She Buildeth Her House

FIRST CHAPTER

PAULA ENCOUNTERS THE REMARKABLE EYES OF HER FIRST GIANT, AND HEARKENS TO THE SECOND, THUNDERING AFAR-OFF

Paula Linster was twenty-seven when two invading giants entered the country of her heart. On the same day, these hosts, each unconscious of the other, crossed opposite borders and verged toward the prepared citadel between them.

Reifferscheid, though not one of the giants, found Paula a distraction in brown, when she entered his office before nine in the morning, during the fall of 1901. He edited the rather distinguished weekly book-page of The States, and had come to rely upon her for a paper or two in each issue. There had been rain in the night. The mellow October sunlight was strange with that same charm of maturity which adds a glow of attraction to motherhood. The wonderful autumn haze, which broods over our zone as the spirit of ripening grains and tinting fruits, just perceptibly shaded the vivid sky. A sentence Paula had heard somewhere in a play, "My God, how the sun does shine!" appealed to her as particularly fitting for New York on such a morning. Then in the streets, so lately flooded, the brilliant new-washed air was sweet to breathe.

Paula had felt the advisability the year before of adding somewhat to her income. Inventory brought out the truth that not one of her talents had been specialized to the point of selling its product. She had the rare sense to distinguish, however, between a certain joyous inclination to write and a marked ability for producing literature; and to recognize her own sound and sharp appreciation of what was good in the stirring tide of books. Presenting herself to Reifferscheid, principally on account of an especial liking for the book-page of The States, she never forgot how the big man looked at her that first time over his spectacles, as if turning her pages with a sort of psychometric faculty. He found her possible and several months won her not a little distinction in the work.

Reifferscheid was a fat, pondrous, heavy-spectacled devourer of work. He compelled her real admiration—"the American St. Beuve," she called him, because he was so tireless, and because he sniffed genius from afar. There was something unreservedly charming to her, in his sense of personal victory, upon discovering greatness in an unexpected source. Then he was so big, so common to look at; kind as only a bear of a man can be; so wise, so deep, and with such a big smoky factory of a brain, full of fascinating crypts. Subcutaneous laughter that rested her internally for weeks lingered about certain of the large man's sayings. Even in the auditing of her account, she felt his kindness.

"Now here are some essays by Quentin Charter—a big man, a young man and a slow worker," he said. "Charter's first volume was a thunderer. We greeted it with a whoop two years ago. Did you see it?"

"No," Paula replied. "I was too strong for literary trifles then."

"Anyway, look out for Charter. He didn't start to appear until he was an adult. He's been everywhere, read everything and has a punch like a projectile. An effective chap, this Charter. He dropped in to see me a few weeks after my review. He confessed the critics had made him very glad.... 'I am doing a second book,' he confided to me. 'Down on my knees to it. Work-shop stripped of encomiums; no more dinner-parties or any of that fatness. Say, it's a queer thing about making a book. You never can tell whether it's to be a boy or a girl....'"

Paula smiled reservedly.

"I asked him what his second book was to be about," Reifferscheid went on. "'Women,' said he. 'How novel!' said I. He grinned genially. 'Reifferscheid,' he declared, in his snappy way, 'women are interesting. They're doing the thinking nowadays. They're getting there. One of these mornings, man will wake up to the fact that he's got to be born again to get in a class with his wife. Man is mixed up with altogether too much of this down-town madness. Women don't want votes, public office, or first-hand dollars. They want men!' ... I always remembered that little bit of stuff from Charter. He says the time will come when classy girls will get their heads together and evolve this ultimatum, which will be handed intact to adorers: 'No, boys, we can't marry you. We haven't any illusions about celibacy. It isn't nice nor attractive, but it's better than being yoked with hucksters and peddlers who come up-town at night—mental cripples in empty wagons. Go away and learn what life means, what it means to be men—what it means to us for you to be men! Learn how to live—and oh, boys, hurry back!'"

"Splendid!" Paula exclaimed.

"Oh, yes, Charter is a full deck and a joker. He's lived. He makes you feel him. His years are veritable campaigns. He has dangled in the vortices of human action and human passion—and seemed to come out whole!..." Reifferscheid chuckled at a memory. "'Women are interesting,' Charter finished in his dry fashion. 'I just got to them lately. I wish I could know them all.'"

"I love the book already," Paula said. Reifferscheid laughed inwardly at the feminine way she held the volume in both hands, pressing it close.

"It's the only book on my table this morning that I'd like to read," he added. "Therefore I give it to you. There's no fun in giving something you don't want.... Are you going to hear Bellingham to-night?"

She was conscious of an unaccountable dislike at the name, a sense of inward chill. It was almost as reckonable as the pleasure she felt in the work and personality of Quentin Charter.

"Who's Bellingham?" Paula swallowed dryly after the first utterance of the name.

"Mental magician. I only mentioned him, because you so seldom miss the unusual, and are so quick to hail a new cult or odd mental specimen."

"Magician—surely?" she asked.

"He comes rather stoutly recommended as such," Reifferscheid replied, "though personally mine is more than a healthy skepticism. There's a notice this morning of his lectures. He recently hypnotized a man to whom the medical profession was afraid to administer an anaesthetic—held him painless during a long and serious operation. Then Bellingham is the last word in alchemy, feminine emotions, causes of hysteria, longevity, the proportions of male and female in each person; also he renews the vital principle, advises unions, makes you beautiful, and has esoteric women's classes. A Godey's Ladies' man. Some provincial husband will shoot him presently."

Paula took the surface car home, because the day was so rare and the crowd was still downward bent. The morning paper contained an announcement of Quentin Charter's new book, and a sketch of the author. A strange, talented figure, new in letters, the article said. The paragraphs had that fresh glow of a publisher's perennial high hope. Here was the book of a man who had lived; who drew not only upon art, history, and philosophy for his prisms of thought, but who had roamed and worked and ridden with men, keeping a sensitive finger ever at the pulse of nature; a man who had never in the most insignificant degree lowered the import or artificially raised the tension of his work to adjust it to the fancied needs of the public. In spite of the enthusiastic phrasing, everything about Charter fascinated her; even the make-up of the unread book in her hand, and the sentences that gleamed from the quickly turned pages.

She had ridden many squares, when the name of Dr. Bellingham stood out before her eyes in the newspaper. The chill in her arteries was perceptible as before, when Reifferscheid spoke the name. It was as the latter had said—the famous healer and telepathist was to start a series of classes for women.

Paula lived alone in a small apartment at the Zoroaster, "Top-side o' Park." Few friends, many books, within a car ride of the world's best fruition in plays, lectures, music, and painting—yet the reality of it all was the expansion of her mind in the days and nights alone. The subtle relations of things encroached upon her intelligence with a steady and certain trend. She never had to pass, like so many of cruder nature, through the horrid trials of materialism; nor to be painfully bruised in mind from buffeting between manhandled creeds and the pure ethics of the Lord Christ. Hers was not an aggressive masculine originality, but the complement of it—that inspiring, completing feminine intelligence, elastic to a man's hard-won concepts and ready with a crown for them.

Something of this type of woman, the big-brained brothers of men have written and chiselled, painted, sung and dreamed of, since human thought first lifted above the appetites. There must be a bright answer for each man's particular station of evolution in the world's dumfounding snarl of the sexes—one woman to lighten his travail and accelerate his passage to the Uplands. For we are but half-men, man and woman alike. The whole is two, whose union forms One.... This is the key to Nature's arcanum; this, the one articulate sentence from all the restless murmuring out of the past; this, the stupendous Purpose weaving the million thrilling and truant activities of the present hour—the clean desire for completion—the union of two which forms One.

The search for this completing woman is the secret of man's roving in the gardens of sense. His frequent falls into abysmal depravity are but results incidental to the occultations of his Guide Star. From reptiles in the foul smoke of chaos, to the lifted spines of manhood on a rising road, Man has come; and by the interminable torture of the paths which sink behind, he has the other half of eternity to reach the Top.

From a child whose fairies were only enchanted into books for day-time convenience, darkness to Paula meant visions, indeed. Often now at night, though she never spoke of it, the little apartment was peopled by the spirits of her reading and her ideals—mystics, priests, prophets, teachers, ascetics. To the congenial dark they came—faces unlike any she had ever seen, but quite unmistakable in her dreamings. Once when she pampered a natural aversion to meat for several months, soft foot-falls and low voices (which had nothing whatever to do with her neighbors across the hall, or the elevator-man in any passage) began to rouse her in the night. New York is no place for such refinements of sense, and she checked these manifestations through physical exercise and increased diet. She was seldom afraid, but there was a tension in all her imaginings, and she grew marvellously in this twenty-eighth year—furnishing her mind more sumptuously than she knew. Reifferscheid saw this in her eyes and in her work.

Throughout the swiftly passing day, Paula realized that she would go to Prismatic Hall in West Sixty-seventh Street, where Dr. Bellingham was to organize his lecture-course that night. Against this foreknowledge was a well-defined distaste for the man and his work. Between the two, the thought of the evening crowded frequently into mind until she became impatient with herself at the importance it assumed. It was with a certain feminine manipulation of conscience, so deft as almost to be unconscious, that she excused her own curiosity on the ground that her disfavor for the doctor and his message would be strengthened by the first meeting, beyond the need of further experience.

One concession she made to her natural aversion—that of going late. She was in a mood poignantly critical. The real Paula Linster, she fancied, was at home, "Top-side o' Park"; here was just a sophisticated professional surface, such as reporters carry about. The Hall was packed with women; the young and the jaded; faces of pup-innocence; faces bitten from terrible expeditions to the poles of sense; faces tired and thick from the tread of an orient of emotions; slow-roving eyes which said, "I crave—I crave! I have lost the sense of reality, but seven sick and pampered organs crave within me!"

The thought came to Paula—to be questioned afterward—that man's evil, after all, is rudimentary compared to a worldly woman's; man's soul not so complicated, nor so irrevocably identified with his sensual organism. She could not avoid pondering miserably upon woman's innate love for far ventures into sensation, permitting these ventures to be called (if the world would) searches for the holy grail. The inevitable attraction for women which specialists of the body possess, actually startled her. Bellingham was one of these. On the surface of all his sayings, and all comment about him, was the bland, deadly insinuation that the soul expands in the pursuit of bodily health. About his name was the mystery of his age, whispers of his physical perfection, intimations of romantic affairs, the suggestion of his miraculous performances upon the emotions—the whole gamut of activities designed to make him the instant aversion of any normal member of his own sex. Yet the flock of females had settled about him, as they have settled about every black human plague—and glorious messiah—since the birth of days.

