A Woman of Flame

by Harold MacGrath

A Woman
of
Flame

BY HAROLD
MACGRATH

SHE lay in a gray corner. The walls were gray; the robe which covered the lounge was gray; her peignoir was gray; and so perhaps were her thoughts. Only the thick black hair of her head and the pale skin of her face had definite outline, standing out from the gray background like the head of a swimmer in a misty sea. There was no color anywhere about her, except the two little points of ruby light in her great somber black eyes. One could scarcely tell whether this light was reflected or came mysteriously from within.

She was watching the man in the room beyond, in the library. He sat at a desk, writing, writing. Sometimes he paused to gaze into space, where inspirations lie ready to spring forth at the beckon of the seeing eye. Sometimes his thin fingers burrowed into his blond hair or snarled in and out of his ashen beard. Again, he would lean on his elbows and cover his face with his hands. And ever and anon a wisp of smoke from a discarded cigarette in the ash-tray—an old pewter porringer would curl aslant his beautiful profile, giving an Olympian touch to it.

"Men tire, and women fade," she murmured in an undertone. "But I haven't faded, and he hasn't tired. It's that will-o'-the-wisp. I wonder what I shall have to do? Half-illusions are the most deadly. With a full illusion, one does not think; with no illusion at all one is free. How shall I act to convince him?"

Presently the writer dropped his pencil, rose and walked hastily over to one of the windows.

The woman in gray slid off the lounge. She drifted rather than walked to a spot directly behind him, her chin almost touching his shoulder, and looked out into the diademed night. If he felt her presence, he gave no sign. For several minutes they remained thus. "One never tires of that picture," she said.

"No. It is always beautiful."

The two had many things in common, among which was the rapture of standing on heights. The apartment was on the top floor of a twenty-storied business block in the center of the town. There were two sides, as with this story. One looked out upon the river and the sea, and the other commanded the great thoroughfares, the towers of marble and granite and brick, the lofty, spidery bridges. White stars above the yellow stars below flickered and winked at them, stars celestial and earthly, the white light of peace and the yellow light of turmoil. God's and man's.

"Yes, it is always beautiful up here. Do you remember that snowstorm last winter, how we sat here by this window for two full hours? Was ever anything more exquisite than that white mantle which obliterated the unsightly, which covered the city's scars and wounds?" She laid a hand upon his shoulder, possessively.

"Scars and wounds," he repeated, reaching up and laying his hand on hers. "How like a great city humanity is! Always building up always tearing down, moving and twisting, now beautiful, now ugly; and one by one the landmarks vanish and are forgotten, as you and I shall vanish and be forgotten."

"Read me what you have written, you've been at that desk for three whole hours. Do you want your coffee now? Oh, it will be a great play. The second act was superb."

"You ought to know." He smiled and then looked at his watch. "One o'clock? I didn't know it was so late. Go to bed. Don't bother about the coffee."

"But I want to!"

He caught her by the arms and lightly swung her over toward the desk—with a strength rather astonishing in so slender a body—and tilted the lamp so that the glare of it might cover her. The ruby points of light expanded until her eyes glowed like Burgundy wine in glasses held against candlelight. Her skin was no longer pale but rosy: and her bosom rose up and out with the deep intake of ecstatic breath.

 

SELMA NORDSTROM was one of those anomalies which sometimes come down from the great north countries. She should have been of heroic mold—her hair blonde as ripe wheat, her eyes as blue as cornflower, Viking's daughter that she was. Instead, she was as a blossom from the valleys of Tuscany.

"Selma, you are like a flame. When I am near you, I am always warm. Those wine-dipped eyes of yours seem to open up every prison door in my mind. You have been my inspiration. To you alone do I owe the fame I have." He took her in his arms and kissed her hair.

"I have always wanted to die in moments like this. You call me a flame. I want to be blown out: I don't want to die ember by ember."

"You mustn't talk like that!"

"Why not? It's the truth."

He turned away abruptly. "I live in heaven and hell alternately."

Her bosom sank, and the lights in her eyes dwindled to points once more. Listlessly she fingered the manuscript on the desk. He was seeing his will-o'-the-wisp. More and more frequently he saw it.

"I feel like a cad, an abominable wretch," he went on. "For three years you have practically hidden away from the world. It isn't fair. The world was at your feet."

