Paula heard a hoa.r.s.e voice, but the words of the reply were lost.

"Come over across the street for a minute. I want a stimulant and a talk with you," Felix Larch added, wriggling into his overcoat.

There was a low, husky laugh, and then plainly these words: "She makes your goppers sizzle--eh?... Wait until I tell her she has won and I'll go with you," added the queer little man, whom Paula knew now to be Vhruebert....

The latter pa.s.sed along the emptied aisle toward Stephen Cabot, who had not left his seat. Paula noted with a start that the playwright's head had dropped forward in a queer way. Vhruebert glanced at him, and grasped his shoulder. The old manager then cleared his throat--a sound which apparently had meaning for the nearest usher, who hurried forward to be dispatched for a doctor. It was very cleverly and quietly done....

Stephen Cabot, who could see more deeply than others into the art of the woman and the power of his own lines, and possibly deeper into the big result of this fine union of play and player--had fainted at the climacteric moment.... A physician now breasted his way through the crowd at the doors, and _The Thing_ suddenly appeared in the nearest box and darted forward like a rush of wind. She gathered the insensible one in her arms and repeated his name low and swiftly.

"Yes," he murmured, opening his eyes at last.

They seemed alone.... Presently Stephen Cabot laughingly protested that he was quite well, and disappeared behind the scenes, a.s.sisted by the long, bare arm that had so recently hurled havoc over the throng. Paula waited for a few moments at the door until she was a.s.sured.

Driving home through the Park, she felt that she could not endure another emotion. For a long time she tossed restlessly in bed, too tired to sleep. A reacting depression had fallen upon her worn nerves. She could not forget the big structure of the day's joy, but substance had dropped from it.... The cold air sweeping through her sleeping-room seemed to come from desolate mountains. Lost entirely was her gladness of victory in the Selma Cross achievement. She called herself spiteful, ungrateful, and quite miserably at last sank into sleep....

She was conscious at length of the gray of morning, a stifling pressure in her lungs, and the effort to rouse herself. She felt the cold upon her face; yet the air seemed devitalized by some exhausting voltage, she had known before. There was a horrid jangle in her brain, as of two great forces battling to complete the circuit there. A face imploring from a garret-window, a youth in a lion's skin, a rock in the desert and a rock in the Park, the dim hotel parlor and the figure of yesterday among the mountain-peaks--so the images rushed past--until the tortured face of Bellingham (burning eyes in the midst of ghastly pallor), caught and held her mind still. From a room small as her own, and gray like her own with morning, he called to her: "Come to me.... Come to me, Paula Linster.... I have lived for you--oh, come to me!"

She sprang out of bed, and knelt. How long it was before she freed herself, Paula never knew. Indeed, she was not conscious of being actually awake, until she felt the bitter cold and hurried into the heated room beyond. She was physically wretched, but no longer obsessed.... She would not believe now that the beyond-devil had called again. It was all a dream, she told herself again and again--this rush of images and the summons from the enemy. Yesterday, she had been too happy; human bodies cannot endure so long such refining fire; to-day was the reaction and to-morrow her old strength and poise would come again.

Quite bravely, she a.s.sured herself that she was glad to pay the price for the hours of yesterday. She called for the full series of morning papers, resolving to occupy her mind with the critical notices of the new play.

These were quite remarkable in the unanimity of their praise. The Cross-Cabot combination had won, indeed, but Paula could extract no buoyancy from the fact, nor did black coffee dispel the vague premonitive shadows which thickened in the background of her mind. The rapping of Selma Cross upon her door was hours earlier than ever before.

She, too, had called for the morning papers. A first night is never finished until these are out. Paula did not feel equal to expressing all that the play had meant to her. It was with decided disinclination that she admitted her neighbor.

Selma Cross had not bathed, nor dressed her hair. She darted in noiselessly in furry slippers--a yellow silk robe over her night-dress.

Very silken and sensuous, the huge, laughing creature appeared as she sank upon the lounge and shaded her yellow eyes from the light. So perfect was her health, and so fresh her happiness, that an hour or two of sleep had not left her eyes heavy nor her skin pallid. There was an odor of sweet clover about her silks that Paula never sensed afterward without becoming violently ill. She knew she was wrong--that every fault was hers--but she could not bear the way her neighbor cuddled this morning in the fur of the couch-covering. Selma had brought in every morning newspaper issued and a thick bundle of telegrams besides. Paula told her, literally forcing the sentences, how splendidly the play and her own work had appealed to her. This task, which would have been a pure delight at another time, was adequately accomplished only after much effort now. It appeared that the actress scarcely heard what she was saying. The room was brightening and there was a grateful piping of steam in the heaters of the apartment.

