Chapter VII: Part 7

Selma Cross arose and paced the room, stretching out her great arms from time to time as she walked. "You're getting back your glibness," she exclaimed, "your quick little sentences which fit in so nicely! Ah, I know them well, as other women are learning them. But I have things which you cannot answer so easily--you of the garret penances.... You find a starved woman of thirty--play with her for a fortnight, showing her everything that she can desire, and seeming to have no thought, but of her. I discover that there was not a moment in which you were so ardent that you forgot to be an analyst. I forgive that, as you might forgive things in my day's work. You put on your gray garret-garb, and forget the hearts of my people, to uncover their weaknesses before the world--you, so recently one of us, and none more drunk or drained with the dawn--than you! Such preaching is not good to the nostrils, but I forgive that. You are sick, and even the drink won't warm you, so you leave me at a moment's notice----"

"There was another reason."

"Hear me out, first," she commanded.... "To you, it is just, 'Adios, my dear'; to me, it is an uprooting--oh, I don't mind telling you. I was overturned in that furrow, left naked for the long burning day, but I remembered my work--the work you despise! I, who had reason to know how noble your pen can be, forgave even those first paltry letters, filled with excuses such as a cheap clerk might write. I forgave the dictation, because it said you were ill--forgave the silences.... But when you came to New York six months afterwards, and did not so much as 'phone or send me a card of greeting--Selma called in her silly tears."

"It was vile ingratitude," he said earnestly. "That's where my big fault lay. I wonder if you would try to understand the only palliation. You were strangely generous and wonderful in your ways. I did not cease to think of that. Personally, you are far above the things I came to abhor. No one understands but the victim, what alcohol does to a man when it gets him down. I tried to kill myself. I became convalescent literally by force. Slowly approaching the normal again, I was glad enough to live, but the horrors never leave the mind entirely. Everything connected with the old life filled me with shuddering fear. I tell you no one hates alcohol like a drunkard fresh in his reform."

"But I did not make you drink," she said impatiently. "I'm not a drink-loving woman."

Charter's face flushed. The interview was becoming a farce. It had been agony for him to make this confession. She would not see that he realized his ingratitude; that it was his derangement caused by indulging low propensities which made him identify her with the days of evil.

"I know that very well, Selma Cross," he said wearily, "but the stage is a part of that old life, that sick night-life that runs eternally around the belt-line."

She hated him for reverting to this point. Holding fast to what she still had to say, the actress picked up a broken thread. "You said there was another reason why you left New York so suddenly."

Charter expected now to learn if any one were listening. He was cold with the thought of the interview being weighed in the balances of a third mind.

"You've made a big point of my going away," he essayed. "The other reason is not a pretty matter, and doubtless you will call any repugnance of mine an affectation----"

"Repugnance--what do you mean?" she asked savagely, yet she was afraid, afraid of his cool tongue. "I never lied to you."

"That may be true. I'm not curious for evidence to the contrary. The day before I left for the West, a friend told me that you and I were being watched; that all our movements were known. I didn't believe it; could not see the sense--until it was proved that same night by the devious walk we took.... You doubtless remember the face of that young night-bird whom we once laughed about. We thought it just one of those coincidences which frequently occur--a certain face bobbing up everywhere for a number of days. I assured myself that night that you knew nothing of this remarkable outside interest in our affairs."

Selma Cross, with swift stealth, disappeared into the apartment-hall and closed the outer door; then returned, facing him. Her yellow eyes were wide open, filled with a misty, tortured look. To Charter the place and the woman had become haggard with emptiness. He missed the occasional click of the elevator in the outer-hall, for it had seemed to keep him in touch with the world's activities. The old carnal magnetism of Selma Cross stirred not a tissue in him now; the odor of her garments which once roused him, was forbidding. He had not the strength to believe that the door had been shut for any other reason than to prevent Skylark from hearing. The actress had not minded how their voices carried, so long as _he_ was being arraigned.... The air was devitalized. It was as if they were dying of heart-break--without a sound.... It had been so wonderful--this thought of finding his mate after the aeons, his completion--a woman beautiful with soul-age and spiritual light....

Selma Cross was speaking. Charter stirred from his great trouble. She was changed, no longer the clever mistress of a dramatic hour.... Each was so burdened with a personal tragedy that pity for the other was slow to warm between them.

"Do you mean that old Villiers paid the night-bird to watch us--to learn where we went, and possibly what we said?" she was saying hoarsely. Selma Cross felt already that her cad was exploded.

"Yes, and that was unpleasant," Charter told her. "I didn't like the feel of that procurer's eyes, but what revolted me was Villiers himself. I took pains to learn his name the next day--that last day. There isn't a more unclean human package in New York.... It was so unlike you. I couldn't adjust the two. I couldn't be where he had been. I was sick with my own degradation. I went back to my garret."

Selma Cross was crippled; she saw there was no lie in this. At what a price had been bought the restoration of faith for Paula Linster!... She had heard after their compact about Villiers' early days. There had been times when her fingers itched to tighten upon his scrawny throat. To have Quentin Charter hear this record was fire in her veins; it embraced the added horror that Stephen Cabot might also hear.... There was nothing further with which to charge the man before her. She nursed her wrath to keep from crying out.

"Was it a man's way to give me no chance to explain?" she demanded.

"Broadway knew Villiers."

"I did not!"

