SIXTH CHAPTER

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

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

  Just once, the thought came to Paula that Bellingham had designed ameeting such as took place in the Park to soften her aversion and clearfrom her mind any idea of his abnormality. She could not hold thissuspicion long. Attributing evil strategies to another was not easy forPaula. The simpler way now was to give him every benefit, even to regardthe recent dreadful adventures with an intangible devil--as an outburstof her neglected feminine prerogatives, coincident with the stress ofher rather lonely intellectual life. As for Madame Nestor, might she nothave reached a more acute stage of a similar derangement? Paula was notunacquainted with the great potentialities of fine physical health, nordid she miss the fact that Mother Nature seldom permits a woman ofnormal development to reach the fourth cycle of her years, withoutreckoning with the ancient reason of her being.

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

  Paula loved to think that Woman was to be the chief resource of theLifting Age. Everywhere among men she saw the furious hunger forspiritual refreshment. Words, which she heard by mere chance frompassers-by, appalled her. It was so tragically clear to her how the lifeled by city men starves their better natures--that there were times whenshe could hardly realize they did not see it. She wanted someone to makethe whole world understand--that just as there are hidden spaces betweenthe atoms of steel which made radioactivity possible, so in the humanbody there is a permeating space, in which the soul of man is built dayby day from every thought and act; and when the worn-out physicalenvelope falls away--there it stands, a record to endure.... She wantedto believe that it was the office of woman to help man make this recordbeautiful. Just as the old Anglo-Saxon for "lady" means "giver ofbread," so she loved to think that the spiritual loaf was in the keepingof woman also.

  Paula could not meditate without ecstasy upon the thought that a greatspiritual tide was rising, soon to overflow every race and nation. Thelifting of man from greedy senses to the pure happiness of brotherhood,was her most intimate and lovely hope. Back of everything, this livedand lit her mind. There were transcendent moments--she hardly dared todescribe or interpret them--when cosmic consciousness swept into herbrain. Swift was the visitation, nor did it leave any memorableimpression, but she divined that such lofty moments, different only indegree, were responsible for the great utterances in books that aredeathless. The shield was torn from her soul, leaving it naked to everyworld-anguish. The woman, Paula Linster, became an accumulation of allsuffering--desert thirsts, untold loves, birth and death parturitions,blind cruelties of battle, the carnal lust of Famine (that soft-treadingspectre), welted flesh under the screaming lash, moaning from theWorld's Night everywhere--until the impassioned spirit within rushedforth to the very horizon's rim to shelter an agonizing people from anangry God. Such is the genius of race-motherhood--the ineffable spiritof 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--theGethsemanes. Out of the dream, would appear the actual spectacle of theCity--human beings preying one upon the other, the wolf still frothingin man's breast--and then would crush down upon her with shattering painthe realization of her own hopeless ineffectuality. To a mind thusstricken and desolated often, premonitions of madness come atlast--madness, the black brother of genius. There is safety alone in abody strong and undefiled to receive again the expanded spirit. From howmany a lustrous youth--tarrying too long by the fetid margins ofsense--has the glory winged away, never to return to a creature falleninto hairy despoliation.

  * * * * *

  Paula had returned from down-town about noon. Reifferscheid, who had aweakness for Herman Melville, and annually endeavored to spur theAmerican people into a more adequate appreciation of the old sea-lion,had ordered her to rest her eyes for a few days in _Moby Dick_. With thefat, old fine-print novel under her arm, Paula let herself into her ownapartment and instantly encountered the occultist's power. She sank tothe floor and covered her face in the pillows of the couch. In the pasttwenty-four hours she had come to believe that the enemy had been putaway forever, yet here in her own room she was stricken, and soswiftly.... Though she did not realize it at once, many of the thoughtswhich gradually surged into her mind were not her own. She came to seeBellingham as other women saw him--as a great and wise doctor. Her ownconception battled against this, but vainly, vaguely. It was as if heheld the balance of power in her consciousness. Without attempting tolink them together, the processes of her mind quickly will be set intowords.

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

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

  Again and again the little sentences fell upon her mind, until itssurface stirred against reiteration, as one, thoroughly understanding,resents repeated explanations.... It was right now for her to go. Shehad been rebellious and headstrong to conjure such evils about the nameof a famous physician. The world called him famous. Only she and MadameNestor had stood apart, clutching fast to their ideas of his deviltry.He had taken the trouble to call her to him--to prove that he was good.The degradation which she had felt at the first moment of hissummons--was all from her own perversity.... Clearly she saw the streetbelow, Cathedral Way; a turn north, then across the Plaza to the brownornate entrance of _The Maidstone_.... There was no formality about thegoing. Her hat and coat had not been removed.... She was in the hall;the elevator halted at her floor while the man pushed a letter and somepapers under the door of the Selma Cross apartment.... In the street,she turned across the Plaza from Cathedral Way to _The Maidstone_. Thereal Paula Linster marshalled a hundred terrible protests, but her voicewas muffled, her strength ineffectual as Josephine's beating with whitehands against the Emperor's iron door. Real volition was locked in thepitiless will of the physician, to whom she hastened as one hoping to besaved.

