She Buildeth Her House Part 5

"I truly wish," he added softly, and with a kindness she felt, because her eyes were turned from him, "that you would join one of my wiser cla.s.ses. You would be an inspiration. Besides, the little things that have been given me to tell--should be known by the very few who have reached your degree of evolution."

"Thank you," she faltered. "I must think."

"Good-by, Miss Linster."

Reaching the street in front of her apartment house, she turned just in time to see him disappear among the trees. He strode forward as if this were his world, and his days had been a continuous pageant of victories.... Her rooms were all cleared of disorder, her mind refreshed and stimulated.... That night between eleven and twelve she was writing to Charter. There were a half dozen penned pages before her, and a smile on her lips. She poured out a full heart to the big Western figure of cleanliness and strength--wrote to the man she wanted him to be.... The day had been strange and expanding. She had suffered no evil. The thoughts remaining with her from the talk in the Park were large with significance, and they had cleared slowly from the murkiness of their source. These, and the ideal of manhood she was building out of Charter's book and letter and Reifferscheid's little sketch of him, had made the hours rich with healing. She was tired but steady-nerved as she wrote.... There was a faint tapping at her hall-door.

FIFTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE FURIOUS HISTORY OF SELMA CROSS AND WRITES A LETTER TO QUENTIN CHARTER

Paula thrust the sheets of the letter in her desk drawer and admitted Selma Cross, an actress whose apartment was across the hall. These two had chatted together many times, sometimes intimately. Each had found the other interesting. Hints of a past that was almost cla.s.sic in the fury of its struggle for publicity, had repeatedly come to Paula's ears, with other matters she greatly would have preferred not to hear. Selma Cross was huge to look upon, and at first thought without grace. There was something uncanny in her face and movements, and an extraordinary breadth between her yellow eyes which were wide-lidded, slow-moving and ever-changing. She was but little past thirty, yet the crowded traffic of her years was intricately marked.

"I saw the light under your door, and felt like coming in for a few minutes," she said. "I must talk to some one and my maid, Dimity, is snoring. You see, I'm celebrating for two reasons."

"Tell me, so I can help," Paula answered.

"Vhruebert has taken a play for me. You know, I've been begging him to for months. The play was made for me--not that it was written with me in mind, but that I just suit it. Selma Cross is to be carved in light over a theatre-entrance, twenty seconds from Broadway--next April. It will be at the _Herriot_--Vhruebert's theatre. We run through Hartford, Springfield, Rochester and that string of second cities earlier in the Spring."

Paula rose and gave both her hands.

"Oh, I'm so glad for you," she said. "I know something about how you have worked for this----"

"Yes, and the play is _The Thing_. I am an ugly slaving drudge, but have all the emotions that the sweet _ingenue_ of the piece should have, and the audience watches me deliver. Yes, I've waited long for this, and yet I'm not so glad as I thought I should be. I've been pretty sure of it for the last year or two. I said I was celebrating for two things----"

"Pray, what is the other?"

"I forget that it might not interest you--though it certainly does me,"

Selma Cross said with a queer, low laugh.... "He wasn't ugly about it, but he has been exacting--ugh! The fact is, I have earned the privilege at last of sleeping in my own respectable apartment."

Paula couldn't help s.h.i.+vering a bit. "You mean you have left your----"

"Oh, he wasn't my husband.... It's such a luxury to pay for your own things--for your own house and clothes and dinners--to earn a dollar for every need and one to put away.... You didn't think that I could get my name above the name of a play--without an angel?"

"I didn't know," Paula said, "I saw you with him often. It didn't exactly occur to me that he was your husband, because he didn't come here. But do you mean that now when you don't need him any longer--you told him to go away?"

"Just that--except it isn't at all as it looks. You wouldn't pity old man Villiers. Living G.o.d, that's humorous--after what I have given.

Don't look for wings on theatrical angels, dear."

It was plain that the woman was utterly tired. She regarded Paula with a queer expression of embarra.s.sment, and there was a look of harsh self-repression under the now-drooped eyelids.

