PAULA IS DEEPER INTO THE SELMA CROSS PAST AND IS BRAVELY WOOED THROUGH FURTHER MESSAGES FROM THE WEST
Selma Cross frequently filled the little place of books across the hall with her tremendous before the trial trip of her new play on the road. Paula liked to have her come in, delighted in the great creature's over the hunch-back, Stephen Cabot, author of The Thing. There was an indescribably brighter in the waxing and of romantic tides, than the eyes of Paula had ever before discovered, so that the confidences of the other were of moment. Selma was terrified by some promise she had made years before in Kentucky. It was gradually driven deep into the listener's understanding that no matter how harsh and dreadful the intervening years had been, here was a woman to whom a promise meant a promise. Paula was moved almost to tears by the other's description of Stephen Cabot, and the first time she saw him.
"I wonder if the long white face with the pain-lit eyes could ever mean to any one else what it does to me?" Selma whispered raptly when they talked together one Sunday night. "Why, to see him sitting there before me at rehearsal—the finest, lowest head in all the chairs—steadies, me! I hold fast to .... It It was Vhruebert who brought me to him, and the first words Stephen said were: 'Your manager is a wizard, Miss Cross, to get you for this. Why, you are the woman I wrote about in The Thing!'"
"Tell me more," Paula had whispered.
"We met in Vhruebert's office and forgot the manager . I guess two hours passed, as we talked, and went over the play together that first time. Vhruebert sent in his office-boy finally to remind us that he was still in the building. How we three laughed about it!... Then as we started out for together, Stephen and I, Vhruebert took his place at the door before us, and delivered himself of something like this:
"'You two listen to the father of what you are to be,'" Selma Cross went on, roughening her voice and her nasal passages, to imitate the old Hebrew star-maker. "'Listen to the soulless Vhruebert, who brudalizes the great Amerigan stage. You two are Art. Very well, listen to Commerce. It took me twenty-five years to learn that there must be humor in a blay. This T'ing would not lift the lip of a ganary-bird. It took me twenty-five years to learn there must be joy at the end of a blay—and wedding-bells. This T'ing ends just about—over the hills to the mad-house. Twenty-five years proved to me what I know the first day—that women of the stage must be beautiful. Miss Gross is not. I say no more. Here I have neither dramatist nor star. I could give the blay by Gabot to Ellen Terry—or to Miss Gross, if Ibsen write it. As it is, I have no name. There are five thousand people in this country writing blays with humor and habby endings. There are ten thousand beautiful women exbiring to spend it on the stage. Yet you two are the chosen of Vhruebert. When you look into each other's eye and visper how von-der-ful you are, with rising inflection; and say, "To hell with Gommerce and the Binhead Bublic!" remember Vhruebert who advances the money!'"
"And did you remember Vhruebert in that fairy luncheon together?" Paula asked happily.
"No, I only saw the long white face of Stephen Cabot. I wanted to take him in my arms and make him whole!"
For ten weeks Bellingham lay in one of the New York hospitals. "A woman attends him," Madame Nestor informed. "She is young and has been very beautiful. How well do I know her look of impotence and apathy—that look of unresisting ." To Paula, the magician seemed back among the dead ages, although Madame Nestor did not regard the present without foreboding. Paula could not feel that her real self had been . The dreadful visitations were all but , as pass the spectres of . What was more real, and rocked the centres of her being, was the conception of this outcast's battle for life. She could not forget that it was in pursuing her, that he had been injured. Facing not only death, but , this idolater of life had, as one physician expressed it, held together his shattered by sheer force of will, until healing set in. The only thought comparable in terror to such a conflict, had to do with the and of inter-stellar spaces.
The Skylark Letters, as she came to call them, were after all, the feature of the fall and winter weeks. There was a startling paragraph in one of the December series: "I think it is fitting for you to know (though, believe me, I needed no word regarding you from without), that I am not entirely in the dark as to how you have impressed another. I know nothing of the color of your hair or eyes, nothing of your size or appearance,—only just how you impressed another. This information, it is needless to say, was unsolicited...." Just that, and no further reference. It was as though he had felt it a duty to incorporate those lines. Portions of some of the later letters follow:
Did you know, that without the upward spread of wings—there can be no song from the Skylark? This, for me, has a and delicate significance. It is true that the poor little caged-birds sing, but how sorry they are, since they have to flutter their wings to give sound, and cling with their claws to the bars to hold themselves down!... I think you must have been a little wing-weary when you wrote your last letter to me. Perhaps the dusk was crowding into the Heights. No one knows as I do how the Skylark has sung and sung!... You did not say it, but I think you wanted the earth-sweet meadows. It came to me like needed rain—straight to the heart of mine that little plaint in the song. It made me feel how useless is the strength of my arms.... You see, I manage pretty well to keep you up There. I must. And because you are so wonderful, I can.... An rises to me from your letters. I love to let it flood through my brain....
I do not feel at all sure that you know me truly. What a man's soul appears to be, through the intimations of his higher moments, is not the man altogether that humans must reckon with. Nor must they reckon with the violences of one's past. I truly believe in the soul. I believe it is an essence fundamentally fine; that great mothers brood it beautifully into their babes; that it is nourished by the good a man does and thinks. I believe in the ultimate victory of the soul, against the tough, twisted fibres of flesh which rise to demand a thousand sensations. I would have you think of me as one lifting; happy in discoveries, the crown of which you are; conscious of an integrating spirit; that sometimes in my silences I answer your song as one . But then, I remember that you must not judge me by the brightest of my work. Such are the trained, tense bursts of speed—the swift of the best. I think a man is about half as good as his best work and half as bad as his most leisure. Midway between his emotions and exaltations—is indicated his valuation.... All men clinging to the sweep of the upward cycle, must know the evil multitude at some time. Perhaps few men have met and discarded so many personal devils as I, in a single life. But I say to you as I write to-night, those devils cast out seem far back among cannibal centuries. I worship the fine, the pure,—thoughts and deeds which are expanded and warmed by the soul's breath. And you are the anchorage of this sweeter spirit which is upon me. Now, out of the which life burns into the brain, comes this thought: (I set it down only to the of truth in which our relation alone can .) Are there and hackles and claws which I have not yet uncovered? Am I given the present as a resting-time before meeting a more subtle and formidable enemy? Has my vitality been preserved for some final battle with a champion of champions of the flesh? Is it because the sting is gone from my scar-tissues that I feel so strong and so white to-night? I cannot think this, because I have heard—because I still hear—my Skylark sing.
The personal element of the foregoing and the hint of years of " and wanderings," which she saw in his second photograph, correlated themselves in Paula's mind. They frightened her cruelly, but did not put Charter farther away. Remembering the ef............