a paragraph, to get the whole market. But how generous the dear old multitude is—(if the writer has suffered enough)—with its bed and board and lamplight....I have been scored and salted so many times that I heal like an earth-worm. Tell me, can scar-tissue ever be so fine? Fineness—that's the one excellent feature of being human! There's no other reason for being—no other meaning or reason for atomic affinity or star-hung space. True, the great Conceiver of Refining Thought seems pleased to take all eternity to play in....You've made me think of you out of all proportion. I don't want to help it. I'm very glad we hailed each other across the distance. There's something so entirely blithe and wise and finished about the personality I've builded from three little letters and a critique—that I refresh myself very frequently from them.... I think we must be old playmates. Perhaps we plotted ghost-stories and pegged oranges at each other in Atlantean orchards millenniums ago. I begin to feel as if I deserve to have my playmate back.... Then, again, it is as though these little letters brought to my garret window the Skylark I have heard far and faintly so long in the higher moments of dream. Just a note here and there used to come to me from far-shining archipelagoes of cloud-land. I listen now and clearly understand what you have sung so long in the Heights.... You are winged—that's the word! Wing often to my window—won't you? Life is peppering me with good things this year, I could not be more grateful.
... Do you know, I really like to write to you? I feel untrammelled—turned loose in the meadows. It seems when I start an idea—that you've grasped it as soon as it is clear to me. Piled sentences after that are unnecessary. It's a real joy to write this way, as spirits commune. It wouldn't do at all for the blessed multitude. You have to be a mineral and a vegetable and an animal, all in a paragraph, to get the whole market. But how generous the dear old multitude is—(if the writer has suffered enough)—with its bed and board and lamplight....
I have been scored and salted so many times that I heal like an earth-worm. Tell me, can scar-tissue ever be so fine? Fineness—that's the one excellent feature of being human! There's no other reason for being—no other meaning or reason for atomic affinity or star-hung space. True, the great Conceiver of Refining Thought seems pleased to take all eternity to play in....
You've made me think of you out of all proportion. I don't want to help it. I'm very glad we hailed each other across the distance. There's something so entirely blithe and wise and finished about the personality I've builded from three little letters and a critique—that I refresh myself very frequently from them.... I think we must be old playmates. Perhaps we plotted ghost-stories and pegged oranges at each other in Atlantean orchards millenniums ago. I begin to feel as if I deserve to have my playmate back.... Then, again, it is as though these little letters brought to my garret window the Skylark I have heard far and faintly so long in the higher moments of dream. Just a note here and there used to come to me from far-shining archipelagoes of cloud-land. I listen now and clearly understand what you have sung so long in the Heights.... You are winged—that's the word! Wing often to my window—won't you? Life is peppering me with good things this year, I could not be more grateful.
Letters like these made Paula think of that memorable first afternoon with Grimm; and like it, too, the joy was so intense as to hold the suggestion that there must be something evil in it all. She laughed at this. What law, human or divine, was disordered by two human grown-ups with clean minds communing together intimately in letters? Quentin Charter might have been less imperious, or less precipitous, in writing such pleasing matters about herself, but had he not earned the boon of saying what he felt? Still, Paula would not have been so entirely feminine, had she not repressed somewhat. She even may have known that artful repression from without is stimulus to any man. Occasionally, Charter forgot his sense of humor, but the woman five years younger, never. The inevitable thought that in the ordinary sequence of events, they should meet face to face, harrowed somewhat with the thought that she must keep his ideals down—or both were lost. What could a mind like hisnotbuild about months of communion (eyes and ears strained toward flashing skies) with a Skylark ideal?... She reminded Charter that skylarks are little, brown, tame-plumaged creatures that only sing when they soar. She could not forbear to note that he was a bit sky-larky, too, in his letters, and observed that she had found it wise, mainly to keep one's wings tightly folded in New York. She signed her next letter, nevertheless, with a small pen-picture of the name he had given her—full-throated and ascending. Also she put on her house address. Some of the paragraphs from letters which came in the following weeks, she remembered without referring to the treasured file:
... Bless the wings! May they never tire for long—since I cannot be there when they are folded.... Often, explain it if you can, I think of you as some one I have seen in Japan, especially in Tokyo—hurrying through the dusk in the Minimasakurna-cho, wandering through the tombs of the Forty-seven Ronins. or sipping tea in the Kameido among the wistaria blooms. Some time—who knows? I have made quite a delightful romance about it.... Who is so wise as positively to say, that we are not marvellously related from the youth of the world? Who dares declare we have not climbed cliffs of Cathay to stare across the sky-blue water, nor whispered together in orient casements under constellations that swing more perilously near than these?... We may be a pair of foolish dreamers, but Asia must have a cup of tea for us—Asia, because she is so far and so still. We shallrememberthen....And so you live alone? How strange, I have always thought of you so? From the number, I think you must overlook the Park—don't you?... It may strike you humorously, but I feel like ordering you not to take too many meals alone. One is apt to be neglectful, and women lose their appetites easier than men. I used to be graceless toward the gift of health. Perhaps I enjoy perfectly prepared food altogether too well for one of inner aspirations. The bit of a soul in which you see such glorious possibilities, packs rather an imperious animal this trip, I fear. However, I don't let the animal carryme—any more.I see a wonderful sensitiveness in all that you write—that's why I suggest especially that you should never forget fine food and plentiful exercise. Psychic activity in America is attained so often at the price of physical deterioration. This is an empty failure, uncentering, deluding. Remember, I say in America.... Pray, don't think I fail to worship sensitiveness—those high, strange emotions, the sense of oneness with all things that live, the vergings of the mind toward the intangible, the light, refreshing sleep of asceticism, subtle expandings of solitude and the mystical launchings,—anything that gives spread of wing rather than amplitude of girth—but I have seen these very pursuits carry one entirely out of rhythm with the world. The multitudes cannot follow us when there are stars in our eyes—they cannot see.A few years ago I had a strange period of deep-delving into ancient wisdom. A lot of big, simple treasures unfolded, but I discovered great dogmas as well—the steel shirts, iron shields, mailed fists and other junk which lesser men seem predestined to hammer about the gentle spirit of Truth. I vegetarianed, lived inside, practiced meditate, and became a sensitive, as it seems now, in rather a paltry, arrogant sense. The point is I lost the little appeal I had to people through writing. It came to me at length with grim finality that if a man means to whip the world into line at all, he must keep a certain brute strength. He must challenge the world at its own gamesand win, before he can show the world that there are finer games to play. You can't stand above the mists and call the crowd to you, but many willfollowyou up through them.... I truly hope, if I am wrong in this, that you will see it instantly, and not permit the edge and temper of your fineness to be coarsened through me. You are so animate, so delicately strong, and seem so spiritually unhurt, that it occurs to me now that there may be finer laws for you, than are vouchsafed to me. I interpreted my orders—to win according to certain unalterable rules of the world. Balzac did that. I think some Skylark sang to him at the last, when he did his Seraphita....I cannot help but tell you again of my gratitude. I am no impressionable boy. I know what the woman must be who writes to me.... Isn't this an excellent world when the finer moments come; when we can think with gentleness of past failures of the flesh and spirit, and with joy upon the achievements of others; when we feel that we have preserved a certain relish for the rich of all thought, and a pleasure in innocence; when out of our errors and calamities we have won a philosophy which makes serene our present voyaging and gives us keen eyes to discern the coast-lights of the future?... With lifted brow—I harken for your singing.
