It was in circumstances which, if not dramatic, were, at least,
uncommon, that Leilah Verplank met Barouffski.
At Los Angeles, after her flight from Coronado, she caught an express
that would have taken her East. Even so, it could not take her from
herself, it could not distance memory, it could not annihilate the
past. The consciousness of that obsessed her. Each of her thoughts
became a separate throb. About her head formed an iron band. Her body
ached. She felt hot and ill. She had a sense of thirst, a sense, too,
of fear.
In the compartment where she sat, a stranger came. She hid her face,
covering it with her hands. The stranger sidled in between them, looked
her in the eyes, penetrated them, permeated her, shook long shudders
through her, shrieked at her: “I am Fright!”
She cried aloud. No one heard. She got to the door.
In the section immediately adjoining were her women. Perplexed at the
start by her unaccountable flight and, since then, alarmed by the
abnormal excitability which she had displayed, both, at the sight of
her then, rushed to her.
Salt Lake was the first possible asylum. There, weeks later, Leilah
arose from one of those attacks, which, for lack of a better term, has
been called brain fever.
Like fire, fever may consume, it does not necessarily obliterate. The
past remained. But in that lassitude which fever leaves, Leilah was
able to consider it with a wearied certainty that no immediate effort
could be required of her then.
“Forget,” some considerate and subliminal self admonished. “Forget.”
Even in sleep she could not always do that. But though she could not
forget the past, she could, she believed, barricade herself against it.
The idea was suggested by the local sheet in which she found an item
about neighbourly Nevada. The item hung a hammock for her thoughts,
rested her mentally, unrolled a carpet for the returning steps of
health.
Verplank, meanwhile, misdirected at Los Angeles, reached San Francisco.
Learning there that a party of three women had, that morning, at the
last moment, embarked on the Samoa packet; learning also that of these
women the central figure projected, or seemed to project, Leilah’s
silhouette, he wired for his yacht and sailed away in pursuit. But
an accident supervening, the packet reached Samoa before him. When
Verplank got there the boat was gone. Still in pursuit he started for
the austral seas. There, the mistake discovered, hope for the time
abandoned him and he landed in Melbourne, ignorant that the supremely
surgical court of Nevada was amputating him from his wife.
In matters of this solemnity, the Nevada statutes require that one of
the parties to the operation shall have resided for six months within
the state. But at Carson, the capital, a town that has contrived to
superpose the Puritan aspect of a New England village on the vices of
a Malay port, in this city Leilah learned that statutes so severe were
not enacted for such as she.
The information, tolerably consoling, was placed before her by a young
Jew who, as she alighted from the train, divined her errand, addressed
her with easy Western informality, put a card in her hand, offered his
services, telling her as he did so that if she retained him he would
have her free in no time, in three months, in less. It was a mere
matter of money, he explained, and, what he did not explain, a mere
matter of perjury as well, the perjury of local oafs ready to swear
to whatever they were paid for, ready to testify for instance that
they had known anybody for any required length of time. But the Jew in
divining Leilah’s errand divined too her loyalty. In speaking of fees,
he kept manœuvres and methods to himself.
Leilah, repelled yet beguiled, succumbed. The Jew was retained and in
a wretched inn her things were unpacked. At once a rain of days began,
long, loveless days in which she tried to starve her thoughts into
submission and bear the cross that had been brought.
The effort was not very satisfactory. The reason why she should have a
cross and why it should be borne had never even to her devout mind been
adequately explained. Hitherto she had not required any explanation and
not unnaturally perhaps since she had had no cross to bear. The dogma
that she in common with the rest of humanity must suffer because of the
natural propensities of beings that never were, she had accepted as
only such dogmas can be accepted, on faith. But in the dismal solitudes
of Carson, faith faded, the dogma seemed absurd.
Then suddenly that which in her ignorance she took to be chance,
supplied a superior view. While waiting in a shop for a slovenly
clerk to do up a package, she looked at a shelf on which were some
books--frayed, bedrabbled, second hand. Among them was a treatise on
metallurgy, another on horse-breeding, a string of paper covered novels
and the _Vidyâ_.
The title, which conveyed nothing, for that reason attracted. At random
she opened the book. A paragraph sprang at her:
“From debility to strength, from strength to power, from power
to glory, from glory to perfection, from plane to plane, in an
evolution proceeding from the outward to the inward, from the
material to the spiritual, from the spiritual to the divine,
such is the destiny of the soul.”
Leilah turned a page. Another paragraph leaped out.
“There is not an accident in our lives, not a sorrow, a
misfortune, a catastrophe, a happiness that is not due to
our own conduct in this existence or in a previous one. In
accordance with the nature of our deeds there are thrown about
us the tentacles of pain or the arms of joy.”
