She Buildeth Her House Part 22

Charter did not find Paula Linster in the week of New York that followed his call at the _Zoroaster_, but he found Quentin Charter. The first three or four days were rather intense in a psychological way. The old vibrations of New York invariably contained for him a destructive principle, as Paris held for Dr. Duprez. The furious consumption of nerve-tissue during the first evening after his arrival; a renewal of desires operating subconsciously, and in no small part through the pa.s.sion of Selma Cross; his last struggle, both subtle and furious, with his own stimulus-craving temperament, and the desolation of the true romance--combined, among other things, worthily to test the growth of his spirit.... The thought that Skylark had fallen into the hands of Selma Cross, and had been given that ugly estimate of him which the actress held before his call, as he expressed it in his letter, "drove straight and swiftly to the very centres of sanity." Over this, was a ghastly, whimpering thing that would not be immured--the effect of which, of all a.s.sailants to rising hope, was most scarifying: That Paula Linster had suffered herself to listen to those old horrors, and had permitted him to be called to the bar before Selma Cross. No matter how he handled this, it held a fundamental lesion in the Skylark-fineness.

Charter whipped his wastrel tendencies one by one until on the fifth day his resistance hardened, and the brute within him was crippled from beating against it. His letter to Paula Linster was a triumph of repression. Probably one out of six of the thoughts that came to him were given expression. He felt that he had made of Selma Cross an implacable enemy, and was pursued by the haunting dread (if, indeed, the conversation had not been overheard), that she might think better about "squaring" him. It was on this fifth day that for a moment the mystic attraction returned to his consciousness, and he heard the old singing.

This was the first reward for a chastened spirit. Again and again--though never consciously to be lured or forced--the vision, unhurt, undiminished, returned for just an instant with a veiled, but exquisite refinement.

The newspaper account of Pelee's overflowing wrath immediately materialized all his vague thought of voyaging. His quest had vanished from New York. Had Selma Cross been true to her word; at least, had any part of their interview been empowered to restore something of the faith of Paula Linster--there had been ample time for him to hear it. He was afraid that, in itself, his old intimacy with the actress had been enough to startle the Skylark into uttermost flight. Reifferscheid's frigidity had required only one test to become a deep trouble. His hint that Miss Linster would be away two or three months rendered New York and a return to his own home equally impossible. Father Fontanel held a bright, substantial warmth for his isolated spirit--and the _Panther_ was among the imminent sailings.

He bought his berth and pa.s.sage on the morning of the sailing date, and there was a matinee of _The Thing_ in the meantime. Charter did not notify Selma Cross of his coming, but he liked the play unreservedly, and was amazed by the perfection of her work. He wrote her a line to this effect; and also a note of congratulation and greeting to Stephen Cabot.... It was not without a pang that he looked back at Manhattan from The Narrows that night.

For several mornings he had studied the gaunt, striding figure of a fellow-pa.s.senger, who appeared to be religious in the matter of his const.i.tutional; or, as a sailor softly remarked as he glanced up at Charter from his holy-stoning, "He seems to feel the need av walkin' off sivin or eight divils before answerin' the breakfast-gong...." In behalf of this stranger also, Charter happened to overhear the chief-steward encouraging one of the waiters to extra-diligence in service, Queerly, in the steward's mind, the interest seemed of a deeper sort than even an unusual fee could exact--as if he recognized in the stranger a man exalted in some mysterious masonry. And Charter noticed that the haggard giant enforced a sort of willing slavery throughout the ship--from the hands, but through the heads. This strange potentiality was decidedly interesting; as was the figure in itself, which seemed possessed of the strength of vikings, in spite of an impression, inevitable to Charter when he drew near--of one enduring a sort of Promethean dissolution. Charter reflected upon the man's eyes, which had the startling look of having penetrated beyond the formality of Death--into shadows where inquisition-h.e.l.ls were limned. It was not until he heard the steward address the other as "Doctor Bellingham,"

that the fanciful attraction weakened. His recollection crowded instantly with newspaper paragraphs regarding the Bellingham activities.

