Part 3

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 _algae_, 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."