She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort

"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 simplicity. 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 fabrics. 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 wrings 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 lather, 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 tightened 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 tuned 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 vibrations of New York are too powerful for many, but there is more of health and hope than not.... A good mother cleanses a sauce-pan from her water-pitcher and showers with the rinsing 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 awakened she could hear the drum of a typewriter winging across the precipice—one of the night-shift helping 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 lame 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 steadily through the hours. To what god or devil had he sold his soul that he was thus condemned 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 maidens, 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 torrent of melody; and along one of the lower window ledges opposite, an old gray cat was crouched, a picture of sinister 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 falter 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, demurely black. What a world of suggestion in the contrast!... So it was always—her wall of a hundred windows, a changing panorama of folly, tragedy, toil 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 brass kettle at length, crossing the room for an occasional glance into the mirror as she finished her hair.... The strange numbing power she had felt the night before crept suddenly back from her eyes now to the base of her brain, striving to cripple her volition. 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 spectral Paula with crimson 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 thrall of redolent imaginings, except that thought of the source of it all, the occultist—was as acid in her veins.

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 pageant 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 lyric ardor. In her momentary power she conceived a great literary possibility of the future—an effulgent Burns-vine blossoming forth upon the austere cliff of a Carlyle. She had finished, and it was dusk when Madame Nestor called.

For several years, at various philosophical gatherings and brotherhoods, Paula, invariably stimulated by the unusual, had encountered this remarkable woman. Having very little to say as a rule, Madame Nestor was a figure for comment and one not readily forgotten because of occasional memorable utterances. In all the cults of New York, there was likely no individual quite so out of alignment 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 pulpy shapelessness to her body which gave the impression of advanced physical deterioration—that peculiar kind of breaking down, often noticeable among psychics of long practice. Her absolute incapacity to keep anything of value was only one characteristic of interest. Madame Nestor's record of apparently thoughtless generosity 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?"