She Buildeth Her House Part 9

"Walking with G.o.d," "talking with G.o.d," "a personal G.o.d," "presence of G.o.d,"--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 G.o.d, indeed.

TENTH CHAPTER

PAULA SEES SELMA CROSS IN TRAGEDY, AND IN HER OWN APARTMENT NEXT MORNING IS GIVEN A REALITY TO PLAY

Selma Cross did not reach New York until the morning of the opening day at the _Herriot Theatre_. She was very tired from rehearsals and the try-outs along the string of second cities. There had been a big difference of opinion regarding _The Thing_, among what New Yorkers are pleased to call the provincial critics. From the character of the first notices, on the contrary, it was apparent that the townsmen were not a little afraid to trust such a startling play to New York. Mid-forenoon of an early April day, the actress rapped upon Paula's door.

"I have seen the boards," Paula exclaimed. "'Selma Cross' in letters big as you are; and yesterday afternoon they were hanging the electric sign in front of the _Herriot_. Also I shall be there to-night--since I was wise enough to secure a ticket ten days ago. Isn't it glorious?"

"Yes, I am quite happy about it," Selma Cross said, stretching out upon the lounge. "Of course, it's not over until we see the morning papers. I was never afraid--even of the vitriol-throwers, before. You see, I have to think about success for Stephen Cabot, too."

"Is he well?" Paula asked hastily.

"Oh yes, though I think sometimes he's a martyr. Oh, I have so much to say----"

"You said you would tell me some time how Vhruebert first decided to take you on," Paula urged.

"Before I got to the gate where the star-stuff pa.s.ses through?" Selma Cross answered laughingly. "That was four years ago. I had been to him many times before he let me in. His chair squeaked under him. He looked at me first as if he were afraid I would spring at him. I told him what I could do, and he kept repeating that he didn't know it and New York didn't know it. I said I would show New York, but unfortunately I had to show him first. He screwed up his face and stared at me, as if I were startlingly original in my ugliness. I know he could hear my heart beat.

"'I can't do anything for you, Miss Gross,' he said impatiently, but in spite of himself, he added, 'Come to-morrow.' You see, I had made him think, and that hurt. He knew something of my work all right, and wondered where he would put a big-mouthed, clear-skinned, yellow-eyed amazon. The next day, he kept me waiting in the reception-room until I could have screamed at the half-dressed women on the walls.

"'I don't know exactly why I asked you to come again,' was his greeting when the door finally opened to me. 'What was it, once more, that you mean to do?'

"'I mean to be the foremost tragedienne,' I said.

"'Sit down. Tragedy doesn't bay.'

"'I shall make it pay.'

"'Um-m. How do you know? Some brivate vire of yours?'

"'I can show you that I shall make it pay.'

"'My Gott, not here! We will go to the outskirts.'

"And he meant it, Paula. It was mid-winter. He took me to a little summer-theatre up Lenox way. The place had not been open since Thanksgiving. Vhruebert sat down in the centre of the frosty parquet, s.h.i.+vering in his great coat. You know he's a thin-lipped, smile-less little man, but not such a dead soul as he looks. He leaks out occasionally through the dollar-varnish. Can you imagine a colder reception? Vhruebert sat there blowing out his breath repeatedly, seemingly absorbed in the effect the steam made in a little bar of sunlight which slanted across the icy theatre. That was my try-out before Vhruebert. I gave him some of Sudermann, Boker, and Ibsen. He raised his hand finally, and when I halted, he called in a bartender from the establishment adjoining, and commanded me to give something from Camille and Sapho. I would have murdered him if he had been fooling me after that. The bartender s.h.i.+vered in the cold.

"'What do you think of that, Mr. Vite-Ap.r.o.n?' Vhruebert inquired at length. He seemed to be warmer.

"'Hot stuff,' said the man. 'It makes your coppers sizzle.'

"The criticism delighted Vhruebert. 'Miss Gross, you make our goppers sizzle,' he exclaimed, and then ordered wine and told me to be at his studio to-morrow at eleven. That was the real winning," Selma Cross concluded. "To-night I put the crown on it."

Paula invariably felt the fling of emotions when Selma Cross was near.

The latter seemed now to have found her perfect dream; certainly there was fresh coloring and poise in her words and actions. It was inspiriting for Paula to think of Selma Cross and Stephen Cabot having been accepted by the hard-headed Vhruebert--that such a pair could eat his bread and drink his wine with merry hearts. It was more than inspiriting for her to think of this vibrant heart covering and mothering the physically unfortunate. Paula asked, as only a woman could, the question uppermost in both minds.

"Love me?" Selma whispered. "I don't know, dear. I know we love to be together. I know that I love him. I know that he would not ask me to take for a husband--a broken vessel----"

"But you can make him know that--to you--he is not a broken vessel!...

Oh, that would mean so little to me!"

"Yes, but I should have to tell him--of old Villiers--and the other!...

Oh, G.o.d, he is white fire! He is not the kind who could understand that!... I thought I could do anything, I said, 'I am case-hardened.

Nothing can make me suffer!... I will go my way,--and no man, no power, earthly or occult, can make me alter that way,' but Stephen Cabot has done it. I would rather win for him to-night, than be called the foremost living tragedienne.... I think he loves me, but there is the price I paid--and I didn't need to pay it, for I had already risen out of the depths. That was vanity. I needed no angel. I didn't care until I met Stephen Cabot!"

"I think--I think, if I were Stephen Cabot, I could forgive that," Paula said slowly. She wondered at herself for these words when she was alone, and the little place of books was no longer energized by the other's presence.

