“I cannot tell more to-night. I cannot make it snappy. I _cannot_ go
on.”
The tortured protest of the spirit-girl Dolores was as the breath of
a blower to her demon audience. It fanned the tinder of their evil
imaginations and inflamed their desires for intimate details.
A clamor of profanity arose as the marble-pale, but fervid face which
had wrought such grief among men lowered to the shield of hands
that looked too weak to have torn to bits a strong man’s honor. The
shudder of crucified modesty caused the jewel-like lights that adorned
her hair, her throat, her breast to wink, as from carnal thoughts
“indestructible” as their source of life.
For several nights the first Royal Entertainer had held her place at
the monk-table’s head by virtue of a two-fold charm; had dazzled their
eyes with her beauty and the illusion of her gorgeous apparel, while
enslaving their attention with the finished style of her tale. Now
that she had reached what might be considered a low spot of intensity,
however, her sense of the artistic had failed her and them. She had
fallen from the superiority of her infernal state; and backslid, as
it were, into the slough of an almost human self-consciousness. When
their most venomous hisses did not lift the sin-dark head from the
board, they turned as one to him who had arranged the little inside
entertainment. Interest of another kind stirred in them at the look of
him.
Exasperation had lifted the King from his chair. He stood at the
table’s foot, glaring down at the proselyte who had dared to arouse,
then deny his emotions. A glow surrounded him, outlining his superb
proportions against the black velvet hangings. From his eyes--nearer
green than gray at the moment--poured a baleful light. His features
worked from mental lasciviousness.
“I told you to dispense with the asterisks,” he reminded her. “How dare
you tease me with this obsolete trick?”
Dolores lifted her face. In the radium glow of his vicious expectations
it gleamed with unthinkable chastity.
“I have not meant to tease or trick you,” she said. “I have done my
best to entertain--have plotted and planned my story like the writer
of a book--have rehearsed my lines each day like an actress before
her opening night. Every little treasured phrase and word I have
given you, just as learned by heart at the time and re-learned in my
afterthoughts. I’ve tried--_tried_. But I find that I cannot go on. No
true woman-soul could. What happened was between ourselves and----”
“Watch your words! For the infidel you boast yourself, you’re quite
too free with the name of a certain Potentate. Besides, aren’t you
flattering the Great-I-Am? I miss my guess if what happened wasn’t
between yourselves and me.”
Dolores’ timidity left her at the suggestion. “I am sure Your Lowness
had nothing to do with--with that night. Otherwise it would not seem
so wrong to tell it here--such an injustice to John. The fault was not
his. It was mine--all mine. I did what he implored me not to do. I
urged myself upon him beyond his strength. The only excuse for me is
that, with all I had known of mortal man, I really did not understand.
And he--he had felt so safe in his sorrow.”
Half-rising, she clutched the table for support and gazed along the
double file of spectral faces. The leer on the lips of him nicknamed
Old Original aroused her to further defense.
“Perhaps our mateship was not meant to be gainsaid. Perhaps the races
of the mortal world would be worthier their fair lands if right were
not made wrong by mortal laws--if only the Maker whom John questioned
need be obeyed. Perhaps He meant that the crave to be satisfied of all
true love should compensate for His inexorable law that man must die.”
At the shriek of derision that greeted her thought, she lifted her head
and eyes in a transport of humble defiance.
“Whatever the perhaps and perhaps, I do not regret. The proof of what
I felt for John I never shall regret. If I did wrong it was in caring
for him and that I could not help. Love’s first and best impulse is to
bestow. I knew that I belonged to him and I wanted him to know. I am
glad--_glad_ that I told him. The way I gave the knowledge was called a
crime--the only crime on earth not judged by motive and circumstance.
Surely on that Day when justice becomes absolute, I shall not be
blamed. What is a whispered confession, a lingering kiss, an abandoned
embrace, to be quibbled over by Him said to have made us and all that
we are from the impulse of love divine? Did not He Himself decree that
love must be served?”
“She-fiend, you overstep yourself!”
The lash of His Majesty’s voice convinced the girl-soul. Whipped by it
back into her chair, she awaited the chastisement which probably would
follow her regardlessness of rules. Thoughts of the Wantons’ Well and
the Ward for Bastard Babes subdued her small access of courage in the
dread which had come with her from Earth to Shadow Land. She closed her
eyes; ceased to breathe; expected. The pause seemed long; was long.
When finally the Rex of Reversals spoke, his humorous tone and diction
made her realize that until then she had expected clemency.
“Hard to beat, this faith of fools! At least, the Great Judge of whom
you hope a reprieve from the fiat of your world hasn’t any corner on
tolerance. Although love is a puny motive, I excuse a lot of it for
sake of the passion it begets. Young woman, your story interests me.
