The Ball of Fire

by George Randolph Chester; Lillian Chester

She was shaken, she knew that, shaken and stirred as she had never been before. Something in the depths of her had leaped up into life, and cried out in agony, and would not stop crying until it was satisfied.

The hardest part of the whirl from which to untangle herself was the tremendous overwhelming attraction there had been between them. The red wave of consciousness rose up over her neck and crimsoned her cheeks and flushed her very brow, as the nearness of him came back to her. Again she could feel that marvellous welding of their palms, the tingle of her shoulder where he had accidentally brushed against it; the music of his voice, which had set up that ecstatic answering vibration within her. She felt again his warm breath upon her cheek, the magnetic thrill of his arms as he enfolded her, the breathless joy which had ensued when he had drawn her to his breast, and held and held and held her there, as an indivisible part of him, forever and forever. The burning pressure of his lips upon hers! That breathless, intolerable ecstasy when he had folded her closer, and still closer! A sense of shame flooded her that she had yielded so much, that she had been so helpless in the might and the strength and the sweep—

She raised her head with a jerk, and rubbed her hands over her eyes. Why there had been no such episode! He had not folded her in his arms, nor drawn her to him, nor kissed her lips; though her breath was fluttering and her wrists burning in the bare memory of it; he had only drawn quite near to her, and held her hand; and once he had kissed it! How then had she reproduced all these sensations so vividly? Then indeed, shame came to her, as she realised how much more completely than he could know, she had, in one breathless instant, given herself to him!

It was that shame which came to her rescue, which set her upon her defence, which started her to the seeking for her justification. She had refused him, even at the very height of her most intense yielding. And why? She must go deeper into the detail of that. She had to grope her way slowly and painfully back through the quivering maze of her senses, to recall the point at which she had been taken rudely from the present into the future.

“I need you to walk hand in hand with me about the greatest work in the world!” That was it; the greatest work in the world! And what was that work? To live and teach ritual in place of religion; to turn worship into a social observance; to use helpless belief as a ladder of ambition; to reduce faith to words, and hope to a recitation, and charity to an obligation; to make pomp and ceremony a substitute for conscience, and to interpose a secretary between the human heart and God!

For just an instant Gail’s eyelids dropped, her long brown lashes curved upon her cheeks, while beneath them her eyes glinted, and a smile touched the corners of her lips; then she was serious again. No, she had decided wisely. They could not spend a lifetime in the ecstasy of touch. Between those rare moments of the rapture of love must come stern hours of waking. Then she must live a constant lie, she must battle down her own ideals and her own thoughts and her own worship and subscribe to a dead shell of pretence, which she had come to hold in contempt and even loathing. She must appear constantly before the world as subscribing to and upholding a sham which had been formulated as thoroughly as the multiplication table; and to do all these things she would be compelled to throttle her own dear Deity, with whom she had been friends since her babyhood, to whom she could go at any hour with pure faith and simple confidence; always in love and never in fear!

Yes, she had chosen wisely. Through all the years to come there would be clash upon clash, until they would grow so far apart spiritually that no human yearning, no matter how long nor how strong, could bridge the chasm. She was humiliated to be compelled to confess to herself that the tremendous fire which had consumed them, that the tremendous attraction which had drawn them together, that the tremendous ecstasy which had enveloped them, was by no means of the soul or the spirit or the mind. And yet, how potent that attraction had been, how it left her still quivering with longing. Did she despise that tendency in herself? Something within her answered defiantly “No!” Still defiantly, she exulted in it; for many instincts which the Creator has planted in humanity have been made sinful by teaching alone. Moreover, a further search brought a deserved approbation to the rescue of her self-respect. Mighty as had been the call upon her from without and from within, she had resisted it, and driven it back, and leashed it firmly with the greater strength of her faith! She gloried that she had not been weak in this stormy test, and her eyes softened with a smile of gratitude. Poor Tod!

There was a knock on the door, and Gail smiled again as she said:

“Come in.”

Mrs. Helen Davies entered, tall and stately in her boudoir frills and ruffles. She gazed searchingly at Gail’s now calm face, with its delicately tinted oval cheeks and its curved red lips and its brown eyes, into which a measure of peace had come. The face did not tell her as much as she had expected to find in it, but the fact that Gail had so far deviated from her unbreakable habit of piling into a negligee and putting every minute trace of disorder to rights before she did anything else, was sufficient indication that something unusual had occurred. Aunt Helen sat down in front of Gail and prepared to enact the rôle of conscientious mother.