Athalie Part 44

"And it's a cinch that she scores more bull's eyes than blanks. I had a seance with her. Never mind what she told me.

Anyway it was devilish clever,--and true as far as I knew.

And I suppose the chances are good that the whole business will happen to me. Watch me.

"I think Athalie must have cleared a lot of money already.

Mrs. Faithorn told me she gave her a cheque for five hundred that evening. And Athalie's private business must be pretty good because all the afternoon until five o'clock carriages and motors are coming and going. And you ought to see who's in 'em. Your prospective father-in-law was in one! Perhaps he wanted inside information about Dominion Fuel--that d.a.m.n stock which has done a few things to me since I monkeyed with it.

"But you should see the old dragons and dowagers and death-heads, and frumps who go to see Athalie! And the younger married bunch, too. I understand one has to ask for an appointment a week ahead.

"So she must be making every sort of money. And yet she lives simply enough--sky floor of a new office-apartment building on Long Acre--hoisted way up in the air above everything. You look out and see nothing but city and river and bay and haze on every side as far as the horizon's circle. At night it's just an endless waste of electric lights. There's very little sound from the street roar below. It's still up there in the sky, and sunny; silent and snowy; quiet and rainy; noiseless and dark--according to the hours, seasons, and meteorological conditions, my son. And it's some joint, believe me, with the dark old mahogany trim and furniture and the dull rich effects in azure and gold; and the Beluch carpets full of sombre purple and dusky fire, and the white cat on the window-sill watching you put of its sapphire blue eyes.

"And Athalie! curled up on her deep, soft divan, nibbling sweetmeats and listening to a dozen men--for there are usually as many as that who drop in at one time or another after business is over, and during the evening, unless Athalie is dining out, which she often does, d.a.m.n it!

"Business hours for her begin at two o'clock in the afternoon; and last until five. She could make a lot more money than she does if she opened earlier. I told her this, once, but she said that she was determined to educate herself.

"And it seems that she studies French, Italian, German, piano and vocal music; and has some down-and-out old hen read with her. I believe her ambition is to take the regular Harvard course as nearly as possible. Some nerve! What?

"Well, that's how her mornings go; and now I've given you, I think, a fair schedule of the life she leads. That fellow Dane hangs about a lot. So do Hargrave and Faithorn and young Allys and Arthur Ensart. And so do I, Clive; and a lot of others. Why, I don't know. I don't suppose we'd marry her; and yet it would not surprise me if any one of us asked her.

My suspicions are that the majority of the men who go there _have_ asked her. We're a fine lot, we men. So d.a.m.n fastidious. And then we go to sentimental pieces when we at last get it into our bone-heads that there is no other way that leads to Athalie except by marrying her. And we ask her.

And _then_ we get turned down!

"Clive, _that_ girl ought to be easy. To look at her you'd say she was made of wax, easily moulded, and fashioned to be loved, and to love. But, by G.o.d, I don't think it's in her to love.... For, if it were--good night. She'd have raised the devil in this world long ago. And some of us would have done murder before now.

"If I had not dined so copiously and so rashly I wouldn't write you all this. I'd write a page or two and lie to you, politely. And so I'll say this: I really do believe that it is in Athalie to love some man. And I believe, if she did love him, she'd love him in any way he asked her. He hasn't come along yet; that's all. But Oh! how he will be hated when he does--unless he is the marrying kind. And anyway he'll be hated. Because, however he does it, he'll get one of the loveliest girls this town ever set eyes on. And the rest of us will realise it then, and there will be some teeth-gnashing, believe me!--and some squirming. Because the worm that never dieth will continue to chew us one and all, and never, never let us forget that the girl no man of our sort could really condescend to marry, had been asked by every one of us in turn to marry him; and had declined.

"And I'll add this for my own satisfaction: the man who gets her, and doesn't marry her, will ultimately experience a biting from that same worm which will make our lacerations resemble the agreeable tickling of a feather.

"We're a rotten lot of cowards. And what hypocrites we are!

"I saw Fontaine sending flowers to his wife. He'd been at Athalie's all the evening. There are only two occasions on which a man sends flowers to his wife; one of them is when he's in love with her.

"Aren't we the last word in scuts? Custom-ridden, habit-cursed, afraid, eternally afraid of something--of our own sort always, and of their opinions. And that offering of flowers when the man who sends them hopes to do something of which he is ashamed, or has already done it!

"How I do run on! In _vino veritas_--there's some cla.s.s to pickled truth! Here are olives for thought, red peppers for honesty, onions for logic--and cauliflower for constancy--and fifty-seven other varieties, Clive--all absent in the canned make-up of the modern man.

"'When you and I behind the veil have pa.s.sed'--but they don't wear veils now; and now is our chance.

"We'll never take it. Hall-marks are our only guide. When absent we merely become vicious. We know what we want; we know what we ought to have; but we're too cowardly to go after it. And so are you. And so am I.

"Yours-- "REEVE."

CHAPTER XVIII

During that first year Athalie Greensleeve saw a great deal of New York society, professionally, and of many New York men, socially.