Selma started up from the lounge, stretched her great arm half across the room and clutched Paula's hand. There was a soft grateful glow in the big yellow eyes. "Do you know that means something--from a woman like you? Always I shall remember that--as a fine thing from my one fine woman. Mostly, they have hated me--what you call--our sisters."

"You are a different woman--you're all brightened, since you met Stephen Cabot. I feel this," Paula declared.

"Even if all smoothed out here, there is still the old covenant in Kentucky," Selma said, after a moment, and sprang to her feet, shaking herself full-length.

"Won't you tell me about that, too?"

"Yes, but not now. I must go down-town. There is a dress-maker--and _we_ breakfast together.... Root for me--for us, to-night--won't you, dear girl?"

"With all my heart."

They pa.s.sed out through the hall together--just as the elevator-man tucked a letter under the door.... Alone, Paula read this Spring greeting from Quentin Charter:

I look away this morning into the brilliant East. I think of you there--as glory waits. I feel the strength of a giant to battle through dragons of flesh and cataclysms of Nature....

Who knows what conflicts, what conflagrations, rage in the glowing distance--between you and me? Not I, but that I have strength--I do know.... By the golden glory of this wondrous Spring morning which spreads before my eyes a world of work and heroism blessed of the Most High G.o.d, I only ask to know that you are there--_that you are there_.... While eternity is yet young, we shall emerge out of time and distance; though it be from a world altered by great cosmic shattering--yet shall we emerge, serene man and woman.

You are there in the brilliant East. In good time I shall go to you. Meanwhile I have your light and your song. The dull dim brute is gone from me, forever. Even that black prince of the blood, Pa.s.sion, stands beyond the magnetic circle. With you _there_, I feel a divine right kings.h.i.+p, and all the black princes of the body are afar off, herding with the beasts. I tell you, since I have heard the Skylark sing--there is no death.

That day became a vivid memory. Charter reached the highest pinnacle of her mind--a man who could love and who could wait. The message from the West exalted her. Here, indeed, was one of the New Voices. All through the afternoon, out of the hushes of her mind, would rise this paean from the West--sentence after sentence _for her_.... No, not for her alone.

She saw him always in the midst of his people, ill.u.s.trious among his people.... She saw him coming to her over mountains--again and again, she caught a glimpse of him, configured among the peaks, and striding toward her--yet between them was a valley torn with storm.... It came to her that there must be a prophecy in this message; that he would not be suffered to come to her easily as his letters came. Yet, the strength he had felt was hers, and those were hours of ecstasy--while the gray of the Spring afternoon thickened into dark. Only _The Thing_ could have called her out that night; for once, when it was almost time to go, the storm lifted from the valley between them. She saw his path to her, just for an instant, and she longed to see it again....

Paula entered the theatre a moment before the curtain rose, but in the remaining seconds of light, discovered in the fourth aisle far to the right--"the finest, lowest head" and the long white face of Stephen Cabot. If a man's face may be called beautiful, his was--firm, delicate, poetic,--brilliant eyes, livid pallor. And the hand in which the thin cheek rested, while large and chalky-white, was slender as a girl's....

In the middle of the first act, a tall, elderly man shuffled down the aisle and sank into the chair in front of Paula, where he sprawled, preparing to be bored. This was Felix Larch, one of the best known of the metropolitan critics, notorious as a play-killer.

The first-night crowd can be counted on. It meant nothing to Vhruebert that the house was packed. The venture was his up to the rise of the curtain. Paula was absorbed by the first two acts of the play, but did not feel herself fit to judge. She was too intensely interested in the career of Selma Cross; in the face of Stephen Cabot; in the att.i.tudes of Felix Larch, who occasionally forgot to pose. It was all very big and intimate, but the bigger drama, up to the final curtain, was the battle for success against the blase aspirations of the audience and the ultra-critical enemy personified in the man before her.

The small and excellent company was balanced to a crumb. Adequate rehearsals had finished the work. Then the lines were rich, forceful and flowing--strange with a poetic quality that "got across the footlights."

Paula noted these exterior matters with relief. Unquestionably the audience forgot itself throughout the second act. Paula realized, with distaste, that her own critical sense was bristling for trouble. She had hoped to be as receptive to emotional enjoyment as she imagined the average play-goer to be. Though she failed signally in this, her sensibilities were in no way outraged, nor even irritated. On the contrary, she began to rise to the valor of the work and its performance. The acting of Selma Cross, though supreme in repression, was haunting, unforgettable. Felix Larch had twice disturbed her by taking his seat in the midst of the first and second acts. She had heard that he rarely sat out a whole performance, and took it therefore as a good omen when he returned, in quite a gentlemanly fas.h.i.+on, as the final curtain rose.

By some new mastery of style, Selma Cross had managed, almost throughout, to keep her profile to the audience. The last act was half gone, moreover, before the people realized that there were qualities in her voice, other than richness and flexibility. She had held them thus far with the theme, charging the ma.s.sed consciousness of her audience with subtle pa.s.sions. Now came the rising moments. Full into the light she turned her face.... She was quite alone with her tragedy. A gesture of the great bare arm, as the stage darkened, and she turned loose upon the men and women a perfect havoc of emptiness--in the shadows of which was manifesting a huge unfinished human. She made the people see how a mighty pa.s.sion, suddenly bereft of its object, turns to devour the brain that held it. They saw the great, gray face of _The Thing_ slowly rubbed out--saw the mind behind it, soften and run away into chaos. There was a whisper, horrible with exhaustion--a breast beaten in the gloom.

Felix Larch swore softly.... _The Thing_ was laughing as the curtain crawled down over her--an easy, wind-blown, chattering laugh....

The critic grasped the low shoulders of a bald, thin-lipped acquaintance, exclaiming:

"Where did you get that diadem, Lucky One?"