She Buildeth Her House Part 3

Something of pity mingled with her reverence for her mother. For years, she could not come to a belief that the Most High G.o.d had any interest in a creature of such primal defilement. Queerly enough, it was the great preparer, Darwin, who helped her at the last. Man having come up through dreadful centuries from an earth-bent mouth and nostril, to a pitying heart and a lifted brow--has all the more hope of becoming an angel....

There was something of the nature of a birthmark in Paula's loathing for the animal in man and woman. Her mother had been sheltered in girlhood to such an extent that the mention of a corsage-ribbon would have offended. Very early, she had married, and the first days of the relation crushed illusions that were never restored. The birth of Paula ended a period of inordinate sorrow, which brought all the fine threads of her life into wear, gave expression to the highest agony of which she was capable, and ravelled out her emotions one by one. As a mother, she was rather forceless; the excellent elements of her lineage seemed all expended in the capacities of the child. Her limitations had not widened in the dark months, nor had her nature refined. It was as if the heart of the woman had lost all its color and ardor. The great sweep of Paula's emotions; her strangeness, her meditative mind and heart-hunger for freedom; her love for open s.p.a.ces, still groves and the prophylactic trends of running water--all expressed, without a doubt, the mysterious expiration of her mother's finer life. But something beyond heredity, distances beyond the reach of human mind to explain, was the lofty quality of the child's soul. Very old it was, and wise; very strange and very strong.

Paula never failed afterward in a single opportunity to spare younger girl-friends from the savagery of revelation, as it had come to her. The bare truth of origin, she made radiant with illimitable human possibilities.... Her dream beyond words was some time to give the world a splendid man or woman. Loving, and loved by a strong-souled, deep-thinking man; theirs the fruit of highest human concord; beautiful communions in the midst of life's n.o.bilities, and the glory of these on the brow of their child--such was her dream of womanhood, whitened through many vicissitudes.

Her mother died when Paula was twenty. The call came in the night. In the summons was that awful note which tells the end. Her mother was on the border and crossing swiftly. Paula screamed.

There was no answer, but a faint ruffle on the brow that had been serene.

"Mother!... Mother!" a last time--then the answer:

"Don't--call--me,--Paula! Oh, it--hurts--so--to be--called--back!"

After that, the dying was a matter of hours and great pain. Had she come to her in silence, the tired spirit would have lifted easily. So Paula learned, by terrible experience, the inexpressible value of silence in a room with death. She had been very close to the mystery. Holding her mother's hand and praying inaudibly at the last, she had felt the final wrench to the very core of her being.... Departure, indeed; Paula was never conscious of her mother's spirit afterward. It is probably futile to inquire if a child of one's flesh is invariably one's spiritual offspring.... An ineffectual girl, the mother became a hopeless woman.

In the interval, out of the grinding of her forces, was produced a fervent heat.... Did blind negative suffering make her receptive to a gifted child, or did Paula's mother merely give, from her own lovely flesh, a garment for a spirit-alien from a far and s.h.i.+ning country?

Three or four mornings after the Charter critique, Paula brought further work down-town. Reifferscheid swung about in his chair and stared at her fully thirty seconds. Then he spoke brusquely, possibly to hide his embarra.s.sment:

"Take these three books home, but don't bother with them to-day. I want you back here at four o'clock. You are to go out to supper with me."

The idea was not exactly pleasant. She had seen Reifferscheid only a few times apart from his desk, where she liked him without reservation. She had always pictured him as a club-man--a typically successful New Yorker, with a glitter of satire and irreverent humor about all his sayings. The thought of a supper with Reifferscheid had a bit of supper heaviness about it. The club type she preferred to know from a sort of middle distance....

"Won't you, please?"

His change of manner was effective. All brusqueness was gone. Paula saw his real earnestness, and the boyish effort of its expression. There was no reason for her to refuse, and she hesitated no longer. Yet she wondered why he had asked her, and searched her mind to learn why she could not see him at leisure, apart from a club-window's leather chair; at some particular table in a grill or buffet, or enlivening a game of billiards with his inimitable characterizations. One of the finest and most effective minds she had ever contacted belonged to this editor. His desk was the symbol to her of concentrated and full-pressure strenuousness; in his work was all that was sophisticated and world-weathered, but she could neither explain nor overcome the conviction that his excellence was in spite of, rather than the result of his life outside.... She met him on the stroke of four in the entrance to _The States_ building, and he led the way at once to South Ferry, where they took the Staten Island boat. She felt that he was not at ease in the crowds, but it was a fact, also, that he did not appear so huge and froggy in the street, as in the crowded office she knew so well.

