PAULA THE WALL OF A HUNDRED WINDOWS, AND THE MYSTERIOUS MADAME NESTOR CALLS AT THE ZOROASTER Paula had never felt such a consciousness of as the next forenoon, after three or four hours' sleep. She was just unrested enough to be alive with tension. Her physical and mental capacities seemed expanded beyond all common bounds, and her thoughts tumbled about playfully in full arenic light, as athletes awaiting the beginning of performance. She into a tub of cool water with such delight as to souse her hair, so it became necessary to spend a half-hour in the sunlight by the open window, combing and fanning, her mind turning over wonderful things.
 
If you ever looked across a valley of oaks and and elms in the full morning glow of mid-October, you can divine the glory of red and brown and gold which was this fallen hair. One must long to suggest with words the eyes of Paula Linster; perhaps the best her chronicler can do is to offer a glimpse from time to time. Just now you are asked for the sake of her eyes to that valley once more—only in a dusk that enriches rather than dims. A beautiful young woman, sitting there by the open window—one of the elect would have said.
 
The difficulty in having to do with Linster attractions is to avoid rising into rhapsody. One thinks of stars and lakes, angels and autumn lands, because his heart is full as a country-boy's, and high clean-clipped thinking is choked. Certainly, once having known such a woman, you will never fall under the spell of Weininger, or any other scale-eyed genius. There is an inspiring reach to that hard-handled word, Culture, when it is used about a woman like this. It means so pure a fineness as neither to require nor to be capable of ; and yet, a fineness that wears and gives and associates with heroisms. You think of a lineage that for centuries has not been by or , and has preserved a glowing human warmth, too, to retain the spirit of woman. When men rise to the real and the , one by one, each will find his Paula Linster, whom to make happy is happiness; whose companionship calls his best; whom to be with constantly means therefore that all within him, not of the best, must surely die. Clearly when a man finds such a woman, all his roads are closed, save one—to the Shining Heights! And who can say that his royal mate will not laughingly unfold wings for him, when they stand together in the radiant altitude?
 
She was thinking of Charter's book as she brushed her hair dry. His sentences played brightly in her mind, fastening themselves to comment of her own for the review. Deep was the appeal of the rapt, sunlit face, as she looked away across the rear-court. The colored hall-boy of her own house might have missed the lines of lip, , , brow, temple and chin, but his head uncovered in her presence, and the choicest spirit of service sprang within him. In all about her, to an enlightened vision, was the unconscious of beauty—art-stirring lines of mental and spiritual ; that look of deep inner freshness and health, the sight of which disgusts a man with all he has done to soil and sicken his body. Full and easily she breathed, as one who sweet air like the taste of pure water. You could imagine Paula exclaiming with joy at the delight of a wind from the sea, but not from the steaming of a . It was all an æsthetic attraction—not an over-rounded arc, not a tissue stretched shiny from plumpness, not a or fold to suggest the easy content of a mere feeding and breeding animal.
 
The rear-view of a great granite-ridge of rooming-houses across the court had often fascinated her with the thought of the mysteries within. Once she had spoken to Reifferscheid about the splendid story of New York yet to be written by someone who watched, as she often did, one of these walls of a hundred windows.
 
"Yes," he had said. "It's great to be poor. Best blood of New York is in those back rooms. Everyone needs his poverty-stage of growth—about seven years will do. It teaches you . You step into your neighbor's room and find him washing his stockings with shaving-soap. He explains that it is better than tooth-powder for textile . Also, he intimates that he has done a very serious thing in wetting down these small garments, having looked in his bag since, and learned that he has not another pair. However, he them very tight and puts them on with the remark that this is a certain way to prevent shrinkage."
 
Even now, a man stood by his window in a sleeveless garment and a ruff of , shaving with a free hand, and a song between strokes. His was a shining morning face, indeed.... A bare feminine arm leaped quickly forth from behind a curtain nearby and adjusted a flower-pot better to the sunlight. From somewhere came a girlish voice in Wagner's Walkure Call. There was not a thought of effort in her carrying that lofty elaborate music—just a fine heart to harmony on a rare morning. The effect is not spoiled by the glimpse of a tortured feminine face igniting a cigarette over a gas-flame that has burned all night. The of New York are too powerful for many, but there is more of health and hope than not.... A good mother a sauce-pan from her water-pitcher and showers with the a young heaven-tree far below. Then she lifts in a milk-bottle from the stone ledge—and blows the dust from the top....
 
Often at night when Paula she could hear the drum of a typewriter winging across the precipice—one of the night-shift to feed the insatiable maw of print. Had New York called him? Would the City crush him into a trifler, with artificial emotions, or was this a Daniel come to interpret her evil dreams?... In a corner-room with two windows, sat a young man before an easel. Almost always he was there, when there was light. Heaven be with him, Paula thought, if his picture failed.... And in one of the least and darkest, an old man sat writing. Day after day, he worked through the hours. To what god or devil had he sold his soul that he was thus to eternal scrivening? This was the harrowing part. The back-floors of New York are not for the old men. Back-rooms for the young men and , still strong in the flight of time and the fight of competition—back-rooms for young New York. Nature loses interest in the old. Civilization should be kinder.
 