The thrilled, expectant look on several faces brought to Paula's mind the type of her sisters who relish being shocked; whose exaltations are patently those of emotional contact; who call physical excitement the glorifying of their spirit, and cannot be persuaded to confess otherwise. Woman as a negation for man to play upon never distressed her before with such direct and certain pressure. Here were women intent upon encountering a new sensation; women who devoutly breathed the name of Motherhood next to Godhood, and yet endured their pregnancy with organic rebellion and mental loathing; women who could not conceive of love apart from the embrace of man, and who imagine a "message" in deformed and salacious novels, making such books popular; women of gold-leaf culture whose modesty fastens with a bow—narrow temples of infinite receptivity....

Why had they come? In the perfect feminine system of information, the whisper had run: "Bellingham is wonderful. Bellingham tells you how to live forever. Bellingham teaches the renewal of self and has esoteric classes—for the few!" They had the sanction of one another. There was no scandal in being there openly, nor any instinct, apparently, to warn them that secret classes to discover how to live forever, had upon the surface no very tonic flavor. The digest of the whole matter was that revelations sooner or later would be made to a certain few, and that these revelations, which would be as fine oil upon the mental surfaces of many women near her, would act as acid upon the male mind generally.

In the sickening distaste for herself and for those who had to make no concession to themselves for coming, inasmuch as society permitted; and who would be heartfully disappointed in a lecture on hygiene that did not discuss the more intimate matters of the senses, Paula did not appraise the opposite sex at any higher value. She merely reviewed matters which had come to her vividly as some of the crowning frailties of her own kind. The centre of the whole affair, Dr. Bellingham, was now introduced.

He looked like a Dane at first glance. His was the size, the dusty look and the big bone of a Dane; the deep, downy paleness of cheek, the tumbled, though not mussy hair. He was heavy without being adipose, lean, but big-boned; his face was lined with years, though miraculously young in the texture of skin. The lips of a rather small and feminine mouth were fresh and red as a girl's. In the softness of complexion and the faintest possible undertone of color, it was impossible not to think of perfected circulation and human health brought to truest rhythm. The costliest lotions cannot make such a skin. It is organic harmony. Exterior decoration does not delude the seeing eye any more than a powder-magazine becomes an innocent cottage because its walls are vine-clad.... Directly behind her, Paula now heard a slow whisper:

"I knew him twenty-five years ago, and he is not a moment older to look at."

She seemed to have heard the voice before, and though the sentence surged with a dark significance through her mind, she did not turn. Bellingham's words were now caressing the intelligence of his audience. To Paula, his soft mouth was indescribably odious with cultured passion, red with replenishment, fresh with that sinister satisfaction which inevitably brings to mind a second figure, fallen, drained. His presence set to quivering within her, fears engendered from the great occult past. Strange deviltries would always be shadowed about the Bellingham image in her mind.... Here was a man who made a shrine of his body, invested it with a heavy hungering God, and taught others—women—to bow and to serve.

To her the body was but a nunnery which enclosed for a time an eternal element. This was basic, incontrovertible to her understanding. All that placated the body and helped to make fleshly desires last long, was hostile to the eternal element. Not that the body should be abused or neglected, but kept as nearly as possible a clean vessel for the spirit, brought to a fine automatic functioning. It was as clear to Paula Linster as the faces of the women about her, that the splendid sacrifice of Jesus was not that He had died upon the Cross, but that He put on flesh in the beginning for the good of infant-souled men.... To eat sparingly of that which is good; to sleep when weary; to require cleanliness and pure air—these were the physical laws which worked out easily for decent minds. Beyond such simple affairs, she did not allow the body often to rule her brain. When, indeed, the potentialities of her sex stirred within, Paula felt that it was the down-pull of the old brood-mother, Earth, and not the lifting of wings.

Bellingham's voice correlated itself, not with the eyes and brow, but with the Lilith mouth—that strangely unpunished mouth. It was soft, suave. There was in it the warmth of breath. The high white forehead and the tousled brown hair, leonine in its masculinity—seemed foreign as another man's. She hearkened to the voice of a doctor used to women; one who knows women without illusion, whom you could imagine saying, "Why bless you, women never say 'no.'"

The eyes were blue-gray, but toned very darkly. The iris looked small in contrast to the expanse of clear white. They were fixed like a bird's in expression, incapable of warming or softening, yet one did not miss the impression that they could brighten and harden, even to shining in the dark. Heavy blonde brows added a look of severity.

Paula's spirit, as if recognizing an old and mortal enemy, gathered about itself every human protecting emotion. Frankly hateful, she surveyed the man, listening. He talked marvellously; even in her hostility, she had to grant that. The great sunning cat was in his tones, but the words were joined into clean-thought expression, rapid, vivid, unanswerable. He did not speak long; the first meeting was largely formative. Paula knew he was studying his company, and watched him peer into the faces of the women. His mouth occasionally softened in the most winsome and engaging way, while his words ran on with the refined wisdom of ages. And always to her, his eyes stood out cold, hard, deadly.

Finally, she was conscious that they were roving near her; moving left to right, from face to face, as a collection-plate might have been passed. Her first thought was to leave; but fear never failed to arouse an impulse to face out the cause. The second thought was to keep her eyes lowered. This she tried. His words came clearly now, as she stared down into the shadow—the perfectly carved thoughts, bright and swift like a company of soldiers moving in accord. As seconds passed, this down-staring became insufferable as though some one were holding her head. She could not breathe under repression. Always it had been so; the irresistible maddened the very centres of her reason—a locked room, a hand or a will stronger than her own.

Raising her head with a gasp, as one coming to the surface from a great depth of water, she met Bellingham's glance unerringly as a shaft of light. He had waited for this instant. The eyes now boring into her own, seemed lifted apart from all material things, veritable essences of light, as if they caught and held the full rays of every arc-lamp in the Hall. Warmth and smiling were not in them; instead, the spirit of conquest aroused; incarnate preying-power, dead to pity and humor. Here was Desire toothed, taloned, quick with every subtle art of nature. Something at war with God, his eyes expressed to her. Failing to master God, failing to foul the centres of creative purity, this Something devoured the souls of women. Continually his voice sought to drug her brain. The fine edge was gone from her perceptions; dulled, she was, to all but his sayings. There was a chill behind and above her eyes; it swept backward and seemed to converge in the coarser ganglia at the base of her brain. Once she had seen a bird hop and flutter lower and lower among the branches of a lilacbush. On the ground below was a cat with head twisted upward—its vivid and implacable eyes distending. Paula could understand now the crippling magnetism the bird felt.... Finally she could hear only the words of Bellingham, and feel only his power. What he was saying now to her was truth, the unqualified truth of more-than-man.

When his eyes turned away, she felt ill, futile, immersed in an indescribable inner darkness. Her fingers pained cruelly, and she realized she had been clutching with all her strength the book in her hand—Quentin Charter's book—which she had begun since morning. She could not remember a single one of his sentences which had impressed her, for her brain was tired and ineffectual, as after a prolonged fever, but she held fast to the bracing effect of an optimistic philosophy. Then finally out of the helplessness of one pitifully stricken, a tithe of her old vitality returned. She used it at once, rose from her seat to leave the Hall. Into the base of her brain again, as she neared the door, penetrated the protest of his eyes. Had she been unable to go on, she would have screamed. She felt the eyes of the women, too; the whole, a ghastly experience. Once outside, she wanted to run.

Not the least astonishing was the quick obliteration of it all. This was because her sensations were the result of an influence foreign to her own nature. In a few moments she felt quite well and normal again, and was conscious of a tendency to make light of the whole proceeding. She reached home shortly after ten, angered at herself—inexplicable perversity—because she had taken Bellingham and the women so seriously.... That night she finished one of the big books of her life—Quentin Charter's "A Damsel Came to Peter." When the dawn stole into the little flat, her eyes were stinging, and her temples felt stretched apart from the recent hours.

SECOND CHAPTER

PAULA CONTEMPLATES THE WALL OF A HUNDRED WINDOWS, AND THE MYSTERIOUS MADAME NESTOR CALLS AT THE ZOROASTER

Paula had never felt such a consciousness of vitality as the next forenoon, after three or four hours' sleep. She was just unrested enough to be alive with tension. Her physical and mental capacities seemed expanded beyond all common bounds, and her thoughts tumbled about playfully in full arenic light, as athletes awaiting the beginning of performance. She plunged into a tub of cool water with such delight as thoroughly to souse her hair, so it became necessary to spend a half-hour in the sunlight by the open window, combing and fanning, her mind turning over wonderful things.

If you ever looked across a valley of oaks and maples and elms in the full morning glow of mid-October, you can divine the glory of red and brown and gold which was this fallen hair. One must meditate long to suggest with words the eyes of Paula Linster; perhaps the best her chronicler can do is to offer a glimpse from time to time. Just now you are asked for the sake of her eyes to visualize that lustrous valley once more—only in a dusk that enriches rather than dims. A memorably beautiful young woman, sitting there by the open window—one of the elect would have said.

The difficulty in having to do with Linster attractions is to avoid rising into rhapsody. One thinks of stars and lakes, angels and autumn lands, because his heart is full as a country-boy's, and high clean-clipped thinking is choked. Certainly, once having known such a woman, you will never fall under the spell of Weininger, or any other scale-eyed genius. There is an inspiring reach to that hard-handled word, Culture, when it is used about a woman like this. It means so pure a fineness as neither to require nor to be capable of ostentation; and yet, a fineness that wears and gives and associates with heroisms. You think of a lineage that for centuries has not been fouled by brutality or banality, and has preserved a glowing human warmth, too, to retain the spirit of woman. When men rise to the real and the worthy, one by one, each will find his Paula Linster, whom to make happy is happiness; whose companionship inevitably calls forth his best; whom to be with constantly means therefore that all within him, not of the best, must surely die. Clearly when a man finds such a woman, all his roads are closed, save one—to the Shining Heights! And who can say that his royal mate will not laughingly unfold wings for him, when they stand together in the radiant altitude?

She was thinking of Charter's book as she brushed her hair dry. His sentences played brightly in her mind, fastening themselves to comment of her own for the review. Deep was the appeal of the rapt, sunlit face, as she looked away across the rear-court. The colored hall-boy of her own house might have missed the exquisite lines of lip, eyelid, nostril, brow, temple and chin, but his head uncovered in her presence, and the choicest spirit of service sprang within him. In all about her, to an enlightened vision, was the unconscious repression of beauty—art-stirring lines of mental and spiritual awakening; that look of deep inner freshness and health, the mere sight of which disgusts a man with all he has done to soil and sicken his body. Full and easily she breathed, as one who relishes sweet air like the taste of pure water. You could imagine Paula exclaiming with joy at the tonic delight of a wind from the sea, but not from the steaming aroma of a grill. It was all an æsthetic attraction—not an over-rounded arc, not a tissue stretched shiny from uneven plumpness, not a drowsy sag or fold to suggest the easy content of a mere feeding and breeding animal.