But the plaything which society attempted to make of her she gently but adroitly declined to become. She herself drew this line whenever it was necessary to draw it, never permitting herself to mistake the fundamental att.i.tude of these agreeable and amicably demonstrative people toward her, or toward any girl who lived alone in New York and who practised such a profession.

Not among the people who employed her and who paid her lavishly for an evening's complacency; not among people who sought her at her own place during business hours for professional advice or for lighter amus.e.m.e.nt could she expect any other except professional recognition.

And after a few months of wistful loneliness she came, gradually, to desire from these people nothing except what they gave.

But there were some people she met during that first year's practice of her new profession who seemed to be unimpressed by the popular belief in such an awesome actuality as New York "society." And some of these, oddly enough, were the descendants of those who, perhaps, had formed part of the only real society the big, raw, sprawling city ever had. But that was long, long ago, in the day of the first President.

New York will always be spotted with the symptoms but will never again have it. Paris has gone the same way. London is still flushed with it, Berlin hectic, Vienna fevered. But the days of a "society" as a distinct _ensemble_, with a logical reason for being, with authority, with functions, with offensive and defensive powers and fixed boundaries, is over forever; possibly never existed, certainly never will exist in the series of gregarious aggregations and segregations known to a perplexed and slightly amused world as the city of New York.

For Athalie that first year of new interests and of unfamiliar successes pa.s.sed more rapidly than had any single month ever before pa.s.sed in her life since the strenuous and ragged days of childhood.

It was a year of novelty, of excitement, of self-development, and the development of interests as new as they had been unsuspected.

Like a gaily illuminated pageant the processional pa.s.sed before her with its constantly changing surroundings, new faces, new voices, new ideas, new motives.

And the new faces were to be scanned and understood, the new voices listened to intently, the new ideas a.n.a.lysed, the new motives detected and dissected.

In drawing-rooms, in ballrooms, in boudoirs, new scenes constantly presented themselves; one house was never like the next, one hostess never resembled another; wealth itself was presented to her under innumerable aspects ranging all the way from that false modesty and smugness known as meekness, to fevered pretence, arrogance, and noisy aggressiveness.

Wonderful school for a girl to learn in!--the gilded halls of which were eternally vexed and swept by the winds and whirlwinds of every human pa.s.sion.

For here, under her still, clear scrutiny, was huddled humanity itself, unconsciously bent on self-revelation. And Athalie's very presence amid a.s.semblies ever shifting, ever renewed, was educating her eyes and ears and intellect to an insight and a comprehension she had never dreamed of.

In some the supreme necessity for self-ventilation interested her; in others, secretiveness hermetically sealed fascinated her. Motives interested or disinterested, sordid or n.o.ble; desires, aspirations, hopes, perplexities,--whatever a glance, a word, an att.i.tude, a silence, suggested to her, fixed her attention, excited her intelligence to curiosity, and focussed her interest to a mental concentration.

Out of which emerged deductions--curious fruits of logic, experience, instinct, intuitiveness, and of some extraneous perception, outside of and independent of her own conscious and objective personality.

But in one radical particular Athalie differed from any individual of either s.e.x ever recorded in the history of hypnotic therapeutics or of psychic phenomena.

For those two worlds in which we all dwell, the supraliminal or waking world, the transliminal, or sleeping world, were merged in this young girl.

The psychological fact that natural or induced sleep is necessary for extraneous or for auto-suggestion, did not exist for her. Her psychic qualities were natural and beautiful, as much a part of her objective as of her subjective life. Neither the trance induced by mesmerism or hypnotism, nor the less harmful slumber by induction, nor the sleep of nature itself was necessary for the girl to find herself in rapport with others or with her own higher personality--her superior spiritual self. Nor did her clairvoyance require trances; nor was sleep in others necessary before she ventured suggestion.

A celebrated physician who had been eager to meet her found her extremely interesting but rather beyond his ability to cla.s.sify.

How much of her he believed to be fraud might be suspected by what he said to her that evening in a corner of a very grand house on Fifth Avenue:

"There is no such thing as a 'control'; there is no such thing as a 'medium.' No so-called medium has ever revealed anything that did not exist either in her own consciousness or in the consciousness of some other living human being.

"Self-delusion induced by auto-suggestion accounts for the more respectable victims of Spiritism. For Spiritism is a doctrine accepted by many people of education, intelligence, refinement, and of generally excellent judgment.

"And it is a pity, because Spiritism is a bar to all real intellectual, material, moral, and spiritual progress. It thrives only because it pretends to satisfy an intense human craving--the desire to re-establish personal relations with the dead. It never has done this; it never will, Miss Greensleeve. And if you really believe it has done this you are sadly and hopelessly mistaken."

"But," said Athalie, looking at him out of blue eyes the chiefest beauty of which was their fearless candour, "I do not concern myself with what is called Spiritism--with trances, table-tipping, table-rapping, slate-writing, apparitions, reincarnations--with cabinets, curtains, darkened rooms, psychic circles."

"You employ a crystal in your profession."

"Yes. I need not."

"Why do you do it, then?"