She Buildeth Her House Part 6

But you have no right to despise them--you, of all women. You're blooming up, up, up,--farther and farther out of the common--your blooming has been for years because you have kindled your mind. You must bloom for years still--that's the only meaning of your strength--because you will kindle your soul.... A woman with power like yours--has no right but to love the weak. Think what strength you have! There have been moments in the last half-hour that you have roused me to such a pitch of thinking--that I have felt weak and ineffectual beside you. You made me think sometimes of a great submarine--I don't know just why--flashing in the depths."

"I don't think you see me right," Selma Cross said wearily. "Many times I have been lost in the dark. I have been wicked--hated the forces that made me. I have so much in me of the peasant--that I abhor. There have been times when I would have been a prost.i.tute for a clean house and decent clothes to cover me, but men did not look at _The Thing_--only the old man, and one other!" Her eyes brightened, either at the memory or at the thought that she was free from the former.... "Don't wince and I'll tell you about that angel. You will be wiser. I don't want you for my friend, if I must keep something back. It was over three years ago, during my first real success. I was rather startling as Sarah Blixton in Heber's _Caller Herrin_. It was in that that I learned repression. That was my struggle--to repress.... Old man Villiers saw me, and was wise enough to see my future. 'Here's a girl,' I can imagine him saying, 'who is ugly enough to be square to one man, and she's a comer in spite of her face.' He showed where his check-book could be of unspeakable service. It was all very clear to me. I felt I had struggled enough, and went with him.... Villiers is that kind of New Yorker who feels that he has nothing left to live for, when he ceases to desire women. In his vanity--they are always vain--he wanted to be seen with a woman mentioned on Broadway. It was his idea of being looked up to--and of making other men envious. You know his sort have no interest--save where they can ruin.

"Then for two winter months, Villiers and I had a falling out. He went South, and I remained here to work. During this time I had my first real brush with love--a young Westerner. It was terrific. He was a brilliant, but turned out a rotten cad. I couldn't stand that in a young man....

You can pity an old man, much the worse for living, when he is brazenly a cad--doesn't know anything else.... When Villiers came back from the South I was bought again. I put it all nakedly, Paula, but I was older than you are now, when that sort of thing began with me. Remember that!

Still, I mustn't take too much credit, because I didn't attract men....

If you don't abhor me now, you never will, little neighbor, because you have the worst.... Sometime I'll tell you a real little love story--oh, I'm praying it's real! He's a hunch-back, Paula,--the author of _The Thing_.... n.o.body could possibly want a hunch-back but me--yet I'm not good enough. He's so n.o.ble and so fine!... The past is so full of abominations, and I'm not a liar.... I don't think he'd want me--though I could be his nurse. I could _carry him_!... Then there is a long-ago promise.... Oh, I know I'm not fit for that kind of happiness!..."

There was an inspiration in the last. It was strong enough to subvert Paula's mind from the road of dreary degradation over which she had been led. From rousing heights of admiration to black pits of shame, she had fallen, but here again was a tonic breath from clean alt.i.tudes. The picture in her mind of this great glowing creature tenderly mothering the poor crippled genius of _The Thing_--was a thrilling conception.

"There is nothing which cannot be forgiven--save soul-death!" Paula said ardently. "What you have told me is very hard to adjust, but I hope for your new love. Oh, I am glad, Selma, that the other is all behind! I don't know much of such things, but it has come to me that it is easier for a man to separate himself from past degradations and be clean--than a woman. This is because a man gives--_but the woman receives her sin_!

That which is given cannot continue to defile, but woman is the matrix.... Still, you do not lie. Such things are so dreadful when matted in lies. We all carry burdensome devils--but few uncover them, as you have done for me. There is something n.o.ble in looking back into the past with a shudder, saying,--'I was sick and full of disease in those days,' but when one hugs the corrosion, painting it white all over--there is an inner devouring that is never appeased.... All our sisters are in trouble. I think we live in a world of suffering sororities. You are big and powerful. Your greater life is to come.... I am glad for what you have put behind. You will progress farther and farther from it. I am glad you are back across the hall--alone!"

For many moments after Selma Cross had gone, Paula sat thinking under the lamp. At last she drew the sheets of the letter to Charter from the desk-drawer, and read them over. The same rapt smile came to her lips, as when she was writing. It was a letter to her Ideal--the big figure of cleanness and strength, she wanted this man to be. Even a line or two she added. No one ever knew, but Paula.... At length, she began tearing the sheets. Finer and finer became the squares under her tense fingers--a little pile of _confetti_ on the desk at last--and brushed into a basket.... Then she wrote another letter, blithe, brief, gracious--about his book and her opinion. It was a letter such as he would expect....

SIXTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS CALLED TO PARLOR "F" OF THE _MAID-STONE_ WHERE THE BEYOND-DEVIL AWAITS WITH OUTSTRETCHED ARMS

Paula felt singularly blessed the next morning wondering if ever there existed another woman into whose life-channel poured such strange and torrential tributaries. The current of her mind was broadening and accelerating. She was being prepared for some big expression, and there is true happiness in the thought. Reifferscheid, since her pilgrimage to Staten Island, had become a fixture of delight. Selma Cross had borne her down on mighty pinions to the lower revelations of the City, but had winged her back again on a breeze of pure romance. Madame Nestor had parted the curtains, which shut from the world's eye, h.e.l.l unqualified, yet her own life was a miracle of penitence. Not the least of her inspirations was this mild, brave woman of the solitudes. Then, there was the commanding mystery of Bellingham, emerging in her mind now from the chicaneries of the past ten days; rising, indeed, to his own valuation--that of a New Voice. Finally, above and before all, was the stirring figure of her Ideal--her splendid secret source of optimism--Charter, less a man than a soul in her new dreams--a name to which she affixed, "The Man-Who-Must-Be-Somewhere."

Just once, the thought came to Paula that Bellingham had designed a meeting such as took place in the Park to soften her aversion and clear from her mind any idea of his abnormality. She could not hold this suspicion long. Attributing evil strategies to another was not easy for Paula. The simpler way now was to give him every benefit, even to regard the recent dreadful adventures with an intangible devil--as an outburst of her neglected feminine prerogatives, coincident with the stress of her rather lonely intellectual life. As for Madame Nestor, might she not have reached a more acute stage of a similar derangement? Paula was not unacquainted with the great potentialities of fine physical health, nor did she miss the fact that Mother Nature seldom permits a woman of normal development to reach the fourth cycle of her years, without reckoning with the ancient reason of her being.

She now regarded early events connected with Bellingham as one might look back upon the beginning of a run of fever.... Could he be one of the New Voices?

Paula loved to think that Woman was to be the chief resource of the Lifting Age. Everywhere among men she saw the furious hunger for spiritual refreshment. Words, which she heard by mere chance from pa.s.sers-by, appalled her. It was so tragically clear to her how the life led by city men starves their better natures--that there were times when she could hardly realize they did not see it. She wanted someone to make the whole world understand--that just as there are hidden s.p.a.ces between the atoms of steel which made radioactivity possible, so in the human body there is a permeating s.p.a.ce, in which the soul of man is built day by day from every thought and act; and when the worn-out physical envelope falls away--there it stands, a record to endure.... She wanted to believe that it was the office of woman to help man make this record beautiful. Just as the old Anglo-Saxon for "lady" means "giver of bread," so she loved to think that the spiritual loaf was in the keeping of woman also.

Paula could not meditate without ecstasy upon the thought that a great spiritual tide was rising, soon to overflow every race and nation. The lifting of man from greedy senses to the pure happiness of brotherhood, was her most intimate and lovely hope. Back of everything, this lived and lit her mind. There were transcendent moments--she hardly dared to describe or interpret them--when cosmic consciousness swept into her brain. Swift was the visitation, nor did it leave any memorable impression, but she divined that such lofty moments, different only in degree, were responsible for the great utterances in books that are deathless. The shield was torn from her soul, leaving it naked to every world-anguish. The woman, Paula Linster, became an acc.u.mulation of all suffering--desert thirsts, untold loves, birth and death parturitions, blind cruelties of battle, the carnal l.u.s.t of Famine (that soft-treading spectre), welted flesh under the screaming lash, moaning from the World's Night everywhere--until the impa.s.sioned spirit within rushed forth to the very horizon's rim to shelter an agonizing people from an angry G.o.d. Such is the genius of race-motherhood--the ineffable spirit of mediation between Father and child.

One must regard with awe the reaction which follows such an outpouring.

These are the wilderness-wrestlings of the great-souled--the Gethsemanes. Out of the dream, would appear the actual spectacle of the City--human beings preying one upon the other, the wolf still frothing in man's breast--and then would crush down upon her with shattering pain the realization of her own hopeless ineffectuality. To a mind thus stricken and desolated often, premonitions of madness come at last--madness, the black brother of genius. There is safety alone in a body strong and undefiled to receive again the expanded spirit. From how many a l.u.s.trous youth--tarrying too long by the fetid margins of sense--has the glory winged away, never to return to a creature fallen into hairy despoliation.

