During that first year Athalie Greensleeve saw a great deal of New
York society, professionally, and of many New York men, socially.
But the plaything which society attempted to make of her she gently
but adroitly declined to become. She herself drew this line whenever
it was necessary to draw it, never permitting herself to mistake the
fundamental attitude of these agreeable and amicably demonstrative
people toward her, or toward any girl who lived alone in New York and
who practised such a profession.
Not among the people who employed her and who paid her lavishly for an
evening's complacency; not among people who sought her at her own
place during business hours for professional advice or for lighter
amusement could she expect any other except professional recognition.
And after a few months of wistful loneliness she came, gradually, to
desire from these people nothing except what they gave.
But there were some people she met during that first year's practice
of her new profession who seemed to be unimpressed by the popular
belief in such an awesome actuality as New York "society." And some of
these, oddly enough, were the descendants of those who, perhaps, had
formed part of the only real society the big, raw, sprawling city
ever had. But that was long, long ago, in the day of the first
President.
New York will always be spotted with the symptoms but will never again
have it. Paris has gone the same way. London is still flushed with it,
Berlin hectic, Vienna fevered. But the days of a "society" as a
distinct _ensemble_, with a logical reason for being, with authority,
with functions, with offensive and defensive powers and fixed
boundaries, is over forever; possibly never existed, certainly never
will exist in the series of gregarious aggregations and segregations
known to a perplexed and slightly amused world as the city of New
York.
For Athalie that first year of new interests and of unfamiliar
successes passed more rapidly than had any single month ever before
passed in her life since the strenuous and ragged days of childhood.
It was a year of novelty, of excitement, of self-development, and the
development of interests as new as they had been unsuspected.
Like a gaily illuminated pageant the processional passed before her
with its constantly changing surroundings, new faces, new voices, new
ideas, new motives.
And the new faces were to be scanned and understood, the new voices
listened to intently, the new ideas analysed, the new motives detected
and dissected.
In drawing-rooms, in ballrooms, in boudoirs, new scenes constantly
presented themselves; one house was never like the next, one hostess
never resembled another; wealth itself was presented to her under
innumerable aspects ranging all the way from that false modesty and
smugness known as meekness, to fevered pretence, arrogance, and noisy
aggressiveness.
Wonderful school for a girl to learn in!--the gilded halls of which
were eternally vexed and swept by the winds and whirlwinds of every
human passion.
For here, under her still, clear scrutiny, was huddled humanity
itself, unconsciously bent on self-revelation. And Athalie's very
presence amid assemblies ever shifting, ever renewed, was educating
her eyes and ears and intellect to an insight and a comprehension she
had never dreamed of.
In some the supreme necessity for self-ventilation interested her; in
others, secretiveness hermetically sealed fascinated her. Motives
interested or disinterested, sordid or noble; desires, aspirations,
hopes, perplexities,--whatever a glance, a word, an attitude, a
silence, suggested to her, fixed her attention, excited her
intelligence to curiosity, and focussed her interest to a mental
concentration.
Out of which emerged deductions--curious fruits of logic, experience,
instinct, intuitiveness, and of some extraneous perception, outside of
and independent of her own conscious and objective personality.
But in one radical particular Athalie differed from any individual of
either sex ever recorded in the history of hypnotic therapeutics or of
psychic phenomena.
For those two worlds in which we all dwell, the supraliminal or waking
world, the transliminal, or sleeping world, were merged in this young
girl.
The psychological fact that natural or induced sleep is necessary for
extraneous or for auto-suggestion, did not exist for her. Her psychic
qualities were natural and beautiful, as much a part of her objective
as of her subjective life. Neither the trance induced by mesmerism or
hypnotism, nor the less harmful slumber by induction, nor the sleep of
nature itself was necessary for the girl to find herself in rapport
with others or with her own higher personality--her superior spiritual
self. Nor did her clairvoyance require trances; nor was sleep in
others necessary before she ventured suggestion.
A celebrated physician who had been eager to meet her found her
extremely interesting but rather beyond his ability to classify.
