CHAPTER XVII
“I cannot tell more to-night. I cannot make it snappy. I cannot go on.”
The tortured protest of the spirit-girl Dolores was as the breath of a blower to her demon audience. It fanned the tinder of their evil imaginations and inflamed their desires for intimate details.
A clamor of profanity arose as the marble-pale, but fervid face which had wrought such grief among men lowered to the shield of hands that looked too weak to have torn to bits a strong man’s honor. The shudder of crucified modesty caused the jewel-like lights that adorned her hair, her throat, her breast to wink, as from carnal thoughts “indestructible” as their source of life.
For several nights the first Royal Entertainer had held her place at the monk-table’s head by virtue of a two-fold charm; had dazzled their eyes with her beauty and the illusion of her gorgeous apparel, while enslaving their attention with the finished style of her tale. Now that she had reached what might be considered a low spot of intensity, however, her sense of the artistic had failed her and them. She had fallen from the superiority of her infernal state; and backslid, as it were, into the slough of an almost human self-consciousness. When their most venomous hisses did not lift the sin-dark head from the board, they turned as one to him who had arranged the little inside entertainment. Interest of another kind stirred in them at the look of him.
Exasperation had lifted the King from his chair. He stood at the table’s foot, glaring down at the proselyte who had dared to arouse, then deny his emotions. A glow surrounded him, outlining his superb proportions against the black velvet hangings. From his eyes—nearer green than gray at the moment—poured a baleful light. His features worked from mental lasciviousness.
“I told you to dispense with the asterisks,” he reminded her. “How dare you tease me with this obsolete trick?”
Dolores lifted her face. In the radium glow of his vicious expectations it gleamed with unthinkable chastity.
“I have not meant to tease or trick you,” she said. “I have done my best to entertain—have plotted and planned my story like the writer of a book—have rehearsed my lines each day like an actress before her opening night. Every little treasured phrase and word I have given you, just as learned by heart at the time and re-learned in my afterthoughts. I’ve tried—tried. But I find that I cannot go on. No true woman-soul could. What happened was between ourselves and——”
“Watch your words! For the infidel you boast yourself, you’re quite too free with the name of a certain Potentate. Besides, aren’t you flattering the Great-I-Am? I miss my guess if what happened wasn’t between yourselves and me.”
Dolores’ timidity left her at the suggestion. “I am sure Your Lowness had nothing to do with—with that night. Otherwise it would not seem so wrong to tell it here—such an injustice to John. The fault was not his. It was mine—all mine. I did what he implored me not to do. I urged myself upon him beyond his strength. The only excuse for me is that, with all I had known of mortal man, I really did not understand. And he—he had felt so safe in his sorrow.”
Half-rising, she clutched the table for support and gazed along the double file of spectral faces. The leer on the lips of him nicknamed Old Original aroused her to further defense.
“Perhaps our mateship was not meant to be gainsaid. Perhaps the races of the mortal world would be worthier their fair lands if right were not made wrong by mortal laws—if only the Maker whom John questioned need be obeyed. Perhaps He meant that the crave to be satisfied of all true love should compensate for His inexorable law that man must die.”
At the shriek of derision that greeted her thought, she lifted her head and eyes in a transport of humble defiance.
“Whatever the perhaps and perhaps, I do not regret. The proof of what I felt for John I never shall regret. If I did wrong it was in caring for him and that I could not help. Love’s first and best impulse is to bestow. I knew that I belonged to him and I wanted him to know. I am glad—glad that I told him. The way I gave the knowledge was called a crime—the only crime on earth not judged by motive and circumstance. Surely on that Day when justice becomes absolute, I shall not be blamed. What is a whispered confession, a lingering kiss, an abandoned embrace, to be quibbled over by Him said to have made us and all that we are from the impulse of love divine? Did not He Himself decree that love must be served?”
“She-fiend, you overstep yourself!”
The lash of His Majesty’s voice convinced the girl-soul. Whipped by it back into her chair, she awaited the chastisement which probably would follow her regardlessness of rules. Thoughts of the Wantons’ Well and the Ward for Bastard Babes subdued her small access of courage in the dread which had come with her from Earth to Shadow Land. She closed her eyes; ceased to breathe; expected. The pause seemed long; was long.
When finally the Rex of Reversals spoke, his humorous tone and diction made her realize that until then she had expected clemency.
“Hard to beat, this faith of fools! At least, the Great Judge of whom you hope a reprieve from the fiat of your world hasn’t any corner on tolerance. Although love is a puny motive, I excuse a lot of it for sake of the passion it begets. Young woman, your story interests me. Since so large an audience has disconcerted you, suppose you finish it to sympathetic me alone. It is hate divine that must be served and you who must serve it.”