... Bless the wings! May they never tire for long—since I cannot be there when they are folded.... Often, explain it if you can, I think of you as some one I have seen in Japan, especially in Tokyo—hurrying through the dusk in the Minimasakurna-cho, wandering through the tombs of the Forty-seven Ronins. or sipping tea in the Kameido among the wistaria blooms. Some time—who knows? I have made quite a delightful romance about it.... Who is so wise as positively to say, that we are not marvellously related from the youth of the world? Who dares declare we have not climbed cliffs of Cathay to stare across the sky-blue water, nor whispered together in orient casements under constellations that swing more perilously near than these?... We may be a pair of foolish dreamers, but Asia must have a cup of tea for us—Asia, because she is so far and so still. We shallrememberthen....
And so you live alone? How strange, I have always thought of you so? From the number, I think you must overlook the Park—don't you?... It may strike you humorously, but I feel like ordering you not to take too many meals alone. One is apt to be neglectful, and women lose their appetites easier than men. I used to be graceless toward the gift of health. Perhaps I enjoy perfectly prepared food altogether too well for one of inner aspirations. The bit of a soul in which you see such glorious possibilities, packs rather an imperious animal this trip, I fear. However, I don't let the animal carryme—any more.
I see a wonderful sensitiveness in all that you write—that's why I suggest especially that you should never forget fine food and plentiful exercise. Psychic activity in America is attained so often at the price of physical deterioration. This is an empty failure, uncentering, deluding. Remember, I say in America.... Pray, don't think I fail to worship sensitiveness—those high, strange emotions, the sense of oneness with all things that live, the vergings of the mind toward the intangible, the light, refreshing sleep of asceticism, subtle expandings of solitude and the mystical launchings,—anything that gives spread of wing rather than amplitude of girth—but I have seen these very pursuits carry one entirely out of rhythm with the world. The multitudes cannot follow us when there are stars in our eyes—they cannot see.
A few years ago I had a strange period of deep-delving into ancient wisdom. A lot of big, simple treasures unfolded, but I discovered great dogmas as well—the steel shirts, iron shields, mailed fists and other junk which lesser men seem predestined to hammer about the gentle spirit of Truth. I vegetarianed, lived inside, practiced meditate, and became a sensitive, as it seems now, in rather a paltry, arrogant sense. The point is I lost the little appeal I had to people through writing. It came to me at length with grim finality that if a man means to whip the world into line at all, he must keep a certain brute strength. He must challenge the world at its own gamesand win, before he can show the world that there are finer games to play. You can't stand above the mists and call the crowd to you, but many willfollowyou up through them.... I truly hope, if I am wrong in this, that you will see it instantly, and not permit the edge and temper of your fineness to be coarsened through me. You are so animate, so delicately strong, and seem so spiritually unhurt, that it occurs to me now that there may be finer laws for you, than are vouchsafed to me. I interpreted my orders—to win according to certain unalterable rules of the world. Balzac did that. I think some Skylark sang to him at the last, when he did his Seraphita....
I cannot help but tell you again of my gratitude. I am no impressionable boy. I know what the woman must be who writes to me.... Isn't this an excellent world when the finer moments come; when we can think with gentleness of past failures of the flesh and spirit, and with joy upon the achievements of others; when we feel that we have preserved a certain relish for the rich of all thought, and a pleasure in innocence; when out of our errors and calamities we have won a philosophy which makes serene our present voyaging and gives us keen eyes to discern the coast-lights of the future?... With lifted brow—I harken for your singing.
Paula knew that Quentin Charter was crying out for his mate of fire. She remembered that she had strangely felt his strength before there were any letters, but she could not deny that it since had become a greater and more intimate thing—her tower, white and heroic, cutting clean through the films of distance, and suggesting a vast, invisible city at its base. That she was the bright answer in the East for such a tower was incredible. She could send a song over on the wings of the morning—make it shine like ivory into the eyes of the new day, but she dared not think of herself as a corresponding fixture. A man like Charter could form a higher woman out of dreams and letter-pages than the world could mold for him from her finest clays. Always she said this—and forgot that the man was clay. A pair of dreamers, truly, and yet there was a difference in their ideals. If Charter's vision of her lifted higher, it was also flexible to contain a human woman. As for hers—Paula had builded a tower. True, there were moments of flying fog in which she did not see it, but clean winds quickly brushed away the obscurations, and not a remnant clung. When seen at all, her tower was pure white and undiminished.
Of necessity there were reactions. His familiarity with the petty intensities of the average man often startled her. He seemed capable of dropping into the parlance of any company, not as one who had listened and memorized, but as an old familiar who had served time in all societies. In the new aspect of personal letters, his book revealed a comprehension of women—that dismayed. Of course, his printed work was filled with such stuff as her letters were made of, but between a book and a letter, there is the same difference of appeal as the lines read by an actor, however gifted, are cold compared to a friend's voice. Though she wondered at Charter giving his time to write such letters to her, this became very clear, if his inclination were anything like her own to answer them. All the thinking of her days formed itself into compressed messages for him; and all the best of her sprang to her pen under his address. The effort then became to repress, to keep her pages within bounds, and the ultimate effort was to wait several days before writing again. His every sentence suggested pleasure in writing; and as a matter of fact, he repressed very little.... Was it through letters like hers in his leisure months that Charter amassed his tremendous array of poignant details; was it through such, that he reared his imposing ranges of feminine understanding? This was a question requiring a worldlier woman than Paula long to hold in mind. In the man's writing, regarded from her critical training, there was no betrayal of the literary clerk dependent upon data.
"I am no impressionable boy. I know what the woman must be who writes to me." There was something of seership in his thus irrevocably affixing his ideal to the human woman who held the pen.... His photograph was frequently enough in the press—a big browed, plain-faced young man with a jaw less aggressive than she would have imagined, and a mouth rather finely arched for a reformer who was to whip the world into line. And then there was a discovery. In a magazine dated a decade before, she ran upon his picture among the advertising pages. Verses of his were announced to appear during the year to come. He could not have been over twenty for this picture, and to her it was completely charming—a boy out of the past calling blithely; a poetic face, too, reminding her of prints she had seen of an early drawing of Keats's head now in London—eager, sensitive, all untried!... It was not without resistance that she acknowledged herselfcloser to the boy—that something of the man was beyond her. There was a mystery left upon the face by the intervening years, "while the tireless soul etched on...." Should she ever know? Or must there always be this dim, hurting thing? Was it all the etching of thesoul—that this later print revealed?... These were but bits of shadow—ungrippable things which made her wings falter for a moment and long for something sure to rest upon, but Reifferscheid's first talk about Charter, the latter's book, and the letters—out of these were reconstructed her tower of shining purity.
There were times when Paula's heart, gathering all its tributary sympathies, poured out to the big figure in the West in a deep and rushing torrent. Her entire life was illuminated by these moments of ardor. Here was a giving, in which the thought of actual possession had little or no part. Her finest elements were merged into one-pointed expression. It is not strange that she was dismayed by the triumphant force of the woman within her, nor that she recalled one of the first of Madame Nestor's utterances, "Nonsense, Paula, the everlasting feminine is alive in every movement of you." Yet this outpouring was lofty, and noon-sky clear. An emotion like this meant brightness to every life that contacted it.... But ruthlessly she covered, hid away even from her own thoughts, illuminations such as these. Here was a point of tragic significance. Out of the past has come this great fear to strong women—the fear to let themselves love. This is one of the sorriest evolutions of the self-protecting instinct. So long have women met the tragic fact of fickleness and evasion in the men of their majestic concentrations—that fear puts its weight against the doors that love would open wide.