"Anyway, I couldn't get it straight in my mind, then," Charter said hastily. "You're no vulgar woman, mad after colors and dollars. You love your work too much to be one of those insatiable deserts of passion. Nor are you a creature of black evolution who prefers the soul, to the body of man, for a plaything.... You were all that was generous and normally fervent with me.... Let's cut the subject. It does not excuse me for not calling when I came to New York. You were nothing if not good to me."

"Then Villiers paid to find out things about us," she said slowly. "He said you bragged about such matters to your friends."

Charter shivered. "I fail to see how you troubled about a man not writing--if you could believe that about him."

"I didn't see how he could know our places of meeting--any other way. I should never have seen him again, if he hadn't made me believe this of you."

Charter scarcely heard her. The thought was inevitable now that the actress might have represented him to Skylark as one with the loathed habit of talking about women to his friends. The quick inclination to inquire could not overcome his distaste for mentioning a dear name in this room. The radiant, flashing spirit behind the letters did not belong here.... His brain ached with emptiness; he wondered continually how he could ever fill the spaces expanded by the Skylark's singing....

In the brain of Selma Cross a furious struggle was joined. Never before had she been given to see so clearly her own limitations--and this in the high light of her great dramatic triumph. Her womanhood contained that mighty quality of worshiping intellect. This, she had loved in Charter long ago; in Stephen Cabot now. The inner key to her greatness was her capacity to forget the animal in man--if he proved a brain. There is only one higher reverence--that of forgetting brain to worship soul. Perceiving the attitude of Quentin Charter to her old life, it was made clear to her that she must preserve a lie in her relation with Stephen Cabot; if, indeed, the playwright did not learn outside, as Charter had done. It was plain that he did not know yet, since he had not run from her--to a garret somewhere. What a hideous mockery was this night--begun in pride! Distantly she was grateful that Paula Linster was at hand to be restored, but her own mind was whipped and cowed by its thoughts--so there was little energy for another's romance.... Charter had made no comment on her last remark. She realized now that his thoughts were bearing him close to the truth.

"You say they forced you to cast out your enemy," she declared hoarsely. "I cast out mine of my own accord. If there is palliation for you, there should be for a woman in her first experience. You asked me to stretch my imagination about a drink-reaction making you avoid me. I ask you, how is a woman, for the first time alone with a man--to know that he is different from other men? Add to this, a woman who has come up from the dregs--for years in the midst of the slum-blooms of the chorus? What I heard from them of their nights--would have taxed the versatility of even Villiers--to make me see him lower than I expected! I ask you--how did I know he was an exception--rather than the rule among the Glowworms?"

"I'm rather glad you said that," Charter declared quickly. "It's a point of view I'm grateful for. Do you wonder that the life from which you have risen to one of the regnant queens has become inseparable in my mind with shuddering aversion?"

In the extremity of her suffering, her mind had reverted, as an artist's always does when desperately pressed, to thoughts of work--work, the healer, the refuge where devils truly are cast out. Even in her work she now encountered the lash, since Charter despised it. Literally, she was at bay before him.

"Always that!" she cried. "It is detestable in you always to blame my work. I broke training. I should have won without the damned angel. You degraded yourself for years in your work, but I don't hear you blaming art for your debaucheries! You have sat alone so long that you think all men outside are foul. You sit high in your attic, so that all men look like bugs below!"

"There is something in what you say," he answered, aroused by her bigness and strength. "Yet in my garret, I do not deal with rootless abstractions. Everything has its foundation in actual observation. I moved long among the play-managers, and found them men of huckster-minds--brainless money-bags, dependent upon every passing wind of criticism. I tell you, when one talked to them or to their office-apes--one felt himself, his inner-self, rushing forth as if to fill something bottomless----"

"You do not know Vhruebert----"

"Eliminate him. I am not speaking of any particular man. I do not mean all playwrights when I say that I found playwrights as a class, not literary workers--but literary tricksters. I am not speaking of _The Thing_, nor of its author, of whom I have heard excellent word--when I say that plays are not written, but rewritten by elementals, who, through their sheer coarseness, sense the slow vibrations of the mob, and feculate the original lines to suit."

"Bah--an idea from one of your nights, when you tried to drown the blue devils! It broods over all your thinking! You forget the great army, that silent army, which is continually lifting itself artistically by writing one after another--impossible plays. You forget the great hearts of the players--men and women who pull together for big results."

"I am not speaking of the vast library of manuscript failures, but of a small proportion which get into the sinister glare of Broadway----"

"My God, Broadway is not New York!"

"For which I am powerfully glad," he answered with energy. "As for warm human hearts--there is warmth and loyalty, genuine tears and decent hopes in every brothel and bar--yet the black trends of their existence course on. This was so hard for me to learn, that I have it very clearly.... I remember the opening night of Martha Boardman as a star--telegrams pouring in, critics besieging her dressing-room. Even her manager didn't know what he had, until the critics told him the play would stay in New York a year--yet his name was on the boards above the star and bigger than the author's. I watched the bleak, painted faces of the women and heard their false voices acclaiming the new star. What they had in their hearts was not praise, but envy. Their words were sham, indecency and lying. Eternally simulating--that's the stage life. Pity the women--poor Maachas, if you will--but their work is damnable, nevertheless. It is from such unhappy creatures evading motherhood that youths get the abominable notion that real manhood lies in the loins."