Since so large an audience has disconcerted you, suppose you finish it
to sympathetic me alone. It is hate divine that must be served and you
who must serve it.”
Dolores’ moan went unheard in the instant protest of the demon cabinet.
But their controller did not trouble to repeat his order. Not so much
as a gesture or nod of dismissal did he vouchsafe as they, not daring
to vent their spleen over being excluded from this culminating séance,
filed out one by one.
Although several times before Dolores had been alone with His Highness,
she never had feared as now the Evil Mind. Her face returned to her
palms. In darting speculation over what he next might say or do, she
awaited his displeasure. Unendurably the silence lasted. She at last
glanced up from morbid curiosity.
He was not looking at her. The green glow, so weird from his gray
eyes, shafted well to one side and past her. She noticed that he was
at once unusually attractive because unusually repulsive to-night. The
concentration into which he had sunk drew out of her like a magnet a
certain sympathy for the very evil he would do her. She shuddered in
ghoulish anticipation.
More slowly lagged the seconds. More unnatural it seemed that still he
did not look at her. Had there remained in his mind a shadow of Old
Sam’s suggestion that he had a weakness for her? Doubt of what might
lurk in his averted eyes obsessed her.
“Why don’t you speak? Why don’t you look at me?” she urged aloud.
“Please look at me.”
She would better have remained in doubt. To see what was in his eyes,
to try to grasp the odious meaning of the glance now fixed upon her----
As she swayed backward in her chair, he proceeded to enlighten her.
“I get it.”
“_It_, Your Majesty?”
“It--you--the secret power that has made you the desire of men and
devils. Who would have thought to look at you that it was only a case
of lust beget lust?”
“Oh, don’t say that!”
He leered. “Why a pretense of apology between two bad ones like us?
Instead of protesting virtues of which you ought to be ashamed,
realize that your guilt as charged makes your desirability
one-hundred-per-cent-plus down here, as it did on Earth.”
Evidently not interested in her agreement, he turned away and began to
pace the floor.
“This has been a red-letter night to me. Do you know, you’re not
telling a good story--not good at all. It has elements that quite hold
me. We’ve had the vamp in books, over the footlights and on the screen.
I thought I knew the types and methods forward and backward--especially
back. But your delineation of a young girl who is without design
because herself unconscious of the prurience in her, who appeals to
the best in men by her guilelessness and the worst by her sleeping
desire, who, although intending well, spreads disaster in her wake----
No matter what its claims to truth, sweet Grief, it makes a damned bad
story.”
He stopped directly before her in time to hear a murmured appeal to her
guardian companions.
“Innocentia, must I believe these dreadful things about myself? If they
are not true, help me to prove them false, dear, _dear_ Amor.”
Approvingly the Satanic chuckle sounded. “Consistent to fanaticism in
your part! As you like. But let’s get to the end. Forget the asterisks.
Pull up the curtain. Give us the expurgated lines.”
“If I am fanatic in my desire to be decent, you are an atheist. I tell
you I cannot--will not go on!” From strength of her abhorrence the
spirit-girl started up and faced him. “Punish me as you like. Anything
is better than to strip my soul to your unholy gaze.”
“_Anything?_” He seized her arm with the sear of a red-hot iron. “I’ll
give you one second to fête your fancy upon what your punishment might
be. You’ll pay in full, you helliot, if you cheat me of an experiment
that I plan to make. You’ve given me an idea more seducing than any of
my own inception. If it works out, it will net you more than it will
me. Come a day, you being what you are and I what I am----”
“I wish to hear no new ideas for me. I cannot endure more to-night.”
At her sustained effort to combat his will he leaned so close over her
that her face felt scorched from his mental insistence, more offensive
than the physical insistence of any man of Earth. She struggled toward
her chair; there fell face forward on the board. He--without looking,
she saw--swept after her like some ravening bird of prey. Strong, long
talons clutched her. Almost had they shaken her access of strength from
her when----
“Better let up on her, Your Demnition Pow-Wows.”
A carping voice offered the advice. A tall, strong-looking ghoul
swaggered into the light from the comparative darkness outside the door.
“Sin, you infernal eaves-dropper, how dare you----”
“Leaves-dropper, rather--table-leaves-dropper.” With incredible bravado
Old Original winked into the Balial glare. “May I assume the compliment
to my invisibility that you failed to notice me humbly awaiting Your
Damnity’s convenience without?”
“Impudently awaiting My Damnity’s inconvenience, you mean. You may
_not_. That I didn’t notice you was due to the super-visibility of our
royal _raconteuse_.”
“Who will recount no more if you continue to torture her. Having
recommended her to your inclemency in the first place, I feel more
than less responsible. The wages of sin are best paid by death--you’ll
concede that to me, Excellency? Yet you do not, I am sure, wish her to
die.”