Dolores’ moan went unheard in the instant protest of the demon cabinet. But their controller did not trouble to repeat his order. Not so much as a gesture or nod of dismissal did he vouchsafe as they, not daring to vent their spleen over being excluded from this culminating séance, filed out one by one.
Although several times before Dolores had been alone with His Highness, she never had feared as now the Evil Mind. Her face returned to her palms. In darting speculation over what he next might say or do, she awaited his displeasure. Unendurably the silence lasted. She at last glanced up from morbid curiosity.
He was not looking at her. The green glow, so weird from his gray eyes, shafted well to one side and past her. She noticed that he was at once unusually attractive because unusually repulsive to-night. The concentration into which he had sunk drew out of her like a magnet a certain sympathy for the very evil he would do her. She shuddered in ghoulish anticipation.
More slowly lagged the seconds. More unnatural it seemed that still he did not look at her. Had there remained in his mind a shadow of Old Sam’s suggestion that he had a weakness for her? Doubt of what might lurk in his averted eyes obsessed her.
“Why don’t you speak? Why don’t you look at me?” she urged aloud. “Please look at me.”
She would better have remained in doubt. To see what was in his eyes, to try to grasp the odious meaning of the glance now fixed upon her——
As she swayed backward in her chair, he proceeded to enlighten her.
“I get it.”
“It, Your Majesty?”
“It—you—the secret power that has made you the desire of men and devils. Who would have thought to look at you that it was only a case of lust beget lust?”
“Oh, don’t say that!”
He leered. “Why a pretense of apology between two bad ones like us? Instead of protesting virtues of which you ought to be ashamed, realize that your guilt as charged makes your desirability one-hundred-per-cent-plus down here, as it did on Earth.”
Evidently not interested in her agreement, he turned away and began to pace the floor.
“This has been a red-letter night to me. Do you know, you’re not telling a good story—not good at all. It has elements that quite hold me. We’ve had the vamp in books, over the footlights and on the screen. I thought I knew the types and methods forward and backward—especially back. But your delineation of a young girl who is without design because herself unconscious of the prurience in her, who appeals to the best in men by her guilelessness and the worst by her sleeping desire, who, although intending well, spreads disaster in her wake—— No matter what its claims to truth, sweet Grief, it makes a damned bad story.”
He stopped directly before her in time to hear a murmured appeal to her guardian companions.
“Innocentia, must I believe these dreadful things about myself? If they are not true, help me to prove them false, dear, dear Amor.”
Approvingly the Satanic chuckle sounded. “Consistent to fanaticism in your part! As you like. But let’s get to the end. Forget the asterisks. Pull up the curtain. Give us the expurgated lines.”
“If I am fanatic in my desire to be decent, you are an atheist. I tell you I cannot—will not go on!” From strength of her abhorrence the spirit-girl started up and faced him. “Punish me as you like. Anything is better than to strip my soul to your unholy gaze.”
“Anything?” He seized her arm with the sear of a red-hot iron. “I’ll give you one second to fête your fancy upon what your punishment might be. You’ll pay in full, you helliot, if you cheat me of an experiment that I plan to make. You’ve given me an idea more seducing than any of my own inception. If it works out, it will net you more than it will me. Come a day, you being what you are and I what I am——”
“I wish to hear no new ideas for me. I cannot endure more to-night.”
At her sustained effort to combat his will he leaned so close over her that her face felt scorched from his mental insistence, more offensive than the physical insistence of any man of Earth. She struggled toward her chair; there fell face forward on the board. He—without looking, she saw—swept after her like some ravening bird of prey. Strong, long talons clutched her. Almost had they shaken her access of strength from her when——
“Better let up on her, Your Demnition Pow-Wows.”
A carping voice offered the advice. A tall, strong-looking ghoul swaggered into the light from the comparative darkness outside the door.
“Sin, you infernal eaves-dropper, how dare you——”
“Leaves-dropper, rather—table-leaves-dropper.” With incredible bravado Old Original winked into the Balial glare. “May I assume the compliment to my invisibility that you failed to notice me humbly awaiting Your Damnity’s convenience without?”
“Impudently awaiting My Damnity’s inconvenience, you mean. You may not. That I didn’t notice you was due to the super-visibility of our royal raconteuse.”
“Who will recount no more if you continue to torture her. Having recommended her to your inclemency in the first place, I feel more than less responsible. The wages of sin are best paid by death—you’ll concede that to me, Excellency? Yet you do not, I am sure, wish her to die.”