"So glad you liked it, dear," Selma said briefly. "And isn't it great the way the papers treated it? Not one of them panned the play nor my work.... I say, it's queer when a thing you've dreamed of for years comes true at last--it's different from the way you've seen it come to others. I mean there's something unique and a fullness you never imagined. Oh, I don't know nor care what I'm drowning to say.... Please do look over these telegrams--_from everybody_! There's over a hundred!

I had to come in here. I'd have roused you out of bed--if you hadn't been up. The telephone will be seething a little later--and I wanted this talk with you."

Big theatrical names were attached to the yellow messages. It is a custom for stages-folk to speed a new star through the first performance with a line of courage--wired. You are supposed to count your real friends in those who remember the formality. It is not well to be a day late....

"And did you notice how Felix Larch uncoiled?"

Paula looked up from the telegrams to explain how this critic had been the object of her contemplation the night before.

"He hasn't turned loose in that sort of praise this season," Selma Cross added. "His notice alone, dear, is enough to keep us running at the _Herriot_ until June--and we'll open there again in the fall, past doubt."

Paula felt wicked in that she must enthuse artificially. She forced herself to remember that ordinarily she could have sprung with a merry heart into the very centre of the other's happiness.

"Listen, love," Selma resumed, ecstactically hugging her pillow, "I want to tell you things. I wanted to yesterday, but I had to hurry off.

You've got so much, that you must have the rest. Besides, it's in my mind this morning, because it was the beginning of last night----"

"Yes, tell me," Paula said faintly, bringing her a cup of coffee.

"I was first smitten with the pa.s.sion to act--a gawky girl of ten at a child's party," Selma began. "I was speaking a piece when the impulse came to turn loose. It may have been because I was so homely and straight-haired, or it may have been that I did the verses so differently from the ordinary routine of speaking pieces--anyway, a boy in the room laughed. Another boy immediately bored in upon the scoffer, downed his enemy and was endeavoring hopefully to kill him with bare hands, when I interfered. My champion and I walked home together and left a wailing and disordered company. That's the first brush.

"My home was Danube, Kentucky. They had a dramatic society there. Eight years after the child's party, this dramatic society gave _A Tribute to Art_. Where the piece came from is forgotten. How it got its name never was known outside of the sorry brain that thrust it, deformed but palpitating, upon the world. Mrs. Fiske couldn't have made other than a stick of the heroine. The hero was larger timber, though too dead for vine leaves. But, I think I told you about the Big Sister--put there in blindness or by budding genius. There were possibilities in that character. Danube didn't know it, or it wouldn't have fallen to me.

Indeed, I remember toward the end of the piece--a real moment of windy gloom and falling leaves, a black-windowed farmhouse on the left, the rest a desolate horizon--in such a moment the Big Sister plucks out her heart to show its running death.

"I had persisted in dramatic work, in and out of season, during those eight years, but it really was because the Big Sister didn't need to be beautiful that I got the part. I wove the lines tighter and sharpened the thing in rehearsals, until the rest of the cast became afraid, not that I would outshine them, but that I might disgrace the society on the night o' nights. You see, I was only just tolerated. Poor father, he wasn't accounted much in Danube, and there was a raft of us. Poor, dear man!

"Danube wasn't big enough to attract real shows, so the visiting drama gave expression to limited trains, trap-doors, blank cartridges and falling cliffs"--Selma Cross chuckled expansively at the memory--"and I plunged my fellow-townsmen into waters deeper and stormier than _n.o.body's Claim_ or _Shadows of a Great City_. Wasn't it monstrous?"

Paula inclined her head, but was not given time to answer.

"A spring night in Kentucky--hot, damp, starlit--shall I ever forget that terrible night of _A Tribute to Art_? All Danube somebodies were out to see the younger generation perpetuate the lofty culture of the place. Grandmothers were there, who played _East Lynne_ on the same stage--before the raids of Wolfert and Morgan; and daddies who sat like deans, eyes dim, but artistic, you know--watched the young idea progress upon familiar paths.... The heroine did the best she could. I was a camel beside her--strode about her raging and caressing. You see how I could have spoiled _The Thing_ last night--if I had let the pa.s.sion flood through me like a torrent through a broken dam? That's what I did in Danube--and some full-throated baying as well. Oh, it is horrible to remember.

"The town felt itself brutalized, and justly. I had left a rampant thing upon every brain, and very naturally the impulse followed to squelch the perpetrator for all time. I don't blame Danube now. I had been bad; my lack of self-repression, scandalous. The part, as I had evolved it, was out of all proportion to the piece, to Danube, to amateur theatricals. I don't know if I struck a false note, but certainly I piled on the feeling.