How much of her he believed to be fraud might be suspected by what he
said to her that evening in a corner of a very grand house on Fifth
Avenue:
"There is no such thing as a 'control'; there is no such thing as a
'medium.' No so-called medium has ever revealed anything that did not
exist either in her own consciousness or in the consciousness of some
other living human being.
"Self-delusion induced by auto-suggestion accounts for the more
respectable victims of Spiritism. For Spiritism is a doctrine accepted
by many people of education, intelligence, refinement, and of
generally excellent judgment.
"And it is a pity, because Spiritism is a bar to all real
intellectual, material, moral, and spiritual progress. It thrives only
because it pretends to satisfy an intense human craving--the desire
to re-establish personal relations with the dead. It never has done
this; it never will, Miss Greensleeve. And if you really believe it
has done this you are sadly and hopelessly mistaken."
"But," said Athalie, looking at him out of blue eyes the chiefest
beauty of which was their fearless candour, "I do not concern myself
with what is called Spiritism--with trances, table-tipping,
table-rapping, slate-writing, apparitions, reincarnations--with
cabinets, curtains, darkened rooms, psychic circles."
"You employ a crystal in your profession."
"Yes. I need not."
"Why do you do it, then?"
"Some clients ask for it."
"And you see things in it?"
"Yes," said the girl simply.
"And when your clients do not demand a crystal-reading?"
"I can see perfectly well without it--when I can see clearly at all."
"Into the future?"
"Sometimes."
"The past, too, of course."
"Not always."
She fascinated the non-scientific side of this famous physician; he
interested her intensely.
"Do you know," she ventured with a faint smile, "that you are really
quite as psychically endowed as I am?"
His handsome, sanguine features flushed deeply, but he smiled in
appreciation.
"Not in the manner you so saucily imply, Miss Greensleeve," he said
gaily. "My work is sound, logical, reasonable, and based on
fundamental truths capable of being proven. I never saw an apparition
in my life--and believed that it was really there!"
"Oh! So you _have_ seen an apparition?"
"None that could have really existed independently of my own vision.
In other words it wouldn't have been there at all if I hadn't supposed
I had seen it."
"You _did_ suppose so?"
"I knew perfectly well that I didn't see it. I didn't even think I saw
it."
"But you _saw_ it?"
"I imagined I did, and at the same time I knew I didn't."
"Yes," she said quietly, "you did see it, Dr. Westland. You have seen
it more than once. You will see it again."
A heavier colour dyed his face; he started impatiently as though to
check her--as though to speak; and did not.
She said: "If what I say is distasteful to you, please stop me." She
waited a moment; then, as he evinced no desire to check or interrupt
her: "I _am_ very diffident about saying this to you--to a man so
justly celebrated--pre-eminent in the greatest of all professions. I
am so insignificant in comparison, so unimportant, so ignorant where
you are experienced and learned.
"But may I say to you that nothing dies? I am not referring to a
possible spiritual world inhabited perhaps by souls. I mean that here,
on this earth, all around us, nothing that has ever lived really
dies.... Is what I say distasteful to you?"
He offered no reply.
"Because," she said in a low voice, "if I say anything more it would
concern you. And what you saw.... For what you saw was alive, and
real--as truly living as you and I are. It is nothing to wonder at,
nothing to trouble or perplex you, to see clearly--anybody--you have
ever--_loved_."
He looked up at her in a silence so strained, so longing, so intense,
that she felt the terrific tension.
"Yes," she said, "you saw clearly and truly when you saw--her."
"Who? in God's name!"
"Need I tell you, Dr. Westland?"
No, she had no need to tell him. His wife was dead. But it was not his
wife he had seen so often in his latter years.
No, she had no need to tell him.
* * * * *
Athalie had never been inclined to care for companions of her own sex.
As a child she had played with boys, preferring them. Few women
appealed to her as qualified for her friendship--only one or two here
and there and at rare intervals seemed to her sufficiently interesting
to cultivate. And to the girl's sensitive and shy advances, here and
there, some woman responded.