"Poor youths--go on! When you have finished I shall tell you something."

"Don't misunderstand me, Selma Cross. No one knows better than I--how the sexes prey upon each other--how they drag each other to the ground. Only I was thinking of the poor things in ties, canes, cigarettes and coatings--out catching!... I saw the whole horrid, empty game of the stage. You have come wonderfully and differently into the glare, but let me ask where is Martha Boardman to-night--a few short years later?"

"Yes, she was tired, her energy burned out, when she finally arrived. It's a stiff grade," Selma Cross said gently.

"I would explain it, that she was prostituted from _excessive simulation_--season after season of simulation--emotion after emotion false to herself! The Law says, 'Live your own life.' The Stage says, 'Act mine,'--so pitiably often a poor playwright's abortive sensations! What can happen to a body that continually makes of itself a lying instrument? Like the queen-bee whose whole life is made up of egg-laying--the brain of this poor purveyor of emotions becomes a waxy pulp. As for her soul--it is in God's hands--let us hope."

"It is good to laugh at you, Quentin Charter. You have another appetite. You wanted alcohol when I knew you first--now you thirst after purists and winged women. I have a lover now who can live among men, soar just as high as you do, work with just as much greatness and strength, without ever having degraded himself or believed all human creatures vile. The stage has its shams, its mockeries, but its glories, too. It is not all deranged by money-bags. The most brilliant of your writers give us our lines--the most wonderful of your mystics. It is true we simulate; true that ours is a constant giving; but call in your garret-high logic now, Sir Prophet: Look at the tired empty faces of my company, look at mine, after we have finished _The Thing_; then look at the strengthened grip on life and the lifted hopes which, each night, the multitude takes from out our breasts--and call ours a prostitution, if you can!"

Charter arose and extended his hand, which she took gracelessly, but was instantly sorry that she had misjudged his intent.

"Can't you see, Selma Cross, that you and I have no difference, no point for argument, if the general run of plays were like _The Thing_--as you make me see it? We had eliminated this from the discussion, but I have nothing but praise for Vhruebert, nothing but enthusiasm for Mr. Cabot and for you--if the combination gives the people an expansion of hope and a lifted ideal. Do that, and you need not reckon with critics."

Instantly she changed her point of view again, so that he was both chilled and puzzled. "I should have been glad to come out in any successful play," she said wearily. "_The Thing_ just happens to have an uplift----"

"So much is accomplished for you, then. You will never be content again with a play that has not. Oh, I don't mean ostensible good, melodramatically contrasted with obvious bad, but the subtle inspiration of real artists--that marvellous flexibility of line and largeness of meaning that fits about every life! Just as you can draw fresh strength again and again from a great poem; so, in performing a great play--one does not act, but lives!"

"Are you going?" she questioned absently.

"Yes, I confess I haven't been so consumed in years----"

She drew close to him.... "It has been dramatic, if not literary, hasn't it?" Her nostrils dilated and her lower lip was drawn back between her teeth.

He smiled.

"I feel burnt out, too," she went on softly. "It has been strange to be with you again--almost like--those early mornings.... Did you ever hear me calling you--'way off there in the West? I used to lie awake, all feverish after you went away, calling in a whisper, 'Quentin--Quentin!...' It seemed you must come, if you were alive. There were times after you went away, that I would have given this week's victory, which I saw from afar,--to have you rush in for just one hour!... In God's name," she cried suddenly, "is there really this sort of honor in living man--is it because you hate me--or do you have to drink to take a woman in your arms? You, who used to be--singing flames?"

Charter was not unattracted, but his self-command was strangely imperious. There was magnetism now in the old passion--but a flutter of wings broke the attraction.... Darkness covered the wings, and the song was stilled; yet in that faint rustling, was enchantment which changed to brute matter--these open arms and the rising breast.

"I'm afraid it is as you said--about the anaemic priest," he muttered laughingly.... And then it occurred to him that there might have been a trick to her tempting.... From this point he was sexless and could pity her, though his nerves were raw from her verbal punishments. It was altogether new in his experience--this word-whipping; and though he had not sharpened a sentence in retaliation, he could not but see the ghastly way in which a woman is betrayed by her temper, which checks a man's passion like a sudden fright. Between a woman given to rages and her lover--lies a naked sword. Consummate, in truth, is the siren who has mastered the art of silence.... Selma Cross sank back into a chair. The world's wear was on her brow and under her eyes, as she laughed bitterly.

"You always had a way of making me sick of life," she said strangely. "I wonder if ever there was a humiliation so artistically complete as mine?"

This was another facet to the prism of the woman. Charter could not be quite certain as to her present intent, so frequently alternating had been the currents of her emotion during the interview. Typically an actress, she had run through her whole range of effects. He was not prepared yet to say which was trick, which reality; which was the woman, Selma Cross, or the tragedienne. He did not miss the thought that his theory was amazingly strengthened here--the theory that moral derangement results from excessive simulation.

"You--would--not--kiss--me," she repeated. "For my own sake, I'd like to believe--that you're trying to be true to some one,--but it's all rot that there are men like that! It's because I no longer tempt you--you spook!"