But the slovenly clerk was approaching. Leilah closed the book, asked
the price, paid for it, paid for the other purchase and went back to
the inn where during the rest of the day she read the drama of the
soul, the story of its emanation from the ineffable, of its surrender
to desire, of its fall into matter, of its birth and rebirth in the
mansions of life which are death, of the persistence there of its
illusory joys, of the recurrences of its unenlightening trials, until,
at last, some memory returning of what it had been when it was other
than what it had become, it learns at last to conquer desire and
accomplish its own release.
The drama, however old, was new to Leilah, and at first not very clear.
But beneath it was a chain of causality, the demonstration that this
life is the sum of many others, the harvest after the sowing, and,
joined to the demonstration were corollaries and deductions which
showed that sorrow, when rightly viewed, is not a cross but a gift, a
boon granted to the privileged.
It was a little before she mastered the idea. When she had, the novelty
of it impressed. At the back of the _Vidyâ_ was a list of cognate
works. She wired to San Francisco for them. Shortly they came, and in
their companionship the rain of long, loveless days fell by.
Ultimately she sat on a high chair. An oaf asked her questions. Others
testified. On the morrow a paper was brought her. It had on it a large
seal, the picture of a big building, words that were engrossed, others
in script.
She was free.
The knowledge brought no exultation. It was a hostage to joy, one of
the many that she was to give.
Meanwhile she had written to Violet Silverstairs telling her that she
had separated from Verplank, and asking might she join her. The answer,
which was cabled, told her to come. That day she started.
The town house of the Earls of Silverstairs is in Belgrave Square.
There are worse places. But to the American countess the discomforts
of the residence were not to be endured. After one season she declined
to put up with them. Pending an entire modernisation of the house, she
and Silverstairs migrated to Paris, where they took an apartment, and a
very charming one, in the rue François Premier.
In this apartment Leilah was made to feel that she was with friends,
one of whom, however, could not get over the fact that she could not
get at the facts in the matter.
“See here, Leilah,” Violet Silverstairs said aggrievedly, not once, but
fifty times, “it is downright mean of you to keep me in the dark. What
was it that he did? Tell me.”
The lady had known Verplank, as she had known Leilah, ever since she
had known anybody. They had grown up together. Though not related
by blood, they were by choice, which is sometimes thicker. In the
circumstances it was perhaps but natural that she should call it mean,
perhaps but human that she should be aggrieved.
The puzzle of the situation she put before her husband.
“What do you suppose it can be?” she asked.
But Silverstairs had no surmises to hazard.
“It must be something quite too dreadful,” Violet continued. “One of
those things, don’t you know, that are said to change your whole life.
She just sits about and reads queer books.”
“Queer books!” Silverstairs surprisedly repeated.
“Yes, books that tell of planes and rounds and cycles and chains of
lives and rebirths and redeaths. She believes in them, too. She told me
so.”
Silverstairs tugged at his moustache. “She might as well believe in the
music of the spheres.”
Violet looked at her lord. She loved him as certain delicately
organized women do love men who are merely robust. But her affection
did not warp her judgment. She knew that within his splendid physique
was a spirit, valiant perhaps, but obtuse.
“Well, why not?” she retorted. “Let a microphone receive from a steel
plate the reflection of a star, and sounds are emitted, tones peculiar
to the star itself. Those of the sun are blatant. Those of Arcturus are
like little bells. Those of Sirius are as sobs from a zither. Everybody
knows that. Why shouldn’t she believe in the music of the spheres?”
“Gammon!” cried this man who at Eton and Christ Church had abundantly
acquired everything which is most useless. “I never heard such rot.”
“I daresay, but that is not the point. The point is that it is no joke
to her.”
Nor was it. Leilah at first refused to go anywhere, to see any one, to
be present when there were guests. But Violet, declaring that she would
have no moping in her diggings, forced her. It was very reluctantly
that Leilah acceded. After a while she did so as a matter of course.
Finally, as was inevitable, she accepted invitations elsewhere.
It was what Violet had aimed at, though not at all at the result. Yet
that, Leilah, who had come to believe in karma, afterward regarded as
fate.
Presently, it so fell about that at one dinner she had at her left a
man whom she did not know, whose name she had not caught and with whom,
during the preliminary courses, she had not exchanged a word. As the
dinner progressed, cigarettes were served. Twice she refused them. The
second time, as she turned again to the man at her right, she heard a
cry, across the table she saw a face, the eyes staring, the features
elongated. At once there was an uproar, behind her there was a crash,
she was torn bodily from her chair, a piece of tapestry had been thrown
about her and in it she was rolled on the floor by the man whom she did
not know.
