She Buildeth Her House. Will Levington Comfort

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СКАЧАТЬ had once been an artist's model—and had loved the artist. … There was one woman long ago—a woman with a box of alabaster—who was forgiven because she loved much. … The lady across the way loved children now, children of most unhappy fortunes. To those who came, and there were many, she gave music lessons; often all day long helping grimy fingers to falter over the keys. So she awakened poetry and planted truth-seedlings in shaded little hearts. To the children, though the lady was poor as any—in spite of her piano and a wall of books—she was Lady Bountiful, indeed. … Paula smiled. Two windows, strangely enough side by side, were curtained with stockings out to dry. In one, there were many—cerise and lavender, pink and baby blue. In the next there were but two pair, demurely black. What a world of suggestion in the contrast! … So it was always—her wall of a hundred windows, a changing panorama of folly, tragedy, toil that would not bow to hopelessness, vanity, art, sacrifice. Blend them all together above the traffic's roar—and you have the spirit of young New York.

      She put on the brass kettle at length, crossing the room for an occasional glance into the mirror as she finished her hair. … The strange numbing power she had felt the night before crept suddenly back from her eyes now to the base of her brain, striving to cripple her volition. Bellingham was calling her. … The sunlight was gone. There was a smell of hot metal in the air, as if some terrific energy had burned out the vitality. Her heart hurt her from holding her breath so long. Beyond all expression she was shocked and shamed. The mirror showed now a spectral Paula with crimson lips and haggard eyes. … An indescribable fertility stirred within her—almost mystic, like a whisper from spiritland where little children play, waiting to be born. She could have fallen in a strange and subtle thrall of redolent imaginings, except that thought of the source of it all, the occultist—was as acid in her veins.

      She drank tea and crossed the street to the Park for an hour. The radiance of autumn impressed her rarely; not as the death of a year, but rather as a glorious pageant of evening, the great energies of nature all crowned with fruition and preparing for rest. Back in her room, she wrote the Charter critique, wrote as seldom before. The cool spirit of the essayist seemed ignited with a lyric ardor. In her momentary power she conceived a great literary possibility of the future—an effulgent Burns-vine blossoming forth upon the austere cliff of a Carlyle. She had finished, and it was dusk when Madame Nestor called.

      For several years, at various philosophical gatherings and brotherhoods, Paula, invariably stimulated by the unusual, had encountered this remarkable woman. Having very little to say as a rule, Madame Nestor was a figure for comment and one not readily forgotten because of occasional memorable utterances. In all the cults of New York, there was likely no individual quite so out of alignment with ordinary life. Indefinitely, she would be called fifty. Her forehead was broad, her mouth soft. The face as a whole was heavy and flour-white. There was a distention of eyeballs and a pulpy shapelessness to her body which gave the impression of advanced physical deterioration—that peculiar kind of breaking down, often noticeable among psychics of long practice. Her absolute incapacity to keep anything of value was only one characteristic of interest. Madame Nestor's record of apparently thoughtless generosity was truly inspiriting.

      "I had to see you to-day," she said, sinking down with a sigh of relief. "I sat behind you last night in Prismatic Hall."

      The younger woman recalled with a start—the whisper she had heard. She leaned forward and inquired quickly: "So it was you, Madame Nestor, who knew—this Bellingham"—she cleared her throat as she uttered the name—"as he is now—a quarter of a century ago?"

      "Yes. How very strange that you should have heard what I said. … You will join one of his classes, I presume?"

      "I can imagine doing no such thing."

      "Dear Paula, do you think it will really turn out—that you are to have no relation with Bellingham?"

      Paula repressed the instant impulse to answer sharply. The fact that she had already felt Bellingham's power made the other's words a harsh irritation.

      "What relation could I have? He is odious to me."

      "I suppose I should have been a cinder long since, dear, if these were days for burning witches," Madame Nestor said. "When I saw Bellingham's eyes settle upon you last night—it appeared to me that you are to know him well. I came here to give you what strength I could—because he is the chief of devils."

      "I'm only one of the working neuters of the human hive," Paula managed to declare.

      The elder woman said a strange thing: "Ah, no. The everlasting feminine is alive in your every movement. A man like Bellingham would cross the world for you. Some strong-souled woman sooner or later must encompass his undoing, and last night it came to me in a way to force my conviction—that you are the woman."

      Paula bent toward her. Darkness covered the centres of her mind and she was afraid. She could not laugh, for she had already met the magician's will. "But I loathe him," she whispered. "About the very name when I first heard it yesterday was an atmosphere which aroused all my antagonism."

      "Even that—he has overcome, but it may help you to endure."

      "What does the man want?"

      "He wants life—life—floods of young, fine vitality to renew his own flesh. He wants to live on and on in the body which you have seen. It is all he has, for his soul is dead—or feeble as a frog's. He fears death, because he cannot come back. He renews his life from splendid sources of human magnetism—such as you possess. It is Bellingham's hell to know that, once out of the flesh, he has not soul enough, if any, to command a human body again. You see in him an empty thing, which has lived, God knows how many years, hugging the warmth of his blood—a creature who knows that to die means the swift disintegration of an evil principle."

      "Do you realize, Madame Nestor," Paula asked excitedly, "that you are talking familiarly of things which may exist in books of ancient wisdom, but that this is New York—New York packed about us? New York does not reckon with such things."

      "The massed soul of this big city does not reckon with such things, Paula. That is true, but we are apart. Bellingham is apart. He is wiser than the massed soul of New York."

      "One might believe, even have such a religious conviction, but you speak of an actual person, the terrible inner mystery of a man, whom we have seen—a man who frightened me hideously last night—and to-day! You bring the thing home to a room in a New York apartment … Can't you see how hard to adjust, this is? I don't mean to stop or distract you, but this has become—you are helping to keep it so—such an intimate, dreadful thing!"

      Madame Nestor had been too long immersed in occultism to grasp the world's judgment of her sayings. "Listen, Paula, this that I tell you is inherent in every thinking man. You are bewildered by the personal nature it has assumed. … To every one of us shall come the terrible moment of choice. Man is not conceived blindly to be driven. Imagine a man who is become a rapidly evolving mind. On the one side is the animal-nature, curbed and obedient; on the other, his gathering soul-force. The mind balances between these two—soul and body. The time has come for him to choose between a lonely path to the Heights, or the broad diverging highway, moving with pomp, dazzling with the glare of vain power, and brooded over by an arrogant materialism which slays the soul. … The spirit of man says, 'Take the rising road alone.' The old world-mother sings to him from the swaying throng, 'Come over and be my king. Look at my arts, my palaces, my valiant young men and my glorious women. I will put worship in the hearts of the strong—for you! I will put love in the hearts of the beautiful—for you! Come over and be my king! Later, when you are old and have drunk deep of power—you may take the rising road alone.'"

      Paula invariably qualified a dogmatic statement СКАЧАТЬ