"And I preferred to be at yours. What is all that?" she cried with a gesture toward the million city lights. "Nothing! And what are those up yonder but white, dead stars? For three years I have had the happiness to give and give. It is the law of nature that woman should give and that man should take. Have I ever breathed the slightest regret for having thrown away the world? And do you think we fool the world, hiding up here? Pouf! The world knows, but it doesn't care. It forgives and condones because, forsooth, we amuse it—I as an actress and you as a dramatist. We are liniments for its mental rheumatism, as it were."

"I am actually two men!"

"No. She should have been two women. That is always so. All things to one man. She is crystal, that woman. The sun shines through her, but leaves no warmth. She catches the light and reflects it; she has no light of her own. Have you ever held your hand near a window-pane in the winter sunshine? Soon your palm grows rosy and warm, but the glass remains cold. She is like that. Have you not told me so a thousand times? A woman without fire, without companionship, without interest, whose body lives but whose heart was never born. Haven't you told me? Don't I know? And yet she calls to every fiber of your being, from the ends of the world. When you put your arms around me, you poor innocent, don't I know that you are playing it is she? So often do you close your eyes when I kiss you! I know. You are visualizing her. Nature is inexorable, but not always just."

 

THE man sat down heavily in his chair and leaned on his elbows. "I am damned!" he said.

"We all are from the beginning, caro mio: only some of us are more damned than others. Yes, poets and dramatists and novelists and philosophers rave about Nature, but for all that she is unjust." The woman pressed her palms upon her heart "Look at me! Am I not a proper mate? Am I not beautiful? Have I not genius and fire and the capacity of growing fat on crumbs? Have you not called me pomegranate and oranges? Intellectually and physically I am your mate. Have I not inspired you? Have I not kindled your fancy a thousand times? And always her specter glides in between. You have described her so many times that I know just how she looks: beautiful and cold, serene and passionless. The world speaks of our liaison. It is a poor fool of a world. It is my intellect alone you love; the heart, which is I, is nothing. Am I bitter? Perhaps—but only in sadness, never in reproach. I am trying to understand what is not humanly understandable. God gave me the right to love one man, whoever he was, whatever he was, and wherever I found him. And Nature tosses this riddle at my feet!"

The man folded his arms and slid down in his chair.

She went on. "A little while ago I drew the world after me as a child draws a toy. I made humanity laugh and weep: I made it it tender and brave: I made it go home with better hearts or lighter. I was the potter and it the clay; I was the musician, and under my fingers lay a thousand strings. Am I a pagan? No doubt. My gods were once Odin and Thor; you have said that. How I drew them, speaking a tongue which was not my own! And I drew you; but it was only my art, my brain. My heart was never the magnet, though at the beginning I believed it was. I was honest. I repelled you until I learned that the mate you had chosen was made of beautiful ice—who took no joy in your genius, who understood you not. I love you; and when I say that, I say everything. What is the magnet this crystal woman has that draws you, out of my arms, away from my kisses? I don't understand. You reaching out for her: I reaching out for you—the eternal triangle! But what does she reach out for?"

"Selma!"

"She is the peak. She is the Matterhorn. She is the ice we gazed upon from the Gornergrat. What does she reach out for? Is there a human undesiring? She must desire something."

"She was always very religious."

"Ah! Then it is God she wants? Yes, yes; I lie when I say that I am not bitter. I do not reproach you, I reproach her. She has no right to you; I have every right. If only she loved you and wanted you, it would be different. I could go away, knowing at least you would be happy. It is your happiness; my own is nothing. Why doesn't she divorce you?"

"She doesn't believe in that. Her lawyer wrote that she would never divorce me." The man spoke wearily. "I saw her on the street to-day. She came into town to shop. I followed her for two hours. She did not see me."

"And she did not know! Oh, if I were at one end of the city and you entered at the other, I should know and feel your presence instantly. That's because I love you and she doesn't. And she bought her gown, or her hat, or her gloves, and never knew! Crystal, always crystal!"

"Selma, I do love you!"

"What you love in me is what she lacks. What a part God has given me! And I must go on playing it. Have I been a fool? Who can say? Well, let me hold you a little longer. Oh, you will go back to her. That is written."

"But will she take me?" He laughed cynically. "Don't worry, it will be a long time before that happens, if ever."

"Poor man, you will go as surely as I stand here. Then I'll go back to the stage. Perhaps I sha'n't be as tender with the clay as I once was. Go back to her if you must: and when the day comes that you crave warmth, blood instead of ice—here!"