Charter was rather normal in his masculine hatred for hypnotic artists and itinerary confessionals for women.

The _Panther_ ran into a gale in that storm-crucible off Hatteras.

Charter smiled at the thought, as the striding Bellingham pa.s.sed, doing his mileage on the rocking deck, that the roar of the wind in the funnels aloft was fierce energy in the draughts of this human furnace.

While his own interest waned, the other, curiously enough, began to respond to his unspoken overtures of a few days before. The _Panther_ was a day out from San Juan, steaming past the far-flung coral shoals off Santo Domingo, when Charter was beckoned forward where Bellingham sat.

"This soft air would call a Saint Francis down from his spiritual meditations," the Doctor observed.

The voice put Charter on edge, and the manner affected him with inward humor. It was as if the other thought, "Why, there's that pleasant-faced young man again. Perhaps it would be just as well to speak with him." As he drew up his chair, however, Charter was conscious of an abrupt change in his mental att.i.tude--an inclination to combat, verbally to rush in, seize and destroy every false utterance. His initial idea was to compel this man who spoke so glibly of meditations to explain what the word meant to him. This tense, nervous impatience to disqualify all the other might say became dominant enough to be reckoned with, but when Charter began to repress his irritation, a surprising inner resistance was encountered. His sensation was that of one being demagnetized. Thoughts and words came quickly with the outgoing energy of the current.

Altogether he was extraordinarily affected.

"These Islands are not particularly adapted for one who pursues the austerities," he replied.

"Yet where can you find such temperamental happiness?" Bellingham inquired, plainly testing the other. His manner of speech was flippant, as if it were quite the same to him if his acquaintance preferred another subject.

"Anywhere among the less-evolved nations, when the people are warm and fed."

The Doctor smiled. "You will soon see the long, lithe coppery bodies of the Islanders, as they plunge into the sea from the Antillean cliffs.

You will hear the soft laughter of the women, and then you will forget to deny their perfection." Sensuality exhaled from the utterance.

"You speak of the few brief zenith years which lie at the end of youth,"

Charter said. "This sort of perfection exists anywhere. In the Antilles it certainly is not because the natives have learned how to preserve life."

"That's just the point," said Bellingham, "Add to their natural gifts of beautiful young bodies--the knowledge of preservation."

"Take a poor, unread Island boy and inform him how to live forever,"

Charter observed. "Of course, he'll grasp the process instantly. But wouldn't it be rather severe on the other boys and girls, if the usual formula of perpetuating self is used? I mean, would he not have to restore his vitality from the others?"

Bellingham stared at him. Charter faced it out, but not without cost, for the livid countenance before him grew more and more ghastly and tenuous, until it had the effect of becoming altogether unsubstantial; and out of this wraith shone the eyes of the serpent. The clash of wills was quickly pa.s.sed.

"You have encountered a different fountain of youth from mine," the Doctor said gently.

"Rather I have encountered a disgust for any serious consideration of immortality in the body."

"Interesting, but our good Saint Paul says that those who are in the body when the last call sounds, will be caught up--without disturbing the sleep of the dead."

"It would be rather hard on such bodies--if the chariots were of fire,"

Charter suggested.

He was inwardly groping for his poise. He could think well enough, but it disturbed him to feel the need to avoid the other's eyes. He liked the shaping of the conversation and knew that Bellingham felt himself unknown. Charter realized, too, that he would strike fire if he hammered long enough, but there was malevolence in the swift expenditure of energy demanded.

Bellingham smiled again. "Then you think it is inevitable that the end of man is--the clouds?"

"The aspiration of the spirit, I should say, is to be relieved of feet of clay.... Immortality in the body--that's an unbreakable paradox to me. I'm laminated, Harveyized against anything except making a fine tentative instrument of the body."

"You think, then, that the spirit grows as the body wastes?"