The rear-view of a great granite-ridge of rooming-houses across the court had often fascinated her with the thought of the mysteries within. Once she had spoken to Reifferscheid about the splendid story of New York yet to be written by someone who watched, as she often did, one of these walls of a hundred windows.

"Yes," he had said. "It's great to be poor. Best blood of New York is in those back rooms. Everyone needs his poverty-stage of growth—about seven years will do. It teaches you simplicity. You step into your neighbor's room and find him washing his stockings with shaving-soap. He explains that it is better than tooth-powder for textile fabrics. Also, he intimates that he has done a very serious thing in wetting down these small garments, having looked in his bag since, and learned that he has not another pair. However, he wrings them very tight and puts them on with the remark that this is a certain way to prevent shrinkage."

Even now, a man stood by his window in a sleeveless garment and a ruff of lather, shaving with a free hand, and a song between strokes. His was a shining morning face, indeed.... A bare feminine arm leaped quickly forth from behind a tightened curtain nearby and adjusted a flower-pot better to the sunlight. From somewhere came a girlish voice in Wagner's Walkure Call. There was not a thought of effort in her carrying that lofty elaborate music—just a fine heart tuned to harmony on a rare morning. The effect is not spoiled by the glimpse of a tortured feminine face igniting a cigarette over a gas-flame that has burned all night. The vibrations of New York are too powerful for many, but there is more of health and hope than not.... A good mother cleanses a sauce-pan from her water-pitcher and showers with the rinsing a young heaven-tree far below. Then she lifts in a milk-bottle from the stone ledge—and blows the dust from the top....

Often at night when Paula awakened she could hear the drum of a typewriter winging across the precipice—one of the night-shift helping to feed the insatiable maw of print. Had New York called him? Would the City crush him into a trifler, with artificial emotions, or was this a Daniel come to interpret her evil dreams?... In a corner-room with two windows, sat a lame young man before an easel. Almost always he was there, when there was light. Heaven be with him, Paula thought, if his picture failed.... And in one of the least and darkest, an old man sat writing. Day after day, he worked steadily through the hours. To what god or devil had he sold his soul that he was thus condemned to eternal scrivening? This was the harrowing part. The back-floors of New York are not for the old men. Back-rooms for the young men and maidens, still strong in the flight of time and the fight of competition—back-rooms for young New York. Nature loses interest in the old. Civilization should be kinder.

From an unseen somewhere a canary poured out a veritable fire-hose torrent of melody; and along one of the lower window ledges opposite, an old gray cat was crouched, a picture of sinister listening. Here was a dragon, indeed, for small, warm birds.

Directly opposite a curtain was lifted, and a woman, no longer young, appeared to breathe the morning. Many New Yorkers knew this woman for her part in children's happiness. There was a whisper that she had once been an artist's model—and had loved the artist.... There was one woman long ago—a woman with a box of alabaster—who was forgiven because she loved much.... The lady across the way loved children now, children of most unhappy fortunes. To those who came, and there were many, she gave music lessons; often all day long helping grimy fingers to falter over the keys. So she awakened poetry and planted truth-seedlings in shaded little hearts. To the children, though the lady was poor as any—in spite of her piano and a wall of books—she was Lady Bountiful, indeed.... Paula smiled. Two windows, strangely enough side by side, were curtained with stockings out to dry. In one, there were many—cerise and lavender, pink and baby blue. In the next there were but two pair, demurely black. What a world of suggestion in the contrast!... So it was always—her wall of a hundred windows, a changing panorama of folly, tragedy, toil that would not bow to hopelessness, vanity, art, sacrifice. Blend them all together above the traffic's roar—and you have the spirit of young New York.

She put on the brass kettle at length, crossing the room for an occasional glance into the mirror as she finished her hair.... The strange numbing power she had felt the night before crept suddenly back from her eyes now to the base of her brain, striving to cripple her volition. Bellingham was calling her.... The sunlight was gone. There was a smell of hot metal in the air, as if some terrific energy had burned out the vitality. Her heart hurt her from holding her breath so long. Beyond all expression she was shocked and shamed. The mirror showed now a spectral Paula with crimson lips and haggard eyes.... An indescribable fertility stirred within her—almost mystic, like a whisper from spiritland where little children play, waiting to be born. She could have fallen in a strange and subtle thrall of redolent imaginings, except that thought of the source of it all, the occultist—was as acid in her veins.

She drank tea and crossed the street to the Park for an hour. The radiance of autumn impressed her rarely; not as the death of a year, but rather as a glorious pageant of evening, the great energies of nature all crowned with fruition and preparing for rest. Back in her room, she wrote the Charter critique, wrote as seldom before. The cool spirit of the essayist seemed ignited with a lyric ardor. In her momentary power she conceived a great literary possibility of the future—an effulgent Burns-vine blossoming forth upon the austere cliff of a Carlyle. She had finished, and it was dusk when Madame Nestor called.

For several years, at various philosophical gatherings and brotherhoods, Paula, invariably stimulated by the unusual, had encountered this remarkable woman. Having very little to say as a rule, Madame Nestor was a figure for comment and one not readily forgotten because of occasional memorable utterances. In all the cults of New York, there was likely no individual quite so out of alignment with ordinary life. Indefinitely, she would be called fifty. Her forehead was broad, her mouth soft. The face as a whole was heavy and flour-white. There was a distention of eyeballs and a pulpy shapelessness to her body which gave the impression of advanced physical deterioration—that peculiar kind of breaking down, often noticeable among psychics of long practice. Her absolute incapacity to keep anything of value was only one characteristic of interest. Madame Nestor's record of apparently thoughtless generosity was truly inspiriting.

"I had to see you to-day," she said, sinking down with a sigh of relief. "I sat behind you last night in Prismatic Hall."

The younger woman recalled with a start—the whisper she had heard. She leaned forward and inquired quickly: "So it was you, Madame Nestor, who knew—this Bellingham"—she cleared her throat as she uttered the name—"as he is now—a quarter of a century ago?"

"Yes. How very strange that you should have heard what I said.... You will join one of his classes, I presume?"

"I can imagine doing no such thing."

"Dear Paula, do you think it will really turn out—that you are to have no relation with Bellingham?"

Paula repressed the instant impulse to answer sharply. The fact that she had already felt Bellingham's power made the other's words a harsh irritation.

"What relation could I have? He is odious to me."

"I suppose I should have been a cinder long since, dear, if these were days for burning witches," Madame Nestor said. "When I saw Bellingham's eyes settle upon you last night—it appeared to me that you are to know him well. I came here to give you what strength I could—because he is the chief of devils."

"I'm only one of the working neuters of the human hive," Paula managed to declare.

The elder woman said a strange thing: "Ah, no. The everlasting feminine is alive in your every movement. A man like Bellingham would cross the world for you. Some strong-souled woman sooner or later must encompass his undoing, and last night it came to me in a way to force my conviction—that you are the woman."

Paula bent toward her. Darkness covered the centres of her mind and she was afraid. She could not laugh, for she had already met the magician's will. "But I loathe him," she whispered. "About the very name when I first heard it yesterday was an atmosphere which aroused all my antagonism."

"Even that—he has overcome, but it may help you to endure."

"What does the man want?"

"He wants life—life—floods of young, fine vitality to renew his own flesh. He wants to live on and on in the body which you have seen. It is all he has, for his soul is dead—or feeble as a frog's. He fears death, because he cannot come back. He renews his life from splendid sources of human magnetism—such as you possess. It is Bellingham's hell to know that, once out of the flesh, he has not soul enough, if any, to command a human body again. You see in him an empty thing, which has lived, God knows how many years, hugging the warmth of his blood—a creature who knows that to die means the swift disintegration of an evil principle."

"Do you realize, Madame Nestor," Paula asked excitedly, "that you are talking familiarly of things which may exist in books of ancient wisdom, but that this is New York—New York packed about us? New York does not reckon with such things."

"The massed soul of this big city does not reckon with such things, Paula. That is true, but we are apart. Bellingham is apart. He is wiser than the massed soul of New York."

"One might believe, even have such a religious conviction, but you speak of an actual person, the terrible inner mystery of a man, whom we have seen—a man who frightened me hideously last night—and to-day! You bring the thing home to a room in a New York apartment ... Can't you see how hard to adjust, this is? I don't mean to stop or distract you, but this has become—you are helping to keep it so—such an intimate, dreadful thing!"

Madame Nestor had been too long immersed in occultism to grasp the world's judgment of her sayings. "Listen, Paula, this that I tell you is inherent in every thinking man. You are bewildered by the personal nature it has assumed.... To every one of us shall come the terrible moment of choice. Man is not conceived blindly to be driven. Imagine a man who is become a rapidly evolving mind. On the one side is the animal-nature, curbed and obedient; on the other, his gathering soul-force. The mind balances between these two—soul and body. The time has come for him to choose between a lonely path to the Heights, or the broad diverging highway, moving with pomp, dazzling with the glare of vain power, and brooded over by an arrogant materialism which slays the soul.... The spirit of man says, 'Take the rising road alone.' The old world-mother sings to him from the swaying throng, 'Come over and be my king. Look at my arts, my palaces, my valiant young men and my glorious women. I will put worship in the hearts of the strong—for you! I will put love in the hearts of the beautiful—for you! Come over and be my king! Later, when you are old and have drunk deep of power—you may take the rising road alone.'"

Paula invariably qualified a dogmatic statement as a possibility in her own mind; but something of this—man reaching a moment of choice—had always appealed to her as a fundamental verity. Man must conquer not only his body, but his brain, with its subtle dreams of power, a more formidable conflict, before the soul assumes supremacy in the mind, and man's progress to the Uplands becomes a conscious and glorious ascent.

"You put it with wonderful clearness, Madame Nestor," she said.

"I am an old woman who has thought of these things until they are clear. This is the real battle of man, beside which victory over mere appetites of the body is but a boyish triumph. The intellect hungers for power and possession; to hold the many inferior intellects in its own despotic destiny. Against this glittering substance of attraction is the still intangible faith of the soul—an awful moment of suspense. God or Mammon—choose ye!... Listen, Paula, to New York below—treading the empty mill of commerce——"

"New York has not chosen yet?"

"No, dear, but hundreds, thousands, are learning in preparation for that moment of choice—the falseness and futility of material possessions."

"That is a good thought—an incorruptible kind of optimism!" Paula exclaimed.... "You think this Bellingham has made the evil choice?"

"Yes. Long ago."

"Yet to have arisen to the moment of choosing, you say he must have conquered the flesh."

"Yes."

"But you depict him—I find him—Desire Incarnate!"

