She Buildeth Her House Part 16

"I have always been very fond of and grateful to you. It was the whole life that the drinking carried me into--that I had such horror for when, when I became well."

"You got well very suddenly after you left me," she told him. Her huge face was livid, and her lips dry.

"On the contrary, I was a long time ill." Her temper chilled his attempts at sincerity.

"It looked so from those first few--letters, is rather a dignified word."

"I say it with shame, I was practically unable to write. I was burnt out when I left here. I had been to Asia--gone from home seven months--and the returning fool permitted the bars to welcome him----"

"You seized a moment to dictate a letter----"

"Silence would have been far better," he said. "I see that now. My only idea was to let you hear. Writing myself was out of the question by that time."

"You wrote an article about stage people--with all the loftiness of an anaemic priest."

"That was written before I left here--written and delivered----"

"All the worse, that you could write such an article--while you were spending so much time with me."

"I have never belittled what you gave me, Selma. I could praise you, without admiring the stage. You are amazingly different. I think that's why New York is talking about you to-night. I had made many trips to New York and knew many stage people, before I met you. If you had belonged to the type familiar to me, I should have needed a stronger stimulus than drink to force an interest. Had there been others like you--had I even encountered 'five holy ones in the city'--I should not have written that stage article, or others before it."

"You were one with the Broadway Glowworms, Quentin Charter. Few of them drank so steadily as you."

"I have already told you that for a long time I was an unutterable fool.

Until three years ago, I did not begin to know--the breath of life."

Selma Cross arose and paced the room, stretching out her great arms from time to time as she walked. "You're getting back your glibness," she exclaimed, "your quick little sentences which fit in so nicely! Ah, I know them well, as other women are learning them. But I have things which you cannot answer so easily--you of the garret penances.... You find a starved woman of thirty--play with her for a fortnight, showing her everything that she can desire, and seeming to have no thought, but of her. I discover that there was not a moment in which you were so ardent that you forgot to be an a.n.a.lyst. I forgive that, as you might forgive things in my day's work. You put on your gray garret-garb, and forget the hearts of my people, to uncover their weaknesses before the world--you, so recently one of us, and none more drunk or drained with the dawn--than you! Such preaching is not good to the nostrils, but I forgive that. You are sick, and even the drink won't warm you, so you leave me at a moment's notice----"

"There was another reason."

"Hear me out, first," she commanded.... "To you, it is just, 'Adios, my dear'; to me, it is an uprooting--oh, I don't mind telling you. I was overturned in that furrow, left naked for the long burning day, but I remembered my work--the work you despise! I, who had reason to know how n.o.ble your pen can be, forgave even those first paltry letters, filled with excuses such as a cheap clerk might write. I forgave the dictation, because it said you were ill--forgave the silences.... But when you came to New York six months afterwards, and did not so much as 'phone or send me a card of greeting--Selma called in her silly tears."

"It was vile ingrat.i.tude," he said earnestly. "That's where my big fault lay. I wonder if you would try to understand the only palliation. You were strangely generous and wonderful in your ways. I did not cease to think of that. Personally, you are far above the things I came to abhor.

No one understands but the victim, what alcohol does to a man when it gets him down. I tried to kill myself. I became convalescent literally by force. Slowly approaching the normal again, I was glad enough to live, but the horrors never leave the mind entirely. Everything connected with the old life filled me with shuddering fear. I tell you no one hates alcohol like a drunkard fresh in his reform."

"But I did not make you drink," she said impatiently. "I'm not a drink-loving woman."

Charter's face flushed. The interview was becoming a farce. It had been agony for him to make this confession. She would not see that he realized his ingrat.i.tude; that it was his derangement caused by indulging low propensities which made him identify her with the days of evil.

"I know that very well, Selma Cross," he said wearily, "but the stage is a part of that old life, that sick night-life that runs eternally around the belt-line."

She hated him for reverting to this point. Holding fast to what she still had to say, the actress picked up a broken thread. "You said there was another reason why you left New York so suddenly."

Charter expected now to learn if any one were listening. He was cold with the thought of the interview being weighed in the balances of a third mind.

"You've made a big point of my going away," he essayed. "The other reason is not a pretty matter, and doubtless you will call any repugnance of mine an affectation----"

"Repugnance--what do you mean?" she asked savagely, yet she was afraid, afraid of his cool tongue. "I never lied to you."

"That may be true. I'm not curious for evidence to the contrary. The day before I left for the West, a friend told me that you and I were being watched; that all our movements were known. I didn't believe it; could not see the sense--until it was proved that same night by the devious walk we took.... You doubtless remember the face of that young night-bird whom we once laughed about. We thought it just one of those coincidences which frequently occur--a certain face bobbing up everywhere for a number of days. I a.s.sured myself that night that you knew nothing of this remarkable outside interest in our affairs."

Selma Cross, with swift stealth, disappeared into the apartment-hall and closed the outer door; then returned, facing him. Her yellow eyes were wide open, filled with a misty, tortured look. To Charter the place and the woman had become haggard with emptiness. He missed the occasional click of the elevator in the outer-hall, for it had seemed to keep him in touch with the world's activities. The old carnal magnetism of Selma Cross stirred not a tissue in him now; the odor of her garments which once roused him, was forbidding. He had not the strength to believe that the door had been shut for any other reason than to prevent Skylark from hearing. The actress had not minded how their voices carried, so long as _he_ was being arraigned.... The air was devitalized. It was as if they were dying of heart-break--without a sound.... It had been so wonderful--this thought of finding his mate after the aeons, his completion--a woman beautiful with soul-age and spiritual light....

Selma Cross was speaking. Charter stirred from his great trouble. She was changed, no longer the clever mistress of a dramatic hour.... Each was so burdened with a personal tragedy that pity for the other was slow to warm between them.

