She felt a trifle weak. In her ears there lingered a dull, confused
sensation, like the echo of things still falling. Something had gone
very wrong with the scheme of nature. Even beneath her feet, now, the
floor seemed unsteady, unreliable.
A half-darkness dimmed her eyes; she laid one slim hand on the sofa-back
and seated herself, fighting instinctively for consciousness.
She sat there for a long while. The swimming faintness passed away. An
intense stillness seemed to invade her, and the room, and the street
outside. And for vast distances beyond. Half hours and hours rang
clearly through the silence from the mantel-clock. So still was the
place that a sheaf of petals falling from a fading rose on the piano
seemed to fill the room with ghostly rustling.
* * * * *
This, then, was the finish. Love had ended. Youth itself was ending,
too, here in the dead silence of this lamplit room.
There remained nothing more. Except that ever darkening horizon where,
at the earth's ends, those grave shapes of cloud closed out the vista
of remote skies.
There seemed to be no shelter anywhere in the vast nakedness of the
scheme of things--no shadow under which to crouch--no refuge.
Dim visions of cloistered forms, moving in a blessed twilight, grew
and assumed familiar shape amid the dumb desolation reigning in her
brain. The spectral temptation passed, repassed; processional,
recessional glided by, timed by her heart's low rhythm.
But, little by little, she came to understand that there was no refuge
even there; no mystic glow in the dark corridors of her own heart; no
source of light save from the candles glimmering on the high altar; no
aureole above the crucifix.
Always, everywhere, there seemed to be no shelter, no roof above the
scheme of things.
* * * * *
She heard the telephone. As she slowly rose from the sofa she noted
the hour as it sounded;--four o'clock in the morning.
A man's voice was speaking--an unhurried, precise, low-pitched,
monotonous voice:
"This--is--the--Memorial Hospital. Doctor--Willis--speaking. Mr.--John--
Estridge--died--at--ten minutes--to--four. Miss Westgard--wishes--to--
go--to--your--residence--and--remain--over--night--if--convenient....
Thank you. Miss--Westgard--will--go--to--you--immediately. Good-night."
* * * * *
Palla rose from her chair in the unfurnished drawing-room, went out
into the hall, admitted Ilse, then locked and chained the two front
doors.
When she turned around, trembling and speechless, they kissed. But it
was only Palla's mouth that trembled; and when they mounted the stairs
it was Ilse's arm that supported Palla.
Except that her eyes were heavy and seemed smeared with deep violet
under the lower lids, Ilse did not appear very much changed.
She took off her furs, hat, and gloves and sat down beside Palla. Her
voice was quite clear and steady; there appeared to be no sign of
shock or of grief, save for a passing tremor of her tired eyes now and
then.
She said: "We talked a little together, Jack and I, after I telephoned
to you.
"That was the last. His hand began to burn in mine steadily, like
something on fire. And when, presently, I found he was not asleep, I
motioned to the night nurse.
"The change seemed to come suddenly; she went to find one of the
internes; I sat with my hand on his pulse.... There were three
physicians there.... Jack was not conscious after midnight."
Palla's lips and throat were dry and aching and her voice almost
inaudible:
"Darling," she whispered, "--darling--if I could give him back to you
and take his place!----"
Ilse smiled, but her heavy eyelids quivered:
"The scheme of things is so miserably patched together.... Except for
the indestructible divinity within each one of us, it all would be so
hopeless.... I had never been able to imagine Jack and Death
together--" She looked up at the clock. "He was alive only an hour
ago.... Isn't it strange--"
"Oh, Ilse, Ilse! I wish this God who deals out such wickedness and
misery had struck me down instead!"
Neither seemed to notice the agnostic paradox in this bitter cry wrung
from a young girl's grief.
Ilse closed her eyes as though to rest them, and sat so, her steady
hand on Palla's. And, so resting, said in her unfaltering voice:
"Jack, of course, lives.... But it seems a long time to wait to see
him."
"Jack lives," whispered Palla.
"Of course.... Only--it seems so long a time to wait.... I wanted to
show him--how kind love has been to us--how still more wonderful love
could have been to us ... for I could have borne him many children....
And now I shall bear but one."
After a silence, Palla lifted her eyes. In them the shadow of terror
still lingered; there was not an atom of colour in her face.
* * * * *
Ilse slept that night, though Palla scarcely closed her eyes. Dreadful
details of the coming day rose up to haunt her--all the ghastly
routine necessary before the dead lie finally undisturbed by the stir
and movement of many footsteps--the coming and going of the living.
* * * * *
Because what they called pneumonia was the Black Death of the ancient
East, they had warned Ilse to remain aloof from that inert thing that
had been her lover. So she did not look upon his face again.
There were relatives of sorts at the chapel. None spoke to her. The
sunshine on the flower-covered casket was almost spring like.
