She Buildeth Her House Part 1

She Buildeth Her House.

by Will Comfort.

FIRST CHAPTER

PAULA ENCOUNTERS THE REMARKABLE EYES OF HER FIRST GIANT, AND HEARKENS TO THE SECOND, THUNDERING AFAR-OFF

Paula Linster was twenty-seven when two invading giants entered the country of her heart. On the same day, these hosts, each unconscious of the other, crossed opposite borders and verged toward the prepared citadel between them.

Reifferscheid, though not one of the giants, found Paula a distraction in brown, when she entered his office before nine in the morning, during the fall of 1901. He edited the rather distinguished weekly book-page of _The States_, and had come to rely upon her for a paper or two in each issue. There had been rain in the night. The mellow October sunlight was strange with that same charm of maturity which adds a glow of attraction to motherhood. The wonderful autumn haze, which broods over our zone as the spirit of ripening grains and tinting fruits, just perceptibly shaded the vivid sky. A sentence Paula had heard somewhere in a play, "My G.o.d, how the sun does s.h.i.+ne!" appealed to her as particularly fitting for New York on such a morning. Then in the streets, so lately flooded, the brilliant new-washed air was sweet to breathe.

Paula had felt the advisability the year before of adding somewhat to her income. Inventory brought out the truth that not one of her talents had been specialized to the point of selling its product. She had the rare sense to distinguish, however, between a certain joyous inclination to write and a marked ability for producing literature; and to recognize her own sound and sharp appreciation of what was good in the stirring tide of books. Presenting herself to Reifferscheid, princ.i.p.ally on account of an especial liking for the book-page of _The States_, she never forgot how the big man looked at her that first time over his spectacles, as if turning her pages with a sort of psychometric faculty.

He found her possible and several months won her not a little distinction in the work.

Reifferscheid was a fat, pondrous, heavy-spectacled devourer of work. He compelled her real admiration--"the American St. Beuve," she called him, because he was so tireless, and because he sniffed genius from afar.

There was something unreservedly charming to her, in his sense of personal victory, upon discovering greatness in an unexpected source.

Then he was so big, so common to look at; kind as only a bear of a man can be; so wise, so deep, and with such a big smoky factory of a brain, full of fascinating crypts. Subcutaneous laughter that rested her internally for weeks lingered about certain of the large man's sayings.

Even in the auditing of her account, she felt his kindness.

"Now here are some essays by Quentin Charter--a big man, a young man and a slow worker," he said. "Charter's first volume was a thunderer. We greeted it with a whoop two years ago. Did you see it?"

"No," Paula replied. "I was too strong for literary trifles then."

"Anyway, look out for Charter. He didn't start to appear until he was an adult. He's been everywhere, read everything and has a punch like a projectile. An effective chap, this Charter. He dropped in to see me a few weeks after my review. He confessed the critics had made him very glad.... 'I am doing a second book,' he confided to me. 'Down on my knees to it. Work-shop stripped of encomiums; no more dinner-parties or any of that fatness. Say, it's a queer thing about making a book. You never can tell whether it's to be a boy or a girl....'"

Paula smiled reservedly.

"I asked him what his second book was to be about," Reifferscheid went on. "'Women,' said he. 'How novel!' said I. He grinned genially.

'Reifferscheid,' he declared, in his snappy way, 'women are interesting.

They're doing the thinking nowadays. They're getting there. One of these mornings, man will wake up to the fact that he's got to be born again to get in a cla.s.s with his wife. Man is mixed up with altogether too much of this down-town madness. Women don't want votes, public office, or first-hand dollars. _They want men!_' ... I always remembered that little bit of stuff from Charter. He says the time will come when cla.s.sy girls will get their heads together and evolve this ultimatum, which will be handed intact to adorers: 'No, boys, we can't marry you. We haven't any illusions about celibacy. It isn't nice nor attractive, but it's better than being yoked with hucksters and peddlers who come up-town at night--mental cripples in empty wagons. Go away and learn what life means, what it means to be men--_what it means to us for you to be men_! Learn how to live--and oh, boys, hurry back!'"