She caught his head in her hands and pressed it with savage tenderness against her heart, and her stormy eyes glittered with unshed tears.

"But I do love you, Selma! I shall never leave you. I'm not that kind. I am only a human being, I know, but I am not a cad. You cast your lot with mine; and so we'll stick it out. As God is my judge, I believed I could forget, stamp out all thought of her. Haven't I fought: and what good has it done? Didn't you fight too? Well, here we are! A man cannot find real happiness anywhere on earth except in work. Go back, even if she agreed to take me, knowing that it would be the same thing over again? Three years were as much as I could stand. I never put my arms around her that I did not feel a subtle repellance. And yet, God help me, I see her face everywhere. If I open a book, I see it there; if I stare into a fire, or gaze into a shadow. Have I not dragged you here and there across the world, as if it were something I could leave behind?"

"I understand. Three of us, and none of us happy. For if she is not unhappy in love, she is in pride. Sometimes I doubt there is a God. I think we are just born and flung about haphazard, three at a time: two women and one man, two men and one woman."

"If I had but met you first! I am really damned. I am constantly pulled two ways as by wild horse. She pulls one way, and you quite as strongly another."

"Poppies and roses—color and perfume. Never mind. ... I'll go and get your coffee." And she sped from the room.

 

HE stared after her, struck by the anticlimax of this extraordinary scene. What a third act! Instinctively he drew a blank sheet toward him and began to scribble. Then with sudden fury he crumpled up the sheet and flung it into the wastebasket. To make profit of her pain! He laid his head upon his arms; but in his soul he knew that some day he would reconstruct the scene on paper. Inspiration! Even in her misery she helped him. "Never mind I'll go and get your coffee." She talked of crystal. She was crystal too—crystal in her love, her frankness: crystal and flame.

Neither of these two was troubled by codes, the codes of organized society. Upon a certain day they had flung the world aside, the one in love and the other in hurt. Only genius may do this with impunity. The world accepts these peculiarities of conduct tolerantly only when it knows that the actors are indifferent to its opinion. To-morrow both might return to the world without causing more than a ripple of domestic interest. Mediocrity alone pays the full measure.

Morality is subject to many analyses; it possesses as many sides as a diamond, each side reflecting one color; so one must accept the fact that morality is more or less a question of individuality. What may be eminently moral to me may not be so to my neighbor. Church and civil law write down that this shall be and that shall be; but Nature neither reads nor writes; she neither sees nor hears. She is instinct. Her business is to weld bodies, souls, intellects, to bring forth others; and having done this, she passes on.

These two atoms. Selma Nordstrom and Herbert Lane, were drawn together by their intellects, by a community of ideals, and later by love. For he did love her. Another eternal mystery of Nature, which she has never condescended to divulge, is this: that a man may love two women if he cannot find them both in one. He wants his wife and mistress under one roof, and if he cannot have them so, he builds a second home. Over against this, a woman wants but one man, however she may have him. Selma and Lane might have been supremely happy but for the fact that he still loved his wife.

Selma knew humanity. She possessed an almost infernal intuition as to what this or that person would do under stress of emotion: and often she anticipated the effect, to her material or spiritual benefit. She was a pagan, but she was a tender pagan. She hated cruelty, and if she ever gave hurt it was due to the two first laws: to protect oneself, and then those one loves.

Principally, among all humans, she knew Lane. For three years now she had studied him as she would have studied a part. Indeed, she had to. He was not unstable, but he was variant in his moods; he never broke a promise, but he often avoided making one. To-day he would be in the depths; to-morrow he would be riding in the clouds. She sometimes grew dizzy in her effort to follow him in these plunges and flights. She was often conscious, too, of a singular truth, that in this retirement she was a greater actress than she had ever been on the stage. Half the time what he believed to be impulse was calculation, and what he sensed as calculation was pure impulse. She was as full of surprises as a spring morning in Madeira: sudden showers, radiant sunshine, mists, bursts of color, chill and warmth. When least expected she would smother him with kisses, loose her hair and flood him with it—and then for the rest of the day go about calmly, attend to the material affairs of the household and pleasantly rebuff him if he came near her. She studied how to be irresistible after three years of intimacy. And yet the invisible magnet drew him more powerfully day by day.

 

SHE understood clearly. These queer animals called men! She herself was no longer a mystery to him, and more and more his wife was becoming one. Oh, she could hold him for years; what with her profound love and his exaggerated sense of loyalty, she could hold him. But already the feat promised to be a difficult one. What should she do? How should she act? She had been thinking over these things as she lay upon the lounge.