"Orientals have encountered starvation with astonishing results to philosophy," Charter remarked. "But I was thinking only of a body firmly helmed by a clean mind. The best I have within me declares that the fleshly wrapping becomes at the end but a c.u.mbering cerement; that through life, it is a spirit-vault. When I pamper the body, following its fitful and imperious appet.i.tes, I surely stiffen the seals of the vault. In my hours in which the senses are dominant the spirit shrinks in abhorrence; just as it thrills, warms and expands in rarer moments of n.o.bility."

"Then the old martyrs and saints who macerated themselves wove great folds of spirit?"

The inconsequential manner of the question urged Charter to greater effort to detach, if possible, for a moment at least, the other's Ego.

"In ideal," he went on, "I should be as careless of food as Th.o.r.eau, as careless of physical pain as Suso. As for the reproductive devil incarnated in man--it, and all its ramifications, since the most delicate and delightful of these so often betray--I should encase in the coldest steel of repression----"

"You say, in ideal," Bellingham ventured quietly. "... But are not these great forces splendid fuel for the mind? Prodigious mental workers have said so."

"A common view," said Charter, who regarded the remark as characteristic. "Certain mental workers are fond of expressing this. You hear it everywhere with a sort of 'Eureka.' Strength of the loins is but a coa.r.s.e inflammation to the mind. A man may use such excess strength, earned by continence, in the production of exotics, feverish lyrics, and in depicting summer pa.s.sions, but the truth is, that so long as that force is not censored, shriven and sterilized--it is the same jungle pestilence, and will color the mind with impurity. It is much better where it belongs--than in the mind."

"You do not believe in the wild torrents, the forked lightnings, and the shocking thunders of the poets?"

"I like the calm, conquering voices of the prophets better....

Immortality of the body?... There can be no immortality in a substance which earth attracts. We have vast and violent lessons to learn in the flesh; lessons which can be learned only in the flesh, because it is a matrix for the integration of spirit. It appears to me that, in due time, man reaches a period when he balances in the attractions--between the weight of the body and the lifting of the soul. This is the result of a slow, refining process that has endured through all time.

Reincarnation is the best theory I know for the process. That there is an upward tendency driving the universe, seems to be the only cause and justification for Creating. Devolution cannot be at the centre of such a system.... The body becomes more and more a spotless garment for the soul; soul-light more and more electrifies it; the elimination of carnality in thought may even render the body delicate and transparent, but it is a matrix still, and falls away--when one's full-formed wings no longer need the weight of a thorax----"

"What an expression!" Bellingham observed abruptly. He had been staring away toward a low, cloudy film of land in the south. One would have thought that he had heard only the sentence which aroused his comment.

Charter was filling with violence. The man's vanity was chained to him like a corpse. This experience of pouring out energy to no purpose aroused in Charter all the forces which had combined to force the public to his work. The thought came that Bellingham was so accustomed to direct the speech and thought of others, mainly women, that he had lost the listening faculty.

"Let me express it, then," Charter declared with his stoutest repression, "that this beautiful surviving element, having finished with the flesh, knows only the attraction of Light. It is the perfect flower of ages of earth-culture, exquisite and inimitable from the weathering centuries, and is radiant for a higher destiny than a cooling planet's crust----"

"My dear young man, you speak very clearly, prettily, and not without force, I may say,--a purely Platonistic gospel."

Charter's mental current was turned off for a second. True or false, the remark was eminently effective. A great man might have said it, or a dilettante.

"In which case, I have a firm foundation."

"But I am essentially of the moderns," said Bellingham.

"Perhaps I should have known that from your first remark--about the brown bodies of the Islanders, rejoicing in the sunlight and bathing in these jewelled seas."

"Ah, yes----" The softening of Bellingham's mouth, as he recalled his own words, injected fresh stimulant into the animus of the other. As Charter feared the eyes, so he had come to loathe the mouth, though he was not pleased with the intensity of his feelings.

"Do you honestly believe that--that which feels the attraction of earth, and becomes a part of earth after death--is the stuff of immortality?"

he demanded.

"By marvellous processes of prolongation and refinement--and barring accident--yes."

"Processes which these poor Islanders could understand?"