"Yes, I live over yonder," he said, drawing two stools to the extreme forward of the deck. "I supposed you knew. The nearest way out of New York, this is. Besides, you get full five cents' worth of sea voyage, and it's really another country across the bay. That's the main thing--not a better country, but different."

Little was said on the boat. It was enough to breathe the sea and contemplate the distances. She scarcely noticed which of the trolley-cars he helped her into at the terminal; but they were out of town presently, where there were curving country roads, second-growth hills, and here and there a dim ravine to cool the eye. Then against the sky she discovered a black ribbon of woods. It was far and big to her eyes, full of luring mysteries that called to her--her very own temples.... Turning to Reifferscheid, she found that he had been regarding her raptly. He coughed and jerked his head the other way, delightfully embarra.s.sed.

"Guess you like it here," he said after a moment. "I knew you would. I knew I ought to make you come, somehow. You see, you're a little too fit--drawn just a trifle too fine. It isn't that you're out of condition; just the contrary. When one's drawn so fine as you are, one wears--just from living at joy speed.... We get off here."

"It's incredible that you should have a house all to yourself!"

They were walking on the gra.s.s that edged the road. It had taken an hour and a half to come. Dusk was beginning to crowd into the distances.

Ahead on either side of the road were a few houses with land between.

"Whatever you call it," said Reifferscheid, "it's all in one piece.

There it is yonder--'A wee cot, a cricket's chirr--Sister Annie and the glad face of her----'"

"A little white house under big trees!" Paula exclaimed joyously. "And what's that big dug-out thing behind?"

Reifferscheid chuckled. "Dug-out is excellent. That's the aquarium and the lily-lakes. I made those Sierras and clothed their t.i.tanic flanks with forests of sod."

"Don't ask me to speak.... All this is too wonderful for words...." To think that she had imagined this man-mammoth sitting in a club-window.

In truth, she was somewhat perturbed for wronging him, though delighted with the whole expedition. Sister Annie was startling, inasmuch as her face was as fresh and wholesome as a snow-apple, and yet she could not leave her invalid's chair una.s.sisted. She was younger than Reifferscheid.

"I'm so glad to have you come, Miss Linster," she said. "Tim was really set upon it. He speaks of you so frequently that I wanted to meet you very much. I can't get over to the city often."

"Tim." This was the name of names. Paula had known nothing beyond "T.

Reifferscheid." One after another, little joys like this unfolded.

"It will be too dark after supper," the sister added. "Tim won't be content until you see his system of ponds. You better go with him now."

Reifferscheid already filled the side-door. Evidently inspection was the first and only formality demanded of the guest at the cottage. Paula followed him up a tiny gravel path to the rim of the top pond--a saucer of cement, eighteen inches deep and seven or eight feet across. It was filled with pond-weed and nelumbo foliage. Gold fish and stickle-backs played in the shadowed water.

"It isn't the time of year, you know," he said apologetically. "The lilies are through blossoming, and in a week or two, I'll have to take my fishes back to winter-quarters. You see my water supply comes from Silver Lake. The great main empties here." (Paula followed his finger to the nozzle of a hose that hung over the rim of cement on the top pond.) "The stream overflows in Montmorency Falls yonder,"--(this, a trickle down the gravel to the second pond)--"from which, you can hear the roar of the cataracts into the lower lake, which waters the lands of plenty all about."

His look of surprise and disappointment at her laughter was irresistible.

"The saurians are all in the depths, but you can see some of my snails,"

he went on. "You'd be surprised how important my herd of snails is in the economy of this whole lake country."

He picked up a pebble from the edge of the water, pointing out the green slime that covered it. "These are spores of a very influential vegetable, called _algae_, which spreads like cholera and vegetates anywhere in water that is not of torrential temperament. Without my snails, the whole system would be a thick green soup in a month. It's getting a little dark to see the stickle-back nests. They domesticate very curiously. Next year, I'll have a fountain.... The second-tank contains a frail, northern variety of water-hyacinths, some rock ba.s.s, and a turtle or two. Below are the cattails and ferns and mosses. In the summer, that lower pond is a jungle, but the lilies and lotuses up here are really choice when in blossom. The overflow of water rejoices the bugs and posies generally. Annie likes the yard-flowers."

