"Yet to have arisen to the moment of choosing, you say he must have conquered the flesh."

"Yes."

"But you depict him--I find him--Desire Incarnate!"

"Exactly, Paula, because he has reverted. _The animal controls his mind, not the soul._ Bellingham is retracing his way back to chaos, with a human brain, all lit with magic! Out of the gathered knowledge of the ages, he has drawn his forces, which to us are mystery. He uses these secret forces of Nature to prolong his own life--which is all he has.

The mystic cord is severed within him. He is a body, nothing but a body--hence the pa.s.sion to endure. Out of the craft of the past, he has learned--who knows how long ago?--to replenish his own vitality with that of others. He gives nothing, but drains all. Ah, Paula, this I know too well. He is kin with those creatures of legend, the _loup-garou_, the vampire. I tell you he is an insatiable sponge for human magnetism."

"Past all doubt, can't Bellingham turn back?" Paula asked tensely. "With all his worldly knowledge, and knowing his own doom, can he not turn back--far back, a lowly-organized soul, but on the human way?"

Hopelessness, anywhere, was a blasting conception to her.

"No. I tell you he is a living coffin. There is nothing in him to energize a pure motive. He might give a fortune to the poor, but it would be for his own gain. He could not suffer for the poor, or love them. Dead within, he is detached from the great centres of virtue and purity--from all that carries the race forward, and will save us at the last. You see his frightful dependence upon this temporal physical instrument, since all the records of the past and the unwritten pages of the future are wiped out? Isn't it a sheer black horror, Paula,--to know that from the great tide of hopeful humanity, one is set apart; to know that the amazing force which has carried one from a cell in the ooze to thinking manhood must end with this red frightened heart; to be forced, for the continuance of life, to feed upon the strength of one woman after another--always fairer and finer----" The look of hatred in the speaker's face had become a banner of havoc.

"Can he not stop that kind of devouring?" Paula exclaimed. "Would there not be hope--if he battled with that--put _that_ vampirism behind?"

Madame Nestor regarded the other steadily, until all distortion of feature had given away to her accustomed mildness. Then she uttered an unforgettable question:

"_Can a tiger eat grains?_"

Vast ranges of terrible understanding were suggested.

"It is my duty, if I ever had a duty," the caller went on, "to make you know Bellingham as I know him. You must have no pity."

"Is there really no fact by which his age can be determined?"

"None that I know. Twenty-five years ago, when he left me hideously wise and pitifully drained, he looked as he does now."

"But why, oh why, do you always think of me with Bellingham?" Paula asked hopelessly.

"I watched his face when he regarded you last night. I knew the look."

"What is to prevent me from never seeing him? He cannot force himself upon me here--in the flesh.... Certainly you would not tell him where I am, where I go--if I begged you not to!"

Madame Nestor shuddered. "No, Paula. It is because you are frightened and tormented that such a thought comes. It is I who am showing you the real Bellingham. He menaces my race. None but big-souled women are useful to him now. He is drawn to them, as one hungry, as one always hungry. It is he first who is drawn. Then they begin to feel and respond to his occult attraction. The time might have come when you would worship him--had I not warned you. I did. I was quite his--until I learned. A woman knows no laws in the midst of an attraction like this.

No other man suffices----"

"But why--why do you prepare _me_? Do you think I cannot resist?" Paula asked furiously. She felt the bonds about her already. The blood rose hot and rebellious at the thought of being bound. It was the old hideous fear of a locked room--the shut-in horror which meant suffocation.

"If I thought you could not resist, Paula," Madame Nestor said, "I should advise you to flee to the remotest country--this moment. I should implore you never to allow from your side your best and strongest friend. But I have studied your brain, your strength, your heart. I love you for the thought that has come to me--that it is you, Paula Linster, who is destined to free the race from this destroyer."

Often in the last half-hour had come a great inward revolt against the trend of her caller's words. It pa.s.sed through Paula again, yet she inquired how she could thus be the means.

"By resisting him. Bellingham once told me--trust him, this was after I was fully his--that if I had matched his force with a psychic resistance equally as strong--it would mortally have weakened him. So if he seeks to subvert your will and fails, this great one-pointed power of his, developed who knows how long--will turn and rend itself. This is an occult law."

Paula could understand this--the wild beast of physical desire rending itself at the last--but not the conception of hopelessness--Bellingham cut off from immortality. The woman divined her thoughts.

"Again I beg of you," she said in excitement, "not to let a thought of pity for him insinuate itself in your brain--not the finest point of it!