And in the cemetery, too, there was no snow; and, under the dead
grass, everywhere new herbage tinted the earth with delicate green.
Ilse returned from the cemetery with Palla. Her black veil and
garments made of her gold hair and blond skin a vivid beauty that
grief had not subdued.
That deathless courage which was part of her seemed to sustain the
clear glow of her body's vigour as it upheld her dauntless spirit.
"Did you see Jim in the chapel?" she asked quietly.
Palla nodded. She had seen Marya, also. After a little while Ilse said
gravely:
"I think it no treachery to creed when one submits to the equally
vital belief of another. I think our creed includes submission,
because that also is part of love."
Palla lifted her face in flushed surprise:
"Is there any compromising with truth?" she asked.
"I think love is the greatest truth. What difference does it make how
we love?"
"Does not our example count? You had the courage of your belief. Do
you counsel me to subscribe to what I do not believe by acquiescing in
it?"
Ilse closed her sea-blue eyes as though fatigued. She said dreamily:
"I think that to believe in love and mating and the bearing of
children is the only important belief in the world. But under what
local laws you go about doing these things seems to be of minor
importance,--a matter, I should say, of personal inclination."
Ilse wished to go home. That is, to her own apartment, where now were
enshrined all her memories of this dead man who had given to her
womanhood that ultimate crown which in her eyes seemed perfect.
She said serenely to Palla: "Mine is not the loneliness that craves
company with the living. I have a long time to wait; that is all. And
after a while I shall not wait alone.
"So you must not grieve for me, darling. You see I know that Jack
lives. It's just the long, long wait that calls for courage. But I
think it is a little easier to wait alone until--until there are two
to wait--for him----"
"Will you call me when you want me, Ilse?"
"Always, darling. Don't grieve. Few women know happiness. I have known
it. I know it now. It shall not even die with me."
She smiled faintly and turned to enter her doorway; and Palla
continued on alone toward that dwelling which she called home.
The mourning which she had worn for her aunt, and which she had worn
for John Estridge that morning, she now put off, although vaguely
inclined for it. But she shrank from the explanations in which it was
certain she must become involved when on duty at the Red Cross and the
canteen that afternoon.
Undressed, she sent her maid for a cup of tea, feeling too tired for
luncheon. Afterward she lay down on her bed, meaning merely to close
her eyes for a moment.
It was after four in the afternoon when she sat up with a start--too
late for the Red Cross; but she could do something at the canteen.
She went about dressing as though bruised. It seemed to take an
interminable time. Her maid called a taxi; but the short winter
daylight had nearly gone when she arrived at the canteen.
She remained there on kitchen duty until seven, then untied her white
tablier, washed, pinned on her hat, and went out into the light-shot
darkness of the streets and turned her steps once more toward home.
There is, among the weirder newspapers of the metropolis, a sheet
affectionately known as "pink-and-punk," the circulation of which
seems to depend upon its distribution of fake "extras."
As Palla turned into her street, shabby men with hoarse voices were
calling an extra and selling the newspaper in question.
She bought one, glanced at the headlines, then, folding it, unlocked
her door.
Dinner was announced almost immediately, but she could not touch it.
She sank down on the sofa, still wearing her furs and hat. After a
little while she opened her newspaper.
It seemed that a Bolsheviki plot had been discovered to murder the
premiers and rulers of the allied nations, and to begin simultaneously
in every capital and principal city of Europe and America a reign of
murder and destruction.
In fact, according to the account printed in startling type, the
Terrorists had already begun their destructive programme in
Philadelphia. Half a dozen buildings--private dwellings and one small
hotel--had been more or less damaged by bombs. A New York man named
Wilding, fairly well known as an impresario, had been killed outright;
and a Russian pianist, Vanya Tchernov, who had just arrived in
Philadelphia to complete arrangements for a concert to be given by him
under Mr. Wilding's management, had been fatally injured by the
collapse of the hotel office which, at that moment, he was leaving in
company with Mr. Wilding.
A numbness settled over Palla's brain. She did not seem to be able
to comprehend that this affair concerned Vanya--that this newspaper
was telling her that Vanya had been fatally hurt somewhere in
Philadelphia.
Hours later, while she was lying on the lounge with her face buried in
the cushions, and still wearing her hat and furs, somebody came into
the room. And when she turned over she saw it was Ilse.
Palla sat up stupidly, the marks of tears still glistening under her
eyes. Ilse picked up the newspaper from the couch, laid it aside, and
seated herself.
"So you know about Vanya?" she said calmly.
Palla nodded.
"You don't know all. Marya called me on the telephone a few minutes
ago to tell me."
"Vanya is dead," whispered Palla.
"Yes. They found an unmailed letter directed to Marya in his pockets.
That's why they notified her."
After an interval: "So Vanya is dead," repeated Palla under her
breath.
Ilse sat plaiting the black edges of her handkerchief.