"You said you had a lover----"

She shivered. "You left me unfinished." There was a tragic plaint in her tone, and she added hastily, "There was a reason for my trying you.... I think the most corroding of the knives you have left in me to-night, is that you have refused to ask why I brought you here--refused even to utter the name--of the woman you expected to see--_in my presence_.... You may be a man; you may be a cad; you may be a new appetite, or a God resurrected out of a Glowworm. I either hate or love you--or both--to the point of death! Either way--remember this--I'll be square as a die--to you and to my friend. You'll begin to see what I mean--to-morrow, I think...."

He was at the door. "Good-night," he said and touched the signal for the elevator.

She called him back, "Come and see me--at my best--at the _Herriot_--won't you?"

"Yes----"

"But tell me what performance--and where your seat is----"

"... Good-night."

The car stopped at the floor.

SIXTEENTH CHAPTER

PAULA FINDING THAT BOTH GIANTS HAVE ENTERED HER CASTLE, RUSHES IN TUMULT INTO THE NIGHT

It was after eight that Sunday night, when Paula emerged from the elevator in the upper-hall of the _Zoroaster_, and noted that the door of the Selma Cross apartment was ajar.... The interval since she had parted from the actress the evening before had been abundant with misery. Almost, she had crossed the bay to visit the Reifferscheids; would have done so, indeed, had she been able to 'phone her coming. Her rooms had become a dismal oppression; Bellingham haunted her consciousness; there were moments when she was actually afraid there alone.

All Saturday night she had sleeplessly tossed, knowing that Quentin Charter was speeding eastward, and dreading the moment when he should arrive in the city and find no welcoming note from her. She dared not be in her rooms after he was due to reach the _Granville_, lest he call her by telephone or messenger--and her purpose of not seeing him be destroyed by some swift and salient appeal. She had waited until after the hour in which he had asked to call, to be sure that this time he would have given up all hope of seeing her. The prospect now of entering her apartment and remaining there throughout the night, challenged every ounce of will-force she possessed....

Battling with loneliness and bereavement, as she had been for hours, Paula was grateful to note, by the open door, that the actress was at home, even though she had left her the evening before, hurt and disappointed by the other's swift change of manner upon learning that Quentin Charter was to be in New York to-day.... It was with a startling but indefinable emotion that she heard the man's voice now through the open door. Stephen Cabot was there, she thought, as she softly let herself in to the place of ordeals, which her own flat had become.

In the dark and silence of the inner hall, the old enemy swept into her consciousness--again the awful localizations of the preying force! The usual powers of mind scattered, as in war the pith of a capital's garrisons rush forth to distant borders. By habit, her hand was upon the button, but she did not turn on light. Instead, she drew back, steeling her will to remember her name, her place in the world, her friends. Harshly driven, yet Paula repressed a cry, and fought her way out into the main hall--as from the coiling suction of a maelstrom. Even in her terror, she could not but repress a swift sense of victory, in that she had escaped from the vortex of attraction--her own rooms.

The man's voice reached her again, filled her mind with amazing resistance--so that the point of the occultist's will was broken. Suddenly, she remembered that she had once heard Stephen Cabot, protesting that he was quite well--at the end of the first New York performance of _The Thing_, and that his tones were inseparably identified with his misfortune. The voice she heard now thrilled her like an ancient, but instantly familiar, harmony. It was not Stephen Cabot's. She stood at the open door, when the vehemence of Selma Cross, who was now speaking, caused her to refrain from making her presence known. The unspeakable possibility, suddenly upreared in her mind, banished every formality. The full energies of her life formed in a prayer that she might be wrong, as Paula peered through the inner hall, and for the first time in the flesh glimpsed Quentin Charter.

She was standing before the elevator-shaft and had signaled for the car eternities ago. Selma Cross was moving up and down the room within, but her words though faintly audible, had no meaning to the woman without. Paula's mind seemed so filled with sayings from the actress that there was no room for the interpretation of a syllable further. One sentence of Charter's startled her with deadly pain.... She could wait no longer, and started to walk down. Half-way to the main-floor, the elevator sped upward to answer her bell.... She was very weak, and temptation was fiercely operative to return to her rooms, when she heard a slow, firm step ascending the flight below. She turned from the stairs on the second floor, just as the huge, lean shoulders of Bellingham appeared on the opposite side of the elevator-shaft.

The two faced without words. His countenance was livid, wasted, but his eyes were of fire. Paula lost herself in their power. She knew only that she must return with him. There was no place to go; indeed, to return with him now seemed normal, rational--until the brightly-lit car rushed down and stopped before them.

"Excuse me for keeping you waiting, Miss Linster," the elevator-man said, "but I had to carry a message to the rear."

In the instantaneous break of Bellingham's concentration, Paula recovered herself sufficiently to dart into the car.

"Down, if you please," she said hoarsely. "The gentleman is going up."

Bellingham, who had started to follow, was stopped by the sliding-door. The conductor called that he would be back directly, as his car slid down.... In the untellable disorganization of mind, Paula knew for the moment only this: she must reach the outer darkness instantly or expire. In that swift drop to the main floor, and in the brief interval required to stop the car and slide the door, she endured all the agony of tightened fingers upon her throat. There was an ease in racing limbs, as she sped across the tiles to the entrance, as a frightened child rushes from a dark room. She would die if the great door resisted--pictured it all before her hand touched the knob. She would turn, scream, and fall from suffocation. Her scream would call about her the horror that she feared.

