Part 18

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

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

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

"I like the calm, conquering voices of the prophets better.... Immortality of the body?... There can be no immortality in a substance which earth attracts. We have vast and violent lessons to learn in the flesh; lessons which can be learned only in the flesh, because it is a matrix for the integration of spirit. It appears to me that, in due time, man reaches a period when he balances in the attractions--between the weight of the body and the lifting of the soul. This is the result of a slow, refining process that has endured through all time. Reincarnation is the best theory I know for the process. That there is an upward tendency driving the universe, seems to be the only cause and justification for Creating. Devolution cannot be at the centre of such a system.... The body becomes more and more a spotless garment for the soul; soul-light more and more electrifies it; the elimination of carnality in thought may even render the body delicate and transparent, but it is a matrix still, and falls away--when one's full-formed wings no longer need the weight of a thorax----"

"What an expression!" Bellingham observed abruptly. He had been staring away toward a low, cloudy film of land in the south. One would have thought that he had heard only the sentence which aroused his comment. Charter was filling with violence. The man's vanity was chained to him like a corpse. This experience of pouring out energy to no purpose aroused in Charter all the forces which had combined to force the public to his work. The thought came that Bellingham was so accustomed to direct the speech and thought of others, mainly women, that he had lost the listening faculty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Processes which these poor Islanders could understand?"

"We are moving in a circle," Bellingham said hastily.

For the first moment, Charter felt the whip-hand over his own faculties.

"I've noted the great, modern tendency to preach _body_," he said, inhaling a big breath of the fragrant air, "to make a religion of bodily health--to look for elemental truth in alimentary canals; to mix prayer with carnal subterfuge and heaven with health resorts. Better Phallicism bare-faced.... I read a tract recently written by one of these body-worshippers--the smug, black devil. It made me feel just as I did when I found a doctor book in the attic once, at the age of ten.... Whatever I may be, have done, may feel, dream or think below the diaphragm--hasn't anything to do with my religion. I believe in health, as in a good horse or a good typewriter, but my body's health is not going to rule my day."

"You are young--to have become chilled by such polar blasts," Bellingham said uneasily, for he now found the other's eyes but without result.

"I came into the world with a full quiver of red passions," Charter said wearily, yet strangely glad. "The quiver is not empty. I do not say that I wish it were, but I have this to declare: I do not relish being told how to play with the barbs; how to polish and point and delight in them; how to put them back more deadly poisoned. I think there are big blankets of mercy for a natural voluptuary--for the things done when tissues are aflame--but for the man who deliberately studies to recreate them without cost, and tells others of his experiments--frankly, I believe in hell for such men-maggots. Oblivion is too sweet. The essence of my hatred for these Bodyists is because of the poison they infuse into the minds of youths and maidens, whose character-skeletons are still rubbery.... But let such teachers purr, wriggle, and dilate--for they're going back right speedily to the vipers!"

Bellingham's eyes had been lost in the South. He turned, arose, and after a pause said lightly, "Your talk is strong meat, young man.... I--I suffered a serious accident some months ago and cannot stay too long in one place. We shall talk again. How far do you go with the _Panther_?"

"Saint Pierre."

Charter already felt the first pangs of reaction. His vehemence, the burn of temper for himself, in that he had allowed the other's personality to prey upon him, and the unwonted aggressiveness of his talk--all assumed an evil aspect now as he perceived the occultist's ghastly face. In rising, Bellingham seemed to have stirred within himself centres of unutterable torture. His look suggested one who has been drilled in dreadful arcanums of pain, unapproached by ordinary men.

"I think I must have been pent a long time," Charter said in his trouble. "Perhaps, I'm a little afraid of myself and was rehearsing a warning for the strength of my own bridle-arm--since we're swinging down into these Isles of Seduction."

"You'll find a more comfortable coolness with the years, I think, and cease to abhor your bounding physical vitality. Remember, 'Jesus came eating and drinking----'"

Charter started under the touch of the old iron. "But 'wisdom is justified of all her children,'" he responded quickly.

They were at the door of Bellingham's cabin, which was forward on the promenade. The doctor laughed harshly as he turned the key. "I see you have your Scriptures, too," he said. "We must talk again."

"How far do you go with the _Panther_?" Charter asked, drawing away. His eyes had filled for a second, as the door swung open, with the photograph of a strangely charming young woman within the cabin.

"I have not decided--possibly on to South America."

Charter felt as he walked alone that he had shown his youth, even a pertness of youth. He recalled that he had done almost all the talking; that he had felt the combativeness of a boy who scents a rival from another school--quite ridiculous. Moreover, he was weary, as if one of his furious seasons of work had just ended--that rare and excellent kind of work which gathers about itself an elemental force to drive the mind as with fire until the course is run.... He did not encounter Bellingham during the rest of the voyage.