Paula had returned from down-town about noon. Reifferscheid, who had a weakness for Herman Melville, and annually endeavored to spur the American people into a more adequate appreciation of the old sea-lion, had ordered her to rest her eyes for a few days in _Moby d.i.c.k_. With the fat, old fine-print novel under her arm, Paula let herself into her own apartment and instantly encountered the occultist's power. She sank to the floor and covered her face in the pillows of the couch. In the past twenty-four hours she had come to believe that the enemy had been put away forever, yet here in her own room she was stricken, and so swiftly.... Though she did not realize it at once, many of the thoughts which gradually surged into her mind were not her own. She came to see Bellingham as other women saw him--as a great and wise doctor. Her own conception battled against this, but vainly, vaguely. It was as if he held the balance of power in her consciousness. Without attempting to link them together, the processes of her mind quickly will be set into words.

Her first thought, before the tightening of Bellingham's control in her brain, was to rush into his presence and fiercely arraign him for the treachery he had committed. After blaming Madame Nestor and deforming her own faculties to clear him from evil, the devilishness of the present visitation overwhelmed. And how infinitely more black and formidable now was his magic--after the utterances in the Park! This was her last real stand.... A cry of hopelessness escaped her lips, for the numbness was already about her eyes, and creeping back like a pestilence along the open highways of her mind.

"Come to me. The way is open. I am alone. I am near.... Come to me, Paula Linster, of plentiful treasures.... Do you not see the open way--how near I am? Oh, come--now--come to me now!"

Again and again the little sentences fell upon her mind, until its surface stirred against reiteration, as one, thoroughly understanding, resents repeated explanations.... It was right now for her to go. She had been rebellious and headstrong to conjure such evils about the name of a famous physician. The world called him famous. Only she and Madame Nestor had stood apart, clutching fast to their ideas of his deviltry.

He had taken the trouble to call her to him--to prove that he was good.

The degradation which she had felt at the first moment of his summons--was all from her own perversity.... Clearly she saw the street below, Cathedral Way; a turn north, then across the Plaza to the brown ornate entrance of _The Maidstone_.... There was no formality about the going. Her hat and coat had not been removed.... She was in the hall; the elevator halted at her floor while the man pushed a letter and some papers under the door of the Selma Cross apartment.... In the street, she turned across the Plaza from Cathedral Way to _The Maidstone_. The real Paula Linster marshalled a hundred terrible protests, but her voice was m.u.f.fled, her strength ineffectual as Josephine's beating with white hands against the Emperor's iron door. Real volition was locked in the pitiless will of the physician, to whom she hastened as one hoping to be saved.

She inquired huskily of the man at the hotel-desk.

"The Doctor is waiting on the parlor-floor--in F," was the answer.

Paula stepped from the elevator, and was directed to the last door on the left.... The sense of her need, of her illness, hurried her forward through the long hall. Sometimes she seemed burdened with the body of a woman, very tired and helpless, but quite obedient.... The figure "F" on a silver shield filled her eyes. The door was ajar. Her entrance was not unlike that of a lioness goaded with irons through a barred pa.s.sage into an arena. She did not open the door wider, but slipped through sideways, gathering her dress closely about her.... Bellingham was there. His face was white, rigid from long concentration; yet he smiled and his arms were opened to her.... The point here was that he so marvelously understood. His att.i.tude to her seemed that of a physician of the soul.

She could not feel the fighting of the real woman.... Dazed and broken for the moment, she encountered the soothing magnetism of his hands.

"How long I have waited!" he quietly exclaimed. "Hours, and it was bitter waiting--but you are a wreath for my waiting--how grateful you are to my weariness!... Paula Linster, Paula Linster--what deserts of burning sunshine I have crossed to find you--what dark jungles I have searched for such fragrance!"

His arms were light upon her, his voice low and lulling. He dared not yet touch his lips to her hair--though they were dry and twisted with his awful thirst. Craft and patience altogether feline was in the art with which he wound and wove about her mind thoughts of his own, designed to ignite the spark of responsive desire.... And how softly he fanned--(an incautious blast would have left him in darkness altogether)--until it caught.... Well, indeed, he knew the cunning of the yet unbroken seals; and better still did he know the outraged forces hovering all about her, ready to defeat him for the slightest error--and leave him to burn in his own fires.

"This is peace," he whispered with indescribable repression. "How soft a resting-place--and yet how strong!... Out of the past I have come for you. Do you remember the rock in the desert on which you sat and waited long ago? Your eyes were weary when I came--weary from the blazing light of noon and the endless waning of that long day. On a great rock in the desert you sat--until I came, _until I came_. Then you laughed because I shut the feverish sun-glow from your strained eyes.... Remember, I came in the skin of a lion and shut the sunset from your aching eyes--my shoulders darkening the west--and we were alone--and the night came on...."

