She Buildeth Her House Part 17

"I am not speaking of the vast library of ma.n.u.script failures, but of a small proportion which get into the sinister glare of Broadway----"

"My G.o.d, 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 d.a.m.nable, 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 s.e.xes 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 prost.i.tuted 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 G.o.d's hands--let us hope."

"It is good to laugh at you, Quentin Charter. You have another appet.i.te.

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 mult.i.tude takes from out our b.r.e.a.s.t.s--and call ours a prost.i.tution, 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.sion--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 s.e.xless 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 pa.s.sion 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 appet.i.te, or a G.o.d 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 b.u.t.ton, 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 hoa.r.s.ely. "The gentleman is going up."

Bellingham, who had started to follow, was stopped by the sliding-door.