They had never really quarreled. Many a time both had moved impetuously toward the irruptive danger-line, but their mental balance was so nicely adjusted, their sense of justice and humor so keen and lively, that instinctively both stepped back at the brink of the crisis.

Her stage name was Lena Cagliari: but there was not a known drop of Italian—Sardinian Italian—blood in her veins. She had gone to a Florentine convent school up to her sixteenth year, returned to Stockholm and gone upon the stage in face of parental protests; and at the age of twenty-nine when her particular world lay at her feet, she had fallen in love with this blond poet-dramatist. Neither Lane nor the world knew that this was her first affair. She hugged this secret with a strange blind persistence. Her tremendous vitality, her capacity for work and her sincere love of it, had kept her singularly free from entangling alliances. On the other hand, she had no illusions—or if she had any, they were laid away in lavender.

Thousands had come to hear her laughter. For if she was great in drama, she was superb in comedy. To hear her laughter range through one of those inimitable French comedies was a musical education. Irony, merriment, ridicule, joy: it was like a hand straying over a harp. And beyond this, in everyday life, she possessed a quiet cachinnation which Lane himself had likened to a plummet striking the water in a deep well. And whenever he heard this quality, he watched for the outbreak of some mild bit of deviltry.

Genius in a dramatist being divination, he often wondered if she were not a reversion—that is, if she were not a true daughter of the south for all that she and her forbears had been born in the north? Who could say that some Viking ancestor of her had not raided the Sicilian or Neapolitan coasts in bygone centuries and taken to wife his captive?

Selma was an inveterate gambler. She took plays that had been rejected everywhere and gambled with them, sometimes with extraordinary success. She gambled with her audiences. In Europe she gambled with gold; here in America she gambled with stocks. ... And as she ran out for the coffee-percolator she decided to gamble with Lane.

 

PRESENTLY she returned. Lane sniffed pleasurably. She lighted the alcohol lamp and drew up a chair. She invariably made a ceremony of it. She had the European housewife's opinion that no man knew how to make coffee. The two of them stared at the water-bulb in a fascinated kind of way. Usually they chatted about the play he was writing; but to-night the inclination was toward rumination which provoked a silence that lasted until the metal cover of the upper bulb threatened to pop off.

Swiftly she bent her head and blew out the wick.

"Like that," she said.

"Like what?" he asked, awakening from his reflections.

"That is the way I wish to die."

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that."

"Well, it's the truth, heart o' mine. The one thing I dread is to die in bed, alone, forgotten, crowded to suffocation by memories. When we are young and active, we can open and shut that door at will. But in old age the hinges are loose, the door flops and memory comes out at flood-tide, from every channel. ... No; I don't want to die like that. —Only two cups, mind. You ought not to have any; but if you will work all night, at least it shall not be work wasted. You may sleep all day to-morrow. I'm going out for the day. Good night."

"Kiss me!"

She rumpled his hair instead, laughed and darted away. An hour later she opened her bedroom door quietly and looked into the library. He was writing furiously in a faded blue haze of cigarette-smoke. Only his head and shoulders and arms were visible; the rest of his body and the room were in darkness. He was doing good work; he always did good work when he wrote swiftly. Many a night, as she lay awake, she had heard the rip-rip of manuscript on the way to the waste-basket. He was never afraid to throw away work he considered bad.

What a gift it was to create! So easily one forgot the world about in the joy of making another. He was writing, yes, but he was also breathing, laughing, storming, weeping with those characters which flowed magically from that thread of dead metal wrapped in cedar. She knew what it was. On the stage there was no Selma Nordstrom; she was the creation in flesh.

She went back to bed. As she snuggled down into the bedclothes she laughed softly: the plummet in the well. No doubt Saint Peter and the Devil, equally puzzled, both perked up an ear at the quality of that laughter; there was so much good in it and so much evil.

 

CHAPTER II

THE Lanes had been wealthy for three or four generations. Herbert Lane wrote plays because that was part of his destiny. That he was making a fortune as a dramatist was of less interest to him than the fact that this money was a tangible proof of his success. Forever and always money is success. In his youth he had been studious; he had never been a waster, a roisterer by night. He was like thousands of his kind. Those young fools we read about are merely exceptions to the rule. New York knew but little of him, even in these days of his literary triumphs. Sordidness in any form repelled him. His dramas were strong and sometimes brutal, but they were never tainted by the sordid or the unwholesome. He was a moralist who was neither prude nor pedant. It was his clear insight into life and the attendant cleanness of his mind that first drew Selma,

When the day came when he could no longer withstand, temperamentally, the desire to be free—free of this increasing repellance which forever pushed him hack and forever drew him on—he told his wife frankly.