Almost unconsciously the personal tension of the correspondence increased. Not infrequently after her letters were gone, Paula became afraid that this new, full-powered self of hers had crept into her written pages with betraying effulgence, rising high above the light laughter of the lines. How she cried out for open honesty in the world and rebelled against the garments of falsity which society insists must cover the high as well as the low. Charter seemed to say what was in his heart; at least, he dared to write as the woman could not, as she dared not even to think, lest he prove—against the exclaiming negatives of her soul—a literary craftsman of such furious zeal that he could tear the heart out of a woman he had not seen, pin the quivering thing under his lens, to describe, with his own responsive sensations.
So the weeks were truly emotional. Swiftly, beyond any realization of her own, Paula Linster became full-length a woman. Reifferscheid found it harder and harder to talk even bossily to her, but cleared his voice when she entered, vented a few booky generalities, and cleared his voice when she went away. Keen winter fell upon his system of emptied lakes; gusty winter harped the sound of a lonely ship in polar seas among the naked branches of the big elms above his cottage; indeed, gray winter would have roughed it—in the big chap's breast, had he not buckled his heart against it.... For years, Tim Reifferscheid had felt himself aloof from all such sentiment. Weakening, he had scrutinized his new assistant keenly for the frailties with which her sex was identified in his mind. In all their talks together, she had verified not one, so that he was forced to destroy the whole worthless edition. She was a discovery, thrillingly so, since he had long believed such a woman impossible. Now he felt crude beside her, remembered everything that he had done amiss (volumes of material supposed to be out of print). Frankly, he was irritated with any one in the office who presumed to feel himself an equal with Miss Linster.... But all this was Reifferscheid's, and no other—as far from any expression of his, as thoughtless kisses or thundering heroics.
Selma Cross frequently filled the little place of books across the hall with her tremendous vibrations before the trial trip of her new play on the road. Paula liked to have her come in, delighted in the great creature's rapture over the hunch-back, Stephen Cabot, author ofThe Thing. There was an indescribably brighter luster in the waxing and waning of romantic tides, than the eyes of Paula had ever before discovered, so that the confidences of the other were of moment. Selma was terrified by some promise she had made years before in Kentucky. It was gradually driven deep into the listener's understanding that no matter how harsh and dreadful the intervening years had been, here was a woman to whom a promise meant a promise. Paula was moved almost to tears by the other's description of Stephen Cabot, and the first time she saw him.
"I wonder if the long white face with the pain-lit eyes could ever mean to any one else what it does to me?" Selma whispered raptly when they talked together one Sunday night. "Why, to see him sitting there before me at rehearsal—the finest, lowest head in all the chairs—steadies, exalts me! I hold fast to repression.... It It was Vhruebert who brought me to him, and the first words Stephen said were: 'Your manager is a wizard, Miss Cross, to get you for this. Why, you are the woman I wrote about inThe Thing!'"
"Tell me more," Paula had whispered.
"We met in Vhruebert's office and forgot the manager entirely. I guess two hours passed, as we talked, and went over the play together that first time. Vhruebert sent in his office-boy finally to remind us that he was still in the building. How we three laughed about it!... Then as we started out for luncheon together, Stephen and I, Vhruebert took his place at the door before us, and delivered himself of something like this:
"'You two listen to the father of what you are to be,'" Selma Cross went on, roughening her voice and tightening her nasal passages, to imitate the old Hebrew star-maker. "'Listen to the soulless Vhruebert, who brudalizes the great Amerigan stage. You two are Art. Very well, listen to Commerce. It took me twenty-five years to learn that there must be humor in a blay. ThisT'ingwould not lift the lip of a ganary-bird. It took me twenty-five years to learn there must be joy at the end of a blay—and wedding-bells. ThisT'ingends just about—over the hills to the mad-house. Twenty-five years proved to me what I know the first day—that women of the stage must be beautiful. Miss Gross is not. I say no more. Here I have neither dramatist nor star. I could give the blay by Gabot to Ellen Terry—or to Miss Gross, if Ibsen write it. As it is, I have no name. There are five thousand people in this country writing blays with humor and habby endings. There are ten thousand beautiful women exbiring to spend it on the stage. Yet you two are the chosen of Vhruebert. When you look into each other's eye and visper how von-der-ful you are, with rising inflection; and say, "To hell with Gommerce and the Binhead Bublic!" remember Vhruebert who advances the money!'"
"And did you remember Vhruebert in that fairy luncheon together?" Paula asked happily.
"No, I only saw the long white face of Stephen Cabot. I wanted to take him in my arms and make him whole!"
For ten weeks Bellingham lay in one of the New York hospitals. "A woman attends him," Madame Nestor informed. "She is young and has been very beautiful. How well do I know her look of impotence and apathy—that look of unresisting obedience." To Paula, the magician seemed back among the dead ages, although Madame Nestor did not regard the present lull without foreboding. Paula could not feel that her real self had been defiled. The dreadful visitations were all but erased, as pass the spectres of delirium. What was more real, and rocked the centres of her being, was the conception of this outcast's battle for life. She could not forget that it was in pursuing her, that he had been injured. Facing not only death, but extinction, this idolater of life had, as one physician expressed it, held together his shattered vitality by sheer force of will, until healing set in. The only thought comparable in terror to such a conflict, had to do with the solitudes and abject frigidity of inter-stellar spaces.
The Skylark Letters, as she came to call them, were after all, the eminent feature of the fall and winter weeks. There was a startling paragraph in one of the December series: "I think it is fitting for you to know (though, believe me, I needed no word regarding you from without), that I am not entirely in the dark as to how you have impressed another. I know nothing of the color of your hair or eyes, nothing of your size or appearance,—only just how youimpressed another. This information, it is needless to say, was unsolicited...." Just that, and no further reference. It was as though he had felt it a duty to incorporate those lines. Portions of some of the later letters follow:
Did you know, that without the upward spread of wings—there can be no song from the Skylark? This, for me, has a fragrant and delicate significance. It is true that the poor little caged-birds sing, but how sorry they are, since they have to flutter their wings to give forth sound, and cling with their claws to the bars to hold themselves down!... I think you must have been a little wing-weary when you wrote your last letter to me. Perhaps the dusk was crowding into the Heights. No one knows as I do how the Skylark has sung and sung!... You did not say it, but I think you wanted the earth-sweet meadows. It came to me like needed rain—straight to the heart of mine that little plaint in the song. It made me feel how useless is the strength of my arms.... You see, I manage pretty well to keep you up There. I must. And because you are so wonderful, I can.... An enthralling temperament rises to me from your letters. I love to let it flood through my brain....I do not feel at all sure that you know me truly. What a man's soul appears to be, through the intimations of his higher moments, is not the man altogether that humans must reckon with. Nor must they reckon with the trampling violences of one's past. I truly believe in the soul. I believe it is an essence fundamentally fine; that great mothers brood it beautifully into their babes; that it is nourished by the good a man does and thinks. I believe in the ultimate victory of the soul, against the tough, twisted fibres of flesh which rise to demand a thousand sensations. I would have you think of me as onelifting; happy in discoveries, the crown of which you are; conscious of an integrating spirit; that sometimes in my silences I answer your song as one glorified. But then, I remember that you must not judge me by the brightest of my work. Such are the trained, tense bursts of speed—the swift expiration of the best. I think a man is about half as good as his best work and half as bad as his most lamentable leisure. Midway between his emotions and exaltations—is indicated his valuation.... All men clinging to the sweep of the upward cycle, must know the evil multitude at some time. Perhaps few men have met and discarded so many personal devils as I, in a single life. But I say to you as I write to-night, those devils cast out seem far back among cannibal centuries. I worship the fine, the pure,—thoughts and deeds which are expanded and warmed by the soul's breath. And you are the anchorage of this sweeter spirit which is upon me. Now, out of the logic which life burns into the brain, comes this thought: (I set it down only to fortify the citadel of truth in which our momentous relation alone can prosper.) Are there fangs and hackles and claws which I have not yet uncovered? Am I given the present serenity as a resting-time before meeting a more subtle and formidable enemy? Has my vitality miraculously been preserved for some final battle with a champion of champions of the flesh? Is it because the sting is gone from my scar-tissues that I feel so strong and so white to-night? I cannot think this, because I have heard—because I still hear—my Skylark sing.