Think of yourself, of the Great Good which must sustain you, of the benefit to your race--think of the women less strong! Fail in this, and Bellingham will absorb your splendid forces, and let you fall back into the common as I did--to rise again, ah, so bitterly, so wearily!... But I cannot imagine you failing, you strong young queen, and the women like me, the legion of emptied sh.e.l.ls he has left behind--we shall canonize you, Paula, if you shatter the vampire's power."

Thoughts came too fast for speech now. They burned Paula's mind--a destructive activity, because ineffectual. She wanted to speak of the shameful experience of the morning, but she could not bring the words to confession.

"I had almost forgotten," she said lightly at length, "that it is well for one to eat and drink. Stay, won't you please, and share a bite of supper with me, Madame Nestor? We'll talk of other things. I am deadly tired of Bellingham."

A hungry man would have known no repletion from the entire offering which sufficed for these two, forgotten of appet.i.te. Wafers of dark bread, a poached egg, pickles, a heart of lettuce and a divided melon, cake and tea--yet how fully they fared!... They were talking about children and fairy tales over the teacups, when Paula encountered again that sinister mental seizure--the occultist's influence creeping back from her reason to that part of the brain man holds in common with animals.... The lights of the room dimmed; her companion became invisible. Bellingham was calling: "Come to me--won't you come and help me in my excellent labors? Come to me, Paula. We can lift the world together--you and I. Wonderful are the things for me to show you--you who are already so wise and so very beautiful. Paula Linster,--come to me!"

Again and again the words were laid upon her intelligence, until she heard them only. All the rest was an anterior murmuring, as of wind and rivers. The words were pressed down upon the surfaces of her brain, like leaf after leaf of gold-beaters' film--and hammered and hammered there.... He was in a great gray room, sitting at a desk, but staring at her, as if there were no walls or streets between--just a little bit of blackness.... She seemed to know just where to go. She felt the place for her was there in the great gray room--a wonderful need for her there.... But a door opened into the room where he sat--a door she had not seen, for she had not taken her eyes from his face. A woman came in, a pale woman, a sh.e.l.l of beauty. The huge tousled head at the desk turned from her to the woman who entered. Paula saw his profile alter hideously....

Her own bright room filled her eyes again, and the ashen horror on the countenance of Madame Nestor, who seemed vaguely to see it all.

"I think I should have gone to him," Paula murmured, in the slow, flat tone of one not yet quite normally conscious.

"There is but one way, you poor distressed child--to build about you a fortress of purity--which he cannot penetrate----"

"I think I should have known the car to take--the place to enter," Paula went on, unheeding, "the elevator entrance--the door of the room----"

Madame Nestor continued to implore her to pray. Paula shivered finally, and stared at the other for a few seconds, as if recalling the words the visitor had spoken, and the past she had lived with Bellingham. Her terrible rage toward herself spread and covered Madame Nestor. Did not the latter still dip here, there, and everywhere in the occult and weird? Might she not have something to do with the projectiles of Desire?

"I think I'd better be alone now," she said hoa.r.s.ely. "One does not feel like invoking the Pure Presence--when one is chosen for such defilement."

THIRD CHAPTER

CERTAIN DEVELOPING INCIDENTS ARE CAUGHT INTO THE CURRENT OF NARRATIVE--ALSO A SUPPER WITH REIFFERSCHEID

In the week that followed, Paula's review of Quentin Charter's new book appeared. As a bit of luxury reading, she again went over "A Damsel Came to Peter." It stood up true and strong under the second reading--the test of a real book. The Western writer became a big figure in her mind.

She thought of him as a Soul; with a certain gladness to know that he was Out There; that he refused to answer the call of New York; that he had waited until he was an adult to make his name known, and could not now be cramped and smothered and spoiled. There was a sterilized purity about parts of his work--an uncompromising thunder against the fleshly trends of living--to which she could only a.s.sociate asceticism, celibacy, and mystic power. He was altogether an abstraction, but she was glad that he lived--in the West and in her brain.

