The Crimson Tide Part 18

She came from the dressing-room fresh and flushed as a slightly chilled rose, rejoining him in the lobby, and presently they were seated in the palm room with a discreet and hidden orchestra playing, "Oh! How I Hate To Get Up in the Morning," and rather busy with a golden Casaba melon between them.

"Isn't this jolly!" he said, expanding easily, as do all young men in the warmth of the informal.

"Very. What an agreeable business yours seems to be, Mr. Shotwell."

"In what way?" he asked innocently.

"Why, part of it is lunching with feminine clients, isn't it?"

His close-set ears burned. She glanced up with mischief brilliant in her brown eyes. But he was busy with his melon. And, not looking at her:

"Don't you want to know me?" he asked so clumsily that she hesitated to snub so defenceless a male.

"I don't know whether I wish to," she replied, smiling slightly. "I hadn't aspired to it; I hadn't really considered it. I was thinking about renting a house."

He said nothing, but, as the painful colour remained in his face, the girl decided to be a little kinder.

"Anyway," she said, "I'm enjoying myself. And I hope you are."

He said he was. But his voice and manner were so subdued that she laughed.

"Fancy asking a girl such a question," she said. "You shouldn't ask a woman whether she doesn't want to know you. It would be irregular enough, under the circ.u.mstances, to say that you wanted to know her."

"That's what I meant," he replied, wincing. "Would you consider it?"

She could not disguise her amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Yes; I'll consider it, Mr. Shotwell. I'll give it my careful attention. I owe you something, anyway."

"What?" he asked uncertainly, prepared for further squelching.

"I don't know exactly what. But when a man remembers a woman, and the woman forgets the man, isn't something due him?"

"I think there is," he said so navely that Palla was unable to restrain her gaiety.

"This is a silly conversation," she said, "--as silly as though I had accepted the c.o.c.ktail you so thoughtfully suggested. We're both enjoying each other and we know it."

"Really!" he exclaimed, brightening.

His boyish relief--everything that this young man said to her--seemed to excite the girl to mirth. Perhaps she had been starved for laughter longer than is good for anybody. Besides, her heart was naturally responsive--opened easily--was easily engaged.

"Of course I'm inclined to like you," she said, "or I wouldn't be here lunching with you and talking nonsense instead of houses----"

"We'll talk houses!"

"No; we'll _look_ at them--later.... Do you know it's a long, long time since I have laughed with a really untroubled heart?"

"I'm sorry."

"Yes, it isn't good for a girl. Sadness is a sickness--a physical disorganisation that infects the mind. It makes a strange emotion of love, too, perverting it to that mysticism we call religion--and wasting it.... I suppose you're rather shocked," she said smilingly.

"No.... But have you no religion?"

"Have you?"

"Well--yes."

"Which?"

"Protestant.... Are you Catholic?"

The girl rested her cheek on her hand and dabbed absently at her orange ice.

"I was once," she said. "I was very religious--in the accepted sense of the term.... It came rather suddenly;--it seemed to be born as part of a sudden and close friends.h.i.+p with a girl--began with that friends.h.i.+p, I think.... And died with it."

She sat quite silent for a while, then a tremulous smile edged her lips:

"I had meant to take the veil," she said. "I did begin my novitiate."

"Here?"

"No, in Russia. There are a few foreign cloistered orders there....

But I had a tragic awakening...." She bent her head and quoted softly, "'For the former things have pa.s.sed away.'"

The orange ice was melting; she stirred it idly, watching it dissolve.

"No," she said, "I had utterly misunderstood the scheme of things.

Divinity is not a sad, a solemn, a solitary autocrat demanding selfish tribute, blind allegiance, inexorable self-abas.e.m.e.nt. It is not an insecure tyrant offering bribery for the cringing, frightened servitude demanded."

She looked up smilingly at the man: "Nor, within us, is there any soul in the accepted meaning,--no satellite released at death to revolve around or merge into some super-divinity. No!

"For I believe,--I _know_--that the body--every one's body--is inhabited by a complete G.o.d, immortal, retaining its divine ent.i.ty, beholden to no other deity save only itself, and destined to encounter in a divine democracy and through endless futures, unnumbered brother G.o.ds--the countless divinities which have possessed and shall possess those tenements of mankind which we call our bodies.... You do not, of course, subscribe to such a faith," she added, meeting his gaze.

"Well----" He hesitated. She said:

"Autocracy in heaven is as unthinkable, as unbelievable, and as obnoxious to me as is autocracy on earth. There is no such thing as divine right, here or elsewhere,--no divine prerogatives for tyranny, for punishment, for cruelty."

"How did you happen to embrace such a faith?" he asked, bewildered.

"I was sick of the scheme of things. Suffering, cruelty, death outraged my common sense. It is not in me to say, 'Thy will be done,'

to any autocrat, heavenly or earthly. It is not in me to fawn on the hand that strikes me--or that strikes any helpless thing! No! And the scheme of things sickened me, and I nearly died of it----"

She clenched her hand where it rested on the table, and he saw her face flushed and altered by the fire within. Then she smiled and leaned back in her chair.

"In you," she said gaily, "dwells a G.o.d. In me a G.o.ddess,--a joyous one,--a divine thing that laughs,--a complete and free divinity that is gay and tender, that is incapable of tyranny, that loves all things both, great and small, that exists to serve--freely, not for reward--that owes allegiance and obedience only to the divine and eternal law within its own G.o.dhead. And that law is the law of love.... And that is my subst.i.tute for the scheme of things. Could you subscribe?"

After a silence he quoted: "_Could you and I with Him conspire_----"