“Low-brow, she cannot die.”
The old hoax returned a confident leer. “That I grow more high-brow with every age let me demonstrate through a reminder of how the greatest roughness is the gentlest. What diverts you in her—her very virile hope—may die before that Day. Am I right or wrong in saying that you owe me, if not her, some consideration?”
“Wrong you are. You did throw me the acorn from which a giant oak may grow.”
“And hasn’t she sirened you along bad and improper? Hasn’t she been square with you?”
“Yes, she’s been square. There wasn’t a right angle to all the past Delilahs ever damned by man or me.”
Sin, with a wary eye fixed upon the Master of Malice, made for that end of the monk-board nearer the exit. The while he further ventured: “It isn’t necessarily lowering to Your Highness to say that you have more to learn than I anent the siren act. You can’t bully a dame into doting on you. The present-day caveman style is 40 H. P.—after you’ve got her. Before, a wise one coaxes her. And it isn’t enough to load her down with that stage jewelry of which you’re so prodigal, when you yourself don’t look to be, any more than you act to be, of her day and degeneration. Why not tog yourself up more in the likeness of this millionaire love-hound of hers? Summertime’s coming apace or I’m no weather prophet, so why not moth-ball the well-known Vandyke and those robes of the vintage of Sol-in-all-his-glory days?”
A snarl of stabbed vanity greeted the daring suggestion. Its cogency was demonstrated, however, when, in a lunge after the purveyor of unsolicited counsel, the King tripped over his train.
From the hall the minister primed his advices.
“As for your technique, soft-pedal yourself. Don’t keep blaring like a brass band at a lady who has fainted with fear of your noise.”
The slam of the door was the old impertinent’s period.
Once more tormentor and tormented were alone. Slowly the Past-Master of Policy righted himself and his intent. Returning to the prostrate girl-shade, he thinkingly regarded her. Her side face lay lax upon the board, exquisite as an irradiated cameo in its twisted setting of hair. Closed were those eyes of the purples of the bourgainvillae. Not a breath lifted the luring lines of the back revealed by her décolleté. Could her spirit really have swooned beyond his reach?
He shrugged away the thought. Too often and too vehemently had he himself longed for surcease from consciousness in the last ten thousand years or so. Too well he knew that she still could hear him. Through time which had no beginning and could not end, she as well as he must continue to think—and think—and think.
Thinking of her now as he looked, he felt more than before attracted toward that new idea regarding her which had been inspired by the latest chapter of her earth history. The oldest Original was right. His ways with women were archaic as his clothes in the sight of this most modern of Magdalenes. No repression of his ruthlessness or change in his “style” would be too great a price to pay for success in that experiment.
When he spoke it was in mild tones.
“Forgive my stupidity. ‘It ain’t inherited—it’s a gift.’ All right, fairest fiend. We’ll call it a séance to-night. Or better, suppose I give you a lift over the scene which has overwhelmed you with self-consciousness. At that, it may affect me worse to tell it myself. They say the narrator gets more out of his story than his hearers. He first must feel to arouse feeling. A good bad idea. So then, I’ll tell you.”
The tips of his fingers crackled as he touched them to his lips, then waved them toward the unresponsive audience.
“Behind the Asterisks!” he announced his subject. “The Great-I-Am invented the sex-impulse in order to give life to love. Necessarily He had to make it a strong emotion in order to people His earth.
“I invented loveless lust to people Hell. None born of the flesh dares deny his vulnerability. None but feels its basic attraction, even at times when most repulsed. Not to its cruder phases do I invite your attention—to the reproductive instinct of the mortal male. That is ever awake, unashamed, engaging chiefly through its strength.
“But sleeping passion! Too few are given the dear delight of arousing it. To breathe open the eyes searching through their mist of dreams—to kiss into consciousness the sweet-thick lips—to feel one’s sluggish pulse speeding to match the beat of youth’s startled heart——
“Ah, what man-brute of Earth, what god of Heaven or fiend of Hell would not gladly give the wealth of three worlds to incite the divine awakening!
“Moved beyond modesty, the arms uplift and cling—weak-strong arms, made supple to curve around the bodies of babes. The lips soon learn why they are so thick and honey-sweet, soon learn to give and to ask back in double dole.
“The inarticulate murmur of yearnings that crave utterance, but are ashamed of words.... The sobs of utter innocence.... The tender form that seems to shrink even as it seeks.... At last the naked desire.... Its brief, breathless struggle to control.... The delirium of yielding to its will....
“The hoping fear....
“The fearing hope....”