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

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

  Paula stepped from the elevator, and was directed to the last door onthe left.... The sense of h
er need, of her illness, hurried her forwardthrough the long hall. Sometimes she seemed burdened with the body of awoman, very tired and helpless, but quite obedient.... The figure "F" ona silver shield filled her eyes. The door was ajar. Her entrance was notunlike that of a lioness goaded with irons through a barred passage intoan arena. She did not open the door wider, but slipped through sideways,gathering her dress closely about her.... Bellingham was there. His facewas white, rigid from long concentration; yet he smiled and his armswere opened to her.... The point here was that he so marvelouslyunderstood. His attitude to her seemed that of a physician of the soul.She could not feel the fighting of the real woman.... Dazed and brokenfor the moment, she encountered the soothing magnetism of his hands.

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

  His arms were light upon her, his voice low and lulling. He dared notyet touch his lips to her hair--though they were dry and twisted withhis awful thirst. Craft and patience altogether feline was in the artwith which he wound and wove about her mind thoughts of his own,designed to ignite the spark of responsive desire.... And how softly hefanned--(an incautious blast would have left him in darknessaltogether)--until it caught.... Well, indeed, he knew the cunning ofthe yet unbroken seals; and better still did he know the outraged forceshovering all about her, ready to defeat him for the slightest error--andleave him to burn in his own fires.

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

  Clearly was transferred to hers, the picture in his own brain. One ofthe ancient and mystic films of memory seemed brought after ages to thelight--the reddening sands, the city far behind, from which she had fledto meet her hero, deep in the desert--the glow of sunset on hisshoulders and in his hair, tawny as the lion's skin he wore.... Theheart quickened within her; the savage ardor of that long-ago woman grewhot in her breast. Strong as a lion he was, this youth of the Sun, andfleet the night fell to cover them. She ate the dried grapes he gaveher, drank deep from his skin of wine, and laughed with him in the swiftdescending night.... She felt his arms now, her face was upraised, hereyelids tensely shut. Downward the blood rushed, leaving her lips icycold. She felt the muscles of his arms in her tightening fingers, andher breast rose against him. This was no Twentieth Century magician whothralled her now, but a glorious hero out of the desert sunset;--and thewoman within her was as one consuming with ecstasy from a lover's lastvisit....

  And now Bellingham changed the color and surface of his advances. It washis thought to make such a marvellous sally, that when he retired andthe mistress once again commanded her own citadel, she would perceivethe field of his activities strewn, not with corpses, but with garlands,and in their fragrance she must yearn for the giant to come yet again.The thing he now endeavored to do was beyond an ordinary humanconception for devilishness; and yet, that it was not a momentaryimpulse, but a well considered plan, was proven by the trend of his talkof the day before.... The flaw in his structure was his apparentforgetting that the woman in his arms breathing so ardently, in her ownmind was clinging to a youth out of the sunset--a youth in the skin of alion.

  "Wisdom has been given to my eyes," Bellingham resumed with surpassinggentleness. "For years a conception of wonderful womanhood has lived andbrightened in my mind, bringing with it a promise that in due time, sucha woman would be shown to me. The woman, the promise and the miracle ofits later meaning, I perceived at last were not for my happiness, butfor the world's awful need. You are the fruits of my wonderfulvision--you--Paula Linster. You are the quest of my long and wearysearching!"

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

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

  The word "magic" was a sudden spark around which the thoughts of thewoman now groped.... She had lost her desert lover, passion was drainedfrom her, and there was a weight of great trouble pressing down ..."Magic"--she struggled for its meaning.... She was sitting upon a rockagain, but not in the desert--rather in a place of cooled sunlight,where there were turf roads and grand, old trees--a huge figureapproaching with a powerful swinging stride--yesterday, Bellingham, thePark--the Talk!... Paula lifted her shoulders, felt the binding armsaround them and heard the words uttered now in the meridian of humanpassion:

  "Listen, Paula Linster, you have been chosen for the most exalted taskever offered to living woman. The Great Soul is not yet in the world,and He must come soon!... It is you who have inspired this--you, oftrained will; a mind of stirring evolution, every thought so essentiallyfeminine; you of virgin body and a soul lit with stars! You are brave.The burden is easy to one of your courage, and I should keep you freefrom the world--free from the burns and the whips of this thinkinganimal, the world. All that I have won from the world, her mysteries,her enchantments, I shall give you, all that is big and brave and wisein song and philosophy and nature, I shall bring to your feet, as ahunter with trophies to his beloved--all that a man, wise and tender,can think and express to quicken the splendor of fertility----"

  Paula was now fully conscious--her self restored to her. The Yesterdayand the To-day rose before her mind in startling parallel. Her primarydread was that she might lose control again before Bellingham was putaway. The super-devilishness of his plan--hiding a blasphemy in thewhite robe of a spiritual consecration--had changed him in her sight toa ravening beast. The thing which he believed would cause her eagerly tobestow upon him the riches of her threefold life had lifted her fartherout of his power that moment, than even she realized. Bellingham hadover-reached. She was filled with inner nausea.... The idea of escape,the thought of crippling the magician's power over her forever--in thestress of this, she grew cold.... She was nearest the door. It stoodajar, as when she had entered.

  "Meditation--in the place I have prepared," he was whispering,"meditation and the poetic life, rarest of fruits, purest of whitegarments--cleansed with sunlight and starlight, you and I, PaulaLinster,--the sources of creation which have been revealed to me--foryou! Wonderful woman--all the vitalities of heaven shall play upon you!We shall bring the new god into the world----"

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

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

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

  * * * * *

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

 
Will Levington Comfort's Novels