"Splendid!" Paula exclaimed.

"Oh, yes, Charter is a full deck and a joker. He's lived. He makes you feel him. His years are veritable campaigns. He has dangled in the vortices of human action and human pa.s.sion--and seemed to come out whole!..." Reifferscheid chuckled at a memory. "'Women are interesting,'

Charter finished in his dry fas.h.i.+on. 'I just got to them lately. I wish I could know them all.'"

"I love the book already," Paula said. Reifferscheid laughed inwardly at the feminine way she held the volume in both hands, pressing it close.

"It's the only book on my table this morning that I'd like to read," he added. "Therefore I give it to you. There's no fun in giving something you don't want.... Are you going to hear Bellingham to-night?"

She was conscious of an unaccountable dislike at the name, a sense of inward chill. It was almost as reckonable as the pleasure she felt in the work and personality of Quentin Charter.

"Who's Bellingham?" Paula swallowed dryly after the first utterance of the name.

"Mental magician. I only mentioned him, because you so seldom miss the unusual, and are so quick to hail a new cult or odd mental specimen."

"Magician--surely?" she asked.

"He comes rather stoutly recommended as such," Reifferscheid replied, "though personally mine is more than a healthy skepticism. There's a notice this morning of his lectures. He recently hypnotized a man to whom the medical profession was afraid to administer an anaesthetic--held him painless during a long and serious operation. Then Bellingham is the last word in alchemy, feminine emotions, causes of hysteria, longevity, the proportions of male and female in each person; also he renews the vital principle, advises unions, makes you beautiful, and has esoteric women's cla.s.ses. A G.o.dey's Ladies' man. Some provincial husband will shoot him presently."

Paula took the surface car home, because the day was so rare and the crowd was still downward bent. The morning paper contained an announcement of Quentin Charter's new book, and a sketch of the author.

A strange, talented figure, new in letters, the article said. The paragraphs had that fresh glow of a publisher's perennial high hope.

Here was the book of a man who had lived; who drew not only upon art, history, and philosophy for his prisms of thought, but who had roamed and worked and ridden with men, keeping a sensitive finger ever at the pulse of nature; a man who had never in the most insignificant degree lowered the import or artificially raised the tension of his work to adjust it to the fancied needs of the public. In spite of the enthusiastic phrasing, everything about Charter fascinated her; even the make-up of the unread book in her hand, and the sentences that gleamed from the quickly turned pages.

She had ridden many squares, when the name of Dr. Bellingham stood out before her eyes in the newspaper. The chill in her arteries was perceptible as before, when Reifferscheid spoke the name. It was as the latter had said--the famous healer and telepathist was to start a series of cla.s.ses for women.

Paula lived alone in a small apartment at the _Zoroaster_, "Top-side o'

Park." Few friends, many books, within a car ride of the world's best fruition in plays, lectures, music, and painting--yet the reality of it all was the expansion of her mind in the days and nights alone. The subtle relations of things encroached upon her intelligence with a steady and certain trend. She never had to pa.s.s, like so many of cruder nature, through the horrid trials of materialism; nor to be painfully bruised in mind from buffeting between manhandled creeds and the pure ethics of the Lord Christ. Hers was not an aggressive masculine originality, but the complement of it--that inspiring, completing feminine intelligence, elastic to a man's hard-won concepts and ready with a crown for them.

Something of this type of woman, the big-brained brothers of men have written and chiselled, painted, sung and dreamed of, since human thought first lifted above the appet.i.tes. There must be a bright answer for each man's particular station of evolution in the world's dumfounding snarl of the s.e.xes--one woman to lighten his travail and accelerate his pa.s.sage to the Uplands. For we are but half-men, man and woman alike.

The whole is two, whose union forms One.... This is the key to Nature's arcanum; this, the one articulate sentence from all the restless murmuring out of the past; this, the stupendous Purpose weaving the million thrilling and truant activities of the present hour--the clean desire for completion--the union of two which forms One.

