She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort

Wonderfully strengthened, she was, by the voyage. Sorrow had destroyed large fields of verdure, and turned barren the future, but its devouring was finished. Quentin Charter was adjusted in her mind to a duality with which Paula Linster could have no concern. Only to one mistress could he be faithful; indeed, it was only in the presence of this mistress that he became the tower of visions to another; in the midst of the work he worshipped, Quentin Charter had heard the Skylark sing. Paula did not want to see him again, nor Selma Cross. To avoid these two, as well as the place where the Destroyer had learned so well to penetrate, she had managed not to return to her apartment during the two days before sailing.... There would never be another master-romance—never again so rich a giving, nor so pure an ideal. Before this tragic reality, the inner glory of her womanhood became meaningless. It was this that made the future a crossing of sterile tundras,—yet she would keep her friends, and love her work, and try to hold her faith....

Bellingham did not call her at sea, but he had frightened her too profoundly to be far from mind. The face she had seen in the hall-way was drawn and disordered by the dreadful tortures of nether-planes; and awful in the eyes, was that feline vacancy of soul. Once in a dream, she saw him—a pale reptile-monster upreared from a salty sea, voiceless in that oceanic isolation, a shameful secret of the depths. The ghastly bulk had risen with a mute protest to the sky against dissolution and creeping decay—and sounded again....

To her, Bellingham was living death, the triumph of desire which rends itself, the very essence of tragedy. She gladly would have died to make her race see the awfulness of just flesh—as she saw it now.... His power seemed ended; she felt with the Reifferscheids and Madame Nestor, that her secret was hermetic, and there was a goodly sense of security in the intervening sea....

And now there was a new island each day; each morning a fresh garden arose from the Caribbean—sun-wooed, rain-softened isles with colorful little ports.... There was one tropic city—she could not recall the name—which from the offing had looked like the flower-strewn gateway to an amphitheatre of mountains.

The Fruitlands had lain for a day in the hot, sharky harbor of Santiago; had run into a real cloudburst off the Silver Reefs of Santo Domingo, and breathed on the radiant next morning before the stately and ancient city of San Juan de Porto Rico—shining white as a dream-castle of old Spain, and adrift in an azure world of sky and sea. She spent a day and an evening in this isle of ripe fruits and riper amours; and took away materials for a memory composite of interminable siestas, restless radiant nights, towering cliffs, incomparable courtesy, and soft-voiced maidens with wondrous Spanish eyes that laugh and turn away.

Then for two days they had steamed down past the saintly archipelago—St. Thomas, St. Martin, St. Kitts; then Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, and a legion of littler isles—truncated peaks jutting forth from fragrant, tinted water. There were afternoons when she did not care to lift her voice or move about. Fruit-juices and the simplest salads, a flexible cane chair under the awnings, a book to rest the eyes from the gorgeous sea and enchanted shores, somnolence rather than sleep—these are enough for the approach to perfection in the Caribbean, with the Lesser Antilles on the lee.... Then at last in late afternoon, the great hulking shape of Pelée loomed watery green against the sky; in the swift-speeding twilight, the volcano seemed to swell and blacken until it was like the shadow of a continent, and the lights of Saint Pierre pricked off the edge of the land.

At last late at night, queerly restless, she sat alone on deck in the windless roadstead and regarded the illumined terraces of Saint Pierre. They had told her that the breath from Martinique was like the heavy moist sweetness of a horticultural garden, but the island must have been sick with fever this night, for a mile at sea the land-breeze was dry, devitalized, irritating the throat and nostrils.

There was no moon, and the stars were so faint in the north that the mass of Pelée was scarcely shaped against the sky. The higher lights of the city had a reddish uncertain glow, as if a thin film of fog hung between them and the eye; but to the south the night cleared into pure purple and unsullied tropic stars. The harbor was weirdly hot.

Before her was the city which held the quest of her voyaging—Father Fontanel, the holy man of Saint Pierre.... Only a stranger can realize what a pure shining garment his actual flesh has become. To me there was healing in the very approach of the man.... This was the enduring fragment from the Charter letters; and in that dreadful Sunday night when she began her flight from Bellingham, already deep within her mind Father Fontanel was the goal.... Paula set out for shore early the next morning. The second-officer of the Fruitlands sat beside her in the launch. She spoke of the intense sultriness.

"Yes, Saint Pierre is glowing like a brazier," he said. "I was ashore last night for awhile. The people blame the mountain. Old Pelée has been acting up—showering the town with ash every little while lately. It's the taint of sulphur that spoils the air."