PAULA IS DRAWN DEEPER INTO THE SELMA CROSS PAST AND IS BRAVELY WOOED
THROUGH FURTHER MESSAGES FROM THE WEST
Selma Cross frequently filled the little place of books across the hall
with her tremendous vibrations before the trial trip of her new play on
the road. Paula liked to have her come in, delighted in the great
creature's rapture over the hunch-back, Stephen Cabot, author of _The
Thing_. There was an indescribably brighter luster in the waxing and
waning of romantic tides, than the eyes of Paula had ever before
discovered, so that the confidences of the other were of moment. Selma
was terrified by some promise she had made years before in Kentucky. It
was gradually driven deep into the listener's understanding that no
matter how harsh and dreadful the intervening years had been, here was a
woman to whom a promise meant a promise. Paula was moved almost to tears
by the other's description of Stephen Cabot, and the first time she saw
him.
"I wonder if the long white face with the pain-lit eyes could ever mean
to any one else what it does to me?" Selma whispered raptly when they
talked together one Sunday night. "Why, to see him sitting there before
me at rehearsal--the finest, lowest head in all the chairs--steadies,
exalts me! I hold fast to repression.... It It was Vhruebert who brought
me to him, and the first words Stephen said were: 'Your manager is a
wizard, Miss Cross, to get you for this. Why, you are the woman I wrote
about in _The Thing_!'"
"Tell me more," Paula had whispered.
"We met in Vhruebert's office and forgot the manager entirely. I guess
two hours passed, as we talked, and went over the play together that
first time. Vhruebert sent in his office-boy finally to remind us that
he was still in the building. How we three laughed about it!... Then as
we started out for luncheon together, Stephen and I, Vhruebert took his
place at the door before us, and delivered himself of something like
this:
"'You two listen to the father of what you are to be,'" Selma Cross went
on, roughening her voice and tightening her nasal passages, to imitate
the old Hebrew star-maker. "'Listen to the soulless Vhruebert, who
brudalizes the great Amerigan stage. You two are Art. Very well, listen
to Commerce. It took me twenty-five years to learn that there must be
humor in a blay. This _T'ing_ would not lift the lip of a ganary-bird.
It took me twenty-five years to learn there must be joy at the end of a
blay--and wedding-bells. This _T'ing_ ends just about--over the hills to
the mad-house. Twenty-five years proved to me what I know the first
day--that women of the stage must be beautiful. Miss Gross is not. I say
no more. Here I have neither dramatist nor star. I could give the blay
by Gabot to Ellen Terry--or to Miss Gross, if Ibsen write it. As it is,
I have no name. There are five thousand people in this country writing
blays with humor and habby endings. There are ten thousand beautiful
women exbiring to spend it on the stage. Yet you two are the chosen of
Vhruebert. When you look into each other's eye and visper how
von-der-ful you are, with rising inflection; and say, "To hell with
Gommerce and the Binhead Bublic!" remember Vhruebert who advances the
money!'"
"And did you remember Vhruebert in that fairy luncheon together?" Paula
asked happily.
"No, I only saw the long white face of Stephen Cabot. I wanted to take
him in my arms and make him whole!"
For ten weeks Bellingham lay in one of the New York hospitals. "A woman
attends him," Madame Nestor informed. "She is young and has been very
beautiful. How well do I know her look of impotence and apathy--that
look of unresisting obedience." To Paula, the magician seemed back among
the dead ages, although Madame Nestor did not regard the present lull
without foreboding. Paula could not feel that her real self had been
defiled. The dreadful visitations were all but erased, as pass the
spectres of delirium. What was more real, and rocked the centres of her
being, was the conception of this outcast's battle for life. She could
not forget that it was in pursuing her, that he had been injured. Facing
not only death, but extinction, this idolater of life had, as one
physician expressed it, held together his shattered vitality by sheer
force of will, until healing set in. The only thought comparable in
terror to such a conflict, had to do with the solitudes and abject
frigidity of inter-stellar spaces.
The Skylark Letters, as she came to call them, were after all, the
eminent feature of the fall and winter weeks. There was a startling
paragraph in one of the December series: "I think it is fitting for you
to know (though, believe me, I needed no word regarding you from
without), that I am not entirely in the dark as to how you have
impressed another. I know nothing of the color of your hair or eyes,
nothing of your size or appearance,--only just how you _impressed
another_. This information, it is needless to say, was unsolicited...."
