Chapter IV: Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NINTH CHAPTER

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

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

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

"Tell me more," Paula had whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TENTH CHAPTER

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

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

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

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

"Is he well?" Paula asked hastily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'I shall make it pay.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"With all my heart."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selma Cross had not bathed, nor dressed her hair. She darted in noiselessly in furry slippers--a yellow silk robe over her night-dress. Very silken and sensuous, the huge, laughing creature appeared as she sank upon the lounge and shaded her yellow eyes from the light. So perfect was her health, and so fresh her happiness, that an hour or two of sleep had not left her eyes heavy nor her skin pallid. There was an odor of sweet clover about her silks that Paula never sensed afterward without becoming violently ill. She knew she was wrong--that every fault was 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 the _Herriot_ until 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 gave _A 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 than _Nobody's Claim_ or _Shadows 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 of _A Tribute to Art_? All Danube somebodies were out to see the younger generation perpetuate the lofty culture of the place. Grandmothers were there, who played _East Lynne_ on 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 spoiled _The Thing_ last 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!'