From an unseen somewhere a canary poured out a veritable fire-hose of melody; and along one of the lower window opposite, an old gray cat was , a picture of listening. Here was a dragon, indeed, for small, warm birds.
 
Directly opposite a curtain was lifted, and a woman, no longer young, appeared to breathe the morning. Many New Yorkers knew this woman for her part in children's happiness. There was a whisper that she had once been an artist's model—and had loved the artist.... There was one woman long ago—a woman with a box of alabaster—who was forgiven because she loved much.... The lady across the way loved children now, children of most unhappy fortunes. To those who came, and there were many, she gave music lessons; often all day long helping grimy fingers to over the keys. So she awakened poetry and planted truth-seedlings in shaded little hearts. To the children, though the lady was poor as any—in spite of her piano and a wall of books—she was Lady Bountiful, indeed.... Paula smiled. Two windows, strangely enough side by side, were curtained with stockings out to dry. In one, there were many—cerise and lavender, pink and baby blue. In the next there were but two pair, black. What a world of suggestion in the contrast!... So it was always—her wall of a hundred windows, a changing of , tragedy, that would not bow to hopelessness, vanity, art, sacrifice. Blend them all together above the traffic's roar—and you have the spirit of young New York.
 
She put on the kettle at length, crossing the room for an occasional glance into the mirror as she finished her hair.... The strange power she had felt the night before crept suddenly back from her eyes now to the base of her brain, striving to cripple her . Bellingham was calling her.... The sunlight was gone. There was a smell of hot metal in the air, as if some terrific energy had burned out the vitality. Her heart hurt her from holding her breath so long. Beyond all expression she was shocked and shamed. The mirror showed now a Paula with lips and haggard eyes.... An indescribable fertility stirred within her—almost mystic, like a whisper from spiritland where little children play, waiting to be born. She could have fallen in a strange and subtle of redolent imaginings, except that thought of the source of it all, the occultist—was as acid in her .
 
She drank tea and crossed the street to the Park for an hour. The radiance of autumn impressed her rarely; not as the death of a year, but rather as a glorious of evening, the great energies of nature all crowned with fruition and preparing for rest. Back in her room, she wrote the Charter critique, wrote as seldom before. The cool spirit of the essayist seemed ignited with a . In her power she conceived a great literary possibility of the future—an Burns-vine blossoming forth upon the cliff of a Carlyle. She had finished, and it was dusk when Madame Nestor called.
 
For several years, at various and , Paula, invariably by the unusual, had encountered this woman. Having very little to say as a rule, Madame Nestor was a figure for comment and one not readily forgotten because of occasional . In all the of New York, there was likely no individual quite so out of with ordinary life. Indefinitely, she would be called fifty. Her forehead was broad, her mouth soft. The face as a whole was heavy and flour-white. There was a distention of eyeballs and a shapelessness to her body which gave the impression of advanced physical deterioration—that kind of breaking down, often noticeable among of long practice. Her absolute incapacity to keep anything of value was only one characteristic of interest. Madame Nestor's record of thoughtless was truly inspiriting.
 
"I had to see you to-day," she said, sinking down with a sigh of relief. "I sat behind you last night in Prismatic Hall."
 
The younger woman recalled with a start—the whisper she had heard. She leaned forward and inquired quickly: "So it was you, Madame Nestor, who knew—this Bellingham"—she cleared her throat as she uttered the name—"as he is now—a quarter of a century ago?"
 
"Yes. How very strange that you should have heard what I said.... You will join one of his classes, I presume?"
 
"I can imagine doing no such thing."
 
"Dear Paula, do you think it will really turn out—that you are to have no relation with Bellingham?"
 
Paula repressed the instant impulse to answer sharply. The fact that she had already felt Bellingham's power made the other's words a harsh .
 
"What relation could I have? He is to me."
 
"I suppose I should have been a long since, dear, if these were days for burning witches," Madame Nestor said. "When I saw Bellingham's eyes settle upon you last night—it appeared to me that you are to know him well. I came here to give you what strength I could—because he is the chief of devils."
 
"I'm only one of the working neuters of the human hive," Paula managed to declare.
 
The elder woman said a strange thing: "Ah, no. The feminine is alive in your every movement. A man like Bellingham would cross the world for you. Some strong-souled woman sooner or later must his , and last night it came to me in a way to force my conviction—that you are the woman."
 
Paula toward her. Darkness covered the centres of her mind and she was afraid. She could not laugh, for she had already met the magician's will. "But I him," she whispered. "About the very name when I first heard it yesterday was an atmosphere which aroused all my ."
 
"Even that—he has overcome, but it may help you to endure."
 
"What does the man want?"
 