"Can you imagine, Paula, that it was an instant of singular glory to me--that climax?... Poor Danube couldn't see that I was combustible fuel, freshly lit; that I was bound to burn with a steady flame when the pockets of gas were exploded.... My dazed people did not leave the hall at once. It was as if they had taken strong medicine and wanted to study the effect upon each other. I came out from behind at last, up the aisle, sensing disorder where I had expected praise, and was joined by my old champion, Calhoun Knox, who had whipped the scoffer at the child's party. He pressed my hand. We had always been friends. Pa.s.sing around the edge of the crowd, I heard this sentence:

"'Some one--the police, if necessary--must prevent Selma Cross from making another such shocking display of herself!'

"It was a woman who spoke, and the man at her side laughed. I had no time nor thought to check Calhoun. He stepped up to the man beside the woman. 'Laugh like that again,' he said coldly, 'and I'll kill you!'

"It seemed to me that all Danube turned upon us. My face must have been mist-gray. I know I felt like falling. The woman's words had knifed me.

"'_Oh, you cat-minds!_' I flung at them. Calhoun Knox drew me out into the dark. I don't know how far out on the Lone Ridge Pike we walked, before it occurred to either of us to halt or speak," Selma Cross went on very slowly. "I think we walked nearly to the k.n.o.bs. The night had cleared. It was wonderfully still out there among the hemp-fields. I knew how he was pitying me, and told him I must go away.

"'I can't stand for you to go away, Selma,' Calhoun said. 'I want you to stay and be mine always. We always got along together. You are beautiful enough to me!'

"I guess it was hard for him to say it," the woman finished with a laugh, "I used to wish he hadn't put in that 'enough.' But that moment--it was what I needed. There was always something big and simple about Calhoun Knox. My hand darted to his shoulder and closed there like a mountaineer's, 'You deserve more of a woman than I am, Calhoun,' I said impetuously, 'but you can have me when I come to marry--but, G.o.d, that's far off. I like you, Calhoun. I'd fight for you to the death--as you fought for me to-night and long ago. I think I'd hate any woman who got you--but there's no wife in me to-night. I have failed to win Danube, Kentucky, but I'll win the world. I may be a burnt-out hag then, but I'll come back--when I have won the world--and you can have me and it.... Listen, Calhoun Knox, if ever a man means _husband_ to me--you shall be the man, but to-night,' I ended with a flourish, and turned back home, 'I'm not a woman--just a devil at war with the world!'"

"But haven't you heard from him?" Paula asked, after a moment.

"Yes, he wrote and wrote. Calhoun Knox is the kind of stuff that remembers. The time came when I didn't have the heart to answer. I was afraid I'd ask him for money, or ask him to come to help me. Help out of Danube! I couldn't do that--better old Villiers.... But I mustn't lie to you. I went through the really hard part alone.... So Calhoun's letters were not answered, and maybe he has forgotten. Anyway, before I marry--he shall have his chance. Oh, I'll make it hard for him. I wouldn't open any letter from Danube now--but he shall have his chance----"

"What do you mean to do?"

"Why, we'll finish the season here--and Vhruebert has promised us a little run in the West during June. We touch Cincinnati. From there I'll take the Company down to Danube. I've got to win the world and Danube.

After the play, I'll walk out on the Lone Ridge pike--among the hemp-fields--with Calhoun Knox----"

"But he may have married----"

"G.o.d, how I hope so! I shall wish him kingly happiness--and rush back to Stephen Cabot."

Paula could not be stirred by the story this morning. She missed, as never before, some big reality behind the loves of Selma Cross. There was too much of the sense of possession in her story--arm-possession. So readily, could she be transformed into the earthy female, fighting tooth and claw for her own. Paula could hardly comprehend in her present depression, what she had said yesterday about Stephen Cabot's capacity to forgive.... She was glad, when Selma Cross rose, yawned, stretched, and shook herself. The odor of sweet clover was heaviness in the room.... The long, bare arm darted over the reading-table and plucked forth the book Paula loved. The volume had not been hidden; there was no reason why she should not have done this, yet the action hurt the other like a drenching of icy water upon her naked heart.

"Ho-ho--Quentin Charter! So _A Damsel Came to Peter_?"

"I think--I hear your telephone,--Selma!" Paula managed to say, her voice dry, as if the words were cut from paper.

"Yes, yes, I must go, but here's another story. A rotten cad--but how he can write! I don't mean books--but letters!... He's the one I told you about--the Westerner--while the old man was in the South!"

The last was called from the hall. The heavy door slammed between them.

Paula could not stand--could not keep her mouth from dropping open. Her temples seemed to be cracking apart.... She saw herself in half-darkness--like _The Thing_ last night--beating her breast in the gloom. She felt as if she must laugh--in that same wind-blown, chattering way.