Did you know, that without the upward spread of wings—there can be no song from the Skylark? This, for me, has a fragrant and delicate significance. It is true that the poor little caged-birds sing, but how sorry they are, since they have to flutter their wings to give forth sound, and cling with their claws to the bars to hold themselves down!... I think you must have been a little wing-weary when you wrote your last letter to me. Perhaps the dusk was crowding into the Heights. No one knows as I do how the Skylark has sung and sung!... You did not say it, but I think you wanted the earth-sweet meadows. It came to me like needed rain—straight to the heart of mine that little plaint in the song. It made me feel how useless is the strength of my arms.... You see, I manage pretty well to keep you up There. I must. And because you are so wonderful, I can.... An enthralling temperament rises to me from your letters. I love to let it flood through my brain....
I do not feel at all sure that you know me truly. What a man's soul appears to be, through the intimations of his higher moments, is not the man altogether that humans must reckon with. Nor must they reckon with the trampling violences of one's past. I truly believe in the soul. I believe it is an essence fundamentally fine; that great mothers brood it beautifully into their babes; that it is nourished by the good a man does and thinks. I believe in the ultimate victory of the soul, against the tough, twisted fibres of flesh which rise to demand a thousand sensations. I would have you think of me as onelifting; happy in discoveries, the crown of which you are; conscious of an integrating spirit; that sometimes in my silences I answer your song as one glorified. But then, I remember that you must not judge me by the brightest of my work. Such are the trained, tense bursts of speed—the swift expiration of the best. I think a man is about half as good as his best work and half as bad as his most lamentable leisure. Midway between his emotions and exaltations—is indicated his valuation.... All men clinging to the sweep of the upward cycle, must know the evil multitude at some time. Perhaps few men have met and discarded so many personal devils as I, in a single life. But I say to you as I write to-night, those devils cast out seem far back among cannibal centuries. I worship the fine, the pure,—thoughts and deeds which are expanded and warmed by the soul's breath. And you are the anchorage of this sweeter spirit which is upon me. Now, out of the logic which life burns into the brain, comes this thought: (I set it down only to fortify the citadel of truth in which our momentous relation alone can prosper.) Are there fangs and hackles and claws which I have not yet uncovered? Am I given the present serenity as a resting-time before meeting a more subtle and formidable enemy? Has my vitality miraculously been preserved for some final battle with a champion of champions of the flesh? Is it because the sting is gone from my scar-tissues that I feel so strong and so white to-night? I cannot think this, because I have heard—because I still hear—my Skylark sing.
The personal element of the foregoing and the hint of years of "wrath and wanderings," which she saw in his second photograph, correlated themselves in Paula's mind. They frightened her cruelly, but did not put Charter farther away. Remembering the effect of the passion which Bellingham had projected into her own brain, helped her vaguely to understand Charter's earlier years. His splendid emancipation from past evils lifted her soul. And when he asked, if his present serenity might not be a preparation for a mightier struggle, the serious reflection came—might she not ask the same question of herself? The old Flesh-Mother does not permit one to rest when one is full of strength.... Paula perceived that Quentin Charter was bravely trying to get to some sort of rational adjustment her ideal of him and the blooded reality—and to preserve her from all hurt. Doubts could not exist in a mind besieged by such letters.... One of her communications must have reflected something of her terror at the vague forms of his past, which he partially unveiled, for in answer he wrote:
Do not worry again about the Big Back Time. Perhaps I was over assertive about the shadowed years. The main thing is that this is the wonderful present—and you, my white ally of nobler power and purpose. A gale of good things will come to us—hopes, communions and inspirations. We shall know each other—grow so fine together—that Mother Earth at last will lose her down-pull upon us—as upon perfumes and sunbeams. You have come with mystical brightening. You are the New Era. There is healing in Gethsemanes since you have swept with grace and imperiousness into possession of the Charter heart-country so long undiscovered. The big area is lit, redeemed from chaos. It is thrilling—since you are there. Never must you wing away.... Sometime you shall know with what strength and truth and tenderness I regard you. The spirit of spring is in my veins. It would turn to summer if we were together, but there could be no reacting winter because you have evolved a mind and a soul.... Body and mind and soul all evenly ignited—what a conception of woman!
Do not worry again about the Big Back Time. Perhaps I was over assertive about the shadowed years. The main thing is that this is the wonderful present—and you, my white ally of nobler power and purpose. A gale of good things will come to us—hopes, communions and inspirations. We shall know each other—grow so fine together—that Mother Earth at last will lose her down-pull upon us—as upon perfumes and sunbeams. You have come with mystical brightening. You are the New Era. There is healing in Gethsemanes since you have swept with grace and imperiousness into possession of the Charter heart-country so long undiscovered. The big area is lit, redeemed from chaos. It is thrilling—since you are there. Never must you wing away.... Sometime you shall know with what strength and truth and tenderness I regard you. The spirit of spring is in my veins. It would turn to summer if we were together, but there could be no reacting winter because you have evolved a mind and a soul.... Body and mind and soul all evenly ignited—what a conception of woman!
Paula begged him not to try to fit such an ideal of the finished feminine to a little brown tame-plumaged skylark. Since they might some time meet, she wrote, it was nothing less than unfair for his mind, trained to visualize its images so clearly, to turn its full energies upon an ideal, and expect a human stranger—a happening—in the workaday physical vesture (such as is needed for New York activities) to sublimate the vision. She told him that he would certainly flee away from the reality, and that he would have no one but himself to blame. Visions, she added, do not review books nor write to authors whom they have not met. All of which, she expressed very lightly, though she could not but adore the spirit of ideality to which she had aroused his faculties.
At this time Paula encountered one of the imperishable little books of the world, bracing to her spirit as a day's camp among mountain-pines. Nor could she refrain from telling Charter about "The Practice of the Presence of God," as told in the conversations of Brother Lawrence, a bare-footed Carmelite of the Seventeenth Century. "No wilderness wanderings seem to have intervened between the Red Sea and the Jordan of his experience," she quoted from the preface, and told him how simple it was for this unlearned man to be good—a mere "footman and soldier" whose illumination was the result of seeing a dry and leafless tree in mid-winter, and the thought of the change that would come to it with the Spring. His whole life thereafter, largely spent in the monastery kitchen—"a great awkward fellow, who broke everything"—was conducted as if God were his constantly advising Companion. It was a life of supernal happiness—and so simple to comprehend. Charter's reply to this letter proved largely influential in an important decision Paula was destined to make.