"It's such a--a senseless interruption--death----" she murmured. "It
seems so wanton, so meaningless in the scheme of things ... to make
two people wait so long--so long!--to resume where they had been
interrupted----"
Palla asked coldly whether Marya had seemed greatly shocked.
"I don't know, Palla. She called me up and told me. I asked her if
there was anything I could do; and she answered rather strangely that
what remained for her to do she would do alone. I don't know what she
meant."
* * * * *
Whether Marya herself knew exactly what she meant seemed not to be
entirely clear to her. For, when Mr. Puma, dressed in a travelling
suit and carrying a satchel, arrived at her apartment in the Hotel
Rajah, and entered the reception room with his soundless, springy
step, she came out of her bedroom partly dressed, and still hooking
her waist.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded contemptuously, looking him
over from, head to foot. "Did you really suppose I meant to go to
Mexico with you?"
His heavy features crimsoned: "What pleasantry is this, my Marya?----"
he began; but the green blaze in her slanting eyes silenced him.
"The difference," she said, "between us is this. You run from those
who threaten you. I kill them."
"Of--of what nonsense are you speaking!" he stammered. "All is
arranged that we shall go at eleven----"
"No," she said wearily, "one sometimes plays with stray animals for a
few moments--and that is all. And that is all I ever saw in you,
Angelo--a stray beast to amuse and entertain me between two yawns and
a cup of tea." She shrugged, still twisted lithely in her struggle to
hook her waist. "You may go," she added, not even looking at him, "or,
if you are not too cowardly, you may come with me to the Red Flag
Club."
"In God's name what do you mean----"
"Mean? I mean to take my pistol to the Red Flag Club and kill some
Bolsheviki. That is what I mean, my Angelo--my ruddy Eurasian pig!"
She slipped in the last hook, turned and enveloped him again with an
insolent, slanting glance: "_Allons!_ Do you come to the Red Flag?"
"Marya----"
"Yes or no! _Allez!_"
"My God, are--are you then demented?" he faltered.
"My God, I'm not," she mimicked him, "but I can't answer for what I
might do to you if you hang around this apartment any longer."
She came slowly toward him, her hands bracketed on her hips, her
strange eyes narrowing.
"Listen to me," she said. "I have loved many times. But never _you_!
One doesn't love your kind. One experiments, possibly, if idle.
"A man died to-day whom I loved; but was too stupid to love enough.
Perhaps he knows now how stupid I am.... Unless they blew his soul to
pieces, also. _Allez!_ Good-night. I tell you I have business to
attend to, and you stand there rolling your woman's eyes at me!----"
"Damn you!" he said between his teeth. "What is the matter with
you----"
He had caught her arm; she wrenched it free, tearing the sleeve to her
naked shoulder.
Then she went to her desk and took a pistol from an upper drawer.
"If you don't go," she said, "I shall have to shoot you and leave you
here kicking on the carpet."
"In God's name, Marya!" he cried hoarsely, "who is it you shall kill
at the hall?"
"I shall kill Sondheim and Bromberg and Kastner, I hope. What of it?"
"But--if I go to-night--the others will say _I_ did it! I can't run
away if you do such thing! I can not go into Mexico but they shall
arrest me before I am at the border----"
"Eurasian pig, I shall admit the killing!" she said with a green gleam
in her eyes that perhaps was laughter.
"Yes, my Marya," he explained in agony, the sweat pouring from his
temples, "but if they think me your accomplice they shall arrest me.
Me--I can not wait--I shall be ruined if I am arrest! You do not
comprehend. I have not said it to you how it is that I am compel to
travel with some money which--which is not--my own."
Marya looked at him for a long while. Suddenly she flung the pistol
into a corner, threw back her head while peal on peal of laughter rang
out in the room.
"A thief," she said, fairly holding her slender sides between gemmed
fingers: "--Just a Levantine thief, after all! Not a thing to shoot.
Not a man. No! But a giant cockroach from the tropics. Ugh! Too large
to place one's foot upon!----"
She came leisurely forward, halted, inspected him with laughing
insolence:
"And the others--Kastner, Sondheim--and the other vermin? You were
quite right. Why should I kill them--merely because to-day a real man
died? What if they are the same species of vermin that slew Vanya
Tchernov? They are not men to pay for it. My pistol could not make a
dead man out of a live louse! No, you are quite correct. You know your
own kind. It would be no compliment to Vanya if I should give these
vermin the death that real men die!"
Puma stood close to the door, furtively passing a thick tongue over
his dry, blanched lips.
"Then you will not interfere?" he asked softly.
She shrugged her shoulders: one was bare with the torn sleeve
dangling. "No," she said wearily. "Run home, painted pig. After all,
the world is mostly swine.... I, too, it seems----" She half raised
her arms, but the gesture failed, and she stood thinking again and
staring at the curtained window. She did not hear him leave.