Chapter III: Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

SIXTH CHAPTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

SEVENTH CHAPTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But if I should go far away?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHTH CHAPTER

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

They laughed together over the old whale-epic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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