Just that, and no further reference. It was as though he had felt it a
duty to incorporate those lines. Portions of some of the later letters
follow:
Did you know, that without the upward spread of wings--there
can be no song from the Skylark? This, for me, has a fragrant
and delicate significance. It is true that the poor little
caged-birds sing, but how sorry they are, since they have to
flutter their wings to give forth sound, and cling with their
claws to the bars to hold themselves down!... I think you must
have been a little wing-weary when you wrote your last letter
to me. Perhaps the dusk was crowding into the Heights. No one
knows as I do how the Skylark has sung and sung!... You did
not say it, but I think you wanted the earth-sweet meadows. It
came to me like needed rain--straight to the heart of mine that
little plaint in the song. It made me feel how useless is the
strength of my arms.... You see, I manage pretty well to keep
you up There. I must. And because you are so wonderful, I
can.... An enthralling temperament rises to me from your
letters. I love to let it flood through my brain....
I do not feel at all sure that you know me truly. What a man's
soul appears to be, through the intimations of his higher
moments, is not the man altogether that humans must reckon
with. Nor must they reckon with the trampling violences of
one's past. I truly believe in the soul. I believe it is an
essence fundamentally fine; that great mothers brood it
beautifully into their babes; that it is nourished by the good
a man does and thinks. I believe in the ultimate victory of the
soul, against the tough, twisted fibres of flesh which rise to
demand a thousand sensations. I would have you think of me as
one _lifting_; happy in discoveries, the crown of which you
are; conscious of an integrating spirit; that sometimes in my
silences I answer your song as one glorified. But then, I
remember that you must not judge me by the brightest of my
work. Such are the trained, tense bursts of speed--the swift
expiration of the best. I think a man is about half as good as
his best work and half as bad as his most lamentable leisure.
Midway between his emotions and exaltations--is indicated his
valuation.... All men clinging to the sweep of the upward
cycle, must know the evil multitude at some time. Perhaps few
men have met and discarded so many personal devils as I, in a
single life. But I say to you as I write to-night, those devils
cast out seem far back among cannibal centuries. I worship the
fine, the pure,--thoughts and deeds which are expanded and
warmed by the soul's breath. And you are the anchorage of this
sweeter spirit which is upon me. Now, out of the logic which
life burns into the brain, comes this thought: (I set it down
only to fortify the citadel of truth in which our momentous
relation alone can prosper.) Are there fangs and hackles and
claws which I have not yet uncovered? Am I given the present
serenity as a resting-time before meeting a more subtle and
formidable enemy? Has my vitality miraculously been preserved
for some final battle with a champion of champions of the
flesh? Is it because the sting is gone from my scar-tissues
that I feel so strong and so white to-night? I cannot think
this, because I have heard--because I still hear--my Skylark
sing.
The personal element of the foregoing and the hint of years of "wrath
and wanderings," which she saw in his second photograph, correlated
themselves in Paula's mind. They frightened her cruelly, but did not put
Charter farther away. Remembering the effect of the passion which
Bellingham had projected into her own brain, helped her vaguely to
understand Charter's earlier years. His splendid emancipation from past
evils lifted her soul. And when he asked, if his present serenity might
not be a preparation for a mightier struggle, the serious reflection
came--might she not ask the same question of herself? The old
Flesh-Mother does not permit one to rest when one is full of
strength.... Paula perceived that Quentin Charter was bravely trying to
get to some sort of rational adjustment her ideal of him and the blooded
reality--and to preserve her from all hurt. Doubts could not exist in a
mind besieged by such letters.... One of her communications must have
reflected something of her terror at the vague forms of his past, which
he partially unveiled, for in answer he wrote:
Do not worry again about the Big Back Time. Perhaps I was over
assertive about the shadowed years. The main thing is that this
is the wonderful present--and you, my white ally of nobler
power and purpose. A gale of good things will come to
us--hopes, communions and inspirations. We shall know each
other--grow so fine together--that Mother Earth at last will
lose her down-pull upon us--as upon perfumes and sunbeams. You
have come with mystical brightening. You are the New Era. There
is healing in Gethsemanes since you have swept with grace and
imperiousness into possession of the Charter heart-country so
long undiscovered. The big area is lit, redeemed from chaos. It
is thrilling--since you are there. Never must you wing away....
Sometime you shall know with what strength and truth and
tenderness I regard you. The spirit of spring is in my veins.
It would turn to summer if we were together, but there could be
no reacting winter because you have evolved a mind and a
soul.... Body and mind and soul all evenly ignited--what a
conception of woman!
Paula begged him not to try to fit such an ideal of the finished
feminine to a little brown tame-plumaged skylark. Since they might some
time meet, she wrote, it was nothing less than unfair for his mind,
trained to visualize its images so clearly, to turn its full energies
upon an ideal, and expect a human stranger--a happening--in the workaday
physical vesture (such as is needed for New York activities) to
sublimate the vision. She told him that he would certainly flee away
from the reality, and that he would have no one but himself to blame.
Visions, she added, do not review books nor write to authors whom they
have not met. All of which, she expressed very lightly, though she could
not but adore the spirit of ideality to which she had aroused his
faculties.
At this time Paula encountered one of the imperishable little books of
the world, bracing to her spirit as a day's camp among mountain-pines.