"Do you mean that old Villiers paid the night-bird to watch us--to learn where we went, and possibly what we said?" she was saying hoa.r.s.ely.

Selma Cross felt already that her cad was exploded.

"Yes, and that was unpleasant," Charter told her. "I didn't like the feel of that procurer's eyes, but what revolted me was Villiers himself.

I took pains to learn his name the next day--that last day. There isn't a more unclean human package in New York.... It was so unlike you. I couldn't adjust the two. I couldn't be where he had been. I was sick with my own degradation. I went back to my garret."

Selma Cross was crippled; she saw there was no lie in this. At what a price had been bought the restoration of faith for Paula Linster!... She had heard after their compact about Villiers' early days. There had been times when her fingers itched to tighten upon his scrawny throat. To have Quentin Charter hear this record was fire in her veins; it embraced the added horror that Stephen Cabot might also hear.... There was nothing further with which to charge the man before her. She nursed her wrath to keep from crying out.

"Was it a man's way to give me no chance to explain?" she demanded.

"Broadway knew Villiers."

"I did not!"

"Anyway, I couldn't get it straight in my mind, then," Charter said hastily. "You're no vulgar woman, mad after colors and dollars. You love your work too much to be one of those insatiable deserts of pa.s.sion. Nor are you a creature of black evolution who prefers the soul, to the body of man, for a plaything.... You were all that was generous and normally fervent with me.... Let's cut the subject. It does not excuse me for not calling when I came to New York. You were nothing if not good to me."

"Then Villiers paid to find out things about us," she said slowly. "He said you bragged about such matters to your friends."

Charter s.h.i.+vered. "I fail to see how you troubled about a man not writing--if you could believe that about him."

"I didn't see how he could know our places of meeting--any other way. I should never have seen him again, if he hadn't made me believe this of you."

Charter scarcely heard her. The thought was inevitable now that the actress might have represented him to Skylark as one with the loathed habit of talking about women to his friends. The quick inclination to inquire could not overcome his distaste for mentioning a dear name in this room. The radiant, flas.h.i.+ng spirit behind the letters did not belong here.... His brain ached with emptiness; he wondered continually how he could ever fill the s.p.a.ces expanded by the Skylark's singing....

In the brain of Selma Cross a furious struggle was joined. Never before had she been given to see so clearly her own limitations--and this in the high light of her great dramatic triumph. Her womanhood contained that mighty quality of wors.h.i.+ping intellect. This, she had loved in Charter long ago; in Stephen Cabot now. The inner key to her greatness was her capacity to forget the animal in man--if he proved a brain.

There is only one higher reverence--that of forgetting brain to wors.h.i.+p soul. Perceiving the att.i.tude of Quentin Charter to her old life, it was made clear to her that she must preserve a lie in her relation with Stephen Cabot; if, indeed, the playwright did not learn outside, as Charter had done. It was plain that he did not know yet, since he had not run from her--to a garret somewhere. What a hideous mockery was this night--begun in pride! Distantly she was grateful that Paula Linster was at hand to be restored, but her own mind was whipped and cowed by its thoughts--so there was little energy for another's romance.... Charter had made no comment on her last remark. She realized now that his thoughts were bearing him close to the truth.

"You say they forced you to cast out your enemy," she declared hoa.r.s.ely.

"I cast out mine of my own accord. If there is palliation for you, there should be for a woman in her first experience. You asked me to stretch my imagination about a drink-reaction making you avoid me. I ask you, how is a woman, for the first time alone with a man--to know that he is different from other men? Add to this, a woman who has come up from the dregs--for years in the midst of the slum-blooms of the chorus? What I heard from them of their nights--would have taxed the versatility of even Villiers--to make me see him lower than I expected! I ask you--how did I know he was an exception--rather than the rule among the Glowworms?"

"I'm rather glad you said that," Charter declared quickly. "It's a point of view I'm grateful for. Do you wonder that the life from which you have risen to one of the regnant queens has become inseparable in my mind with shuddering aversion?"

In the extremity of her suffering, her mind had reverted, as an artist's always does when desperately pressed, to thoughts of work--work, the healer, the refuge where devils truly are cast out. Even in her work she now encountered the lash, since Charter despised it. Literally, she was at bay before him.

"Always that!" she cried. "It is detestable in you always to blame my work. I broke training. I should have won without the d.a.m.ned angel. You degraded yourself for years in your work, but I don't hear you blaming art for your debaucheries! You have sat alone so long that you think all men outside are foul. You sit high in your attic, so that all men look like bugs below!"

"There is something in what you say," he answered, aroused by her bigness and strength. "Yet in my garret, I do not deal with rootless abstractions. Everything has its foundation in actual observation. I moved long among the play-managers, and found them men of huckster-minds--brainless money-bags, dependent upon every pa.s.sing wind of criticism. I tell you, when one talked to them or to their office-apes--one felt himself, his inner-self, rus.h.i.+ng forth as if to fill something bottomless----"

"You do not know Vhruebert----"

"Eliminate him. I am not speaking of any particular man. I do not mean all playwrights when I say that I found playwrights as a cla.s.s, not literary workers--but literary tricksters. I am not speaking of _The Thing_, nor of its author, of whom I have heard excellent word--when I say that plays are not written, but rewritten by elementals, who, through their sheer coa.r.s.eness, sense the slow vibrations of the mob, and feculate the original lines to suit."

"Bah--an idea from one of your nights, when you tried to drown the blue devils! It broods over all your thinking! You forget the great army, that silent army, which is continually lifting itself artistically by writing one after another--impossible plays. You forget the great hearts of the players--men and women who pull together for big results."