The big door answered, as it seemed, with a sort of leisurely dignity to her spasm of strength--and out under the rain-blurred lamps, she ran, ready to faint if any one called, and continually horrified lest something pluck at her skirts--thus to Central Park West. An Eighth Avenue car was approaching, half a square above. To stand and wait, in the fear lest Bellingham reach the corner in time for the car, assailed the last of her vitality. It was not until she had boarded it, and was beyond reach of a pedestrian on Cathedral Way, that she breathed as one who has touched shore after the Rapids. Still, every south-bound cab renewed her panic. She could have made time to South Ferry by changing to the Elevated, but fear of encountering the Destroyer prevented this. Fully three-quarters of an hour was used in reaching the waiting-room, where she was fortunate in catching a Staten Island boat without delay. Every figure that crossed the bridge after her, until the big ferry put off, Paula scrutinized; then sank nearly fainting into a seat.

Bellingham's plot was clear to her mind, as well as certain elements of his craft to obviate every possibility of failure. He had doubtless seen her enter the house, and timed his control to dethrone her volition as she reached her rooms. Since the elevator-man would not have taken him up, without word from her, Bellingham had hastened in and started up the stairs when the car was called from the main floor. His shock at finding her in the second-hall was extraordinary, since he was doubtless struggling with the entire force of his concentration, to hold her in the higher apartment and to prepare her mind for his own reception. It was that moment that the elevator-man had saved her; yet, she could not forget how the voice of Quentin Charter had broken the magician's power a moment before; and it occurred to her now how wonderfully throughout her whole Bellingham experience, something of the Westerner's spirit had sustained her in the crises--Quentin Charter's book that first night in Prismatic Hall; Quentin Charter's letter to which she had clung during the dreadful interview in the Park....

As for Quentin Charter rushing immediately to the woman of lawless attractions, because he had not received the hoped-for note at the _Granville_--in this appeared a wantonness almost beyond belief. Wearily she tried to put the man and his base action entirely out of mind. And Selma Cross, whose animation had been so noticeable when informed of Charter's coming, had fallen beneath the reach of Paula's emotions.... She could pity--with what a torrential outpouring--could she pity "that finest, lowest head!"

She stepped out on deck. The April night was inky-black. All day there had been a misty rain from which the chill of winter was gone. The dampness was sweet to breathe and fresh upon her face. The smell of ocean brought up from the subconscious, a thought already in tangible formation there. The round clock in the cabin forward had indicated nine-forty-five. It seemed more like another day, than only an hour and a half ago, that she had caught the Eighth Avenue car at Cathedral Way. The ferry was nearing the Staten slip. In a half-hour more, she would reach Reifferscheid's house. Her heart warmed with gratitude for a friend to whom she could say as little or as much as she pleased, yet find him, heart and home, at her service. One must be terrified and know the need of a refuge in the night to test such values. A few hours before, she had rejected the thought of going, because a slight formality had not been attended to. Hard pressed now, she was seeking him in the midst of the night.... At the mention of the big man's name, the conductor on the Silver Lake car took her in charge, helped her off at the right road, and pointed out the Reifferscheid light. Thus she felt her friend's kindness long before she heard the big elms whispering over his cottage. The front-window was frankly uncurtained, and the editor sat within, soft-shirted and eminently comfortable beside a green-shaded reading-lamp. She even saw him drop his book at her step upon the walk. A moment later, she blinked at him laughingly, as he stood in the light of the wide open doorway.

"Properly 'Driven From Home,' I suppose I should be tear-stained and in shawl and apron," she began.

He laughed delightedly, and exclaimed: "How could Father be so obdurate--alas, a-a-las! Lemme see, this is a fisherman's hut on the moors, or a gardener's lodge on the shore. Anyway, it's good to have you here.... Annie!"

He took her hat and raincoat, wriggling meanwhile into a coat of his own, arranged a big chair before the grate, then removed her rubbers. Not a question did he ask, and Sister Annie's greeting presently, from her chair, was quite the same--as if the visit and the hour were exactly in order.

"You'll stay a day or two, won't you?" he asked. "Honestly, I don't like the way they treat you up there beyond the Park.... It will be fine to-morrow. This soft rain will make Mother Earth turn over and take an eye-opener----"

"The truth is, I want to stay until there's a ship for the Antilles," she told him, "and I don't know when the first one goes."

"I hope it's a week at least," he said briskly. "The morning papers are here with all the sailings. A sea-voyage will do you a world of good, and Europe doesn't compare with a trip to the Caribbean."

"Just you two--and one other--are to know," Paula added nervously.

Reifferscheid had gathered up a bundle of papers, and was turning pages swiftly. "There isn't a reason in the world why everybody should know," he remarked lightly, "only you'd better be Lottie or Daisy Whats-her-name, as the cabin lists of all outgoing ships are available to any one who looks."

"Tim will be delighted to make everything easy for you," Sister Annie put in.

Thus mountains dissolved. The soulful accord and the instant sympathy which sprang to meet her every word, and the valor behind it all, so solid as to need no explanation--were more than Paula could bear.... Reifferscheid looked up from his papers, finding that she did not speak, started with embarrassment, and darted to the buffet. A moment later he had given her a glass of wine and vanished from the room with an armful of newspapers. The door had no sooner closed upon him than Paula discovered the outstretched arms of Sister Annie. In the several moments which followed her heart was healed and soothed through a half-forgotten luxury....

"The twin-screw liner, _Fruitlands_,--do you really want the first?" Reifferscheid interrupted himself, when he was permitted to enter later.