"I don't apologize," she went on hastily. "What I have done, I would do again--only earlier in the game, but you're the sort of woman I don't like to have look at me that--I mean look down upon me. I haven't many friends. I think I must be half wild, but you make the grade that I have--and you pay the price.... You've always looked attractive to me--so easy and finished and out of the ruck."

There was a real warming sincerity in the words. Paula divined on the instant that she could forever check an intimacy--by a word which would betray the depth of her abhorrence for such a concession to ambition, and for the life which seems to demand it. Selma Cross was sick for a friend, sick from containing herself. On this night of achievement there was something pitiful in the need of her heart.

"New York has turned rather too many pages of life before my eyes, Selma, for me to feel far above any one whose struggles I have not endured."

The other leaned forward eagerly, "I liked you from the first moment, Paula," she said. "You were so rounded--it seemed to me. I'm all streaky, all one-sided. You're bred. I'm cattle.... Some time I'll tell you how it all began. I said I would be the greatest living tragedienne--hurled this at a lot of cat-minds down in Kentucky fifteen years ago. Of course, I shall. It does not mean so much to me as I thought, and it may be a bauble to you, but I wanted it. Its far-awayness doesn't torture me as it once did, but one pays a ghastly price. Yes, it's a climb, dear. You must have bone and blood and brain--a sort of brain--and you should have a cheer from below; but I didn't. I wonder if there ever was a fight that can match mine? If so, it would not be a good tale for children or grown-ups with delicate nerves. Little women always hated me. I remember, one restaurant cas.h.i.+er on Eighth Avenue told me I was too unsightly to be a waitress. I have done kitchen pot-boilers and scrubbed tenement-stairs. Then, because I repeated parts of plays in those horrid halls--they said I was crazy....

Why, I have felt a perfect l.u.s.t for suicide--felt my breast ache for a cool knife and my hand rise gladly. Once I played a freak part--that was my greater degradation--debased my soul by making my body look worse than it is. I went down to h.e.l.l for that--and was forgiven. I have been so homesick, Paula, that I could have eaten the dirt in the road of that little Kentucky town.... Yes, I pressed against the steel until something broke--it was the steel, not me. Oh, I could tell you much!..."

She paused but a moment.

"The thing so dreadful to overcome was that I have a body like a great Dane. It would not have hurt a writer, a painter, even a singer, so much, but we of the drama are so dependent upon the shape of our bodies.

Then, my face is like a dog or a horse or a cat--all these I have been likened to. Then I was slow to learn repression. This is a part of culture, I guess--breeding. Mine is a lineage of Kentucky poor white trash, who knows, but a speck of 'n.i.g.g.e.r'? I don't care now, only it gave me a temper of seven devils, if it was so. These are some of the things I have contended with. I would go to a manager and he would laugh me along, trying to get rid of me gracefully, thinking that some of his friends were playing a practical joke on him. Vhruebert thought that at first. Vhruebert calls me _The Thing_ now. I could have done better had I been a cripple; there are parts for a cripple. And you watch, Paula, next January when I burn up things here, they'll say my success is largely due to my figure and face!"

As she looked and listened, Paula saw great meanings in the broad big countenance, a sort of ruffian strength to carry this perfecting instrument of emotion. The great body was needed to support such talents, handicapped by the lack of beauty. Selma Cross fascinated her.

Paula's heart went out to the great crude creature she had been--in pity for this woman of furious history. The processes by which her brain and flesh had been refined would have slain the body and mind of an ordinary human. It came to Paula that here was one of Mother Nature's most enthralling experiments--the evolution of an effective instrument from the coa.r.s.est and vaguest heredity.

"They are all brainless but Vhruebert. You see, unless one is a beauty, you can't get the support of a big manager's name. I mean without money--there are managers who will lend their name to your stardom, if you take the financial risk. Otherwise, you've got to attract them as a possible conquest. All men are like that. If you interest them s.e.xually--they will hear what you have to say----"

"Isn't that a reckless talk?" Paula asked, pale from the repulsiveness of the thought. "You say it without a single qualification----"

Selma Cross stared at her vacantly for a few seconds, then laughed softly. "You don't actually believe--to the contrary?"