Probably, at no dinner, anywhere, had a woman suffered such indignities.
She was so telling herself when she realised, as she immediately did
realise, that the man and others who had joined him, were but occupied
in saving her life. Her dress had caught fire and it was in this flaming
fashion, hurled on the floor by a stranger and there brutalised by him,
that she made the acquaintance of Count Kasimiérz Barouffski.
The sack of her costume forced her to return to the rue François
Premier, where at five o’clock the next day, Barouffski appeared. He
appeared the day following, the day after, the day after that.
These attentions Violet Silverstairs viewed with suspicion.
“I verily believe,” she said to Leilah, “that it was that polecat who
set you on fire, and if he did no one can convince me that he did not
do it on purpose.”
“Violet!”
“That’s right, fly at me. I thought you would. Are you going to take
him?”
In an elaborate drawing room in the rue François Premier the two women
were having tea. Leilah, without replying, raised her cup.
Violet cocked an eye at her. “One would have thought that you had had
enough of matrimony. But perhaps your intentions are not honourable.”
Leilah reddened. “Violet!” she again exclaimed.
“My dear,” Lady Silverstairs resumed, “remember that you are no longer
in the States. England is the most hypocritical country in Europe.
America is the most hypocritical country in the world. That is what
we call progress. But France being old-fashioned and behind the times
is not censorious. I admit, I used to be. But I am not censorious any
longer. I am not because any such _état d’âme_ while advanced is not
becoming.
“I am an old married woman,” added the lady who was not twenty-two.
“But if I were not, if for instance I were like you, free, independent
and not a fright, and I had to choose between love and matrimony, it
would not take me a moment to decide. Not one.”
Leilah put down her cup. “Of course it would not. If you had it to do
again you would marry Silverstairs and you would marry for love. That
is over for me, over forever.”
Narrowly, out of a corner of an eye, Violet considered her. “He was
such a brute, was he?”
“Who? Gulian, do you mean?”
“I suppose so. There has been no other, has there?”
“Violet!”
It was at this juncture, for the fiftieth time, that Lady Silverstairs
exclaimed:
“It is downright mean of you to keep me in the dark. What was it that
happened? Make a soiled breast of it. Do!”
For the fiftieth time Leilah protested:
“Don’t ask me. Don’t. He knows and that is enough. As for me I am
trying to forget.”
“And you think Barouffski will help you. But has it ever occurred to
you that if you were not very rich he might lack the incentive?”
To this Leilah assented. “He said he is poor.”
“At least he does not exaggerate. I told Silverstairs that he was after
you for your money and he said that was what he married me for. So he
did and I married him for his title. It was a fair bargain. Now if we
had it to do over I would say--I would say--well, I would say that it
is better to have loved your husband than never to have loved at all.
But six months hence, if you had it to do over, do you think you could
say as much--or as little?”
“At least I could say that I did not marry for a title.”
“Well, hardly, particularly a Polish one, though I daresay even that
might be useful in the servants’ hall. But what could you say you
married for? It isn’t love?”
“No.”
“Nor position?”
“No.”
“Then what on earth----”
“Violet, how hard you make it for me. Can’t you see that if I do, it
will be for protection?”
“For protection! Merciful fathers! You talk like a chorus girl!
Protection against what? Against whom? Verplank?”
“No.” Leilah choking down something in her throat, replied: “Against
myself.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Violet slowly. But she did or thought
she did, and that night told Silverstairs that Leilah was still in love
with her ex.
It was in these circumstances that Leilah listened to the Count
Kasimiérz Barouffski, who, in telling her that he was poor, omitted
to add that he had resources. These were women and cards. It is a
business like another. But even to his nearest friends, to Tyszkiewicz,
a compatriot, and Palencia, a Corsican, he did not boast of it. He had
therefore some sense of shame, but not of honour, though with humour he
was supplied. A man with some sense of humour and no sense of honour
may go far. Barouffski intended to. After his volcanic introduction to
Leilah, he beheld in her not the woman but the opportunity which chance
had sent his way. To grasp that he displayed every art of which the
Slav is capable. He did more. He impressed her not with the nobility
of his name but of his nature. He was a good actor and though at first
unsuccessful he was not discouraged. It was an axiom of his that among
the dice of destiny there is always a golden six. It was axiomatic with
him also that it is not tossed at once. To deserve it, one must wait.
Barouffski waited. Presently fate shook the box before him. The golden
six was his.
But not the box.