Yes, I have communed with Brother Lawrence—carried the little volume with me on many voyages. I commend a mind that is fine enough to draw inspiration from a message so chaste and simple. You will be interested to hear that I have known another Brother Lawrence—a man whose holiness one might describe as "humble" or "lofty," with equal accuracy. This man is a Catholic priest, Father Fontanel of Martinique. His parish is in that amazing little port, Saint Pierre—where Africa and France were long ago transplanted and have fused together so enticingly. Lafcadio Hearn's country—you will say. I wonder that this inscrutable master, Hearn, missed Father Fontanel in his studies.... I was rough from the seas and a long stretch of military campaigning, when my ship turned into that lovely harbor of Saint Pierre. Finding Father Fontanel, I stayed over several ships, and the healing of his companionship restores me even now to remember.We would walk together on theMorne d'Orangein the evening. His church was on the rise of themorneat the foot ofRue Victor Hugo. He loved to hear about my explorations in books, especially about my studies among the religious enthusiasts. I would tell him of the almost incredible austerities of certain mystics to refine the body, and it was really a sensation to hear him exclaim in his French way: "Can it be possible? I am very ignorant. All that I know is to worship the good God who is always with me, and to love my dear children who have so much to bear. I do not know why I should be so happy—unless it is because I know so very little. Tell me why I live in a state of continual transport...." I can hear his gentle Latin tones even now at night when I shut my eyes—see the lights of the shipping from that cliff road, hear the creoles' moaning songs from the cabins, and recall the old volcano,La Montagne Peleé, outlined like a huge couchant beast against the low, northern stars.Father Fontanel has meant very much to me. In all my thinking upon the ultimate happiness of the race, he stands out as the bright achievement. At the time I knew him, there was not a single moment of his life in which the physical of the man was supreme. What his earlier years were I do not know, of course, but I confess now I should like to know.... The presence of God was so real to him, that Father Fontanel did not understand at all his own great spiritual strength. Nor do his people quite appreciate how great he is among the priests of men. He has been in their midst so long that they seem accustomed to his power. Only a stranger can realize what a pure, shining garment his actualfleshhas become. To me there was healing in the very approach of this man.Dear Father Fontanel! All I had to do was to substitute "Higher Self" for "God" and I had my religion—the Practice of the Presence of the Higher Self. Does it not seem very clear to you?... To me, God is always an abstraction—something of vaster glory than the central sun, but one's Spiritual Body, the real being, integrated through interminable lives, from the finest materials of thought and action—this Higher Self is the Presence I must keep always with me, and do I not deserve that It should stand scornfully aloof, when, against my better knowledge, I fall short in the performance?... I think it is his Higher Self which is so lustrous in Father Fontanel, and the enveloping purity which comes from you is the same. About such purity there is nothing icy nor fibrous nor sterile.... You are singing in my heart, Skylark.
Yes, I have communed with Brother Lawrence—carried the little volume with me on many voyages. I commend a mind that is fine enough to draw inspiration from a message so chaste and simple. You will be interested to hear that I have known another Brother Lawrence—a man whose holiness one might describe as "humble" or "lofty," with equal accuracy. This man is a Catholic priest, Father Fontanel of Martinique. His parish is in that amazing little port, Saint Pierre—where Africa and France were long ago transplanted and have fused together so enticingly. Lafcadio Hearn's country—you will say. I wonder that this inscrutable master, Hearn, missed Father Fontanel in his studies.... I was rough from the seas and a long stretch of military campaigning, when my ship turned into that lovely harbor of Saint Pierre. Finding Father Fontanel, I stayed over several ships, and the healing of his companionship restores me even now to remember.
We would walk together on theMorne d'Orangein the evening. His church was on the rise of themorneat the foot ofRue Victor Hugo. He loved to hear about my explorations in books, especially about my studies among the religious enthusiasts. I would tell him of the almost incredible austerities of certain mystics to refine the body, and it was really a sensation to hear him exclaim in his French way: "Can it be possible? I am very ignorant. All that I know is to worship the good God who is always with me, and to love my dear children who have so much to bear. I do not know why I should be so happy—unless it is because I know so very little. Tell me why I live in a state of continual transport...." I can hear his gentle Latin tones even now at night when I shut my eyes—see the lights of the shipping from that cliff road, hear the creoles' moaning songs from the cabins, and recall the old volcano,La Montagne Peleé, outlined like a huge couchant beast against the low, northern stars.
Father Fontanel has meant very much to me. In all my thinking upon the ultimate happiness of the race, he stands out as the bright achievement. At the time I knew him, there was not a single moment of his life in which the physical of the man was supreme. What his earlier years were I do not know, of course, but I confess now I should like to know.... The presence of God was so real to him, that Father Fontanel did not understand at all his own great spiritual strength. Nor do his people quite appreciate how great he is among the priests of men. He has been in their midst so long that they seem accustomed to his power. Only a stranger can realize what a pure, shining garment his actualfleshhas become. To me there was healing in the very approach of this man.
Dear Father Fontanel! All I had to do was to substitute "Higher Self" for "God" and I had my religion—the Practice of the Presence of the Higher Self. Does it not seem very clear to you?... To me, God is always an abstraction—something of vaster glory than the central sun, but one's Spiritual Body, the real being, integrated through interminable lives, from the finest materials of thought and action—this Higher Self is the Presence I must keep always with me, and do I not deserve that It should stand scornfully aloof, when, against my better knowledge, I fall short in the performance?... I think it is his Higher Self which is so lustrous in Father Fontanel, and the enveloping purity which comes from you is the same. About such purity there is nothing icy nor fibrous nor sterile.... You are singing in my heart, Skylark.
The picture Charter had drawn of Father Fontanel of Saint Pierre appealed strongly to Paula; and her mind's quick grasp of the Charter religion—the Practice of the Presence of the Higher Self—became one of her moments of illumination. This was ground-down simplicity. True, every idea of Charter's was based upon reincarnation. Indeed, this seemed so familiar to him, that he had not even undertaken to state it as one of his fundamentals. But had she cared, she could have discarded even that, from the present concept. So to live that the form of the best within be not degraded; the days a constant cherishing of this Invisible Friend; the conduct of life constantly adjusted to please this Companion of purity and wisdom—here was ethics which blew away every cloud impending upon her Heights. Years of such living could not but bring one to the Uplands. As to Charter, God had always been to her The Ineffable—source of solar, aye, universal energy—the Unseen All. "Walking with God," "talking with God," "a personal God," "presence of God,"—these were forms of speech she could never use, but the Higher Self—this white charioteer—the soul-body that rises when the clay falls—here was a Personal God, indeed.
Selma Cross did not reach New York until the morning of the opening day at theHerriot Theatre. She was very tired from rehearsals and the try-outs along the string of second cities. There had been a big difference of opinion regardingThe Thing, among what New Yorkers are pleased to call the provincial critics. From the character of the first notices, on the contrary, it was apparent that the townsmen were not a little afraid to trust such a startling play to New York. Mid-forenoon of an early April day, the actress rapped upon Paula's door.
"I have seen the boards," Paula exclaimed. "'Selma Cross' in letters big as you are; and yesterday afternoon they were hanging the electric sign in front of theHerriot. Also I shall be there to-night—since I was wise enough to secure a ticket ten days ago. Isn't it glorious?"
"Yes, I am quite happy about it," Selma Cross said, stretching out upon the lounge. "Of course, it's not over until we see the morning papers. I was never afraid—even of the vitriol-throwers, before. You see, I have to think about success for Stephen Cabot, too."
"Is he well?" Paula asked hastily.
"Oh yes, though I think sometimes he's a martyr. Oh, I have so much to say——"
"You said you would tell me some time how Vhruebert first decided to take you on," Paula urged.
"Before I got to the gate where the star-stuff passes through?" Selma Cross answered laughingly. "That was four years ago. I had been to him many times before he let me in. His chair squeaked under him. He looked at me first as if he were afraid I would spring at him. I told him what I could do, and he kept repeating that he didn't know it and New York didn't know it. I said I would show New York, but unfortunately I had to show him first. He screwed up his face and stared at me, as if I were startlingly original in my ugliness. I know he could hear my heart beat.