Long before dawn the _Panther_ gained the harbor before Saint Pierre, and Charter awoke to the consciousness of a disorder in the air. Alone on deck, while the night was being driven back over the rising land, he was delighted to pick out the writhing letters of gold, "_Saragossa_," through the smoky gray, a few furlongs to the south. Peter Stock, an acquaintance from a former call at Saint Pierre, had become a solid and fruitful memory....

Father Fontanel was found early, where the suffering was greatest in the city. The old eyes lit with gladness as he caught Charter with both hands, and murmured something as his gaze sank into the eyes of the younger man--something which Charter did not exactly understand, about wolves being slain.

"What have you been doing with Old Man Pelee, Father? We heard him groaning in the night, and the town is fetid with his sickness."

"Ah, my son, I am afraid!"

Had all the seismologists of civilization gathered in Saint Pierre, and uttered a verdict that the volcano was an imminent menace, Charter would not have turned a more serious look at Pelee than he did that moment.... At the _Palms_, he found Peter Stock and a joyous welcome. They arranged for luncheon together, and the Capitalist hurried down into the city.... That proved a memorable luncheon, since Peter Stock at the last moment persuaded Miss Wyndam to join them.

Charter was disturbed with the thought that he had seen her before; and amazed that he could have forgotten where. He could only put it far back among the phantasmagoria of drinking days. Certainly the sane, restored Charter had never met this woman and forgotten. His veins were dilated as by a miraculous wine.

"The name is new to me, but I seem to have seen you somewhere, Miss Wyndam," he declared.

"That's the second time you've said that, young man," Mr. Stock remarked. "Don't your sentences register?"

"It's always bewildering--I know how Mr. Charter feels," Paula managed to say. "I'm quite sure we were never introduced, though I know Mr. Charter's work."

"That's good of you, indeed," he said. "I don't mean--to know my work--but to help me out with Friend Stock. It is bewildering that I have forgotten. I feel like a boy in an enchanted forest. Pelee has been working wonders all day."

"I can't follow you," the Capitalist sighed. "Your sentences are puckered."

They hardly heard him. Paula, holding fast with all her strength to the part she had planned to play, sensed Charter's blind emotion, distinct from her own series of shocks. To her it was that furious moment of adjustment, when a man and his ideal meet for the first time in a woman's heart. As for this heart, she feared they would hear its beating. Instantly, she knew that he had not come to Saint Pierre expecting to find her; knew that she was flooding into his subconsciousness--that he felt _worlds_ and could not understand. She found the boy in his eyes--the boy of his old picture--and the deep lines and the white skin of a man who has lived clean, and the brow of a man who has thought many clean things. He was thinking of the Skylark, and "Wyndam" disturbed him.... Always when he hesitated in his speech, the right word sprang to her lips to help him. She caught the very processes of his thinking; his remoteness from the thought of food, was her own.... For hours, since she had heard his voice below, Paula had paced the floor of her room, planning to keep her secret long. She would play and watch his struggle to remember the Skylark; she would weigh the forces of the conflict, stimulate it; study him among men, in the presence of suffering, and in the dread of the mountain. All this she had planned, but now her whole heart went out to the boy in his eyes--the boy that smiled. All the doubts which at best she had hoped for the coming days to banish were erased in a moment; she even believed in its fullness the letter from Selma Cross--because he was embarrassed, brimming with emotions he could not understand, quite as the boy of her dreams would be. She lived full-length in his silences, hardly dared to look at him now, for she felt his constant gaze. She knew that she was colorless, but that her eyes were filled with light.... Presently she realized that they were talking of Father Fontanel.

"He's a good old man," said Peter Stock. "He works day and night--and refuses to call it work. Just think of having a servant with a God like Father Fontanel's to make work easy!"

"He's even a little bit sorry for Pelee," Charter said. "I'm never quite the same in Saint Pierre. Many times up in the States, I ask myself, if it isn't largely in my mind about Father Fontanel's spirit and his effect upon me. It isn't. Stronger than ever it came to me this morning. You know him?" He turned the last to the woman.

"Yes, I found him down on the water-front----"

"And brought him to me," said Mr. Stock, and added: "You know what bothered me about priests so long--they seem to have it all settled between them that theirs is the only true Air-line Limited to God. Fontanel's down in the lowlands, where life is pent and cruel, where there are weak sisters and little ones who have to be helped over hard ways--that's what gets Peter Stock."