"Yes."

"Well, it sails in forty-eight hours, or a little less--Savannah, Santiago de Cuba, San Juan de Porto Rico--and down to the little Antilles--Tuesday night at ten o'clock at the foot of Manhattan."

"That will do very well," Paula said, "and I'd like to go straight to the ship from here--if you'll----"

"Berth--transportation--trunks--and sub-let your flat, if you like," Reifferscheid said as gleefully as a boy invited for a week's hunt. "Why, Miss Linster, I am the original arrangement committee."

"You have always been wonderful to me," Paula could not help saying, though it shattered his ease. "This one other who must know is Madame Nestor. She'll take care of my flat and pack things for me--if you'll get a message to her in the morning when you go over. I don't expect to be gone so long that it will be advisable to sub-let."

"Which is emphatically glad tidings," Reifferscheid remarked hastily.

"You'll want all your summer clothes," said Sister Annie. "Tim will see to your trunks."

"Sometime, I'll make it all plain," Paula tried to say steadily. "It's just been life to me--this coming here--and knowing that I could come here----"

"Miss Linster," Reifferscheid broke in, "I don't want to have to disappear again. The little things you need done, I'd do for any one in the office. Please bear in mind that Sister Annie and I would be hurt--if you didn't let us do them. Why, we belong--in a case like this. Incidentally, you are doing a bully thing--to take a sail down past that toy-archipelago. They say you can hear the parakeets screeching out from the palm-trees on the shore, and each island has a different smell of spice. It will be great for you--rig you out with a new set of wings. You must take Hearn along. I've got his volume here on the West Indies. He'll tell you the color of the water your ship churns. Each day farther south it's a different blue----"

So he jockeyed her into laughing, and she slept long and dreamlessly that night, as she had done once before in the same room.... The second night following, Reifferscheid put her aboard the _Fruitlands_.

"It's good you thought of taking your cabin under a borrowed name, Miss--er--Wyndam--Miss Laura Wyndam," he said in a low voice, for the passengers were moving about. "I'll write you all about it. You have famous friends. Selma Cross, who is playing at the _Herriot_, wanted to know where you were. I thought for a minute she was going to throw me down and take it away from me. Quentin Charter, by the way, is in town and asked about you. Seemed depressed when I told him you were out of town, and hadn't sent your address to me yet. I told him and Miss Cross that mail for you sent to _The States_ would get to you eventually. Both said they would write--so you'll hear from them on the ship that follows this." He glanced at her queerly for a second, and added, "Good-by, and a blessed voyage to you, Tired Lady. Write us how the isles bewitch you, and I'll send you a package of books every ship or two----"

"Good-by--my first of friends!"

Two hours afterward Paula took a last turn on deck. The spray swept in gusts over the _Fruitlands's_ dipping prow. The bare masts, tipped with lights, swung with a giant sweep from port to starboard and back to port again, fingering the black heavens for the blown-out stars. She was lonely, but not altogether miserable, out there on the tossing floor of the Atlantic....

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER

PAULA SAILS INTO THE SOUTH, SEEKING THE HOLY MAN OF SAINT PIERRE, WHERE _LA MONTAGNE PELEE_ GIVES WARNING

Wonderfully strengthened, she was, by the voyage. Sorrow had destroyed large fields of verdure, and turned barren the future, but its devouring was finished. Quentin Charter was adjusted in her mind to a duality with which Paula Linster could have no concern. Only to one mistress could he be faithful; indeed, it was only in the presence of this mistress that he became the tower of visions to another; in the midst of the work he worshipped, Quentin Charter had heard the Skylark sing. Paula did not want to see him again, nor Selma Cross. To avoid these two, as well as the place where the Destroyer had learned so well to penetrate, she had managed not to return to her apartment during the two days before sailing.... There would never be another master-romance--never again so rich a giving, nor so pure an ideal. Before this tragic reality, the inner glory of her womanhood became meaningless. It was this that made the future a crossing of sterile tundras,--yet she would keep her friends, and love her work, and try to hold her faith....

Bellingham did not call her at sea, but he had frightened her too profoundly to be far from mind. The face she had seen in the hall-way was drawn and disordered by the dreadful tortures of nether-planes; and awful in the eyes, was that feline vacancy of soul. Once in a dream, she saw him--a pale reptile-monster upreared from a salty sea, voiceless in that oceanic isolation, a shameful secret of the depths. The ghastly bulk had risen with a mute protest to the sky against dissolution and creeping decay--and sounded again....

To her, Bellingham was living death, the triumph of desire which rends itself, the very essence of tragedy. She gladly would have died to make her race see the awfulness of _just flesh_--as she saw it now.... His power seemed ended; she felt with the Reifferscheids and Madame Nestor, that her secret was hermetic, and there was a goodly sense of security in the intervening sea....

And now there was a new island each day; each morning a fresh garden arose from the Caribbean--sun-wooed, rain-softened isles with colorful little ports.... There was one tropic city--she could not recall the name--which from the offing had looked like the flower-strewn gateway to an amphitheatre of mountains.