Paula would not have dared to say how enchantingly these toy-lakes and lily-beds had adjusted, in her mind, to the nature of the big man beside her, whose good word was valued by every sincere and important literary worker in the country. Tim Reifferscheid turning out his tremendous tasks in New York, would never be quite the same to her again, since she had seen him playing with his hose in his own back yard, and heard him talk about his snails and lilies, and the land posies that Sister Annie liked. Down-town, he had always stimulated her, but here with his toy-engineering and playful watersheds, he was equally bracing and just as admirable.

Darkness was covering them. "I must see it all again," she said. "I want to come when the lilies are blossoming. I could watch the fishes and things--for hours. Really, I will never call it a dug-out again."

She saw him grinning in the dusk.

"Come in to supper," he said. "You see, anything smaller than a Staten Island back-yard would hardly do for me to play in. Then there's a stillness about here that I like. It makes your ears ache a little at first. You wake up in the middle of the night and think you're under the earth somewhere, or disembodied. Finally it comes to you that there's nothing to be afraid of except the silence. A man's head gets to need it after a time. As a matter of fact, there's no place across the bay for a fat man after working hours."

"Miss Linster," called Sister Annie as they entered.

Paula followed the voice into a speckless spare room.

"Supper will be served in a moment," the other said. "I just wanted to tell you--Tim will take you back to the city to-night, grateful for the chance, but do you really have to go? This little room is yours, and you can go over together in the morning. Then a night in this stillness will calm you back into a little girl. Tim doesn't know I'm asking you.

Please do just as you want----"

Paula didn't have the heart to drag the big brother back to town.

"Why," she said laughingly, "I'd much rather stay than not. Think how good this all is to me! I didn't have an idea when he asked me, other than a restaurant somewhere in New York."

"I am so glad.... Tim----"

He tried not to look relieved at the announcement. "Really, I didn't put Annie up to this, but if you are content to stay, I think it will smooth you out a bit."

After supper the three sat out in the yard. There was a heavy richness in the air, a soft sea-wind flavored with wood-fires and finished fields. Reifferscheid smoked his pipe and did most of the talking.

"I glanced over Bertram Lintell's new book--out to-day," he said. "It sort of hurts. Two or three months ago, I dropped in on him while he was doing it.... I have always had a certain interest in Lintell because I accepted his first story seven or eight years ago, as a magazine reader.... You may not know that nine-tenths of the unsolicited fiction material in a magazine's mail is a personal affront to intelligence at large. Nowhere does a man show the youth of his soul so pitifully as when first alone with white paper and an idea. He shakes down a crow's rookery and believes in his heart it's an eagle's nest. That there are men in the world paid to open his package, inspect and return same respectfully--and do it again--is an uncommercial peculiarity of a most commercial age. Editors rely upon the more or less technically flawless products of the trained, the "arrived"; writers who have forgotten their dreams--rung the bell once or twice--and show a willingness to take money for the echoes.

"An expensive reading staff is not necessary for these contributors; their stuff goes to the heart of things at once. But what sorry caravans halt in the outer courts of a magazine-office; what sick, empty, unwashed confusion is impounded there! Yet a company of men moves ever through and about, peering into the unsightly, unsavory packs--ever ordering away, ever clearing the court, lest the mess rise to heaven....

But perfect pearls have been found in these restless, complaining trash-heaps, and will be found again. Men are there to glance at all, because one of these pearls is worth a whole necklace of seconds.

There's no way out of it. To make lasting good in the literary game, one must be steeled to reverses--long, ugly corroding reverses. This is the price which a man pays for the adjustment of his brain and hand to the needs of the time. As flesh needs bone, he needs these reverses. They clear the fat from the brain; increase the mental circuits, and lend to the fibres that firm delicacy which alone can carry live hot emotions without blowing out, and big voltage ideas swift and true to their appointed brilliance of expression.

"I'm gabbing a lot, but I was going to tell you about Bertram Lintell. I was first in the office to get his ma.n.u.script, and I raised the cry of 'Pearl.' It was faulty, but full of the arrogance of unhurt youth. The face of Twenty-one with all its unlined audacity stared out from the pages, and every page was an excursion. Here was a true subconscious ebullition--a hang-over from a previous incarnation, like as not. It was hard, gla.s.sy, but the physical prowess of it stimulated. Frank, brutal boyishness--that was the attraction. I shouldn't have taken it."