"Very well; do as you like." She had said nothing more than that.

He packed and left. For days after he lived in a kind of hypnotic fury. And in this mood, always susceptible to sympathy, he met Selma Nordstrom—the woman, not the actress.

Upon leaving his wife, he had turned over the estate and its revenue, conditionally. She was to enjoy them so long as she lived, provided she did not marry again. In the event of her decision to divorce him, these terms should still maintain. If she married again, naturally all her rights would instantly cease. There was, however, a generous clause. She would have the absolute use and control of a hundred thousand. These agreements were in no wise suggested by a consciousness that he was wronging her. He was generous and open-handed because that was one of his characteristics.

He believed in his right to happiness, and he could not be happy with Norma Lane. She did not understand him. She cared nothing for the drama. His plays frankly bored her. She liked simple books, simple music, simple pictures: the thunderbolts of genius left her untouched. Strange, that one must make these discoveries after marriage, seldom if ever before. The truth is, objects that we love we remake in loving; and we cling to the model of our own making until the dazzle wears off; and sometimes the dazzle wears off only in patches, and we still find ourselves in a kind of thrall.

This chasm widened and deepened daily. Two people without a community of interests become isolated. By church and civil law they are one; but by human law they are strangers, the most tragic kind of strangers.

The Lane estate lay about an hour's ride north of New York, on the east side of the Hudson. The house was English manor in style, and nearly a hundred years' growth of vine gave it an aristocracy of age that was the despair of the later arrivals in this district. From the highway to the river's brim stretched an even mile of velvet-green sward. The house stood halfway between. There were chestnuts, oaks, birches, elms and maples—landmarks of what had once been a noble forest. From the southern to the northern line it was fully three miles. In the south was a great garden, typically English: at the northern boundary was a splendid apple orchard, more or less typically American in that it was patriotically permitted to run wild.

 

IT was a brilliant October afternoon when Selma Nordstrom's car rolled up to the grilled gate. She could not control her delight at the exquisite beauty of the scene, the undulating reaches of grass, the brown and scarlet leaves, the ruby vines, the amethyst hills across the noble river, which was mottled with blue shadows and dull silver.

"Oh, this Is beautiful!" she exclaimed. No wonder—" She did not finish the thought. The lodge-keeper, having recognized a lady of quality, was opening the gates.

"Is Mrs. Lane at home?"

"Yes, Miss. Mrs. Lane is always home."

The phrase struck a cold note in Selma's ears: always home! Confronted by conditions which presumably confronted Mrs. Lane, Selma knew that she would have found this spot intolerable, beautiful as it was. The woman could live here, then? She could go on with life as though nothing extraordinary had happened? What kind of a mind was sheltered here? What kind of a heart?

She nodded to the chauffeur to proceed; and the car glided smoothly forward onto the crisp pebbles of the oak-lined driveway, which was a series of half-circles, with sudden and unexpected vistas, inexpressibly lovely. Always some angle of the ruby-garnished gray stone of the manse was to be seen.

Selma laughed: the plummet in the well again. What an adventure! And who but Selma Nordstrom could have conceived it or would have had the audacity to dramatize it? Not a gesture, not a word, would she miss of this strange interview; she would memorize all; and some day she would utilize it. What a souvenir for her old age! Oh, it would take courage of no mean order. Yonder woman might be cold, but usually these cold minds were clear minds and armed with a thousand daggers of merciless wit.

"Mrs. Lane is always home."

The phrase recurred and robbed the bloom from the impulse, at once ironical noble, selfish and magnanimous. She shrugged and laughed again. Having laid a course, it was one of her characteristics to pursue it without deviation to the end.

Her conscience did not trouble her. She was no vampire. She had not stolen Mrs. Lane's husband. There had been no vulgar intrigue. She had rebuffed Lane for weeks; she had forced him to retell his tale a hundred times in order to find discrepancies in it, and she had found none. The man was as honest as he was earnest. Only then had she accepted his attentions or met his advances.