"He wants life—life—floods of young, fine vitality to renew his own flesh. He wants to live on and on in the body which you have seen. It is all he has, for his soul is dead—or feeble as a frog's. He fears death, because he cannot come back. He renews his life from splendid sources of human —such as you possess. It is Bellingham's hell to know that, once out of the flesh, he has not soul enough, if any, to command a human body again. You see in him an empty thing, which has lived, God knows how many years, hugging the warmth of his blood—a creature who knows that to die means the swift of an evil principle."
 
"Do you realize, Madame Nestor," Paula asked excitedly, "that you are talking familiarly of things which may exist in books of ancient wisdom, but that this is New York—New York packed about us? New York does not reckon with such things."
 
"The massed soul of this big city does not reckon with such things, Paula. That is true, but we are apart. Bellingham is apart. He is wiser than the massed soul of New York."
 
"One might believe, even have such a religious conviction, but you speak of an actual person, the terrible inner mystery of a man, whom we have seen—a man who frightened me last night—and to-day! You bring the thing home to a room in a New York apartment ... Can't you see how hard to adjust, this is? I don't mean to stop or distract you, but this has become—you are helping to keep it so—such an intimate, dreadful thing!"
 
Madame Nestor had been too long immersed in occultism to grasp the world's of her sayings. "Listen, Paula, this that I tell you is inherent in every thinking man. You are bewildered by the personal nature it has assumed.... To every one of us shall come the terrible moment of choice. Man is not conceived blindly to be driven. Imagine a man who is become a rapidly evolving mind. On the one side is the animal-nature, and obedient; on the other, his soul-force. The mind balances between these two—soul and body. The time has come for him to choose between a lonely path to the Heights, or the broad highway, moving with pomp, dazzling with the glare of vain power, and brooded over by an which the soul.... The spirit of man says, 'Take the rising road alone.' The old world-mother sings to him from the swaying , 'Come over and be my king. Look at my arts, my palaces, my young men and my glorious women. I will put worship in the hearts of the strong—for you! I will put love in the hearts of the beautiful—for you! Come over and be my king! Later, when you are old and have drunk deep of power—you may take the rising road alone.'"
 
Paula invariably a dogmatic statement as a possibility in her own mind; but something of this—man reaching a moment of choice—had always appealed to her as a fundamental . Man must conquer not only his body, but his brain, with its subtle dreams of power, a more formidable conflict, before the soul assumes in the mind, and man's progress to the Uplands becomes a conscious and glorious .
 
"You put it with wonderful clearness, Madame Nestor," she said.
 
"I am an old woman who has thought of these things until they are clear. This is the real battle of man, beside which victory over mere appetites of the body is but a boyish triumph. The intellect hungers for power and possession; to hold the many inferior intellects in its own despotic destiny. Against this glittering substance of attraction is the still intangible faith of the soul—an awful moment of . God or Mammon—choose ye!... Listen, Paula, to New York below—treading the empty mill of commerce——"
 
"New York has not chosen yet?"
 
"No, dear, but hundreds, thousands, are learning in preparation for that moment of choice—the falseness and of material possessions."
 
"That is a good thought—an incorruptible kind of optimism!" Paula exclaimed.... "You think this Bellingham has made the evil choice?"
 
"Yes. Long ago."
 
"Yet to have arisen to the moment of choosing, you say he must have conquered the flesh."
 
"Yes."
 
"But you him—I find him—Desire !"
 
"Exactly, Paula, because he has . The animal controls his mind, not the soul. Bellingham is his way back to , with a human brain, all lit with magic! Out of the gathered knowledge of the ages, he has 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 within him. He is a body, nothing but a body—hence the passion to endure. Out of the craft of the past, he has learned—who knows how long ago?—to his own vitality with that of others. He gives nothing, but drains all. Ah, Paula, this I know too well. He is with those creatures of legend, the loup-garou, the . 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 , 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 . There is nothing in him to a pure . 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 and purity—from all that carries the race forward, and will save us at the last. You see his 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 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 in the speaker's face had become a banner of .
 
"Can he not stop that kind of ?" 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 ?"
 
"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 . "No, Paula. It is because you are frightened and 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 at the thought of being bound. It was the old fear of a locked room—the shut-in horror which meant .
 
"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 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 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 passed 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 his—that if I had matched his force with a resistance equally as strong—it would mortally have weakened him. So if he seeks to your will and fails, this great one-pointed power of his, developed who knows how long—will turn and itself. This is an occult law."
 
Paula could understand this—the wild beast of physical desire itself at the last—but not the conception of hopelessness—Bellingham cut off from . The woman divined her thoughts.
 
"Again I beg of you," she said in excitement, "not to let a thought of pity for him 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 shells 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 experience of the morning, but she could not bring the words to .
 
"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 from the entire offering which sufficed for these two, forgotten of appetite. Wafers of dark bread, a poached egg, , a heart of 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 ? 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 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 shell 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 horror on the of Madame Nestor, who seemed 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 child—to build about you a 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 ? Might she not have something to do with the of Desire?
 
"I think I'd better be alone now," she said . "One does not feel like the Pure Presence—when one is chosen for such ."