"Exactly, Paula, because he has reverted. The animal controls his mind, not the soul. Bellingham is retracing his way back to chaos, with a human brain, all lit with magic! Out of the gathered knowledge of the ages, he has drawn his forces, which to us are mystery. He uses these secret forces of Nature to prolong his own life—which is all he has. The mystic cord is severed within him. He is a body, nothing but a body—hence the passion to endure. Out of the craft of the past, he has learned—who knows how long ago?—to replenish his own vitality with that of others. He gives nothing, but drains all. Ah, Paula, this I know too well. He is kin with those creatures of legend, the loup-garou, the vampire. I tell you he is an insatiable sponge for human magnetism."

"Past all doubt, can't Bellingham turn back?" Paula asked tensely. "With all his worldly knowledge, and knowing his own doom, can he not turn back—far back, a lowly-organized soul, but on the human way?" Hopelessness, anywhere, was a blasting conception to her.

"No. I tell you he is a living coffin. There is nothing in him to energize a pure motive. He might give a fortune to the poor, but it would be for his own gain. He could not suffer for the poor, or love them. Dead within, he is detached from the great centres of virtue and purity—from all that carries the race forward, and will save us at the last. You see his frightful dependence upon this temporal physical instrument, since all the records of the past and the unwritten pages of the future are wiped out? Isn't it a sheer black horror, Paula,—to know that from the great tide of hopeful humanity, one is set apart; to know that the amazing force which has carried one from a cell in the ooze to thinking manhood must end with this red frightened heart; to be forced, for the continuance of life, to feed upon the strength of one woman after another—always fairer and finer——" The look of hatred in the speaker's face had become a banner of havoc.

"Can he not stop that kind of devouring?" Paula exclaimed. "Would there not be hope—if he battled with that—put that vampirism behind?"

Madame Nestor regarded the other steadily, until all distortion of feature had given away to her accustomed mildness. Then she uttered an unforgettable question:

"Can a tiger eat grains?"

Vast ranges of terrible understanding were suggested.

"It is my duty, if I ever had a duty," the caller went on, "to make you know Bellingham as I know him. You must have no pity."

"Is there really no fact by which his age can be determined?"

"None that I know. Twenty-five years ago, when he left me hideously wise and pitifully drained, he looked as he does now."

"But why, oh why, do you always think of me with Bellingham?" Paula asked hopelessly.

"I watched his face when he regarded you last night. I knew the look."

"What is to prevent me from never seeing him? He cannot force himself upon me here—in the flesh.... Certainly you would not tell him where I am, where I go—if I begged you not to!"

Madame Nestor shuddered. "No, Paula. It is because you are frightened and tormented that such a thought comes. It is I who am showing you the real Bellingham. He menaces my race. None but big-souled women are useful to him now. He is drawn to them, as one hungry, as one always hungry. It is he first who is drawn. Then they begin to feel and respond to his occult attraction. The time might have come when you would worship him—had I not warned you. I did. I was quite his—until I learned. A woman knows no laws in the midst of an attraction like this. No other man suffices——"

"But why—why do you prepare me? Do you think I cannot resist?" Paula asked furiously. She felt the bonds about her already. The blood rose hot and rebellious at the thought of being bound. It was the old hideous fear of a locked room—the shut-in horror which meant suffocation.

"If I thought you could not resist, Paula," Madame Nestor said, "I should advise you to flee to the remotest country—this moment. I should implore you never to allow from your side your best and strongest friend. But I have studied your brain, your strength, your heart. I love you for the thought that has come to me—that it is you, Paula Linster, who is destined to free the race from this destroyer."

Often in the last half-hour had come a great inward revolt against the trend of her caller's words. It passed through Paula again, yet she inquired how she could thus be the means.

"By resisting him. Bellingham once told me—trust him, this was after I was fully his—that if I had matched his force with a psychic resistance equally as strong—it would mortally have weakened him. So if he seeks to subvert your will and fails, this great one-pointed power of his, developed who knows how long—will turn and rend itself. This is an occult law."

Paula could understand this—the wild beast of physical desire rending itself at the last—but not the conception of hopelessness—Bellingham cut off from immortality. The woman divined her thoughts.

"Again I beg of you," she said in excitement, "not to let a thought of pity for him insinuate itself in your brain—not the finest point of it! Think of yourself, of the Great Good which must sustain you, of the benefit to your race—think of the women less strong! Fail in this, and Bellingham will absorb your splendid forces, and let you fall back into the common as I did—to rise again, ah, so bitterly, so wearily!... But I cannot imagine you failing, you strong young queen, and the women like me, the legion of emptied shells he has left behind—we shall canonize you, Paula, if you shatter the vampire's power."

Thoughts came too fast for speech now. They burned Paula's mind—a destructive activity, because ineffectual. She wanted to speak of the shameful experience of the morning, but she could not bring the words to confession.

"I had almost forgotten," she said lightly at length, "that it is well for one to eat and drink. Stay, won't you please, and share a bite of supper with me, Madame Nestor? We'll talk of other things. I am deadly tired of Bellingham."

A hungry man would have known no repletion from the entire offering which sufficed for these two, forgotten of appetite. Wafers of dark bread, a poached egg, pickles, a heart of lettuce and a divided melon, cake and tea—yet how fully they fared!... They were talking about children and fairy tales over the teacups, when Paula encountered again that sinister mental seizure—the occultist's influence creeping back from her reason to that part of the brain man holds in common with animals.... The lights of the room dimmed; her companion became invisible. Bellingham was calling: "Come to me—won't you come and help me in my excellent labors? Come to me, Paula. We can lift the world together—you and I. Wonderful are the things for me to show you—you who are already so wise and so very beautiful. Paula Linster,—come to me!"

Again and again the words were laid upon her intelligence, until she heard them only. All the rest was an anterior murmuring, as of wind and rivers. The words were pressed down upon the surfaces of her brain, like leaf after leaf of gold-beaters' film—and hammered and hammered there.... He was in a great gray room, sitting at a desk, but staring at her, as if there were no walls or streets between—just a little bit of blackness.... She seemed to know just where to go. She felt the place for her was there in the great gray room—a wonderful need for her there.... But a door opened into the room where he sat—a door she had not seen, for she had not taken her eyes from his face. A woman came in, a pale woman, a shell of beauty. The huge tousled head at the desk turned from her to the woman who entered. Paula saw his profile alter hideously....

Her own bright room filled her eyes again, and the ashen horror on the countenance of Madame Nestor, who seemed vaguely to see it all.

"I think I should have gone to him," Paula murmured, in the slow, flat tone of one not yet quite normally conscious.

"There is but one way, you poor distressed child—to build about you a fortress of purity—which he cannot penetrate——"

"I think I should have known the car to take—the place to enter," Paula went on, unheeding, "the elevator entrance—the door of the room——"

Madame Nestor continued to implore her to pray. Paula shivered finally, and stared at the other for a few seconds, as if recalling the words the visitor had spoken, and the past she had lived with Bellingham. Her terrible rage toward herself spread and covered Madame Nestor. Did not the latter still dip here, there, and everywhere in the occult and weird? Might she not have something to do with the projectiles of Desire?

"I think I'd better be alone now," she said hoarsely. "One does not feel like invoking the Pure Presence—when one is chosen for such defilement."

THIRD CHAPTER

CERTAIN DEVELOPING INCIDENTS ARE CAUGHT INTO THE CURRENT OF NARRATIVE—ALSO A SUPPER WITH REIFFERSCHEID

In the week that followed, Paula's review of Quentin Charter's new book appeared. As a bit of luxury reading, she again went over "A Damsel Came to Peter." It stood up true and strong under the second reading—the test of a real book. The Western writer became a big figure in her mind. She thought of him as a Soul; with a certain gladness to know that he was Out There; that he refused to answer the call of New York; that he had waited until he was an adult to make his name known, and could not now be cramped and smothered and spoiled. There was a sterilized purity about parts of his work—an uncompromising thunder against the fleshly trends of living—to which she could only associate asceticism, celibacy, and mystic power. He was altogether an abstraction, but she was glad that he lived—in the West and in her brain.

Also her mind was called to lower explorations of life; moments in which it seemed as if every tissue within her had been carried from arctic repressions to the springing verdures of the Indies. A sound, an odor, a man's step, the voice of a child, would start the spell, especially in moments of receptivity or aimless pondering. Thoughts formed in a lively fascinating way, tingling dreamily over her intelligence, dilating her nostrils with indescribable fragrance, brushing her eyelids half-closed,—until she suddenly awoke to the fact that this was not herself, but Bellingham's thirst playing upon her. Beyond words dreadful then, it was to realize this thing in her brain—to feel it spread hungrily through her veins and localize in her lips, her breast, and the hollow of her arms. Bellingham crushed the trained energies of his thought-force into her consciousness, rendering her helpless. Though he was afterward banished, certain physical forces which he aroused did not fall asleep.... Frequently came that malignant efflorescence. Her name was called; the way shown her. Once when she was summoned to the 'phone, she knew that it was he, but could not at first resist. Reason came at the sound of her own hoarse and frightened voice. Again one night, between nine and ten, when Bellingham was in power, she had reached the street and was hurrying toward the surface-car in Central Park West. Her name was jovially called by Reifferscheid. He accompanied her through the Park and back to her door. He said he thought that she was working too hard, confessed himself skeptical about her eating enough.

One thought apart from these effects, Paula could not shake from her mind: Were there human beings with dead or dying souls? Did she pass on the street men and women in whom the process of soul-starvation was complete or completing? Could there be human mind-cells detached from hope, holiness, charity, eternity, and every lovely conception; infected throughout with earth's descending destructive principle? The thought terrorized her soul, so that she became almost afraid to glance into the face of strangers. To think of any man or woman without one hope! This was insufferable. Compared with this, there is no tragedy, and the wildest physical suffering is an easy temporal thing. She felt like crying from the housetops: "Listen to pity; love the good; cultivate a tender conscience; be clean in body and humble in mind! Nothing matters but the soul—do not let that die!"

Then she remembered that every master of the bright tools of art had depicted this message in his own way; every musician heard it among the splendid harmonies that winged across his heaven; every prophet stripped himself of all else, save this message, and every mystic was ordered up to Nineveh to give it sound. Indeed, every great voice out of the multitude was a cry of the soul. It came to her as never before, that all uplift is in the words, Love One Another. If only the world would see and hear!

And the world was so immovable—a locked room that resisted her strength. This was her especial terror—a locked room or a locked will.... Once when she was a little girl, she released a caged canary that belonged to a neighbor, and during her punishment, she kept repeating:

"It has wings—wings!"