She knew that she loved him loftily and enduringly, as a woman of her caliber loves but once: and it had become intolerable to both her love and her pride to find the specter of his wife occupying his dreams, peering out of the shadows, lurking beyond the windows at night. She knew that she could hold him indefinitely, by the fire of her love and the rock-like solidity of his loyalty. But she would have all of him or—none of him.

From Lane's description, Selma had constructed a handsome woman with a splendid lady, aloof in manner, narrow-minded, Puritanical, fixed unalterably in her outlook upon life, one of those creatures who take and take and never give.

But why was she always at home? To remain here where she had spent the first weeks of her honeymoon—after being cast aside as weighed and found wanting? It was incredible.

A strange little doubt seeped Selma's mind as the car drew under the porte-cochère. She resolutely trampled upon this doubt, got out and rang the old-fashioned bell. As she waited, she became conscious of a familiar flutter, the quality resembling that which always attacked her on first nights. Here, it was not a good presage.

How should she announce herself? As for that, she would go directly to the point, without subterfuge or useless circling. She owed Mrs. Lane nothing; she was under no contract to be gentle or kind.

 

AN elderly maid answered the ring. accepted Selma's card and escorted her gravely into the library, which was at the right of the hall. The maid threw a match into the fireplace and went off to summon her mistress.

Selma went over to the reading-table, upon which lay half a dozen books, some of them marked: Ibsen, Turgeniev, Maeterlinck, Sudermann! Who in this house studied or even read these thinkers? Curiously she turned the pages of Sudermann, to find that the reader had penciled paragraphs here and there. "The Song of Songs" in this house? Doubtless she had a companion who read. But Selma sat down, rather disturbed.

The lodge-keeper's phrase, and then these books!

Selma's eye roved restlessly. There were hundreds of books; the shelves ran up to the ceiling, which was heated and mellow with age. There were fine rugs on the floor. The furniture was all antique and, marvelous to relate, useful and dependable; it had become antique automatically in these very rooms.

Hy the west window, through which poured the mellowing sunshine, splashing with Roman gold a corner of the Kermanshah. stood a flat mahogany desk. Selma thrilled at the sight of it, for Lane had often described it to her. He had written his first play upon this desk. She got up and approached it eagerly. It was dustless and orderly. In a bronze tray lay briar and calabash pipes. There was a canister of tobacco near by—cigarettes, matches. Selma, as she eyed this paraphernalia of the smoker, sensed impending disaster. Here was his desk just as he had left it, dustless and ready. Whose care? Doubt, which she could no longer trample or smother, menacing, armed with daggers, formidable. Dustless and ready!

She threw up her head truculently and stared boldly at this menace which she could not see. Almost immediately she relaxed, longing to touch the pipes, the pens and pencils in the rack, longing to sit down in his chair, lean upon the desk and conjure up the man as he had sat there in the full bloom of his earliest and most beautiful dreams.

Dustless and ready! She understood. An insane desire to laugh seized her, but she strangled it in her throat.

 

SELMA had no time for further cogitation. She turned suddenly, sensing rather than hearing the approach of some one.

Mrs. Lane crossed the room. There was a smile on her lips, half curious, half friendly. She held Selma's card in her fingers.

"Really, you must pardon me," said Mrs. Lane as she stepped into the sunlight, "but I can remember neither the name nor the face."

Selma could not repress the little gasp of astonishment at the effectiveness of this passing from mahogany shadows into light. Never had she laid eyes upon a more magnificent woman—tall, deep in the bosom, with pale, flawless skin and blue eyes streaked with fine golden threads like lapis lazuli.

"He is right," said Selma mechanically.

"I beg your pardon! Who is right?" The attitude of this beautiful stranger and her irrelevant remark perplexed Mrs. Lane.

"Did I speak aloud? Perhaps your coming so suddenly into the sunshine confused me." Selma's intake of breath was deep and long. She felt like a swimmer unexpectedly overtaken by weariness, with the shore still far away. What a pity her deviltry had dug for her! And now to get out of it with as much dignity as she could. "No doubt my name and face are unfamiliar to you. To the world I am known as Lena Cagliari."

"You? Here?" Mrs. Lane dropped the card as though it were an unclean thing, and to the other woman, the act was equivalent to a blow in the face.

"Wait!" cried Selma, marshaling all her gifts. "Before you surrender to the natural impulse to show me to the door, hear me."

"But the supreme insolence of this visit!"