To Leilah the mere idea of matrimony was abhorrent. Yet she could
not stop indefinitely with the Silverstairs. She had no relatives
with whom she could reside. She felt that it would be awkward and
perhaps equivocal for her to have an establishment of her own. But
these considerations were minor beside another--a sense, haunting and
constant, that the excursion to Nevada had been inadequate, that the
past needed a surer barricade.
It was not a husband that she wanted. Peace and security were the
flesh-pots that she craved. These Barouffski offered or seemed to--and
it was these finally and these only that she agreed to accept.
To the implied stipulation Barouffski consented with an air of high
chivalry but also with an ambiguous smile. Given the golden six of her
income, the box was a detail to him, and it was in these circumstances
that over the perhaps insecurely locked door of her past, this mask
mounted guard.
The news of the engagement, filtering through the press, was cabled to
the States, together with the fact that Leilah was then stopping in
the rue François Premier with Lady Silverstairs, whose portrait, in
addition to bogus presentments of the engaged couple, were printed in
the minor sheets that circulate from New York to San Francisco.
On arriving from Australia at the latter city, Verplank happened on a
belated copy. Since he had gone from Coronado, this, the first news of
his wife, was her engagement to another man.
In his amazement his thoughts stuttered. Into his mind entered
stretches of night. He looked at the sheet without seeing it. But the
paragraph and the purport of it, already photographed on the films of
the brain, were prompting him unconsciously, and it was without really
knowing what he was saying that he exclaimed:
“Leilah! My wife! In Paris! Engaged to another man!”
The names, the words, the meaning of them all, beat on his brain like
blows of a hammer.
“Leilah! My wife! In Paris! Engaged!”
Again he looked at the sheet. “What a damned lie!” he ragingly cried,
and, rumpling the paper, threw it from him.
But now, the names, the words, the meaning of them all, well beaten
into him, readjusted themselves, presenting a picture perfectly defined
and possibly real.
He stooped, gathered the paper, smoothed it, read the account again.
After all, he reflected, it might be that she was in Paris and, if
there, it was natural that she would be with Violet Silverstairs. These
two items were, therefore, not improbably correct. That view reached,
the deduction followed: If they are correct, the other may be. Yet, in
that case, he argued, obviously she must think me dead. On the heels of
this second deduction an impression trod--the ease and dispatch with
which she had become consoled.
Enraged at once, angered already by what he had taken for a lie and
then infuriated by what he took for truth, the anterior incidents that
had this supreme outrage for climax, leaped at him. At the onslaught
the primitive passions flared, and it was with the impulse of the
homicide that he determined to seek and overwhelm this woman who
accepted men and matters with such entire sans-gêne.
On the morrow he left for New York. Before going he sent a cablegram to
the address which the paper had supplied:
_Am just apprised of the studied insult of your engagement to
some foreign cad. Leaving for Paris at once._
As he signed it, deeply, beneath the breath, he swore. “That will show
her,” he added.
It so happened that it showed her nothing. Leilah was not then in the
rue François Premier, but in the rue de la Pompe, where the message
followed, but only to be received by Barouffski, who read it with a
curious smile.
Already he hated Verplank, who had not yet acquired a hatred for him.
But though that hatred had not been acquired, it developed tumultuously
when, on arriving in New York, he learned that not merely the report of
the engagement was true, but that the engagement had since resulted in
a marriage, which itself had been preceded by a Nevada divorce.
In comparison to all that had occurred, the divorce seemed at the time
almost negligible. It was the crowning infamy of this marriage which,
in renewing the primitive passions, aroused in Verplank a determination
not merely to seek and overwhelm the woman, but to seek and destroy the
man. The marriage, he decided could be but the result of an anterior
affair, there was no other explanation of it. The idea that had come to
him at Coronado, the possibility that she might have left him because
informed of some affair of his own and which since then he had examined
again and again, fell utterly away. It was not because of errors of his
that she had gone, but for turpitudes of her own. Then to his anger at
her was added a hatred of Barouffski, whom he had never seen, and who,
without having seen Verplank, hated him also, hated him retrospectively
and prospectively, hated him because clearly Leilah had been his
and--where women are concerned, all things being possible--might be
again.
But though Barouffski hated Verplank actively, he hated him vaguely,
as one must when one hates the unknown. It was the cablegram which, in
supplying the personal element, made the hate concrete.
“Foreign cad, eh?” he repeated, with a curious smile. “Eh bien, nous
verrons, we shall see.”
Presently the opportunity occurred. For it was in these circumstances,
a fortnight after the receipt of the cablegram, that, directed by the
young Baronne de Fresnoy, he turned and saw Verplank entering the room
where he stood.