PAULA IS CALLED TO PARLOR "F" OF THE _MAID-STONE_ WHERE THE BEYOND-DEVIL
AWAITS WITH OUTSTRETCHED ARMS
Paula felt singularly blessed the next morning wondering if ever there
existed another woman into whose life-channel poured such strange and
torrential tributaries. The current of her mind was broadening and
accelerating. She was being prepared for some big expression, and there
is true happiness in the thought. Reifferscheid, since her pilgrimage to
Staten Island, had become a fixture of delight. Selma Cross had borne
her down on mighty pinions to the lower revelations of the City, but had
winged her back again on a breeze of pure romance. Madame Nestor had
parted the curtains, which shut from the world's eye, hell unqualified,
yet her own life was a miracle of penitence. Not the least of her
inspirations was this mild, brave woman of the solitudes. Then, there
was the commanding mystery of Bellingham, emerging in her mind now from
the chicaneries of the past ten days; rising, indeed, to his own
valuation--that of a New Voice. Finally, above and before all, was the
stirring figure of her Ideal--her splendid secret source of
optimism--Charter, less a man than a soul in her new dreams--a name to
which she affixed, "The Man-Who-Must-Be-Somewhere."
Just once, the thought came to Paula that Bellingham had designed a
meeting such as took place in the Park to soften her aversion and clear
from her mind any idea of his abnormality. She could not hold this
suspicion long. Attributing evil strategies to another was not easy for
Paula. The simpler way now was to give him every benefit, even to regard
the recent dreadful adventures with an intangible devil--as an outburst
of her neglected feminine prerogatives, coincident with the stress of
her rather lonely intellectual life. As for Madame Nestor, might she not
have reached a more acute stage of a similar derangement? Paula was not
unacquainted with the great potentialities of fine physical health, nor
did she miss the fact that Mother Nature seldom permits a woman of
normal development to reach the fourth cycle of her years, without
reckoning with the ancient reason of her being.
She now regarded early events connected with Bellingham as one might
look back upon the beginning of a run of fever.... Could he be one of
the New Voices?
Paula loved to think that Woman was to be the chief resource of the
Lifting Age. Everywhere among men she saw the furious hunger for
spiritual refreshment. Words, which she heard by mere chance from
passers-by, appalled her. It was so tragically clear to her how the life
led by city men starves their better natures--that there were times when
she could hardly realize they did not see it. She wanted someone to make
the whole world understand--that just as there are hidden spaces between
the atoms of steel which made radioactivity possible, so in the human
body there is a permeating space, in which the soul of man is built day
by day from every thought and act; and when the worn-out physical
envelope falls away--there it stands, a record to endure.... She wanted
to believe that it was the office of woman to help man make this record
beautiful. Just as the old Anglo-Saxon for "lady" means "giver of
bread," so she loved to think that the spiritual loaf was in the keeping
of woman also.
Paula could not meditate without ecstasy upon the thought that a great
spiritual tide was rising, soon to overflow every race and nation. The
lifting of man from greedy senses to the pure happiness of brotherhood,
was her most intimate and lovely hope. Back of everything, this lived
and lit her mind. There were transcendent moments--she hardly dared to
describe or interpret them--when cosmic consciousness swept into her
brain. Swift was the visitation, nor did it leave any memorable
impression, but she divined that such lofty moments, different only in
degree, were responsible for the great utterances in books that are
deathless. The shield was torn from her soul, leaving it naked to every
world-anguish. The woman, Paula Linster, became an accumulation of all
suffering--desert thirsts, untold loves, birth and death parturitions,
blind cruelties of battle, the carnal lust of Famine (that soft-treading
spectre), welted flesh under the screaming lash, moaning from the
World's Night everywhere--until the impassioned spirit within rushed
forth to the very horizon's rim to shelter an agonizing people from an
angry God. Such is the genius of race-motherhood--the ineffable spirit
of 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--the
Gethsemanes. Out of the dream, would appear the actual spectacle of the
City--human beings preying one upon the other, the wolf still frothing
in man's breast--and then would crush down upon her with shattering pain
the realization of her own hopeless ineffectuality. To a mind thus
stricken and desolated often, premonitions of madness come at
last--madness, the black brother of genius. There is safety alone in a
body strong and undefiled to receive again the expanded spirit. From how
many a lustrous youth--tarrying too long by the fetid margins of
sense--has the glory winged away, never to return to a creature fallen
into hairy despoliation.