"No! Call it the supreme sacrifice. I love your husband with all my soul. He would never come back to you, and your pride would never permit him to send for him. Such is his loyalty."

"Loyalty? You speak of his loyalty?"

"True: I believe he owes none to you. Such is his loyalty to me, then, that by the slender thread of it I could hold him until the end of his days. And, yet, I am come to you to ask you to take him back. When I entered your door, I had an ulterior purpose in mind. I have none now. Why? I saw this desk—his—these pipes. There has been a terrible mistake somewhere. But something tells me that it is neither his nor mine. From your point of view I am immoral: on the contrary, I am only a woman who loves. Shall I defend myself? Why not? This is no hour for subterfuges. There is the happiness of three people involved: yours, mine, his. I am guilty of no vulgar intrigue. I did not take him from you. You let him go. I had pictured you as a woman with a heart of crystal, cold and clear, without warmth, without the least understanding of the man. Ah, how many times have I seen him in fancy—at this desk—that ought to be your shrine!—writing, writing, pouring his soul out on paper because God so willed it, and then running to you to read it, and you, careless, bored. indifferent, without understanding, without trying to understand!"

 

MRS. LANE stared. There was something in the voice that held her in thrall—a dignity which Mrs. Lane had not suspected such a woman could possess.

"It was only when I saw these things which in all honesty he portrayed to me that I suffered his first kiss. Defend myself? Yes! To you I will say what neither he nor the world knows: he was the first man I ever kissed off the stage, and he shall be the last. Why did I never tell him the truth? So that on that day he wished to be free, he might leave me without the slightest remorse.

"What has created your anger against me? That I was able to give, while you could only take. What is marriage by code? Is it always right? Is it always the will of God? If his genius did not stir your love, what did? Why did you marry him at all if you understood him not? Do you believe there was no wrong in that? Did you marry him because he was rich, because you wanted creature-comforts? You made a bargain: did you fulfill your part of it?

"Ah, how well I know life, the kaleidoscope of emotions! But I do not understand this three of us. Why should this destiny be mine? Why should I love him, when you, you are the breath of his life? Are you without desire? Is there not something you want? These pipes!" Selma reached down and took up one. "What a wonderful thing intuition is! It is a key to life. These pipes, this desk, ready! Well, take him back. I hear no children's voices in this house. It is very empty. His happiness—that is all I ask; for myself—nothing."

Selma laid down the pipe. The fire was gone out of her.

Suddenly Mrs. Lane covered her face with her hands and held them there for a space. Then she let them drop heavily to her sides.

"There is a God. I had begun to doubt. And he brought you here to-day. How I have hated you! I have tortured you, torn you limb from limb, beaten you, cursed you. And you are only human like myself. I knew that sooner or later he would tire of you."

"Sooner or later: that's the man of it—always in pursuit of mysteries. Go on. I left my pride outside your gate."

"I did not intend to hurt you. I ought to thank you for some of your truths. But there are some instincts born in me that nothing will eradicate."

"And one of these is that I must be immoral, and being immoral, of necessity low and base! After all, what should I care what you think? It is here," cried Selma, striking her heart, "that I know the right or wrong of my actions. What do I care what you think of me, if you take him back and understand him? What instinct was it that caused you to be his wife?"

"Love," said Mrs. Lane with fine dignity. It came to her sharply that she must not permit this woman to outdo her in magnanimity or frankness. She felt the primordial instincts stirring in her, but she rose above them. "Dimly, somehow, I see that you are a great woman. Until to-day I saw only the actress, armed with a hundred devices for snaring men, beautiful—and you are beautiful!—and intelligent. I have tried to think of you as low, but knowing him even as little as I do, I could not. He left me because I let him go. You are right. Men will seek women when they are lonely. First I was blind—then full of fierce pride—then hurt and more hurt: and finally came understanding. I was afraid to send for him, for fear he would not come."

"So you have opened the book of life?" asked Selma, a little more curious, a little less ironical.

"Yes. As you say, this is not the hour for subterfuges. Do you suppose that I shall permit you to leave me with the feeling that all the magnanimity was on your side? Oh, make no doubt that I shall always hate you—that I shall neither forget nor forgive you. But if you can be truthful, I can be no less so. When I married Herbert, I was asleep. I was even selfish. I had always had everything. I could not understand why a rich man should work as he did. His plays did bore me. I was a fool. Life meant going to teas and dinners and dances, and he detested those things. Life meant to me keeping up with my friends instead of my husband. You have called me crystal. I was but glass. But there is fire in me now, burning, burning. Three years! I have lived a hundred. I have made a new hell for myself each day, and wandered in it."