Liberty, spaces of sky, shadowed running streams, unbroken woods where the paths were so dim as not to disturb the dream of undiscovered depths—in the midst of these, Paula had found, as a girl, a startling kind of happiness. She was tireless in the woods, and strangely slow to hunger. No gloomy stillness haunted her; the sudden scamper of a squirrel or rabbit could not shake her nerves, nor even the degraded spiral of a serpent gliding to cover. Her eyelids narrowed in the midst of confinements. School tightened her lips; much of it, indeed, put a look of hopeless toleration in her eyes, but the big, silent woods quickly healed her mind; in them she found the full life.

At one time, her father essayed to lock her in a closet. Paula told him she would die if he did, and from the look upon the child's face, he could not doubt.... He had directly punished her once, and for years afterward, she could not repress a shudder at his touch. She would serve him in little things, bring him the choicest fruits and flowers; she anticipated his wants in the house and knew his habits as a caged thing learns the movements of its keepers; invariably, she was respectful and apt—until her will was challenged. Then her mother would weaken and her father passed on with a smile. "Paula does not permit me to forget that I have the honor to be her father," he once said.

Reading grew upon her unconsciously. There was a time when she could not read, another when she could. She did not remember the transition, but one afternoon, when she was barely five, she sat for hours in the parlor still as a mole, save for the turning leaves—sat upon a hassock with Grimm. It was The Foster Brother which pioneered her mind. That afternoon endured as one of the most exquisite periods of her life. The pleasure was so intense that she felt she must be doing wrong.

Grimm explained the whole world, in proving the reality of fairies. The soul of the child had always been awake to influences her associates missed. Wonderful Grimm cleared many mysteries—the unseen activities of the woods, the visitors of the dark in her room before she was quite asleep; the invisible weaving behind all events. Later, books inevitably brought out the element of attraction between man and woman, but such were the refinements of her home that nothing occurred to startle her curiosity. It was left to the friendly woods to reveal a mystery and certain ultimate meanings.... She was sick with the force of her divining; the peace and purity of her mind shattered. The accruing revelations of human origin were all that she could bear. She rebelled against the manner of coming into the world, a heaven-high rebellion. Something of pity mingled with her reverence for her mother. For years, she could not come to a belief that the Most High God had any interest in a creature of such primal defilement. Queerly enough, it was the great preparer, Darwin, who helped her at the last. Man having come up through dreadful centuries from an earth-bent mouth and nostril, to a pitying heart and a lifted brow—has all the more hope of becoming an angel....

There was something of the nature of a birthmark in Paula's loathing for the animal in man and woman. Her mother had been sheltered in girlhood to such an extent that the mention of a corsage-ribbon would have offended. Very early, she had married, and the first days of the relation crushed illusions that were never restored. The birth of Paula ended a period of inordinate sorrow, which brought all the fine threads of her life into wear, gave expression to the highest agony of which she was capable, and ravelled out her emotions one by one. As a mother, she was rather forceless; the excellent elements of her lineage seemed all expended in the capacities of the child. Her limitations had not widened in the dark months, nor had her nature refined. It was as if the heart of the woman had lost all its color and ardor. The great sweep of Paula's emotions; her strangeness, her meditative mind and heart-hunger for freedom; her love for open spaces, still groves and the prophylactic trends of running water—all expressed, without a doubt, the mysterious expiration of her mother's finer life. But something beyond heredity, distances beyond the reach of human mind to explain, was the lofty quality of the child's soul. Very old it was, and wise; very strange and very strong.

Paula never failed afterward in a single opportunity to spare younger girl-friends from the savagery of revelation, as it had come to her. The bare truth of origin, she made radiant with illimitable human possibilities.... Her dream beyond words was some time to give the world a splendid man or woman. Loving, and loved by a strong-souled, deep-thinking man; theirs the fruit of highest human concord; beautiful communions in the midst of life's nobilities, and the glory of these on the brow of their child—such was her dream of womanhood, whitened through many vicissitudes.

Her mother died when Paula was twenty. The call came in the night. In the summons was that awful note which tells the end. Her mother was on the border and crossing swiftly. Paula screamed.

There was no answer, but a faint ruffle on the brow that had been serene.

"Mother!... Mother!" a last time—then the answer:

"Don't—call—me,—Paula! Oh, it—hurts—so—to be—called—back!"

After that, the dying was a matter of hours and great pain. Had she come to her in silence, the tired spirit would have lifted easily. So Paula learned, by terrible experience, the inexpressible value of silence in a room with death. She had been very close to the mystery. Holding her mother's hand and praying inaudibly at the last, she had felt the final wrench to the very core of her being.... Departure, indeed; Paula was never conscious of her mother's spirit afterward. It is probably futile to inquire if a child of one's flesh is invariably one's spiritual offspring.... An ineffectual girl, the mother became a hopeless woman. In the interval, out of the grinding of her forces, was produced a fervent heat.... Did blind negative suffering make her receptive to a gifted child, or did Paula's mother merely give, from her own lovely flesh, a garment for a spirit-alien from a far and shining country?

Three or four mornings after the Charter critique, Paula brought further work down-town. Reifferscheid swung about in his chair and stared at her fully thirty seconds. Then he spoke brusquely, possibly to hide his embarrassment:

"Take these three books home, but don't bother with them to-day. I want you back here at four o'clock. You are to go out to supper with me."

The idea was not exactly pleasant. She had seen Reifferscheid only a few times apart from his desk, where she liked him without reservation. She had always pictured him as a club-man—a typically successful New Yorker, with a glitter of satire and irreverent humor about all his sayings. The thought of a supper with Reifferscheid had a bit of supper heaviness about it. The club type she preferred to know from a sort of middle distance....

"Won't you, please?"

His change of manner was effective. All brusqueness was gone. Paula saw his real earnestness, and the boyish effort of its expression. There was no reason for her to refuse, and she hesitated no longer. Yet she wondered why he had asked her, and searched her mind to learn why she could not see him at leisure, apart from a club-window's leather chair; at some particular table in a grill or buffet, or enlivening a game of billiards with his inimitable characterizations. One of the finest and most effective minds she had ever contacted belonged to this editor. His desk was the symbol to her of concentrated and full-pressure strenuousness; in his work was all that was sophisticated and world-weathered, but she could neither explain nor overcome the conviction that his excellence was in spite of, rather than the result of his life outside.... She met him on the stroke of four in the entrance to The States building, and he led the way at once to South Ferry, where they took the Staten Island boat. She felt that he was not at ease in the crowds, but it was a fact, also, that he did not appear so huge and froggy in the street, as in the crowded office she knew so well.

"Yes, I live over yonder," he said, drawing two stools to the extreme forward of the deck. "I supposed you knew. The nearest way out of New York, this is. Besides, you get full five cents' worth of sea voyage, and it's really another country across the bay. That's the main thing—not a better country, but different."

Little was said on the boat. It was enough to breathe the sea and contemplate the distances. She scarcely noticed which of the trolley-cars he helped her into at the terminal; but they were out of town presently, where there were curving country roads, second-growth hills, and here and there a dim ravine to cool the eye. Then against the sky she discovered a black ribbon of woods. It was far and big to her eyes, full of luring mysteries that called to her—her very own temples.... Turning to Reifferscheid, she found that he had been regarding her raptly. He coughed and jerked his head the other way, delightfully embarrassed.

"Guess you like it here," he said after a moment. "I knew you would. I knew I ought to make you come, somehow. You see, you're a little too fit—drawn just a trifle too fine. It isn't that you're out of condition; just the contrary. When one's drawn so fine as you are, one wears—just from living at joy speed.... We get off here."

"It's incredible that you should have a house all to yourself!"

They were walking on the grass that edged the road. It had taken an hour and a half to come. Dusk was beginning to crowd into the distances. Ahead on either side of the road were a few houses with land between.

"Whatever you call it," said Reifferscheid, "it's all in one piece. There it is yonder—'A wee cot, a cricket's chirr—Sister Annie and the glad face of her——'"

"A little white house under big trees!" Paula exclaimed joyously. "And what's that big dug-out thing behind?"

Reifferscheid chuckled. "Dug-out is excellent. That's the aquarium and the lily-lakes. I made those Sierras and clothed their titanic flanks with forests of sod."

"Don't ask me to speak.... All this is too wonderful for words...." To think that she had imagined this man-mammoth sitting in a club-window. In truth, she was somewhat perturbed for wronging him, though delighted with the whole expedition. Sister Annie was startling, inasmuch as her face was as fresh and wholesome as a snow-apple, and yet she could not leave her invalid's chair unassisted. She was younger than Reifferscheid.

"I'm so glad to have you come, Miss Linster," she said. "Tim was really set upon it. He speaks of you so frequently that I wanted to meet you very much. I can't get over to the city often."

"Tim." This was the name of names. Paula had known nothing beyond "T. Reifferscheid." One after another, little joys like this unfolded.

"It will be too dark after supper," the sister added. "Tim won't be content until you see his system of ponds. You better go with him now."

Reifferscheid already filled the side-door. Evidently inspection was the first and only formality demanded of the guest at the cottage. Paula followed him up a tiny gravel path to the rim of the top pond—a saucer of cement, eighteen inches deep and seven or eight feet across. It was filled with pond-weed and nelumbo foliage. Gold fish and stickle-backs played in the shadowed water.

"It isn't the time of year, you know," he said apologetically. "The lilies are through blossoming, and in a week or two, I'll have to take my fishes back to winter-quarters. You see my water supply comes from Silver Lake. The great main empties here." (Paula followed his finger to the nozzle of a hose that hung over the rim of cement on the top pond.) "The stream overflows in Montmorency Falls yonder,"—(this, a trickle down the gravel to the second pond)—"from which, you can hear the roar of the cataracts into the lower lake, which waters the lands of plenty all about."

His look of surprise and disappointment at her laughter was irresistible.

"The saurians are all in the depths, but you can see some of my snails," he went on. "You'd be surprised how important my herd of snails is in the economy of this whole lake country."

He picked up a pebble from the edge of the water, pointing out the green slime that covered it. "These are spores of a very influential vegetable, called algæ, which spreads like cholera and vegetates anywhere in water that is not of torrential temperament. Without my snails, the whole system would be a thick green soup in a month. It's getting a little dark to see the stickle-back nests. They domesticate very curiously. Next year, I'll have a fountain.... The second-tank contains a frail, northern variety of water-hyacinths, some rock bass, and a turtle or two. Below are the cattails and ferns and mosses. In the summer, that lower pond is a jungle, but the lilies and lotuses up here are really choice when in blossom. The overflow of water rejoices the bugs and posies generally. Annie likes the yard-flowers."

Paula would not have dared to say how enchantingly these toy-lakes and lily-beds had adjusted, in her mind, to the nature of the big man beside her, whose good word was valued by every sincere and important literary worker in the country. Tim Reifferscheid turning out his tremendous tasks in New York, would never be quite the same to her again, since she had seen him playing with his hose in his own back yard, and heard him talk about his snails and lilies, and the land posies that Sister Annie liked. Down-town, he had always stimulated her, but here with his toy-engineering and playful watersheds, he was equally bracing and just as admirable.