* * * * *
Paula had returned from down-town about noon. Reifferscheid, who had a
weakness for Herman Melville, and annually endeavored to spur the
American 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 the
fat, old fine-print novel under her arm, Paula let herself into her own
apartment and instantly encountered the occultist's power. She sank to
the floor and covered her face in the pillows of the couch. In the past
twenty-four hours she had come to believe that the enemy had been put
away forever, yet here in her own room she was stricken, and so
swiftly.... Though she did not realize it at once, many of the thoughts
which gradually surged into her mind were not her own. She came to see
Bellingham as other women saw him--as a great and wise doctor. Her own
conception battled against this, but vainly, vaguely. It was as if he
held the balance of power in her consciousness. Without attempting to
link them together, the processes of her mind quickly will be set into
words.
Her first thought, before the tightening of Bellingham's control in her
brain, was to rush into his presence and fiercely arraign him for the
treachery he had committed. After blaming Madame Nestor and deforming
her own faculties to clear him from evil, the devilishness of the
present visitation overwhelmed. And how infinitely more black and
formidable now was his magic--after the utterances in the Park! This was
her last real stand.... A cry of hopelessness escaped her lips, for the
numbness was already about her eyes, and creeping back like a pestilence
along 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 open
way--how near I am? Oh, come--now--come to me now!"
Again and again the little sentences fell upon her mind, until its
surface stirred against reiteration, as one, thoroughly understanding,
resents repeated explanations.... It was right now for her to go. She
had been rebellious and headstrong to conjure such evils about the name
of a famous physician. The world called him famous. Only she and Madame
Nestor 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 his
summons--was all from her own perversity.... Clearly she saw the street
below, Cathedral Way; a turn north, then across the Plaza to the brown
ornate entrance of _The Maidstone_.... There was no formality about the
going. 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 some
papers under the door of the Selma Cross apartment.... In the street,
she turned across the Plaza from Cathedral Way to _The Maidstone_. The
real Paula Linster marshalled a hundred terrible protests, but her voice
was muffled, her strength ineffectual as Josephine's beating with white
hands against the Emperor's iron door. Real volition was locked in the
pitiless will of the physician, to whom she hastened as one hoping to be
saved.
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 on
the left.... The sense of her need, of her illness, hurried her forward
through the long hall. Sometimes she seemed burdened with the body of a
woman, very tired and helpless, but quite obedient.... The figure "F" on
a silver shield filled her eyes. The door was ajar. Her entrance was not
unlike that of a lioness goaded with irons through a barred passage into
an arena. She did not open the door wider, but slipped through sideways,
gathering her dress closely about her.... Bellingham was there. His face
was white, rigid from long concentration; yet he smiled and his arms
were opened to her.... The point here was that he so marvelously
understood. His attitude to her seemed that of a physician of the soul.
She could not feel the fighting of the real woman.... Dazed and broken
for the moment, she encountered the soothing magnetism of his hands.
"How long I have waited!" he quietly exclaimed. "Hours, and it was
bitter waiting--but you are a wreath for my waiting--how grateful you
are to my weariness!... Paula Linster, Paula Linster--what deserts of
burning sunshine I have crossed to find you--what dark jungles I have
searched for such fragrance!"
His arms were light upon her, his voice low and lulling. He dared not
yet touch his lips to her hair--though they were dry and twisted with
his awful thirst. Craft and patience altogether feline was in the art
with which he wound and wove about her mind thoughts of his own,
designed to ignite the spark of responsive desire.... And how softly he
fanned--(an incautious blast would have left him in darkness
altogether)--until it caught.... Well, indeed, he knew the cunning of
the yet unbroken seals; and better still did he know the outraged forces
hovering all about her, ready to defeat him for the slightest error--and
leave him to burn in his own fires.
"This is peace," he whispered with indescribable repression. "How soft a
resting-place--and yet how strong!... Out of the past I have come for
you. Do you remember the rock in the desert on which you sat and waited
long ago? Your eyes were weary when I came--weary from the blazing light
of noon and the endless waning of that long day. On a great rock in the
desert you sat--until I came, _until I came_. Then you laughed because I
shut the feverish sun-glow from your strained eyes.... Remember, I came
in the skin of a lion and shut the sunset from your aching eyes--my
shoulders darkening the west--and we were alone--and the night came
on...."