The _Fruitlands_ had lain for a day in the hot, sharky harbor of Santiago; had run into a real cloudburst off the Silver Reefs of Santo Domingo, and breathed on the radiant next morning before the stately and ancient city of San Juan de Porto Rico--shining white as a dream-castle of old Spain, and adrift in an azure world of sky and sea. She spent a day and an evening in this isle of ripe fruits and riper amours; and took away materials for a memory composite of interminable siestas, restless radiant nights, towering cliffs, incomparable courtesy, and soft-voiced maidens with wondrous Spanish eyes that laugh and turn away.

Then for two days they had steamed down past the saintly archipelago--St. Thomas, St. Martin, St. Kitts; then Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, and a legion of littler isles--truncated peaks jutting forth from fragrant, tinted water. There were afternoons when she did not care to lift her voice or move about. Fruit-juices and the simplest salads, a flexible cane chair under the awnings, a book to rest the eyes from the gorgeous sea and enchanted shores, somnolence rather than sleep--these are enough for the approach to perfection in the Caribbean, with the Lesser Antilles on the lee.... Then at last in late afternoon, the great hulking shape of Pelee loomed watery green against the sky; in the swift-speeding twilight, the volcano seemed to swell and blacken until it was like the shadow of a continent, and the lights of Saint Pierre pricked off the edge of the land.

At last late at night, queerly restless, she sat alone on deck in the windless roadstead and regarded the illumined terraces of Saint Pierre. They had told her that the breath from Martinique was like the heavy moist sweetness of a horticultural garden, but the island must have been sick with fever this night, for a mile at sea the land-breeze was dry, devitalized, irritating the throat and nostrils.

There was no moon, and the stars were so faint in the north that the mass of Pelee was scarcely shaped against the sky. The higher lights of the city had a reddish uncertain glow, as if a thin film of fog hung between them and the eye; but to the south the night cleared into pure purple and unsullied tropic stars. The harbor was weirdly hot.

Before her was the city which held the quest of her voyaging--Father Fontanel, the holy man of Saint Pierre.... _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 the man...._ This was the enduring fragment from the Charter letters; and in that dreadful Sunday night when she began her flight from Bellingham, already deep within her mind Father Fontanel was the goal.... Paula set out for shore early the next morning. The second-officer of the _Fruitlands_ sat beside her in the launch. She spoke of the intense sultriness.

"Yes, Saint Pierre is glowing like a brazier," he said. "I was ashore last night for awhile. The people blame the mountain. Old Pelee has been acting up--showering the town with ash every little while lately. It's the taint of sulphur that spoils the air."

She turned apprehensively toward the volcano. _La Montague Pelee_, over the red-tiled roofs of Saint Pierre, looked huge like an Emperor of the Romans. Paled in the intense morning light, he wore a delicate ruching of white cloud about his crown. They stepped ashore on the Sugar Landing where Paula found a carriage to take her to the _Hotel des Palms_, a rare old plantation-house on the _Morne d'Orange_, recently converted for public use.

The ponies were ascending the rise in _Rue Victor Hugo_, at the southern end of the city, when Paula discovered the little Catholic church she had imaged for so many weeks, _Notre Dame des Lourdes_, niched away in the crowded streets with a Quebec-like quaintness, and all the holier from its close association with the lowly shops. From these walls had risen the spiritual house of Father Fontanel--her far bright beacon.... The _porteuses_, said to be the lithest, hardiest women of the occident, wore a pitiable look of fatigue, as they came down from the hill-trails, steadying the baskets upon their heads. The pressure of the heat, and the dispiriting atmosphere revealed their effects in the distended eyelids and colorless, twisted lips of the burden-bearers.

The ponies at length gained the eminence of the _Morne d'Orange_, and ahead she saw the broad, white plantation-house--_Hotel des Palms_. To the right was the dazzling, turquoise sea where the _Fruitlands_ lay large among the shipping, and near her a private sea-going yacht, nearly as long and angelically white. The broad verandas of the hotel were alluring with palms; the walls and portcullises were cooled with embroidering vines. Gardens flamed with poinsettias and roses, and a shaded grove of mango and India trees at the end of the lawn, was edged with moon flowerets and oleanders. Back of the plantation-house waved the sloping seas of cane; in front, the Caribbean. On the south rose the peaks of Carbet; on the north, the Monster.

Paula had hardly left the veranda of magnificent vistas two hours later, when the friendly captain of the _Fruitlands_ approached with an elderly American, of distinguished appearance, whom he presented--Mr. Peter Stock, of Pittsburg.

"Since you are to leave us here, Miss Wyndam," the captain added, "I thought you would be glad to know Mr. Stock, who makes an annual cruise around these Islands--and knows them better than any American I've encountered yet. Yonder is his yacht--that clipper-built beauty just a bit in from the liner."

"I've already been admiring the yacht," Paula said, "and wondering her name. There's something Venetian about her dazzling whiteness in the soft, deep blue."

"I get it exactly, Miss Wyndam--that 'mirage of marble' in the Italian sky.... My craft is the _Saragossa_." His eyelids were tightened against the light, and the voice was sharp and brisk. His face, tropically tanned, contrasted effectively with the close-cropped hair and mustache, lustrous-white as his ship.... Paula having found the captain's courtesy and good sense invariable during the voyage, gladly accepted his friend, who proved most interesting on the matter of Pelee.

"I've stayed here in Saint Pierre longer now than usual," he told her, pointing toward the mountain, "to study the old man yonder. Pelee, you know, is identified with Martinique, much the same as the memory of Josephine; yet the people of the city can't seem to take his present disorder seriously. This is cataclysmic country. Hell--I use the word to signify a geological stratum--is very close to the surface down here. All these lovely islands are merely ash-piles hurled up by the great subterranean fires. The point is, Lost Atlantis is apt to stir any time under the Caribbean--and rub out our very pretty panorama."