Thus she came to know and to exchange occasional social amenities with
Adele Millis, a youthful actress, with Rosalie Faithorn, a handsome
girl born to a formal social environment, but sufficiently independent
to explore outside of it and snap her fingers at the opinions of those
peeping over the bulwarks to see what she was doing.
Also there was Peggy Brooks, a fascinating, breezy, capable young
creature who was Dr. Brooks to many, and Peggy to very few. And there
were one or two others, like Nina Grey and Jeanne Delauny and Anne
Randolph.
But of men there would have been no limit and no end had Athalie not
learned very early in the game how to check them gently but firmly;
how to test, pick, discriminate, sift, winnow, and choose those to be
admitted to her rooms after the hours of business had ended.
Of these the standards differed, so that she herself scarcely knew why
such and such a one had been chosen--men, for instance, like Cecil
Reeve and Arthur Ensart--perhaps even such a man as James Allys, 3rd.
Captain Dane, of course, had been a foregone conclusion, and John
Lyndhurst was logical enough; also W. Grismer, and the jaunty, obese
Mr. Welter, known in sporting circles as Helter Skelter Welter, and
more briefly and profanely as Hel. His running mate, Harry Ferris had
been included. And there was a number of others privileged to drift
into the rooms of Athalie Greensleeve when she chose to be at home to
anybody.
From Clive she heard nothing: and she wrote to him no more. Of him she
did hear from time to time--mere scraps of conversation caught, a word
or two volunteered, some careless reference, perhaps, perhaps some
scrap of intentional information or some comment deliberate if not a
trifle malicious.
But to all who mentioned him in her presence she turned a serene face
and unclouded eyes. On the surface she was not to be read concerning
what she thought of Clive Bailey--if indeed she thought about him at
all.
Meanwhile he had married Winifred Stuart in London, where, it
appeared, they had taken a house for the season. All sorts of
honourables and notables and nobles as well as the resident and
visiting specimens of a free and sovereign people had been bidden to
the wedding. And had joyously repaired thither--the bride being
fabulously wealthy and duly presented at Court.
The American Ambassador was there with the entire staff of the
Embassy; also a king in exile, several famished but receptive dukes
and counts and various warriors out of jobs--all magnetised by the
subtle radiations from the world's most powerful loadstone, money.
They said that Mrs. Bailey, Sr., was very beautiful and impressive in
a gown that hypnotised the peeresses--or infuriated them--nobody
seemed to know exactly which.
Cecil Reeve, lounging on the balcony by the open window one May
evening, said to Hargrave--and probably really unconscious that
Athalie could hear him if she cared to: "Well, he got her all
right--or rather his mother got her. When he wakes up he'll be sick
enough of her millions."
Hargrave said: "She's a cold-blooded little proposition. I've known
Winifred Stuart all my life, and I never knew her to have any impulse
except a fishy one."
"Cold as a cod," nodded Cecil. "Merry times ahead for Clive."
And on another occasion, later in the summer, somebody said in the
cool dusk of the room:
"It's true that the Bailey Juniors are living permanently in England.
I saw Clive in Scotland when I was fishing out Banff way. He says
they're remaining abroad indefinitely."
Some man's voice asked how Clive was looking.
"Not very fit; thin and old. I was with him several times that month
and I never saw him crack a smile. That's not like him, you know."
"What is it? His wife?"
"Well, I fancy it lies somewhere between his mother and his wife--this
pre-glacial freeze-up that's made a bally mummy of him."
And still again, and in the tobacco-scented dusk of Athalie's room,
and once more from a man who had just returned from abroad:
"I kept running into Clive everywhere. He seems to haunt the
continent, turning up like a ghost here and there; and believe me he
looks the part of the lonely spook."
"Where's his Missis?"
"They've chucked the domestic. Didn't you know?"
"Divorced?"
"No. But they don't get on. What man could with that girl? So poor old
Clive is dawdling around the world all alone, and his wife's
entertainments are the talk of London, and his mother has become pious
and is building a chapel for herself to repose in some day when the
cards go against her in the jolly game."