Nor could she refrain from telling Charter about "The Practice of the
Presence of God," as told in the conversations of Brother Lawrence, a
bare-footed Carmelite of the Seventeenth Century. "No wilderness
wanderings seem to have intervened between the Red Sea and the Jordan of
his experience," she quoted from the preface, and told him how simple it
was for this unlearned man to be good--a mere "footman and soldier"
whose illumination was the result of seeing a dry and leafless tree in
mid-winter, and the thought of the change that would come to it with the
Spring. His whole life thereafter, largely spent in the monastery
kitchen--"a great awkward fellow, who broke everything"--was conducted
as if God were his constantly advising Companion. It was a life of
supernal happiness--and so simple to comprehend. Charter's reply to this
letter proved largely influential in an important decision Paula was
destined to make.
Yes, I have communed with Brother Lawrence--carried the little
volume with me on many voyages. I commend a mind that is fine
enough to draw inspiration from a message so chaste and simple.
You will be interested to hear that I have known another
Brother Lawrence--a man whose holiness one might describe as
"humble" or "lofty," with equal accuracy. This man is a
Catholic priest, Father Fontanel of Martinique. His parish is
in that amazing little port, Saint Pierre--where Africa and
France were long ago transplanted and have fused together so
enticingly. Lafcadio Hearn's country--you will say. I wonder
that this inscrutable master, Hearn, missed Father Fontanel in
his studies.... I was rough from the seas and a long stretch of
military campaigning, when my ship turned into that lovely
harbor of Saint Pierre. Finding Father Fontanel, I stayed over
several ships, and the healing of his companionship restores me
even now to remember.
We would walk together on the _Morne d'Orange_ in the evening.
His church was on the rise of the _morne_ at the foot of _Rue
Victor Hugo_. He loved to hear about my explorations in books,
especially about my studies among the religious enthusiasts. I
would tell him of the almost incredible austerities of certain
mystics to refine the body, and it was really a sensation to
hear him exclaim in his French way: "Can it be possible? I am
very ignorant. All that I know is to worship the good God who
is always with me, and to love my dear children who have so
much to bear. I do not know why I should be so happy--unless it
is because I know so very little. Tell me why I live in a state
of continual transport...." I can hear his gentle Latin tones
even now at night when I shut my eyes--see the lights of the
shipping from that cliff road, hear the creoles' moaning songs
from the cabins, and recall the old volcano, _La Montagne
Pelee_, outlined like a huge couchant beast against the low,
northern stars.
Father Fontanel has meant very much to me. In all my thinking
upon the ultimate happiness of the race, he stands out as the
bright achievement. At the time I knew him, there was not a
single moment of his life in which the physical of the man was
supreme. What his earlier years were I do not know, of course,
but I confess now I should like to know.... The presence of God
was so real to him, that Father Fontanel did not understand at
all his own great spiritual strength. Nor do his people quite
appreciate how great he is among the priests of men. He has
been in their midst so long that they seem accustomed to his
power. Only a stranger can realize what a pure, shining garment
his actual _flesh_ has become. To me there was healing in the
very approach of this man.
Dear Father Fontanel! All I had to do was to substitute "Higher
Self" for "God" and I had my religion--the Practice of the
Presence of the Higher Self. Does it not seem very clear to
you?... To me, God is always an abstraction--something of
vaster glory than the central sun, but one's Spiritual Body,
the real being, integrated through interminable lives, from the
finest materials of thought and action--this Higher Self is the
Presence I must keep always with me, and do I not deserve that
It should stand scornfully aloof, when, against my better
knowledge, I fall short in the performance?... I think it is
his Higher Self which is so lustrous in Father Fontanel, and
the enveloping purity which comes from you is the same. About
such purity there is nothing icy nor fibrous nor sterile....
You are singing in my heart, Skylark.
The picture Charter had drawn of Father Fontanel of Saint Pierre
appealed strongly to Paula; and her mind's quick grasp of the Charter
religion--the Practice of the Presence of the Higher Self--became one of
her moments of illumination. This was ground-down simplicity. True,
every idea of Charter's was based upon reincarnation. Indeed, this
seemed so familiar to him, that he had not even undertaken to state it
as one of his fundamentals. But had she cared, she could have discarded
even that, from the present concept. So to live that the form of the
best within be not degraded; the days a constant cherishing of this
Invisible Friend; the conduct of life constantly adjusted to please this
Companion of purity and wisdom--here was ethics which blew away every
cloud impending upon her Heights. Years of such living could not but
bring one to the Uplands. As to Charter, God had always been to her The
Ineffable--source of solar, aye, universal energy--the Unseen All.
"Walking with God," "talking with God," "a personal God," "presence of
God,"--these were forms of speech she could never use, but the Higher
Self--this white charioteer--the soul-body that rises when the clay
falls--here was a Personal God, indeed.