Darkness was covering them. "I must see it all again," she said. "I want to come when the lilies are blossoming. I could watch the fishes and things—for hours. Really, I will never call it a dug-out again."

She saw him grinning in the dusk.

"Come in to supper," he said. "You see, anything smaller than a Staten Island back-yard would hardly do for me to play in. Then there's a stillness about here that I like. It makes your ears ache a little at first. You wake up in the middle of the night and think you're under the earth somewhere, or disembodied. Finally it comes to you that there's nothing to be afraid of except the silence. A man's head gets to need it after a time. As a matter of fact, there's no place across the bay for a fat man after working hours."

"Miss Linster," called Sister Annie as they entered.

Paula followed the voice into a speckless spare room.

"Supper will be served in a moment," the other said. "I just wanted to tell you—Tim will take you back to the city to-night, grateful for the chance, but do you really have to go? This little room is yours, and you can go over together in the morning. Then a night in this stillness will calm you back into a little girl. Tim doesn't know I'm asking you. Please do just as you want——"

Paula didn't have the heart to drag the big brother back to town.

"Why," she said laughingly, "I'd much rather stay than not. Think how good this all is to me! I didn't have an idea when he asked me, other than a restaurant somewhere in New York."

"I am so glad.... Tim——"

He tried not to look relieved at the announcement. "Really, I didn't put Annie up to this, but if you are content to stay, I think it will smooth you out a bit."

After supper the three sat out in the yard. There was a heavy richness in the air, a soft sea-wind flavored with wood-fires and finished fields. Reifferscheid smoked his pipe and did most of the talking.

"I glanced over Bertram Lintell's new book—out to-day," he said. "It sort of hurts. Two or three months ago, I dropped in on him while he was doing it.... I have always had a certain interest in Lintell because I accepted his first story seven or eight years ago, as a magazine reader.... You may not know that nine-tenths of the unsolicited fiction material in a magazine's mail is a personal affront to intelligence at large. Nowhere does a man show the youth of his soul so pitifully as when first alone with white paper and an idea. He shakes down a crow's rookery and believes in his heart it's an eagle's nest. That there are men in the world paid to open his package, inspect and return same respectfully—and do it again—is an uncommercial peculiarity of a most commercial age. Editors rely upon the more or less technically flawless products of the trained, the "arrived"; writers who have forgotten their dreams—rung the bell once or twice—and show a willingness to take money for the echoes.

"An expensive reading staff is not necessary for these contributors; their stuff goes to the heart of things at once. But what sorry caravans halt in the outer courts of a magazine-office; what sick, empty, unwashed confusion is impounded there! Yet a company of men moves ever through and about, peering into the unsightly, unsavory packs—ever ordering away, ever clearing the court, lest the mess rise to heaven.... But perfect pearls have been found in these restless, complaining trash-heaps, and will be found again. Men are there to glance at all, because one of these pearls is worth a whole necklace of seconds. There's no way out of it. To make lasting good in the literary game, one must be steeled to reverses—long, ugly corroding reverses. This is the price which a man pays for the adjustment of his brain and hand to the needs of the time. As flesh needs bone, he needs these reverses. They clear the fat from the brain; increase the mental circuits, and lend to the fibres that firm delicacy which alone can carry live hot emotions without blowing out, and big voltage ideas swift and true to their appointed brilliance of expression.

"I'm gabbing a lot, but I was going to tell you about Bertram Lintell. I was first in the office to get his manuscript, and I raised the cry of 'Pearl.' It was faulty, but full of the arrogance of unhurt youth. The face of Twenty-one with all its unlined audacity stared out from the pages, and every page was an excursion. Here was a true subconscious ebullition—a hang-over from a previous incarnation, like as not. It was hard, glassy, but the physical prowess of it stimulated. Frank, brutal boyishness—that was the attraction. I shouldn't have taken it."

"You what?" Paula asked.

"It was a shame to take it," Reifferscheid mused, "but someone else—the next man, would have. You see, he needed buffeting—seven years at least. I knew he didn't have the beam and displacement to stand making good so young. It was doing him an evil turn, but we sent him the brass tag that shines like gold. Lintell was not adult enough to twig the counterfeit, not mellowed enough to realize that nothing is so sordid, nothing labeled so securely to Failure, as conscious success. As I say, I saw him at work two or three months ago. He was a patch-haired, baby lion still, dictating stories first draft to a stenographer, supplying demand like a huckster—the real treasure-house of his soul locked for life and the key thrown away.... Even money turns the head of the multitude, but money is small beer compared to the fiery potential wine of literary recognition. Long hammering, refining reverses, alone prepare a man for this. Quentin Charter said something of the kind: that a young writer should live his lean years full length, and if he really craters the mountain, he will praise every god in the Pantheon because his achievements were slow.

"Lintell's present stuff is insufferable. The point is he may have had in the beginning no less a gift than Charter's. That's why the new book sickens me so.... By the way, I got a letter from Charter this afternoon. I meant to bring it along, but I'll pass it over to you in the morning. It's yours, Miss Linster, though he did me the honor to think that I had written his critique. He says you crawled right inside his book. We don't usually answer letters of this kind. There are writers, you know, glad to turn a review office into an Admiration Exchange. But you'll want to write to Charter, I'm sure. He's different."

Paula did not answer, but she was pleased and excited that her review had been a joy to this thunderer of the West, and that he had answered her tidings of high hope for the future.

FOURTH CHAPTER

PAULA ENCOUNTERS HER ADVERSARY WHO TURNS PROPHET AND TELLS OF A STARRY CHILD SOON TO BE BORN

Paula went upstairs to the editorial rooms with Reifferscheid the following morning for Charter's letter. This she carried into the city-office to be alone. Forenoon is the dead time of a morning newspaper. The place seemed still tired from the all-night struggle to spring a paper to the streets. She thrust up a window for fresh air and sat down in a reporter's chair to read.... The letter was big with boyish delight. "When a man spends a couple of years growing and trimming a pile of stuff into a sizable book," he had written, "and the first of the important reviews comes in with such a message of enthusiasm, it is the heart's 'well-done' long waited for." Beyond this, there was only a line or two about the book. It had been in the publisher's hands six months, and he was cold to it now. The States had interested him, however, because there was an inclination in the article to look at his work to come. In fact, some of the thoughts of the reviewer, he wrote, were sympathetic with the subject-matter simmering in his mind. Naturally, the coincidence had thrilled him. Charter, believing that Reifferscheid had done the work, wrote with utmost freedom. This attracted Paula, as it gave her a glimpse of a certain fineness between men who admire each other. The issue was not closed.... She wanted to answer the letter then and there at the reporter's desk, but Reifferscheid knew she had not gone. He might come in—and laugh at her precipitation.

After a night of perfect rest, Paula's mind was animated with thoughts of work—until she reached the Zoroaster. Something of Bellingham's tormenting energy was heavy in the atmosphere of her rooms. When passing the full-length mirror, she turned her face away in fear. Impatiently she caught up one of the new books (and Charter's letter for a marker), and hurried across to the Park. The fall days were still flawless.

It was not yet ten in the morning, and few people were abroad. She sat down upon one of the weathered knobs of Manhattan rock which had worn through the thin skin of soil, and allowed herself to think of the formidable affliction. To all intents, the magician had dispossessed her of the rooms, identified for years with her personality and no other. She could not put away the truth that the full forces of her mind were at bay before the psychic advances of the dreadful stranger. This was not long to be endured. Inasmuch that his power did not harmlessly glance from her, she felt that there must be great potentialities of evil within herself. This conviction made her frightened and desperate. She should have known that it was her inner development, her sensitiveness which had made her so potent an attraction for Bellingham. The substance of her whole terror was that there had been moments under his spell, when she had not been at all the mistress of her own will.

The suggestions which he projected had seemed to her the good and proper actions. She knew it as a law—that every time her own divine right to the rule of her faculties was thus usurped by an evil force, her resistance was weakened. Yet there was a shocking unfairness in the thought that she was not given a chance. In the throne-room of her mind, she was not queen. All the sacred fortifications of self seemed broken, even the soul's integrity debased, when Bellingham crushed his way in and forced her to obey. This is the great psychological crime. When one has broken into the sacred precincts, the door is left open for other malignant, earth-bound entities foully to enter and betray....

There was no one in whom she could confide, but Madame Nestor. Almost any professional man, a physician especially, would have called her revelations hysterical.... Her constant and growing fear was of the time when she should be called by Bellingham—and nothing would supervene to save her. Some time the spell might not be broken. She became ill with tension and shame as this unspeakable possibility seethed through her mind.... Better death than to continue in being passion-ridden by this defiler, in the presence of whom she became so loathsome in her own sight—that she dared not pray....

Somewhere far off children were talking. Their voices warmed and cleansed her mind. There was a stimulating thud of hoofs on the turf-roads. She tried to read now. Her eyes travelled dutifully along the lines of her book, without bringing forth even the phase of a thought from the page of print. A swift step drew her glance down the foot-path. Bellingham was approaching. His shoulders were thrown back, his long arms swinging so that every muscle was in play, striding forward at incredible speed. He filled his lungs with every cubic inch of morning air they could contain, and expelled the volume with gusto. She had once seen a rugged Englishman take his exercise as seriously as this, on the promenade of an Atlantic liner before the breakfast-gong. To all appearances, Bellingham did not have a thought apart from his constitutional.

Paula sat very still on the rock. Her slightest movement now would attract his attention. It occurred to her afterwards that she had been like a crippled squirrel huddled in the fork of a tree—the hunter and his dog below....

At the point where the path was nearest her, he halted. The thing happened exactly as she might have conceived it in a story. For a moment he seemed to be searching his mind for the meaning of his impulse to stop. An unforgettable figure, this, as he stood there with lifted head, concentrating upon the vagary which had brought him to a standstill.... Paula may have been mistaken in her terror, but she never relinquished the thought that her proximity was known to him—before his face turned unerringly to the rock and his bright gray eyes filled with her presence.

"You are Miss Linster?" he asked, smiling agreeably.

She nodded, not trusting her voice.

"You attended the first of my Prismatic Hall lectures ten days ago?... I seldom forget a face, and I remember asking one of my committee your name."

Paula found it rather a unique effort to hold in mind the truth that she had never spoken to this man before. Then the whole trend of her mental activity was suddenly complicated by the thought that all her past terrors might be groundless. Possibly Madame Nestor was insane on this subject. "It may be that her mad words and my stimulated imagination have reared a monster that has no actuality."