Clearly was transferred to hers, the picture in his own brain. One of
the ancient and mystic films of memory seemed brought after ages to the
light--the reddening sands, the city far behind, from which she had fled
to meet her hero, deep in the desert--the glow of sunset on his
shoulders and in his hair, tawny as the lion's skin he wore.... The
heart quickened within her; the savage ardor of that long-ago woman grew
hot in her breast. Strong as a lion he was, this youth of the Sun, and
fleet the night fell to cover them. She ate the dried grapes he gave
her, drank deep from his skin of wine, and laughed with him in the swift
descending night.... She felt his arms now, her face was upraised, her
eyelids tensely shut. Downward the blood rushed, leaving her lips icy
cold. She felt the muscles of his arms in her tightening fingers, and
her breast rose against him. This was no Twentieth Century magician who
thralled her now, but a glorious hero out of the desert sunset;--and the
woman within her was as one consuming with ecstasy from a lover's last
visit....
And now Bellingham changed the color and surface of his advances. It was
his thought to make such a marvellous sally, that when he retired and
the mistress once again commanded her own citadel, she would perceive
the 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 human
conception for devilishness; and yet, that it was not a momentary
impulse, but a well considered plan, was proven by the trend of his talk
of the day before.... The flaw in his structure was his apparent
forgetting that the woman in his arms breathing so ardently, in her own
mind was clinging to a youth out of the sunset--a youth in the skin of a
lion.
"Wisdom has been given to my eyes," Bellingham resumed with surpassing
gentleness. "For years a conception of wonderful womanhood has lived and
brightened in my mind, bringing with it a promise that in due time, such
a woman would be shown to me. The woman, the promise and the miracle of
its later meaning, I perceived at last were not for my happiness, but
for the world's awful need. You are the fruits of my wonderful
vision--you--Paula Linster. You are the quest of my long and weary
searching!"
His utterance of her name strangely disturbed her night-rapture of the
desert. 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. My
thoughts roved over a world, brightened by a new hope, fairer for your
presence. And then, I saw your fine white brow, the ignited magic of
your hair and eyes, your frail exquisite shoulders.... It seemed as
though the lights perished from the place--when you left."
The word "magic" was a sudden spark around which the thoughts of the
woman now groped.... She had lost her desert lover, passion was drained
from her, and there was a weight of great trouble pressing down ...
"Magic"--she struggled for its meaning.... She was sitting upon a rock
again, but not in the desert--rather in a place of cooled sunlight,
where there were turf roads and grand, old trees--a huge figure
approaching with a powerful swinging stride--yesterday, Bellingham, the
Park--the Talk!... Paula lifted her shoulders, felt the binding arms
around them and heard the words uttered now in the meridian of human
passion:
"Listen, Paula Linster, you have been chosen for the most exalted task
ever 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, of
trained will; a mind of stirring evolution, every thought so essentially
feminine; 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 free
from the world--free from the burns and the whips of this thinking
animal, 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 wise
in song and philosophy and nature, I shall bring to your feet, as a
hunter 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 Yesterday
and the To-day rose before her mind in startling parallel. Her primary
dread was that she might lose control again before Bellingham was put
away. The super-devilishness of his plan--hiding a blasphemy in the
white robe of a spiritual consecration--had changed him in her sight to
a ravening beast. The thing which he believed would cause her eagerly to
bestow upon him the riches of her threefold life had lifted her farther
out of his power that moment, than even she realized. Bellingham had
over-reached. She was filled with inner nausea.... The idea of escape,
the thought of crippling the magician's power over her forever--in the
stress of this, she grew cold.... She was nearest the door. It stood
ajar, 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 white
garments--cleansed with sunlight and starlight, you and I, Paula
Linster,--the sources of creation which have been revealed to me--for
you! 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--are
dead--the man's soul is dead within you--you whited sepulchre!"
His face altered like a white wall which an earthquake disorders at the
base. White rock turned to blown paper; the man-mask rubbed out; Havoc
featured upon an erect thing, with arms pitifully outstretched.
* * * * *
Paula, alone in the long hall, ran to the marble stairs, hurried down
and into the street--swiftly to her house. There, every thread of
clothing she had worn was gathered into a pile for burning. Then she
bathed and her strength returned.