"You don't know how good that is to hear," Paula said softly. "I have thought it, too, about some men in holy orders--black figures moving along in a 'grim, unfraternal' Indian file, with their eyes so occupied in keeping their feet from breaking fresh ground--that it seems they must sometimes lose the Summit."

Charter looked from one to the other. Peter Stock regarded their plates. Paula made a quick pretense of eating, and was grateful when Charter broke the silence: "Yes, Father Fontanel has found one of the trails to the Top--one of the happy ones. Sometimes I think there are just as many trails, as an ant could find to the top of an apple. Wayfarers go a-singing on Father Fontanel's trail--eyes warm with soft skies and untellable dreams. It's a way of fineness and loving-kindness----"

Mr. Stock had risen from the table and moved to a window which faced the North. All was vague about them. Paula had been carried by Charter's voice toward far-shining mountains.... In the silence, she met the strange, steady eyes of _the boy_, and looked away to find that the room had darkened.

"It is getting dark," he said.

She would have said it, if he hadn't.

The mountain rumbled.

"The North is a mass of swirling grays and blacks," Peter Stock announced from the window. "It isn't a thunderstorm----"

A sharp detonation cleaved the darkening air, and from the rear of the house the answer issued--quavering cries of children, sharp calling of mothers, and the sullen undertone of men. A subdued drumming came from the North now, completing the tossing currents of sound about the house. The dismal bellowing of cattle and the stamping of ponies was heard from the barns. All this was wiped out by a series of terrific crashes, and the floor stirred as if intaking a deep breath. The dining-room filled with a crying, crouching gray-lipped throng of servants. A deluge of ash complicated the half-night outside, and the curse of sulphur pressed down.

Paula arose. Charter had taken his place close beside her, but spoke no word.

TWENTIETH CHAPTER

CHARTER'S MIND BECOMES THE ARENA OF CONFLICT BETWEEN THE WYNDAM WOMAN AND SKYLARK MEMORIES

In the _Rue Rivoli_ there was a little stone wine-shop. The street was short, narrow, crooked, and ill-paved--a cleft in Saint Pierre's terrace-work. Just across from the vault-like entrance to the shop, the white, scarred cliff arose to another flight of the city. Between the shop and the living-rooms behind there was a little court, shaded by mango-trees. Dwarfed banana-shrubs flourished in the shade of the mangoes, and singing-birds were caged in the lower foliage. Since the sun could find no entrance, the wine-shop was dark as a cave, and as cool. One window, if an aperture like the clean wound of a thirteen-inch gun could be called a window, opened to the north; and from it, by the grace of a crook in the _Rue Rivoli_, might be seen the mighty-calibred cone of Pelee.

Pere Rabeaut's wine was very good, and some of it was very cheap. The service was much as you made it, for if you were known you were permitted to help yourself. In this world there was no one of station too lofty to go to Pere Rabeaut's; and since those of no station whatsoever drank rum, instead of wine, you would meet no one there to whom it was not a privilege to say "_Bon jour_."

"Come and see my birds," the crafty Rabeaut would say if he approved of you.

"Where do you live?" you might ask, being a stranger.

"In the coolest hovel of Saint Pierre," was his invariable answer.

And presently, if you were truly alive, you would find yourself in the little stone wine-shop, listening to the birds and looking over the stalled casks, demijohns, and bottles, filled with more or less concentrated soil and sun. In due course, Soronia would appear in the shadowy doorway (it would seem that the bird-songs were hushed as she crossed the court), and she would show you a vintage of especially long ago. After that, though you became a missionary in Shantung, or a remittance-man in Tahiti, you would never forget the bouquet of the Rabeaut wines, the cantatas of the canaries, nor the witchery of Soronia's eyes.... If the little stone wine-shop were transplanted in New York, artists would find it, and you would be forced to fetch your own goblet and have difficulty in getting in and out for the crowd o' nights.

Thither Charter went the next morning and sat down in the cherished coolness. Peter Stock had reminded him of their former talks there, over a particular wine of Epernay, and had arranged to meet him this morning.... In the foreground of Charter's mind a gritty depression had settled, but throughout the finer, farther consciousness, where realities abide, there hung a mystic constellation, which every little while (and with a shock of ecstasy, so wonderful that his _mere_ brain was alarmed and called it scandalous), fused together into a great, glowing ardent Star of Bethlehem....