The bracing voices of the children, the brilliance of mid-forenoon, the man's kingly figure, agreeable courtesy, and commanding health—indeed, apart from the eyes in which she hardly dared to glance, there was nothing to connect him even vaguely with the sinister persecutions which bore his image. The whole world-mind was with him. What right had she to say that the world-mind was in error and she normal—she and the unreckonable Madame Nestor?... Paula recalled the strange intensity of her mental life for years, and the largeness of her solitudes. The world-mind would say she was beside herself from much study.... More than all, no power was exerted upon her now. Who would believe that this Bellingham, with miles of the metropolis between them, had repeatedly over-ridden her volition, when she felt no threatening influence at the present moment, almost within his reach—only the innate repulsion and the fear of her fears?

"I hope to see you again at the meetings, Miss Linster."

"They do not attract me."

"That is important, if unpleasant to learn," he remarked, as if genuinely perturbed. "I have been studying for a long time, and perhaps I have taken a roundabout road to discovery. It is quite possible that the values of my instruction are over-estimated by many.... Do you mind if I sit down a moment? I have walked a hundred squares and will start back from here." From his manner it was impossible to imagine irony covert in his humbleness.

"Certainly not, though I must return to my apartment in a moment.... I did not like the atmosphere—the audience—that first night," Paula added.

"Nor did I, altogether," he said quickly. "But how can one choose the real, if all are not admitted at first? With each lecture you will find a more select company, and there will be very few when the actual message is unfolded."

He glanced away as if to determine the exact point through the trees from which the children's voices came. His profile was unquestionably that of an aristocrat. The carriage of his head, the wonderful development of his figure, his voice and the gentle temper of his answers, even the cut of his coat and the elegance of his shoes suggested an unconscious and invariable refinement which controverted the horror he had once seemed.

"It may be that I am not quite like other people," she said, "but I cannot think of physical perfection as the first aim in life."

"Nor can I," he answered; "still I think that after the elimination of poisons from the physical organism, one's mental and spiritual powers are quickened and freer to develop."

"Do you always shape your philosophy to meet the objections of your disciples—so?"

"You are stimulating, Miss Linster, but I have made no concession to adapt myself to your views. I only declared that I weed out my classes before real work begins, and that physical disease retards mental growth. I might add that I do not lecture for money."

"Why do you teach only women?"

"There are several reasons," he replied readily enough. "I have found that a mixed audience is not receptive; there is a self-consciousness, sometimes worse, something of a scoffing spirit, which breaks the point of my appeal. Women are aroused to interest when a man appeals directly to them. They do not like to betray a profound interest in any subject apart from the household—when their lords are present. Man instinctively combats any source which tends toward mental emancipation on the part of women. It is only a few decades ago that women were forced to abide entirely within their domestic circle. Instead of using a superior physical strength now to keep her there, man's tendency is to ridicule her outside interests. So I have found that women prefer to study alone."

Bellingham answered thus circuitously, but his manner suggested that he was grateful for the inquiry, since it gave him an opportunity to express matters which had only been half-formed in his mind. Paula, whose every question had come from an inclination to confound him, began to realize that the spirit was unworthy and partook of impertinence.

"I believe in automatic health," she said impatiently. "It seems to me that refinement means this: that in real fineness all such things are managed with a sort of unconscious art. For instance, I should not have health at the price of walking twice a hundred blocks in a forenoon——"

"The point is eminently reasonable, Miss Linster," Bellingham remarked with a smile. "But what I find it well to do, I rarely advise for others. I am from a stock of powerful physical men. My fathers were sailors and fishermen. They gave me an organism which weakens if I neglect exercise, and I seem to require about five times as much physical activity as many men of the present generation. I have absolutely no use for this tremendous muscular strength; in fact, I should gladly be less strong if it could be accomplished without a general deterioration. The point is, that a man with three or four generations of gentle-folk behind him, can keep in a state of glowing health at the expense of about one-fifth the physical energy that I burn—who come from rough men of mighty outdoor labors."

This was very reasonable, except that he seemed far removed in nature from the men of boats and beaches. She had dared to glance into his face as he spoke, and found an impression from the diamond hardness of his eyes, entirely different from that which came through listening merely. But for this glance, it never would have occurred to her, that her questions had stretched his faculties to the slightest tension. She would have arisen to go now, but he resumed:

"I cannot bear to have you think that my energies are directed entirely in the interests of lifting the standards of health, Miss Linster. Really, this is but a small part of preparation. It was only because I felt you ready for the important truths—that I regretted your absence after the first night. Do you know that we live in the time of a spiritual high-tide? It is clear to me that the whole race is lifting with a wonderful inner animation. In the next quarter of a century great mystic voices shall be heard. And there shall be One above all.... I tell you people are breaking down under the tyranny of their material possessions. After desire—comes the burden of holding. We are approaching the great ennui which Carlyle prophesied. There is no longer a gospel of materialism. The great English and German teachers whose work was regarded as supreme philosophy by the people ten years ago, are shown to be pitiful failures in our colleges to-day—or at best, specialists of one particular stage of evolution, who made the mistake of preaching that their little division in the great cosmic line was the whole road. Materialism died out of Germany a few years ago—with a great shock of suicide. The mystics are teaching her now. I assure you the dawn is breaking for a great spiritual day such as the world has never seen. Soon a great light shall cover the nations and evil shall crawl into the holes of the earth where it is dark.... There is shortly to be born into the world—a glorious Child. While He is growing to celestial manhood—New Voices shall rise here and everywhere preparing the way. One of these New Voices—one of the very least of these—is Bellingham to whom you listen so impatiently."

Every venture into the occult had whispered this Child-promise in Paula's ears. There was such a concerted understanding of this revelation among the cults, that the thought had come to her that perhaps this was a delusion of every age. Yet she had seen a Hindu record dated a hundred years before, prophesying the birth of a Superman in the early years of the Twentieth Century. There was scarcely a division among the astrologers on this one point. She had even been conscious in the solitudes of her own life of a certain mystic confidence of such a fulfillment.... She dared not look into Bellingham's face at such a moment. The ghastly phase of the whole matter was to hear this prophecy repeated by one to whom the illustrious prospect (if he were, as she had believed) could become only an awful illumination of the hell to which he was condemned. It was—only unspeakably worse—like hearing a parrot croak, "Feed our souls with the bread of life!..." Paula stirred in her seat, and Charter's letter dropped from the book in her lap. She seized it with a rush of grateful emotion. It was a stanchion in her mind now filled with turbulence.

"There never was a time when woman's intelligence was so eager and rational; never a time," Bellingham went on, "when men were so tired of metals and meals and miles. The groan for the Absolutely New, for the utmost in sense and the weirdest of sensations, for speed to cover distances and to overcome every obstacle, even thin air—all these express the great weariness of the flesh and make clear to the prophetic understanding that man is nearing the end of his lessons in three dimensions and five senses. There is a stirring of the spirit-captive in the worn mesh of the body."

The woman traced her name with her forefinger upon the cover of the book in her lap; again and again, "Paula—Paula—Paula." It was a habit she had not remembered for years. As a little girl when she fought against being persuaded contrary to her will, she would hold herself in hand thus, by wriggling "Paula" anywhere. All that Bellingham said was artfully calculated to inspire her with hope and joy in the world. So marvelously were the words designed to carry her high in happiness, that there was a corresponding tension of terror in remembering that Bellingham uttered them. Yet she would have felt like a lump of clay had she not told him:

"What you say is very wonderful to me."

"And it is the women who are most sensitive to the Light—women who are already unfolding in the rays, yet so far-flung and dim." Bellingham's voice was a quick emotionless monotone. "Perhaps you have noted the great amalgamation of clubs and classes of women which each year turns its power to more direct effort and valuable study. Another thing, let the word Genius be whispered about any child or youth, and he becomes at once the darling of rich matrons. What does this mean—this desire of woman to bring out the latent powers of a stranger's child? This veiled, beautiful quality is the surest sign of all. It is the spirit of Rebecca—which, even in the grief for her own dead babe, turns thrillingly to mother a wayfarer's Starry Child. Verily, when a woman begins to dream about bringing prophets into the world—the giants of those other days are close to her, crowding closer, eager to be born again."

Paula turned to him and arose. His face was not kindled. It was as if he were an actor reading lines to memorize, not yet trying to simulate the contained emotions. There is a glow of countenance where fine thought-force is in action, but Bellingham's face was not lit with the expiration of mind-energy, though his eyes glittered with set, bird-like brightness.

"I must hurry away now," she told him hastily. "I must think upon what you have said."

"I truly wish," he added softly, and with a kindness she felt, because her eyes were turned from him, "that you would join one of my wiser classes. You would be an inspiration. Besides, the little things that have been given me to tell—should be known by the very few who have reached your degree of evolution."

"Thank you," she faltered. "I must think."

"Good-by, Miss Linster."

Reaching the street in front of her apartment house, she turned just in time to see him disappear among the trees. He strode forward as if this were his world, and his days had been a continuous pageant of victories.... Her rooms were all cleared of disorder, her mind refreshed and stimulated.... That night between eleven and twelve she was writing to Charter. There were a half dozen penned pages before her, and a smile on her lips. She poured out a full heart to the big Western figure of cleanliness and strength—wrote to the man she wanted him to be.... The day had been strange and expanding. She had suffered no evil. The thoughts remaining with her from the talk in the Park were large with significance, and they had cleared slowly from the murkiness of their source. These, and the ideal of manhood she was building out of Charter's book and letter and Reifferscheid's little sketch of him, had made the hours rich with healing. She was tired but steady-nerved as she wrote.... There was a faint tapping at her hall-door.

FIFTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE FURIOUS HISTORY OF SELMA CROSS AND WRITES A LETTER TO QUENTIN CHARTER

Paula thrust the sheets of the letter in her desk drawer and admitted Selma Cross, an actress whose apartment was across the hall. These two had chatted together many times, sometimes intimately. Each had found the other interesting. Hints of a past that was almost classic in the fury of its struggle for publicity, had repeatedly come to Paula's ears, with other matters she greatly would have preferred not to hear. Selma Cross was huge to look upon, and at first thought without grace. There was something uncanny in her face and movements, and an extraordinary breadth between her yellow eyes which were wide-lidded, slow-moving and ever-changing. She was but little past thirty, yet the crowded traffic of her years was intricately marked.

"I saw the light under your door, and felt like coming in for a few minutes," she said. "I must talk to some one and my maid, Dimity, is snoring. You see, I'm celebrating for two reasons."

"Tell me, so I can help," Paula answered.

"Vhruebert has taken a play for me. You know, I've been begging him to for months. The play was made for me—not that it was written with me in mind, but that I just suit it. Selma Cross is to be carved in light over a theatre-entrance, twenty seconds from Broadway—next April. It will be at the Herriot—Vhruebert's theatre. We run through Hartford, Springfield, Rochester and that string of second cities earlier in the Spring."