 

SELMA nodded understandingly. She saw something of this hell in the future.

"Possessing this key you call intuition," continued the wife, "did he see in me what I did not realize was there? I understand so much these days! In you he found what he had hoped to find in me. And I failed him from the start! I loved, but did not know how to love. I took, but did not know how to give. I was a sleep-walker. But these three years!"

There was superb abandon in the wide-armed gesture, and it stirred Selma's sense of dramatic values.

"Thinking is good for human beings. I never knew, until after he was gone, what it was to think, think? And then, after having thought, to wait! I have said that I shall always hate you: but none the less I can give you a kind of gratitude. You opened the door for me. ... Lena Cagliari—how I spelled out that name! I would become your equal and tear him away from you. It was in wild pride at first that I set about to retrace his footsteps. I studied, and the more a book bored me, the more tenaciously I stuck to it. His books, his music! And one day the truth came to me that I loved him. I do not ask you to send him back. I can wait, for he will come. I know. Children! You are right; this house is empty. But have you yourself never thought of them, of running your fingers through their hair, of teaching them their prayers—his children?"

Selma shut her eyes. She wanted to go at once, but with dignity, so that this woman could not smile behind her back—this woman who was buffeting her with truths, who was laying bare her soul that she, Selma Nordstrom, might see the strength of it and the immeasurable love in it. The strength to stay here among these souvenirs for three years! The pluck of it! Not even she, Selma Nordstrom, strong as she was, could have done that, not even for Herbert Lane. She heard the other's voice again.

"I was not a woman; I was a female, and I wanted my mate. I have studied, read, studied; and now I am ready, ready like that desk which has been my shrine. I could go with him and live with him as you have done, unlawfully. The shell I was born in is cracked. I no longer lie to myself. I could have killed you when you spoke your name, but now I am glad that you came. I want you to know me. He will come back. And rest assured that I shall hold him. He has tired of you. Why should I hide my exultation? With a single hair of my head I shall hold him as with hoops of steel. He followed me yesterday."

Here was a barb that Selma could not pluck forth.

"He followed me half the afternoon. And God alone knows how hard it was not to turn and speak. But in my misery I have gained wisdom. I knew that it were best he should return to you thinking of me. Well, you came to give him back to me. I will take him." The voice became low and gentle. "I do not know what your ulterior purpose was, but I shall be magnanimous enough to believe that it had to do with his happiness. You love him, if not so terribly, at least as deeply as I do."

Selma grasped at this; she saw in it her cue.

"The ulterior purpose—" she said, with a thin, wintry smile. "Well, I shall take that away with me. and some day I shall smile at the thought of it. Out of life I have managed to squeeze a little happiness. He will come back, and you will have all of him. I am but an episode. My purpose in living up to this hour—I see it clearly—was to bring you two together in perfect understanding; and that purpose being accomplished, I shall pass completely out of your orbit. You were blind: but you see. And who is without blindness? Not I, for one. I am bitter, but only against this inexplicable thing I call the three of us. I misjudged you, naturally. Nor will you go on misjudging me. Oh, he will be happy; for the soul of you is now quite as magnificent as your body. ... Do not call the maid. I'd rather go to the floor alone."

Without turning her head once, she crossed the room, found the door, opened it and closed it softly, and stood for a moment with her back to it. It was retreat, but it was serene and dignified. She had salvaged that much from the debacle. Once the cool October wind touched her cheeks, she realized that her retreat was just in time. She was very weak.

 

THE woman in the library picked up the pipes and crushed them passionately to her bosom, laughing and crying, and held them there until she heard the faint warning of the automobile siren as the car turned out into the highway.

"Home!" Selma drew the robes about her and huddled into a corner.

Then she lavished. Gambler! Torn as her heart was, dull as the future seemed to be, her sense of humor—ironic humor—was as keen as ever. The ulterior purpose! Children! Well, she would have thousands of them—her future audiences; and if she could not rumple their hair, she would rumple their souls. Her ulterior purpose! What she had audaciously planned as an exquisite bit of diablerie had turned upon her and rended her. For what had been this purpose? To send him back to his wife, there to become totally disillusioned. And in that event, what could he do but return to her, Selma—forever?

She laughed again, brokenly. The swift-driving wind dashed the tears from her eyes.