Also her mind was called to lower explorations of life; moments in which it seemed as if every tissue within her had been carried from arctic repressions to the springing verdures of the Indies. A sound, an odor, a man's step, the voice of a child, would start the spell, especially in moments of receptivity or aimless pondering. Thoughts formed in a lively fascinating way, tingling dreamily over her intelligence, dilating her nostrils with indescribable fragrance, brushing her eyelids half-closed,--until she suddenly awoke to the fact that this was not herself, but Bellingham's thirst playing upon her. Beyond words dreadful then, it was to realize this thing in her brain--to feel it spread hungrily through her veins and localize in her lips, her breast, and the hollow of her arms. Bellingham crushed the trained energies of his thought-force into her consciousness, rendering her helpless. Though he was afterward banished, certain physical forces which he aroused did not fall asleep.... Frequently came that malignant efflorescence. Her name was called; the way shown her. Once when she was summoned to the 'phone, she knew that it was he, but could not at first resist. Reason came at the sound of her own hoa.r.s.e and frightened voice. Again one night, between nine and ten, when Bellingham was in power, she had reached the street and was hurrying toward the surface-car in Central Park West. Her name was jovially called by Reifferscheid. He accompanied her through the Park and back to her door. He said he thought that she was working too hard, confessed himself skeptical about her eating enough.

One thought apart from these effects, Paula could not shake from her mind: Were there human beings with dead or dying souls? Did she pa.s.s on the street men and women in whom the process of soul-starvation was complete or completing? Could there be human mind-cells detached from hope, holiness, charity, eternity, and every lovely conception; infected throughout with earth's descending destructive principle? The thought terrorized her soul, so that she became almost afraid to glance into the face of strangers. To think of any man or woman without one hope! This was insufferable. Compared with this, there is no tragedy, and the wildest physical suffering is an easy temporal thing. She felt like crying from the housetops: "Listen to pity; love the good; cultivate a tender conscience; be clean in body and humble in mind! Nothing matters but the soul--do not let that die!"

Then she remembered that every master of the bright tools of art had depicted this message in his own way; every musician heard it among the splendid harmonies that winged across his heaven; every prophet stripped himself of all else, save this message, and every mystic was ordered up to Nineveh to give it sound. Indeed, every great voice out of the mult.i.tude was a cry of the soul. It came to her as never before, that all uplift is in the words, _Love One Another_. If only the world would see and hear!

And the world was so immovable--a locked room that resisted her strength. This was her especial terror--a locked room or a locked will.... Once when she was a little girl, she released a caged canary that belonged to a neighbor, and during her punishment, she kept repeating:

"_It has wings--wings!_"

Liberty, s.p.a.ces of sky, shadowed running streams, unbroken woods where the paths were so dim as not to disturb the dream of undiscovered depths--in the midst of these, Paula had found, as a girl, a startling kind of happiness. She was tireless in the woods, and strangely slow to hunger. No gloomy stillness haunted her; the sudden scamper of a squirrel or rabbit could not shake her nerves, nor even the degraded spiral of a serpent gliding to cover. Her eyelids narrowed in the midst of confinements. School tightened her lips; much of it, indeed, put a look of hopeless toleration in her eyes, but the big, silent woods quickly healed her mind; in them she found the full life.

At one time, her father essayed to lock her in a closet. Paula told him she would die if he did, and from the look upon the child's face, he could not doubt.... He had directly punished her once, and for years afterward, she could not repress a shudder at his touch. She would serve him in little things, bring him the choicest fruits and flowers; she antic.i.p.ated his wants in the house and knew his habits as a caged thing learns the movements of its keepers; invariably, she was respectful and apt--until her will was challenged. Then her mother would weaken and her father pa.s.sed on with a smile. "Paula does not permit me to forget that I have the honor to be her father," he once said.

Reading grew upon her unconsciously. There was a time when she could not read, another when she could. She did not remember the transition, but one afternoon, when she was barely five, she sat for hours in the parlor still as a mole, save for the turning leaves--sat upon a ha.s.sock with Grimm. It was _The Foster Brother_ which pioneered her mind. That afternoon endured as one of the most exquisite periods of her life. The pleasure was so intense that she felt she must be doing wrong.

Grimm explained the whole world, in proving the reality of fairies. The soul of the child had always been awake to influences her a.s.sociates missed. Wonderful Grimm cleared many mysteries--the unseen activities of the woods, the visitors of the dark in her room before she was quite asleep; the invisible weaving behind all events. Later, books inevitably brought out the element of attraction between man and woman, but such were the refinements of her home that nothing occurred to startle her curiosity. It was left to the friendly woods to reveal a mystery and certain ultimate meanings.... She was sick with the force of her divining; the peace and purity of her mind shattered. The accruing revelations of human origin were all that she could bear. She rebelled against the manner of coming into the world, a heaven-high rebellion.