Paula rose and gave both her hands.

"Oh, I'm so glad for you," she said. "I know something about how you have worked for this——"

"Yes, and the play is The Thing. I am an ugly slaving drudge, but have all the emotions that the sweet ingenue of the piece should have, and the audience watches me deliver. Yes, I've waited long for this, and yet I'm not so glad as I thought I should be. I've been pretty sure of it for the last year or two. I said I was celebrating for two things——"

"Pray, what is the other?"

"I forget that it might not interest you—though it certainly does me," Selma Cross said with a queer, low laugh.... "He wasn't ugly about it, but he has been exacting—ugh! The fact is, I have earned the privilege at last of sleeping in my own respectable apartment."

Paula couldn't help shivering a bit. "You mean you have left your——"

"Oh, he wasn't my husband.... It's such a luxury to pay for your own things—for your own house and clothes and dinners—to earn a dollar for every need and one to put away.... You didn't think that I could get my name above the name of a play—without an angel?"

"I didn't know," Paula said, "I saw you with him often. It didn't exactly occur to me that he was your husband, because he didn't come here. But do you mean that now when you don't need him any longer—you told him to go away?"

"Just that—except it isn't at all as it looks. You wouldn't pity old man Villiers. Living God, that's humorous—after what I have given. Don't look for wings on theatrical angels, dear."

It was plain that the woman was utterly tired. She regarded Paula with a queer expression of embarrassment, and there was a look of harsh self-repression under the now-drooped eyelids.

"I don't apologize," she went on hastily. "What I have done, I would do again—only earlier in the game, but you're the sort of woman I don't like to have look at me that—I mean look down upon me. I haven't many friends. I think I must be half wild, but you make the grade that I have—and you pay the price.... You've always looked attractive to me—so easy and finished and out of the ruck."

There was a real warming sincerity in the words. Paula divined on the instant that she could forever check an intimacy—by a word which would betray the depth of her abhorrence for such a concession to ambition, and for the life which seems to demand it. Selma Cross was sick for a friend, sick from containing herself. On this night of achievement there was something pitiful in the need of her heart.

"New York has turned rather too many pages of life before my eyes, Selma, for me to feel far above any one whose struggles I have not endured."

The other leaned forward eagerly, "I liked you from the first moment, Paula," she said. "You were so rounded—it seemed to me. I'm all streaky, all one-sided. You're bred. I'm cattle.... Some time I'll tell you how it all began. I said I would be the greatest living tragedienne—hurled this at a lot of cat-minds down in Kentucky fifteen years ago. Of course, I shall. It does not mean so much to me as I thought, and it may be a bauble to you, but I wanted it. Its far-awayness doesn't torture me as it once did, but one pays a ghastly price. Yes, it's a climb, dear. You must have bone and blood and brain—a sort of brain—and you should have a cheer from below; but I didn't. I wonder if there ever was a fight that can match mine? If so, it would not be a good tale for children or grown-ups with delicate nerves. Little women always hated me. I remember, one restaurant cashier on Eighth Avenue told me I was too unsightly to be a waitress. I have done kitchen pot-boilers and scrubbed tenement-stairs. Then, because I repeated parts of plays in those horrid halls—they said I was crazy.... Why, I have felt a perfect lust for suicide—felt my breast ache for a cool knife and my hand rise gladly. Once I played a freak part—that was my greater degradation—debased my soul by making my body look worse than it is. I went down to hell for that—and was forgiven. I have been so homesick, Paula, that I could have eaten the dirt in the road of that little Kentucky town.... Yes, I pressed against the steel until something broke—it was the steel, not me. Oh, I could tell you much!..."

She paused but a moment.

"The thing so dreadful to overcome was that I have a body like a great Dane. It would not have hurt a writer, a painter, even a singer, so much, but we of the drama are so dependent upon the shape of our bodies. Then, my face is like a dog or a horse or a cat—all these I have been likened to. Then I was slow to learn repression. This is a part of culture, I guess—breeding. Mine is a lineage of Kentucky poor white trash, who knows, but a speck of 'nigger'? I don't care now, only it gave me a temper of seven devils, if it was so. These are some of the things I have contended with. I would go to a manager and he would laugh me along, trying to get rid of me gracefully, thinking that some of his friends were playing a practical joke on him. Vhruebert thought that at first. Vhruebert calls me The Thing now. I could have done better had I been a cripple; there are parts for a cripple. And you watch, Paula, next January when I burn up things here, they'll say my success is largely due to my figure and face!"

As she looked and listened, Paula saw great meanings in the broad big countenance, a sort of ruffian strength to carry this perfecting instrument of emotion. The great body was needed to support such talents, handicapped by the lack of beauty. Selma Cross fascinated her. Paula's heart went out to the great crude creature she had been—in pity for this woman of furious history. The processes by which her brain and flesh had been refined would have slain the body and mind of an ordinary human. It came to Paula that here was one of Mother Nature's most enthralling experiments—the evolution of an effective instrument from the coarsest and vaguest heredity.

"They are all brainless but Vhruebert. You see, unless one is a beauty, you can't get the support of a big manager's name. I mean without money—there are managers who will lend their name to your stardom, if you take the financial risk. Otherwise, you've got to attract them as a possible conquest. All men are like that. If you interest them sexually—they will hear what you have to say——"

"Isn't that a reckless talk?" Paula asked, pale from the repulsiveness of the thought. "You say it without a single qualification——"

Selma Cross stared at her vacantly for a few seconds, then laughed softly. "You don't actually believe—to the contrary?"

"Let's pass it by. I should have to be changed—to believe that!"

"I hope the time will never come when you need something terribly from a strange man—one upon whom you have no hold but—yourself.... Ah, but you—the brighter sort would give you what you asked. You——"

"Please don't go on!" Paula whispered. "The other part is so interesting."

Selma Cross seemed to stir restlessly in her loose, softly-scented garments. "I suppose I'm too rough for you. In ninety-nine women out of a hundred, I'd say your protest was a cheap affectation, but it isn't so with you...."

"It's your set, smothery pessimism that hurts so, Selma," Paula declared intensely. "It hurts me most because you seem to have it so locked and immovable inside.... You have been so big and wonderful to win against tremendous obstacles—not against ugliness—I can't grant that. You startled me, when I saw you first. I think women have held you apart because you were uncommon. You show a strange power in your movements and expression. It's not ugliness——"

"That's mighty rare of you. I haven't had the pleasure of being defied like that before. But you are not like other people—not like other women."

"You will meet many real men and women—wiser and kinder than I am. I think your pessimism cannot endure—when you look for the good in people——"

"The kind I have known would not let me. They're just as hateful now—I mean the stuffy dolls of the stage—just as hateful, calling me 'dear' and 'love' and saying, 'How tremendous you are, Selma Cross!....' Listen, it is only a little while ago that the same women used to ask me to walk on Broadway with them—to use me as a foil for their baby faces! Oh, women are horrible—dusty shavings inside—and men are of the same family."

"You poor, dear unfortunate—not to know the really wonderful kind! You are worn to the bone from winning your victory, but when you're rested, you'll be able to see the beautiful—clearly."

"One only knows as far as one can see."

This sentence was a shock to Paula's intelligence. It was spoken without consciousness of the meaning which drove so deep into the other's mind. It suggested a mind dependent altogether upon physical eyes. Paula refused to believe that this was the key to the whole matter.

"They have been so cruel to me—those female things which bloom a year," Selma Cross continued. "Flesh-flowers! They harried me to martyrdom. I had to hate them, because I was forced to be one with them—I, a big savage, dreaming unutterable things. It's all so close yet, I haven't come to pity them.... Maybe you can tell me what good they are—what they mean in the world—the shallow, brainless things who make the stage full! They are in factories, too, everywhere—daughters of the coolies and peasants of Europe—only worse over here because their fathers have lost their low fixed place in society, and are all mixed in their dim, brute minds. They have no one to rule them. You will see a family of dirty, frightened, low-minded children—the eldest, say a girl of fifteen. A dog or a cat with a good home is rich beside them. Take this eldest girl of a brood—with all the filth of foreign New York in and about her. She is fifteen and ready for the streets. It is the year of her miracle. I've seen it a score of times. You miss her a few months and she appears again at work somewhere—her face decently clean, her eyes clear, a bit of bright ribbon and a gown wrung somewhere from the beds of torture. It is her brief bloom—so horrid to look at when you know what it means. All the fifteen years of squalor, evil, and low-mindedness for this one year—a bloom-girl out of the dirt! And the next, she has fallen back, unwashed, high-voiced, hardening, stiffening,—a babe at her breast, dull hell in her heart. All her living before and to come—for that one bloom year. Maybe you can tell me what the big purpose of it all is. Earth uses them quite as ruthlessly as any weed or flower—gives them a year to bloom, not for beauty, but that more crude seeds may be scattered. Perpetuate! Flowers bloom to catch a bug—such girls, to catch a man—perpetuate—oh God, what for? And these things have laughed at me in the chorus, called me 'Crazy Sal,' because I spoke of things they never dreamed."

"Yes," Paula said quickly, "I've seen something like that. How you will pity them when you are rested! It is hard for us to understand why such numbers are sacrificed like a common kind of plants. Nietzsche calls them 'the much-too-many.' But Nietzsche does not know quite so much as the Energy that wills them to manifest. It is dreadful, it is pitiful. It would seem, if God so loved the world—that He could not endure such pity as would be His at the sight of this suffering and degradation.... 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 prostitute 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.... Nobody could possibly want a hunch-back but me—yet I'm not good enough. He's so noble 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 altitudes. 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 noble 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, hell 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 passers-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 spaces between the atoms of steel which made radioactivity possible, so in the human body there is a permeating space, 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 accumulation of all suffering—desert thirsts, untold loves, birth and death parturitions, blind cruelties of battle, the carnal lust of Famine (that soft-treading spectre), welted flesh under the screaming lash, moaning from the World's Night everywhere—until the impassioned spirit within rushed forth to the very horizon's rim to shelter an agonizing people from an angry God. 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 lustrous 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.

She Buildeth Her House

She Buildeth Her House

By Will Levington Comfort

Author of "Routledge Rides Alone," etc

With a Frontispiece ByMartin Justice

Philadelphia & LondonJ. B. Lippincott Company1911

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

Published May, 1911

PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANYAT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESSPHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

A BOUGH BROUGHT WITH SINGINGTO THE FEET OFHERWHO CROSSED THE SANDS ALONEIN ADORING PILGRIMAGEFOR HER SON

HE REACHED THE CURBING OF THE OLD WELL WITH HIS BURDEN

Contents