"'I can't do anything for you, Miss Gross,' he said impatiently, but in spite of himself, he added, 'Come to-morrow.' You see, I had made him think, and that hurt. He knew something of my work all right, and wondered where he would put a big-mouthed, clear-skinned, yellow-eyed amazon. The next day, he kept me waiting in the reception-room until I could have screamed at the half-dressed women on the walls.
"'I don't know exactly why I asked you to come again,' was his greeting when the door finally opened to me. 'What was it, once more, that you mean to do?'
"'I mean to be the foremost tragedienne,' I said.
"'Sit down. Tragedy doesn't bay.'
"'I shall make it pay.'
"'Um-m. How do you know? Some brivate vire of yours?'
"'I can show you that I shall make it pay.'
"'My Gott, not here! We will go to the outskirts.'
"And he meant it, Paula. It was mid-winter. He took me to a little summer-theatre up Lenox way. The place had not been open since Thanksgiving. Vhruebert sat down in the centre of the frosty parquet, shivering in his great coat. You know he's a thin-lipped, smile-less little man, but not such a dead soul as he looks. He leaks out occasionally through the dollar-varnish. Can you imagine a colder reception? Vhruebert sat there blowing out his breath repeatedly, seemingly absorbed in the effect the steam made in a little bar of sunlight which slanted across the icy theatre. That was my try-out before Vhruebert. I gave him some of Sudermann, Boker, and Ibsen. He raised his hand finally, and when I halted, he called in a bartender from the establishment adjoining, and commanded me to give something from Camille and Sapho. I would have murdered him if he had been fooling me after that. The bartender shivered in the cold.
"'What do you think of that, Mr. Vite-Apron?' Vhruebert inquired at length. He seemed to be warmer.
"'Hot stuff,' said the man. 'It makes your coppers sizzle.'
"The criticism delighted Vhruebert. 'Miss Gross, you make our goppers sizzle,' he exclaimed, and then ordered wine and told me to be at his studio to-morrow at eleven. That was the real winning," Selma Cross concluded. "To-night I put the crown on it."
Paula invariably felt the fling of emotions when Selma Cross was near. The latter seemed now to have found her perfect dream; certainly there was fresh coloring and poise in her words and actions. It was inspiriting for Paula to think of Selma Cross and Stephen Cabot having been accepted by the hard-headed Vhruebert—that such a pair could eat his bread and drink his wine with merry hearts. It was more than inspiriting for her to think of this vibrant heart covering and mothering the physically unfortunate. Paula asked, as only a woman could, the question uppermost in both minds.
"Love me?" Selma whispered. "I don't know, dear. I know we love to be together. I know that I love him. I know that he would not ask me to take for a husband—a broken vessel——"
"But you can make him know that—to you—he is not a broken vessel!... Oh, that would mean so little to me!"
"Yes, but I should have to tell him—of old Villiers—and the other!... Oh, God, he is white fire! He is not the kind who could understand that!... I thought I could do anything, I said, 'I am case-hardened. Nothing can make me suffer!... I will go my way,—and no man, no power, earthly or occult, can make me alter that way,' but Stephen Cabot has done it. I would rather win for him to-night, than be called the foremost living tragedienne.... I think he loves me, but there is the price I paid—and I didn't need to pay it, for I had already risen out of the depths. That was vanity. I needed no angel. I didn't care until I met Stephen Cabot!"
"I think—I think, if I were Stephen Cabot, I could forgive that," Paula said slowly. She wondered at herself for these words when she was alone, and the little place of books was no longer energized by the other's presence.
Selma started up from the lounge, stretched her great arm half across the room and clutched Paula's hand. There was a soft grateful glow in the big yellow eyes. "Do you know that means something—from a woman like you? Always I shall remember that—as a fine thing from my one fine woman. Mostly, they have hated me—what you call—our sisters."
"You are a different woman—you're all brightened, since you met Stephen Cabot. I feel this," Paula declared.
"Even if all smoothed out here, there is still the old covenant in Kentucky," Selma said, after a moment, and sprang to her feet, shaking herself full-length.
"Won't you tell me about that, too?"
"Yes, but not now. I must go down-town. There is a dress-maker—andwebreakfast together.... Root for me—for us, to-night—won't you, dear girl?"
"With all my heart."
They passed out through the hall together—just as the elevator-man tucked a letter under the door.... Alone, Paula read this Spring greeting from Quentin Charter:
I look away this morning into the brilliant East. I think of you there—as glory waits. I feel the strength of a giant to battle through dragons of flesh and cataclysms of Nature.... Who knows what conflicts, what conflagrations, rage in the glowing distance—between you and me? Not I, but that I have strength—I do know.... By the golden glory of this wondrous Spring morning which spreads before my eyes a world of work and heroism blessed of the Most High God, I only ask to know that you are there—that you are there.... While eternity is yet young, we shall emerge out of time and distance; though it be from a world altered by great cosmic shattering—yet shall we emerge, serene man and woman.You are there in the brilliant East. In good time I shall go to you. Meanwhile I have your light and your song. The dull dim brute is gone from me, forever. Even that black prince of the blood, Passion, stands beyond the magnetic circle. With youthere, I feel a divine right kingship, and all the black princes of the body are afar off, herding with the beasts. I tell you, since I have heard the Skylark sing—there is no death.
I look away this morning into the brilliant East. I think of you there—as glory waits. I feel the strength of a giant to battle through dragons of flesh and cataclysms of Nature.... Who knows what conflicts, what conflagrations, rage in the glowing distance—between you and me? Not I, but that I have strength—I do know.... By the golden glory of this wondrous Spring morning which spreads before my eyes a world of work and heroism blessed of the Most High God, I only ask to know that you are there—that you are there.... While eternity is yet young, we shall emerge out of time and distance; though it be from a world altered by great cosmic shattering—yet shall we emerge, serene man and woman.
You are there in the brilliant East. In good time I shall go to you. Meanwhile I have your light and your song. The dull dim brute is gone from me, forever. Even that black prince of the blood, Passion, stands beyond the magnetic circle. With youthere, I feel a divine right kingship, and all the black princes of the body are afar off, herding with the beasts. I tell you, since I have heard the Skylark sing—there is no death.
That day became a vivid memory. Charter reached the highest pinnacle of her mind—a man who could love and who could wait. The message from the West exalted her. Here, indeed, was one of the New Voices. All through the afternoon, out of the hushes of her mind, would rise this pæan from the West—sentence after sentencefor her.... No, not for her alone. She saw him always in the midst of his people, illustrious among his people.... She saw him coming to her over mountains—again and again, she caught a glimpse of him, configured among the peaks, and striding toward her—yet between them was a valley torn with storm.... It came to her that there must be a prophecy in this message; that he would not be suffered to come to her easily as his letters came. Yet, the strength he had felt was hers, and those were hours of ecstasy—while the gray of the Spring afternoon thickened into dark. OnlyThe Thingcould have called her out that night; for once, when it was almost time to go, the storm lifted from the valley between them. She saw his path to her, just for an instant, and she longed to see it again....
Paula entered the theatre a moment before the curtain rose, but in the remaining seconds of light, discovered in the fourth aisle far to the right—"the finest, lowest head" and the long white face of Stephen Cabot. If a man's face may be called beautiful, his was—firm, delicate, poetic,—brilliant eyes, livid pallor. And the hand in which the thin cheek rested, while large and chalky-white, was slender as a girl's.... In the middle of the first act, a tall, elderly man shuffled down the aisle and sank into the chair in front of Paula, where he sprawled, preparing to be bored. This was Felix Larch, one of the best known of the metropolitan critics, notorious as a play-killer.