The search for this completing woman is the secret of man's roving in the gardens of sense. His frequent falls into abysmal depravity are but results incidental to the occultations of his Guide Star. From reptiles in the foul smoke of chaos, to the lifted spines of manhood on a rising road, Man has come; and by the interminable torture of the paths which sink behind, he has the other half of eternity to reach the Top.

From a child whose fairies were only enchanted into books for day-time convenience, darkness to Paula meant visions, indeed. Often now at night, though she never spoke of it, the little apartment was peopled by the spirits of her reading and her ideals--mystics, priests, prophets, teachers, ascetics. To the congenial dark they came--faces unlike any she had ever seen, but quite unmistakable in her dreamings. Once when she pampered a natural aversion to meat for several months, soft foot-falls and low voices (which had nothing whatever to do with her neighbors across the hall, or the elevator-man in any pa.s.sage) began to rouse her in the night. New York is no place for such refinements of sense, and she checked these manifestations through physical exercise and increased diet. She was seldom afraid, but there was a tension in all her imaginings, and she grew marvellously in this twenty-eighth year--furnis.h.i.+ng her mind more sumptuously than she knew. Reifferscheid saw this in her eyes and in her work.

Throughout the swiftly pa.s.sing day, Paula realized that she would go to Prismatic Hall in West Sixty-seventh Street, where Dr. Bellingham was to organize his lecture-course that night. Against this foreknowledge was a well-defined distaste for the man and his work. Between the two, the thought of the evening crowded frequently into mind until she became impatient with herself at the importance it a.s.sumed. It was with a certain feminine manipulation of conscience, so deft as almost to be unconscious, that she excused her own curiosity on the ground that her disfavor for the doctor and his message would be strengthened by the first meeting, beyond the need of further experience.

One concession she made to her natural aversion--that of going late. She was in a mood poignantly critical. The real Paula Linster, she fancied, was at home, "Top-side o' Park"; here was just a sophisticated professional surface, such as reporters carry about. The Hall was packed with women; the young and the jaded; faces of pup-innocence; faces bitten from terrible expeditions to the poles of sense; faces tired and thick from the tread of an orient of emotions; slow-roving eyes which said, "I crave--I crave! I have lost the sense of reality, but seven sick and pampered organs crave within me!"

The thought came to Paula--to be questioned afterward--that man's evil, after all, is rudimentary compared to a worldly woman's; man's soul not so complicated, nor so irrevocably identified with his sensual organism.

She could not avoid pondering miserably upon woman's innate love for far ventures into sensation, permitting these ventures to be called (if the world would) searches for the holy grail. The inevitable attraction for women which specialists of the body possess, actually startled her.

Bellingham was one of these. On the surface of all his sayings, and all comment about him, was the bland, deadly insinuation that the soul expands in the pursuit of bodily health. About his name was the mystery of his age, whispers of his physical perfection, intimations of romantic affairs, the suggestion of his miraculous performances upon the emotions--the whole gamut of activities designed to make him the instant aversion of any normal member of his own s.e.x. Yet the flock of females had settled about him, as they have settled about every black human plague--and glorious messiah--since the birth of days.

The thrilled, expectant look on several faces brought to Paula's mind the type of her sisters who relish being shocked; whose exaltations are patently those of emotional contact; who call physical excitement the glorifying of their spirit, and cannot be persuaded to confess otherwise. Woman as a negation for man to play upon never distressed her before with such direct and certain pressure. Here were women intent upon encountering a new sensation; women who devoutly breathed the name of Motherhood next to G.o.dhood, and yet endured their pregnancy with organic rebellion and mental loathing; women who could not conceive of love apart from the embrace of man, and who imagine a "message" in deformed and salacious novels, making such books popular; women of gold-leaf culture whose modesty fastens with a bow--narrow temples of infinite receptivity....

Why had they come? In the perfect feminine system of information, the whisper had run: "Bellingham is wonderful. Bellingham tells you how to live forever. Bellingham teaches the renewal of self and has esoteric cla.s.ses--_for the few_!" They had the sanction of one another. There was no scandal in being there openly, nor any instinct, apparently, to warn them that secret cla.s.ses to discover how to live forever, had upon the surface no very tonic flavor. The digest of the whole matter was that revelations sooner or later would be made to a certain few, and that these revelations, which would be as fine oil upon the mental surfaces of many women near her, would act as acid upon the male mind generally.