Again, the _mere_ brain said: "What have you done with your three years? The actress knew you better than you knew yourself. All your letters, and the spirit of your letters, have fallen into ruin before the first woman you meet down here in a dreamy, tropic isle. How can you--you, who have lived truly for a little while, and seemed to have felt the love that lifts--sink into the fragrant meshes of romance, through the beautiful eyes of a stranger to your world and to your ways? And what of Skylark, the lovely, the winged?..." And the soul of the man riding at its moorings in the bright calm of wisdom's anchorage, made laughing answer: "This is the Skylark--ah, not that Wyndam is Linster,--but this is the veiled queen who has waited so long for the House of Charter to be ready. This is the forever-fairy that puzzled the nights and mornings of the long-ago Charter boy. It was her wing that held the last dart of light in the gardens of boyhood before the frowning thunders came. It was her songs that made the youth's mind magic with lyrics, certain ones so very clear that they fitted into words. It was to find her dazzling brow that lured him to prodigious wanderings, until he fell fainting in the dust of other women's chariots. It was the rustling of her wings that he heard from without, when he lay in the Caverns of Devouring, where the twain, Flesh and Death, hold ghastly carnival; the flash of her wings again that lifted his eyes to the Rising Road. It was her spirit in the splendid East whose miracles of singing and shining made glorious, with creative touch, his hours by the garret window.... It was she of exquisite shoulder and starry eyes and radiant sympathies--before whom the boy, the man and the spirit, bowed in thankfulness yesterday...."

And so he sat there thinking, thinking,--glimpsing the errant centuries in the same high light of memory that this very morning recurred--an hour or two ago, when he had walked with her through the mango-grove in the coolness following a dawn-shower that had washed the white weight of Pelee's ash-winter from the trees.... "What a chaos I must be," he murmured in dull anguish, "with the finest of my life plighted to a vision that is lost--while I linger desolate in the presence of wondrous reality!" ... Some one was moving and whispering in the little room across the court of the song-birds.... Peter Stock entered, his white hair and mustache dulled with ash; his eyes red and angry.

"Well, I think I've got Father Fontanel frightened," he said, sinking down across the little round table. "He's telling the people to shut up their houses and go to Fort de France. Sixty or seventy have started, and many more have gone up to Morne Rouge and Ajoupa Boullion, where it happens to be cool, though they're just as close to the craters. Fontanel has come into a very proper spirit of respect for Pelee's destructive capacity. By the way, did you hear what happened yesterday, during the darkness and racket while we were at dinner?"

"Not definitely. Tell me," Charter urged.

"The extreme northern end of the city, or part of it, was flooded out like an ant-hill under a kettle boiling over. The River _Blanche_ overflowed her banks, and ran with boiling mud from the volcano. Thirty people were killed and the Usine Guerin destroyed."

"I didn't think it was so bad as that."

"I hope I'm wrong, but the Guerin disaster may be only a preliminary demonstration--like the operator experimenting to find if it is dark enough to start the main fireworks. Nobody can complain to Saint Peter that Pelee hasn't warned."

"There's another way to look at it," Charter said. "The volcano's overflow into the River _Blanche_ might have eased the pressure upon the craters. I wonder if there is any authority or precedent for such a hope?"

"If Pelee's fuse is burning shorter and shorter toward a Krakatoan cataclysm," Peter Stock declared moodily, "it's not for man to say what spark will shake the world.... I tried to see Mondet this morning--but couldn't get in. You wouldn't think one white, small person could contain so much poison. I am haunted with the desire to commit physical depredations."

"I think I'll take a little journey up toward the craters to-morrow," Charter confided, after a moment. "They say that the weather is quiet and clean to the north of the mountain. One might ride up and try to reason with _Pere Pelee_----"

At this juncture Soronia entered the wine-shop from the little court, to fill the eyes and the goblets of the Americans. A dark, ardent, alluring face; flesh like dull gold, made wonderful by the faintest tints of ripe fruit; eyes that could melt and burn and laugh; a fragile figure, but radiantly abloom, and as worthily draped as a young palm in a richly blossoming vine. She made one think of a strange, regal flower, an experiment of Nature, wrought in the most sumptuous shadow of a tropic garden.... She was gone. Charter laughed at the drained look in Peter Stock's face.

"An orchid----" the latter began.

"Or a sunlit cathedral window."

"Will the visitation be repeated? Do I wake or sleep?"

"The years have dealt artistically in the little wine-shop," said Charter. "They say old Pere Rabeaut married a _fille de couleur_--daughter of a former Governor-General of Martinique."

"Some Daphne of the Islands, she must have been, since Pere Rabeaut does not seem designed to father a sunset.... It's my first glimpse of Soronia this voyage. She was beautiful in a girlish way last year.... She's in love, or she couldn't glow like that. I met Pere Rabeaut down in the city----"