The first-night crowd can be counted on. It meant nothing to Vhruebert that the house was packed. The venture was his up to the rise of the curtain. Paula was absorbed by the first two acts of the play, but did not feel herself fit to judge. She was too intensely interested in the career of Selma Cross; in the face of Stephen Cabot; in the attitudes of Felix Larch, who occasionally forgot to pose. It was all very big and intimate, but the bigger drama, up to the final curtain, was the battle for success against the blasé aspirations of the audience and the ultra-critical enemy personified in the man before her.
The small and excellent company was balanced to a crumb. Adequate rehearsals had finished the work. Then the lines were rich, forceful and flowing—strange with a poetic quality that "got across the footlights." Paula noted these exterior matters with relief. Unquestionably the audience forgot itself throughout the second act. Paula realized, with distaste, that her own critical sense was bristling for trouble. She had hoped to be as receptive to emotional enjoyment as she imagined the average play-goer to be. Though she failed signally in this, her sensibilities were in no way outraged, nor even irritated. On the contrary, she began to rise to the valor of the work and its performance. The acting of Selma Cross, though supreme in repression, was haunting, unforgettable. Felix Larch had twice disturbed her by taking his seat in the midst of the first and second acts. She had heard that he rarely sat out a whole performance, and took it therefore as a good omen when he returned, in quite a gentlemanly fashion, as the final curtain rose.
By some new mastery of style, Selma Cross had managed, almost throughout, to keep her profile to the audience. The last act was half gone, moreover, before the people realized that there were qualities in her voice, other than richness and flexibility. She had held them thus far with the theme, charging the massed consciousness of her audience with subtle passions. Now came the rising moments. Full into the light she turned her face.... She was quite alone with her tragedy. A gesture of the great bare arm, as the stage darkened, and she turned loose upon the men and women a perfect havoc of emptiness—in the shadows of which was manifesting a huge unfinished human. She made the people see how a mighty passion, suddenly bereft of its object, turns to devour the brain that held it. They saw the great, gray face ofThe Thingslowly rubbed out—saw the mind behind it, soften and run away into chaos. There was a whisper, horrible with exhaustion—a breast beaten in the gloom.
Felix Larch swore softly....The Thingwas laughing as the curtain crawled down over her—an easy, wind-blown, chattering laugh....
The critic grasped the low shoulders of a bald, thin-lipped acquaintance, exclaiming:
"Where did you get that diadem, Lucky One?"
Paula heard a hoarse voice, but the words of the reply were lost.
"Come over across the street for a minute. I want a stimulant and a talk with you," Felix Larch added, wriggling into his overcoat.
There was a low, husky laugh, and then plainly these words: "She makes your goppers sizzle—eh?... Wait until I tell her she has won and I'll go with you," added the queer little man, whom Paula knew now to be Vhruebert....
The latter passed along the emptied aisle toward Stephen Cabot, who had not left his seat. Paula noted with a start that the playwright's head had dropped forward in a queer way. Vhruebert glanced at him, and grasped his shoulder. The old manager then cleared his throat—a sound which apparently had meaning for the nearest usher, who hurried forward to be dispatched for a doctor. It was very cleverly and quietly done.... Stephen Cabot, who could see more deeply than others into the art of the woman and the power of his own lines, and possibly deeper into the big result of this fine union of play and player—had fainted at the climacteric moment.... A physician now breasted his way through the crowd at the doors, andThe Thingsuddenly appeared in the nearest box and darted forward like a rush of wind. She gathered the insensible one in her arms and repeated his name low and swiftly.
"Yes," he murmured, opening his eyes at last.
They seemed alone.... Presently Stephen Cabot laughingly protested that he was quite well, and disappeared behind the scenes, assisted by the long, bare arm that had so recently hurled havoc over the throng. Paula waited for a few moments at the door until she was assured.
Driving home through the Park, she felt that she could not endure another emotion. For a long time she tossed restlessly in bed, too tired to sleep. A reacting depression had fallen upon her worn nerves. She could not forget the big structure of the day's joy, but substance had dropped from it.... The cold air sweeping through her sleeping-room seemed to come from desolate mountains. Lost entirely was her gladness of victory in the Selma Cross achievement. She called herself spiteful, ungrateful, and quite miserably at last sank into sleep....
She was conscious at length of the gray of morning, a stifling pressure in her lungs, and the effort to rouse herself. She felt the cold upon her face; yet the air seemed devitalized by some exhausting voltage, she had known before. There was a horrid jangle in her brain, as of two great forces battling to complete the circuit there. A face imploring from a garret-window, a youth in a lion's skin, a rock in the desert and a rock in the Park, the dim hotel parlor and the figure of yesterday among the mountain-peaks—so the images rushed past—until the tortured face of Bellingham (burning eyes in the midst of ghastly pallor), caught and held her mind still. From a room small as her own, and gray like her own with morning, he called to her: "Come to me.... Come to me, Paula Linster.... I have lived for you—oh, come to me!"
She sprang out of bed, and knelt. How long it was before she freed herself, Paula never knew. Indeed, she was not conscious of being actually awake, until she felt the bitter cold and hurried into the heated room beyond. She was physically wretched, but no longer obsessed.... She would not believe now that the beyond-devil had called again. It was all a dream, she told herself again and again—this rush of images and the summons from the enemy. Yesterday, she had been too happy; human bodies cannot endure so long such refining fire; to-day was the reaction and to-morrow her old strength and poise would come again. Quite bravely, she assured herself that she was glad to pay the price for the hours of yesterday. She called for the full series of morning papers, resolving to occupy her mind with the critical notices of the new play.
These were quite remarkable in the unanimity of their praise. The Cross-Cabot combination had won, indeed, but Paula could extract no buoyancy from the fact, nor did black coffee dispel the vague premonitive shadows which thickened in the background of her mind. The rapping of Selma Cross upon her door was hours earlier than ever before. She, too, had called for the morning papers. A first night is never finished until these are out. Paula did not feel equal to expressing all that the play had meant to her. It was with decided disinclination that she admitted her neighbor.
Selma Cross had not bathed, nor dressed her hair. She darted in noiselessly in furry slippers—a yellow silk robe over her night-dress. Very silken and sensuous, the huge, laughing creature appeared as she sank upon the lounge and shaded her yellow eyes from the light. So perfect was her health, and so fresh her happiness, that an hour or two of sleep had not left her eyes heavy nor her skin pallid. There was an odor of sweet clover about her silks that Paula never sensed afterward without becoming violently ill. She knew she was wrong—that every fault was hers—but she could not bear the way her neighbor cuddled this morning in the fur of the couch-covering. Selma had brought in every morning newspaper issued and a thick bundle of telegrams besides. Paula told her, literally forcing the sentences, how splendidly the play and her own work had appealed to her. This task, which would have been a pure delight at another time, was adequately accomplished only after much effort now. It appeared that the actress scarcely heard what she was saying. The room was brightening and there was a grateful piping of steam in the heaters of the apartment.
"So glad you liked it, dear," Selma said briefly. "And isn't it great the way the papers treated it? Not one of them panned the play nor my work.... I say, it's queer when a thing you've dreamed of for years comes true at last—it's different from the way you've seen it come to others. I mean there's something unique and a fullness you never imagined. Oh, I don't know nor care what I'm drowning to say.... Please do look over these telegrams—from everybody! There's over a hundred! I had to come in here. I'd have roused you out of bed—if you hadn't been up. The telephone will be seething a little later—and I wanted this talk with you."