In the sickening distaste for herself and for those who had to make no concession to themselves for coming, inasmuch as society permitted; and who would be heartfully disappointed in a lecture on hygiene that did not discuss the more intimate matters of the senses, Paula did not appraise the opposite s.e.x at any higher value. She merely reviewed matters which had come to her vividly as some of the crowning frailties of her own kind. The centre of the whole affair, Dr. Bellingham, was now introduced.

He looked like a Dane at first glance. His was the size, the dusty look and the big bone of a Dane; the deep, downy paleness of cheek, the tumbled, though not mussy hair. He was heavy without being adipose, lean, but big-boned; his face was lined with years, though miraculously young in the texture of skin. The lips of a rather small and feminine mouth were fresh and red as a girl's. In the softness of complexion and the faintest possible undertone of color, it was impossible not to think of perfected circulation and human health brought to truest rhythm. The costliest lotions cannot make such a skin. It is organic harmony.

Exterior decoration does not delude the seeing eye any more than a powder-magazine becomes an innocent cottage because its walls are vine-clad.... Directly behind her, Paula now heard a slow whisper:

"I knew him twenty-five years ago, and he is not a moment older to look at."

She seemed to have heard the voice before, and though the sentence surged with a dark significance through her mind, she did not turn.

Bellingham's words were now caressing the intelligence of his audience.

To Paula, his soft mouth was indescribably odious with cultured pa.s.sion, red with replenishment, fresh with that sinister satisfaction which inevitably brings to mind a second figure, fallen, drained. His presence set to quivering within her, fears engendered from the great occult past. Strange deviltries would always be shadowed about the Bellingham image in her mind.... Here was a man who made a shrine of his body, invested it with a heavy hungering G.o.d, and taught others--women--to bow and to serve.

To her the body was but a nunnery which enclosed for a time an eternal element. This was basic, incontrovertible to her understanding. All that placated the body and helped to make fleshly desires last long, was hostile to the eternal element. Not that the body should be abused or neglected, but kept as nearly as possible a clean vessel for the spirit, brought to a fine automatic functioning. It was as clear to Paula Linster as the faces of the women about her, that the splendid sacrifice of Jesus was not that He had died upon the Cross, but that He put on flesh in the beginning for the good of infant-souled men.... To eat sparingly of that which is good; to sleep when weary; to require cleanliness and pure air--these were the physical laws which worked out easily for decent minds. Beyond such simple affairs, she did not allow the body often to rule her brain. When, indeed, the potentialities of her s.e.x stirred within, Paula felt that it was the down-pull of the old brood-mother, Earth, and not the lifting of wings.

Bellingham's voice correlated itself, not with the eyes and brow, but with the Lilith mouth--that strangely unpunished mouth. It was soft, suave. There was in it the warmth of breath. The high white forehead and the tousled brown hair, leonine in its masculinity--seemed foreign as another man's. She hearkened to the voice of a doctor used to women; one who knows women without illusion, whom you could imagine saying, "Why bless you, women never say 'no.'"

The eyes were blue-gray, but toned very darkly. The iris looked small in contrast to the expanse of clear white. They were fixed like a bird's in expression, incapable of warming or softening, yet one did not miss the impression that they could brighten and harden, even to s.h.i.+ning in the dark. Heavy blonde brows added a look of severity.

Paula's spirit, as if recognizing an old and mortal enemy, gathered about itself every human protecting emotion. Frankly hateful, she surveyed the man, listening. He talked marvellously; even in her hostility, she had to grant that. The great sunning cat was in his tones, but the words were joined into clean-thought expression, rapid, vivid, unanswerable. He did not speak long; the first meeting was largely formative. Paula knew he was studying his company, and watched him peer into the faces of the women. His mouth occasionally softened in the most winsome and engaging way, while his words ran on with the refined wisdom of ages. And always to her, his eyes stood out cold, hard, deadly.