Clearly was transferred to hers, the picture in his own brain. One of the ancient and mystic films of memory seemed brought after ages to the light--the reddening sands, the city far behind, from which she had fled to meet her hero, deep in the desert--the glow of sunset on his shoulders and in his hair, tawny as the lion's skin he wore.... The heart quickened within her; the savage ardor of that long-ago woman grew hot in her breast. Strong as a lion he was, this youth of the Sun, and fleet the night fell to cover them. She ate the dried grapes he gave her, drank deep from his skin of wine, and laughed with him in the swift descending night.... She felt his arms now, her face was upraised, her eyelids tensely shut. Downward the blood rushed, leaving her lips icy cold. She felt the muscles of his arms in her tightening fingers, and her breast rose against him. This was no Twentieth Century magician who thralled her now, but a glorious hero out of the desert sunset;--and the woman within her was as one consuming with ecstasy from a lover's last visit....

And now Bellingham changed the color and surface of his advances. It was his thought to make such a marvellous sally, that when he retired and the mistress once again commanded her own citadel, she would perceive the field of his activities strewn, not with corpses, but with garlands, and in their fragrance she must yearn for the giant to come yet again.

The thing he now endeavored to do was beyond an ordinary human conception for devilishness; and yet, that it was not a momentary impulse, but a well considered plan, was proven by the trend of his talk of the day before.... The flaw in his structure was his apparent forgetting that the woman in his arms breathing so ardently, in her own mind was clinging to a youth out of the sunset--a youth in the skin of a lion.

"Wisdom has been given to my eyes," Bellingham resumed with surpa.s.sing gentleness. "For years a conception of wonderful womanhood has lived and brightened in my mind, bringing with it a promise that in due time, such a woman would be shown to me. The woman, the promise and the miracle of its later meaning, I perceived at last were not for my happiness, but for the world's awful need. You are the fruits of my wonderful vision--you--Paula Linster. You are the quest of my long and weary searching!"

His utterance of her name strangely disturbed her night-rapture of the desert. It was as if she heard afar-off--the calling of her people.

"On the night you entered the Hall," he said, and his face bent closer, "I felt the sense of victory, before these physical eyes found you. My thoughts roved over a world, brightened by a new hope, fairer for your presence. And then, I saw your fine white brow, the ignited magic of your hair and eyes, your frail exquisite shoulders.... It seemed as though the lights perished from the place--when you left."

The word "magic" was a sudden spark around which the thoughts of the woman now groped.... She had lost her desert lover, pa.s.sion was drained from her, and there was a weight of great trouble pressing down ...

"Magic"--she struggled for its meaning.... She was sitting upon a rock again, but not in the desert--rather in a place of cooled sunlight, where there were turf roads and grand, old trees--a huge figure approaching with a powerful swinging stride--yesterday, Bellingham, the Park--the Talk!... Paula lifted her shoulders, felt the binding arms around them and heard the words uttered now in the meridian of human pa.s.sion:

"Listen, Paula Linster, you have been chosen for the most exalted task ever offered to living woman. The Great Soul is not yet in the world, and He must come soon!... It is you who have inspired this--you, of trained will; a mind of stirring evolution, every thought so essentially feminine; you of virgin body and a soul lit with stars! You are brave.

The burden is easy to one of your courage, and I should keep you free from the world--free from the burns and the whips of this thinking animal, the world. All that I have won from the world, her mysteries, her enchantments, I shall give you, all that is big and brave and wise in song and philosophy and nature, I shall bring to your feet, as a hunter with trophies to his beloved--all that a man, wise and tender, can think and express to quicken the splendor of fertility----"

Paula was now fully conscious--her self restored to her. The Yesterday and the To-day rose before her mind in startling parallel. Her primary dread was that she might lose control again before Bellingham was put away. The super-devilishness of his plan--hiding a blasphemy in the white robe of a spiritual consecration--had changed him in her sight to a ravening beast. The thing which he believed would cause her eagerly to bestow upon him the riches of her threefold life had lifted her farther out of his power that moment, than even she realized. Bellingham had over-reached. She was filled with inner nausea.... The idea of escape, the thought of crippling the magician's power over her forever--in the stress of this, she grew cold.... She was nearest the door. It stood ajar, as when she had entered.

"Meditation--in the place I have prepared," he was whispering, "meditation and the poetic life, rarest of fruits, purest of white garments--cleansed with sunlight and starlight, you and I, Paula Linster,--the sources of creation which have been revealed to me--for you! Wonderful woman--all the vitalities of heaven shall play upon you!

We shall bring the new G.o.d into the world----"

She pushed back from his arms and faced him--white-lipped and loathing.

"You father a son of mine," she said, in the doorway. "You--are dead--the man's soul is dead within you--you whited sepulchre!"

His face altered like a white wall which an earthquake disorders at the base. White rock turned to blown paper; the man-mask rubbed out; Havoc featured upon an erect thing, with arms pitifully outstretched.

Paula, alone in the long hall, ran to the marble stairs, hurried down and into the street--swiftly to her house. There, every thread of clothing she had worn was gathered into a pile for burning. Then she bathed and her strength returned.