Big theatrical names were attached to the yellow messages. It is a custom for stages-folk to speed a new star through the first performance with a line of courage—wired. You are supposed to count your real friends in those who remember the formality. It is not well to be a day late....
"And did you notice how Felix Larch uncoiled?"
Paula looked up from the telegrams to explain how this critic had been the object of her contemplation the night before.
"He hasn't turned loose in that sort of praise this season," Selma Cross added. "His notice alone, dear, is enough to keep us running at theHerriotuntil June—and we'll open there again in the fall, past doubt."
Paula felt wicked in that she must enthuse artificially. She forced herself to remember that ordinarily she could have sprung with a merry heart into the very centre of the other's happiness.
"Listen, love," Selma resumed, ecstactically hugging her pillow, "I want to tell you things. I wanted to yesterday, but I had to hurry off. You've got so much, that you must have the rest. Besides, it's in my mind this morning, because it was the beginning of last night——"
"Yes, tell me," Paula said faintly, bringing her a cup of coffee.
"I was first smitten with the passion to act—a gawky girl of ten at a child's party," Selma began. "I was speaking a piece when the impulse came to turn loose. It may have been because I was so homely and straight-haired, or it may have been that I did the verses so differently from the ordinary routine of speaking pieces—anyway, a boy in the room laughed. Another boy immediately bored in upon the scoffer, downed his enemy and was endeavoring hopefully to kill him with bare hands, when I interfered. My champion and I walked home together and left a wailing and disordered company. That's the first brush.
"My home was Danube, Kentucky. They had a dramatic society there. Eight years after the child's party, this dramatic society gaveA Tribute to Art. Where the piece came from is forgotten. How it got its name never was known outside of the sorry brain that thrust it, deformed but palpitating, upon the world. Mrs. Fiske couldn't have made other than a stick of the heroine. The hero was larger timber, though too dead for vine leaves. But, I think I told you about the Big Sister—put there in blindness or by budding genius. There were possibilities in that character. Danube didn't know it, or it wouldn't have fallen to me. Indeed, I remember toward the end of the piece—a real moment of windy gloom and falling leaves, a black-windowed farmhouse on the left, the rest a desolate horizon—in such a moment the Big Sister plucks out her heart to show its running death.
"I had persisted in dramatic work, in and out of season, during those eight years, but it really was because the Big Sister didn't need to be beautiful that I got the part. I wove the lines tighter and sharpened the thing in rehearsals, until the rest of the cast became afraid, not that I would outshine them, but that I might disgrace the society on the night o' nights. You see, I was only just tolerated. Poor father, he wasn't accounted much in Danube, and there was a raft of us. Poor, dear man!
"Danube wasn't big enough to attract real shows, so the visiting drama gave expression to limited trains, trap-doors, blank cartridges and falling cliffs"—Selma Cross chuckled expansively at the memory—"and I plunged my fellow-townsmen into waters deeper and stormier thanNobody's ClaimorShadows of a Great City. Wasn't it monstrous?"
Paula inclined her head, but was not given time to answer.
"A spring night in Kentucky—hot, damp, starlit—shall I ever forget that terrible night ofA Tribute to Art? All Danube somebodies were out to see the younger generation perpetuate the lofty culture of the place. Grandmothers were there, who playedEast Lynneon the same stage—before the raids of Wolfert and Morgan; and daddies who sat like deans, eyes dim, but artistic, you know—watched the young idea progress upon familiar paths.... The heroine did the best she could. I was a camel beside her—strode about her raging and caressing. You see how I could have spoiledThe Thinglast night—if I had let the passion flood through me like a torrent through a broken dam? That's what I did in Danube—and some full-throated baying as well. Oh, it is horrible to remember.
"The town felt itself brutalized, and justly. I had left a rampant thing upon every brain, and very naturally the impulse followed to squelch the perpetrator for all time. I don't blame Danube now. I had been bad; my lack of self-repression, scandalous. The part, as I had evolved it, was out of all proportion to the piece, to Danube, to amateur theatricals. I don't know if I struck a false note, but certainly I piled on the feeling.
"Can you imagine, Paula, that it was an instant of singular glory to me—that climax?... Poor Danube couldn't see that I was combustible fuel, freshly lit; that I was bound to burn with a steady flame when the pockets of gas were exploded.... My dazed people did not leave the hall at once. It was as if they had taken strong medicine and wanted to study the effect upon each other. I came out from behind at last, up the aisle, sensing disorder where I had expected praise, and was joined by my old champion, Calhoun Knox, who had whipped the scoffer at the child's party. He pressed my hand. We had always been friends. Passing around the edge of the crowd, I heard this sentence:
"'Some one—the police, if necessary—must prevent Selma Cross from making another such shocking display of herself!'
"It was a woman who spoke, and the man at her side laughed. I had no time nor thought to check Calhoun. He stepped up to the man beside the woman. 'Laugh like that again,' he said coldly, 'and I'll kill you!'
"It seemed to me that all Danube turned upon us. My face must have been mist-gray. I know I felt like falling. The woman's words had knifed me.
"'Oh, you cat-minds!' I flung at them. Calhoun Knox drew me out into the dark. I don't know how far out on the Lone Ridge Pike we walked, before it occurred to either of us to halt or speak," Selma Cross went on very slowly. "I think we walked nearly to the Knobs. The night had cleared. It was wonderfully still out there among the hemp-fields. I knew how he was pitying me, and told him I must go away.
"'I can't stand for you to go away, Selma,' Calhoun said. 'I want you to stay and be mine always. We always got along together. You are beautiful enough to me!'
"I guess it was hard for him to say it," the woman finished with a laugh, "I used to wish he hadn't put in that 'enough.' But that moment—it was what I needed. There was always something big and simple about Calhoun Knox. My hand darted to his shoulder and closed there like a mountaineer's, 'You deserve more of a woman than I am, Calhoun,' I said impetuously, 'but you can have me when I come to marry—but, God, that's far off. I like you, Calhoun. I'd fight for you to the death—as you fought for me to-night and long ago. I think I'd hate any woman who got you—but there's no wife in me to-night. I have failed to win Danube, Kentucky, but I'll win the world. I may be a burnt-out hag then, but I'll come back—when I have won the world—and you can have me and it.... Listen, Calhoun Knox, if ever a man meanshusbandto me—you shall be the man, but to-night,' I ended with a flourish, and turned back home, 'I'm not a woman—just a devil at war with the world!'"
"But haven't you heard from him?" Paula asked, after a moment.
"Yes, he wrote and wrote. Calhoun Knox is the kind of stuff that remembers. The time came when I didn't have the heart to answer. I was afraid I'd ask him for money, or ask him to come to help me. Help out of Danube! I couldn't do that—better old Villiers.... But I mustn't lie to you. I went through the really hard part alone.... So Calhoun's letters were not answered, and maybe he has forgotten. Anyway, before I marry—he shall have his chance. Oh, I'll make it hard for him. I wouldn't open any letter from Danube now—but he shall have his chance——"
"What do you mean to do?"
"Why, we'll finish the season here—and Vhruebert has promised us a little run in the West during June. We touch Cincinnati. From there I'll take the Company down to Danube. I've got to win the world and Danube. After the play, I'll walk out on the Lone Ridge pike—among the hemp-fields—with Calhoun Knox——"
"But he may have married——"
"God, how I hope so! I shall wish him kingly happiness—and rush back to Stephen Cabot."