"You regard this as an entertainment worth waiting for?" Paula asked.

The vaguest sort of a smile passed over his eyes and touched his lips. "Pelee and I are very old friends. I spoke of the volcanic origin of these islands in the way of suggesting that any seismic activity in the archipelago--Pelee's present internal complaint, for instance,--should be taken significantly. Saint Pierre would have been white this morning--except for the heavy rain before dawn."

"You mean volcanic ash?"

"Exactly."

"That explains the white scum I saw in the gutters, driving through the city.... But it isn't altogether a novelty, is it, for the mountain to behave this way?"

"From time to time in the past ten days, Miss Wyndam, Pelee has had a session of grumbling."

"I mean as a usual thing----"

He turned to her abruptly and inquired, "Didn't you know that there hasn't been a sound from Pelee for twenty years before the month of April now ending?"

This gave intimacy to the disorder. Mr. Stock was called away just now, but after dinner that night he joined Paula again on the great veranda.

"Ever been in Pittsburg?" he asked.

"No."

"I've only to shut my eyes in this second-hand air--to think I'm back among the steel mills of the lower Monongahela."

"The moon looks like beaten egg," Paula said with a slight shiver. "They must be suffering down in the city. You're the expert on Pelee, Mr. Stock, please tell me more about him."

He had been regarding the new moon, low and to the left of the Carbet peaks. It had none of the sharpness of outline peculiar to the tropics, but was blurred and of an orange hue, instead of silvery. "It's the ash-fog in the air which has the effect of a fine wire screen," he explained. "We'll have a white world to-morrow, if it doesn't rain."

They turned to the north where a low rumbling was heard. It was like distant thunder, but the horizon beyond Pelee was unscathed by lightning.

"Are you really worried, Mr. Stock?"

"Why, it's as I said. The fact that Pelee is acting out of the ordinary is quite enough to make any one skeptical regarding his intentions."

He discussed familiarly certain of the man-eaters among the mountains of the world--Krakatoa, Bandaisan, Cotopaxi, Vesuvius, AEtna, calling them chronic old ruffians, whom Time doesn't tame.

"A thousand years is nothing to them," he added. "They wait, still as crocodiles, until seers have built their temples in the high rifts and cities have formed on their flanks. They have tasted blood, you see, and the madness comes back. Twenty years is only a siesta. Pelee is a suspect."

"I think I should prefer to hear you tell the treachery of volcanoes outside of the fire-zone," she declared. "It's like listening to ghost stories in a haunted house."

Pelee rumbled again, and Paula's fingers involuntarily started toward his sleeve. The heavy wooden shutters of the great house rattled in the windless night; the ground upon which they stood seemed to wince at the Monster's pain. She was conscious of the fragrance of roses and magnolia blooms above the acrid taint of the air. Some strange freak of the atmosphere exerted a pressure upon the flowers, forcing a sudden expulsion of perfume. The young moon was a formless blotch now in the fouled sky. A sigh like the whimpering of many sick children was audible from the servants' cabins behind the hotel.... Later, from her own room, she saw the double chain of lights out in the harbor--the _Saragossa_ pulling at her moorings among the lesser craft, like a bright empress in the midst of dusky maid-servants; and in the north was Vulcan struggling to contain the fury of his fluids. She was a little afraid of Pelee.

Very early abroad, Paula set out on her first pilgrimage to _Notre Dame des Lourdes_. Rain had not fallen in the night, and she regarded a white world, as Stock had promised, and the source of the phenomenon with the pastelle tints of early morning upon his huge eastern slope. She had slept little and with her face turned to the north. A cortege had passed before her in dream--all the destroyers of history, each with a vivid individuality, like the types of faces of all nations--the story of each and the desolation it had made among men and the works of men.

Most of them had given warning. Pelee was warning now. His warning was written upon the veins of every leaf, painted upon the curve of every blade of grass, sheeted evenly-white upon the red tiles of every roof. Gray dust blown by steam from the bursting quarries of the mountain clogged the gutters of the city and the throats of men. It was a moving, white cloud in the river, a chalky shading that marked the highest reach of the harbor tide. It settled in the hair of the children, and complicated the toil of bees in the nectar-cups. With league-long cerements, and with a voice that caused to tremble his dwarfed companions, the hills and _mornes_, great Pelee had proclaimed his warning in the night.

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE RENDING FORTUNES OF SAINT PIERRE AND _THE PANTHER_ CALLS WITH NEW YORK MAIL

Father Fontanel was out in the parish somewhere. One of the washer-women told her this, at the door of the church. There were many sick in the city from the great heat and the burned air--many little children sick. Father Fontanel always sought the sick in body; those who were sick in soul, sought him.... So the woman of the river-banks, in her simple way, augmented the story of the priest's love for his people. Paula rested for a few moments in the dim transept. Natives moved in and out for a breath of coolness, some pausing to kneel upon the worn tiles of the nave. Later she walked among the lower streets of the suffering city, her heart filled with pity for the throngs housed on the low breathless water-front. Except when the wind was straight from the volcano, the hotel on the _Morne d'Orange_ was made livable by the cool Trades.