“Low-brow, she cannot die.”
The old hoax returned a confident leer. “That I grow more high-brow
with every age let me demonstrate through a reminder of how the
greatest roughness is the gentlest. What diverts you in her--her very
virile hope--may die before that Day. Am I right or wrong in saying
that you owe me, if not her, some consideration?”
“Wrong you are. You did throw me the acorn from which a giant oak may
grow.”
“And hasn’t she sirened you along bad and improper? Hasn’t she been
square with you?”
“Yes, she’s been square. There wasn’t a right angle to all the past
Delilahs ever damned by man or me.”
Sin, with a wary eye fixed upon the Master of Malice, made for that
end of the monk-board nearer the exit. The while he further ventured:
“It isn’t necessarily lowering to Your Highness to say that you have
more to learn than I anent the siren act. You can’t bully a dame into
doting on you. The present-day caveman style is 40 H. P.--_after_
you’ve got her. Before, a wise one coaxes her. And it isn’t enough to
load her down with that stage jewelry of which you’re so prodigal, when
you yourself don’t look to be, any more than you act to be, of her day
and degeneration. Why not tog yourself up more in the likeness of this
millionaire love-hound of hers? Summertime’s coming apace or I’m no
weather prophet, so why not moth-ball the well-known Vandyke and those
robes of the vintage of Sol-in-all-his-glory days?”
A snarl of stabbed vanity greeted the daring suggestion. Its cogency
was demonstrated, however, when, in a lunge after the purveyor of
unsolicited counsel, the King tripped over his train.
From the hall the minister primed his advices.
“As for your technique, soft-pedal yourself. Don’t keep blaring like a
brass band at a lady who has fainted with fear of your noise.”
The slam of the door was the old impertinent’s period.
Once more tormentor and tormented were alone. Slowly the Past-Master
of Policy righted himself and his intent. Returning to the prostrate
girl-shade, he thinkingly regarded her. Her side face lay lax upon the
board, exquisite as an irradiated cameo in its twisted setting of hair.
Closed were those eyes of the purples of the bourgainvillae. Not a
breath lifted the luring lines of the back revealed by her _décolleté_.
Could her spirit really have swooned beyond his reach?
He shrugged away the thought. Too often and too vehemently had he
himself longed for surcease from consciousness in the last ten thousand
years or so. Too well he knew that she still could hear him. Through
time which had no beginning and could not end, she as well as he must
continue to think--and think--and think.
Thinking of her now as he looked, he felt more than before attracted
toward that new idea regarding her which had been inspired by the
latest chapter of her earth history. The oldest Original was right.
His ways with women were archaic as his clothes in the sight of this
most modern of Magdalenes. No repression of his ruthlessness or change
in his “style” would be too great a price to pay for success in that
experiment.
When he spoke it was in mild tones.
“Forgive my stupidity. ‘It ain’t inherited--it’s a gift.’ All right,
fairest fiend. We’ll call it a séance to-night. Or better, suppose
I give you a lift over the scene which has overwhelmed you with
self-consciousness. At that, it may affect me worse to tell it myself.
They say the narrator gets more out of his story than his hearers. He
first must feel to arouse feeling. A good bad idea. So then, _I’ll_
tell _you_.”
The tips of his fingers crackled as he touched them to his lips, then
waved them toward the unresponsive audience.
“Behind the Asterisks!” he announced his subject. “The Great-I-Am
invented the sex-impulse in order to give life to love. Necessarily He
had to make it a strong emotion in order to people His earth.
“I invented loveless lust to people Hell. None born of the flesh dares
deny his vulnerability. None but feels its basic attraction, even at
times when most repulsed. Not to its cruder phases do I invite your
attention--to the reproductive instinct of the mortal male. That is
ever awake, unashamed, engaging chiefly through its strength.
“But sleeping passion! Too few are given the dear delight of arousing
it. To breathe open the eyes searching through their mist of dreams--to
kiss into consciousness the sweet-thick lips--to feel one’s sluggish
pulse speeding to match the beat of youth’s startled heart----
“Ah, what man-brute of Earth, what god of Heaven or fiend of Hell
would not gladly give the wealth of three worlds to incite the divine
awakening!
“Moved beyond modesty, the arms uplift and cling--weak-strong arms,
made supple to curve around the bodies of babes. The lips soon learn
why they are so thick and honey-sweet, soon learn to give and to ask
back in double dole.
“The inarticulate murmur of yearnings that crave utterance, but are
ashamed of words.... The sobs of utter innocence.... The tender form
that seems to shrink even as it seeks.... At last the naked desire....
Its brief, breathless struggle to control.... The delirium of yielding
to its will....
“The hoping fear....
“The fearing hope....”