"Let's pa.s.s it by. I should have to be changed--to believe that!"

"I hope the time will never come when you need something terribly from a strange man--one upon whom you have no hold but--yourself.... Ah, but you--the brighter sort would give you what you asked. You----"

"Please don't go on!" Paula whispered. "The other part is so interesting."

Selma Cross seemed to stir restlessly in her loose, softly-scented garments. "I suppose I'm too rough for you. In ninety-nine women out of a hundred, I'd say your protest was a cheap affectation, but it isn't so with you...."

"It's your set, smothery pessimism that hurts so, Selma," Paula declared intensely. "It hurts me most because you seem to have it so locked and immovable inside.... You have been so big and wonderful to win against tremendous obstacles--not against ugliness--I can't grant that. You startled me, when I saw you first. I think women have held you apart because you were uncommon. You show a strange power in your movements and expression. It's not ugliness----"

"That's mighty rare of you. I haven't had the pleasure of being defied like that before. But you are not like other people--not like other women."

"You will meet many real men and women--wiser and kinder than I am. I think your pessimism cannot endure--when you look for the good in people----"

"The kind I have known would not let me. They're just as hateful now--I mean the stuffy dolls of the stage--just as hateful, calling me 'dear'

and 'love' and saying, 'How tremendous you are, Selma Cross!....'

Listen, it is only a little while ago that the same women used to ask me to walk on Broadway with them--to use me as a foil for their baby faces!

Oh, women are horrible--dusty shavings inside--and men are of the same family."

"You poor, dear unfortunate--not to know the really wonderful kind! You are worn to the bone from winning your victory, but when you're rested, you'll be able to see the beautiful--clearly."

"One only knows as far as one can see."

This sentence was a shock to Paula's intelligence. It was spoken without consciousness of the meaning which drove so deep into the other's mind.

It suggested a mind dependent altogether upon physical eyes. Paula refused to believe that this was the key to the whole matter.

"They have been so cruel to me--those female things which bloom a year,"

Selma Cross continued. "Flesh-flowers! They harried me to martyrdom. I had to hate them, because I was forced to be one with them--I, a big savage, dreaming unutterable things. It's all so close yet, I haven't come to pity them.... Maybe you can tell me what good they are--what they mean in the world--the shallow, brainless things who make the stage full! They are in factories, too, everywhere--daughters of the coolies and peasants of Europe--only worse over here because their fathers have lost their low fixed place in society, and are all mixed in their dim, brute minds. They have no one to rule them. You will see a family of dirty, frightened, low-minded children--the eldest, say a girl of fifteen. A dog or a cat with a good home is rich beside them. Take this eldest girl of a brood--with all the filth of foreign New York in and about her. She is fifteen and ready for the streets. It is the year of her miracle. I've seen it a score of times. You miss her a few months and she appears again at work somewhere--her face decently clean, her eyes clear, a bit of bright ribbon and a gown wrung somewhere from the beds of torture. It is her brief bloom--so horrid to look at when you know what it means. All the fifteen years of squalor, evil, and low-mindedness for this one year--a bloom-girl out of the dirt! And the next, she has fallen back, unwashed, high-voiced, hardening, stiffening,--a babe at her breast, dull h.e.l.l in her heart. All her living before and to come--for that one bloom year. Maybe you can tell me what the big purpose of it all is. Earth uses them quite as ruthlessly as any weed or flower--gives them a year to bloom, not for beauty, but that more crude seeds may be scattered. Perpetuate! Flowers bloom to catch a bug--such girls, to catch a man--perpetuate--oh G.o.d, what for? And these things have laughed at me in the chorus, called me 'Crazy Sal,' because I spoke of things they never dreamed."

"Yes," Paula said quickly, "I've seen something like that. How you will pity them when you are rested! It is hard for us to understand why such numbers are sacrificed like a common kind of plants. Nietzsche calls them 'the much-too-many.' But Nietzsche does not know quite so much as the Energy that wills them to manifest. It is dreadful, it is pitiful.

It would seem, if G.o.d so loved the world--that He could not endure such pity as would be His at the sight of this suffering and degradation....