* * * * *
The cards went against her in the game that autumn.
Athalie had been writing to her sister Catharine, and had risen from
her desk to find a stick of sealing-wax, when, as she turned to go
toward her bedroom, she saw Clive's mother coming toward her.
Never but once before had she seen Mrs. Bailey--that night at the
Regina--and, for the first time in her life, she recoiled before such
a visitor. A hot, proud colour flared in her cheeks as she drew
quietly aside and stood with averted head to let her pass.
But Clive's mother gazed at her gently, wistfully, lingering as she
passed the girl in the passage-way. And Athalie, turning her head
slowly to look after her, saw a quiet smile on her lips as she went
her silent way; and presently was no longer there. Then the girl
continued on her own way in search of the sealing-wax; but she was
moving uncertainly now, one arm outstretched, feeling along the
familiar walls and furniture, half-blinded with her tears.
* * * * *
[Illustration: "Mrs. Bailey, Jr., looked pale and pretty sitting
there."]
So the chapel fulfilled its functions.
It was a very ornamental private chapel. Mrs. Bailey, Sr., had had it
pretty well peppered with family crests and quarterings, authentic and
imaginary.
Mrs. Bailey, Jr., looked pale and pretty sitting there, the English
sunlight filtered through stained glass; the glass also was thoroughly
peppered with insignia of the House of Bailey. Rich carving, rich
colouring, rich people!--what more could sticklers demand for any
exclusive sanctuary where only the best people received the Body of
Christ, and where God would meet nobody socially unknown.
Clive arrived from Italy after the funeral. The meeting between him
and his wife was faultless. He hung about the splendid country place
for a while, and spent much time inside the chapel, and also outside,
where he directed the planting of some American evergreens, hemlock,
spruce, and white pine.
But the aromatic perfume of familiar trees was subtly tearing him to
tatters; and there came a day when he could no longer endure it.
His young wife was playing billiards with Lord Innisbrae, known
intimately as Cinders, such a languid and burnt out young man was he,
with his hair already white, and every lineament seared with the fires
of revels long since sunken into ashes.
He watched them for a while, his hands clenched where they rested in
his coat pockets, the lean muscles in his cheeks twitching at
intervals.
When Innisbrae took himself off, Winifred still lounged gracefully
along the billiard table taking shots with any ball that lay for her.
And Clive looked on, absent-eyed, the flat jaw muscles working at
intervals.
"Well?" she asked carelessly, laying her cue across the table.
"Nothing.... I think I'll clear out to-morrow."
"Oh."
She did not even inquire where he was going. For that matter he did
not know, except that there was one place he could not go--home; the
only place he cared to go.
He had already offered her divorce--thinking of Innisbrae, or of some
of the others. But she did not want it. It was, perhaps, not in her to
care enough for any man to go through that amount of trouble. Besides,
Their Majesties disapproved divorce. And for this reason alone nothing
would have induced her to figure in proceedings certain to exclude her
from one or two sets.
"Anything I can do for you before I leave?" he asked, dully.
It appeared that there was nothing he could do for his young wife
before he wandered on in the jolly autumn sunshine.
So the next morning he cleared out. Which proceeding languidly
interested Innisbrae that evening in the billiard-room.
* * * * *
That winter Clive got hurt while pig-sticking in Morocco, being but an
indifferent spear. During convalescence he read "Under Two Flags," and
approved the idea; but when he learned that the Spahi cavalry was not
recruiting Americans, and when, a month later, he discovered how
much romance did not exist in either the First or Second Foreign
Legions, he no longer desired dangers incognito under the tri-colour
or under the standard bearing the open hand.
[Illustration: "During convalescence he read 'Under Two Flags' and
approved the idea."]
Some casual wanderer through the purlieus of science whom he met in
Brindisi, induced him to go to Sumatra where orchids and ornithoptera
are the game. But he acquired only a perfectly new species of fever,
which took six months to get over.
He convalesced at leisure all the way from Australia to Cape Town; and
would have been all right; but somebody shot at somebody else one
evening, and got Clive. So it was several months more before he
arrived in India, and the next year before he had enough of China.
But Clive had seen many things in those two years and had learned
fairly well the lesson of his own unimportance in a world which misses
no man, neither king nor clown, after the dark curtain falls and
satiated humanity shuffles home to bed.
He saw a massacre--or the remains of it--where fifteen thousand yellow
men and one white priest lay dead. He saw Republican China, 40,000
strong, move out after the banditti, shouldering its modern rifles,
while its regimental music played "Rosie O'Grady" in quick march time.
He saw the railway between Hankow and Pekin swarming with White Wolf's
bloody pack, limping westward from the Honan-Anhui border with
dripping fangs. He peered into the stinking wells of Honan where women
were cutting their own throats. He witnessed the levity of Lhasa
priests and saw their grimy out-thrust hands clutching for tips
beside their prayer-wheels.
In India he gazed upon the degradation of woman and the unspeakable
bestiality of man till that vile and dusty hell had sickened him to
the soul.
Back into Europe he drifted; and instantly and everywhere appeared the
awful Yankee--shooting wells in Hungary, shooting craps in Monaco,
digging antiques in Greece, digging tunnels in Servia,--everywhere the
Yankee, drilling, bridging, constructing, exploring, pushing, arguing,
quarrelling, insisting, telegraphing, gambling, touring, over-running
older and better civilisations than his own crude Empire where he has
nothing to learn from anybody but the Almighty--and then only when he
condescends to ask for advice on Sunday.
And Clive, nevertheless, longed with a longing that made him sick, for
"God's country" where all that is worst and best on earth still boils
in the vast and seething cauldron of a continent in the making. There
bubbles the elemental broth, dregs, scum, skimmings, residue,
by-products, tailings, smoking corruption above the slowly forming and
incorruptible matrix in its depths where lies imbedded, and ever
growing, the Immam, the Hope of the World--gem indestructible, pearl
beyond price. Difficilia quae pulchra.
And once, Clive had almost set out for home; and then, grimly, turned
away toward the southern continent of the hemisphere.
In Lima he heard of an expedition fitting out to search for the lost
Americans, Cromer and Page, and for the Hungarian Seljan. And that
same evening he met Captain Dane.
They looked at each other very carefully, and then shook hands. Clive
said: "If you want a handy man in camp, I'd like to go."
"Come on," said Dane, briefly.
Later, looking over together some maps in Dane's rooms, the big blond
soldier of fortune glanced up at the younger man, and saw a lean,
bronzed visage clamped mute by a lean bronzed jaw; but he also saw two
dark eyes fixed on him in the fierce silence of unuttered inquiry.
After a moment Dane said very quietly:
"Yes, she was well, and I think happy, when I left New York.... How
long is it since you have heard from her?"
"Three years."
"Three years," mused Dane, gazing into space out of his slitted eyes
of arctic blue; "yes, that's some little time. Bailey.... She is
well--I think I said that.... And very prosperous, and greatly admired
... and happy--I believe."
The other waited.
Dane picked up a linen map, looked at it, fiddled with the corner.
Then, carelessly: "She is not married," he said.... "Here's the
Huallaga River as I located it four years ago. Seljan and O'Higgins
were making for it, I believe.... That red crayon circle over there
marks the habitat of the Uta fly. It's worse than the Tsetse. If
anybody is hunting death--_esta aquí_!... Here is the Putumayo
district. Hell lies up here, just above it.... Here's Iquitos, and
here lies Para, three thousand miles away.... Were you going to say
something?"
But if Clive had anything to say he seemed to find no words to say it.
And he only folded his arms on the table's edge and looked down at the
stained and crumpled map.
"It will take us about a year," remarked Dane.
Clive nodded, but his eye involuntarily sought the irregular red
circle where trouble of all sorts might be conveniently ended by a
perfectly respectable Act of God.
* * * * *
Actus Dei nemini facit injuriam.