III

It was in circumstances which, if not dramatic, were, at least, uncommon, that Leilah Verplank met Barouffski.

At Los Angeles, after her flight from Coronado, she caught an express that would have taken her East. Even so, it could not take her from herself, it could not distance memory, it could not annihilate the past. The consciousness of that obsessed her. Each of her thoughts became a separate throb. About her head formed an iron band. Her body ached. She felt hot and ill. She had a sense of thirst, a sense, too, of fear.

In the compartment where she sat, a stranger came. She hid her face, covering it with her hands. The stranger sidled in between them, looked her in the eyes, penetrated them, permeated her, shook long shudders through her, shrieked at her: “I am Fright!”

She cried aloud. No one heard. She got to the door.

In the section immediately adjoining were her women. Perplexed at the start by her unaccountable flight and, since then, alarmed by the abnormal excitability which she had displayed, both, at the sight of her then, rushed to her.

Salt Lake was the first possible asylum. There, weeks later, Leilah arose from one of those attacks, which, for lack of a better term, has been called brain fever.

Like fire, fever may consume, it does not necessarily obliterate. The past remained. But in that lassitude which fever leaves, Leilah was able to consider it with a wearied certainty that no immediate effort could be required of her then.

“Forget,” some considerate and subliminal self admonished. “Forget.”

Even in sleep she could not always do that. But though she could not forget the past, she could, she believed, barricade herself against it. The idea was suggested by the local sheet in which she found an item about neighbourly Nevada. The item hung a hammock for her thoughts, rested her mentally, unrolled a carpet for the returning steps of health.

Verplank, meanwhile, misdirected at Los Angeles, reached San Francisco. Learning there that a party of three women had, that morning, at the last moment, embarked on the Samoa packet; learning also that of these women the central figure projected, or seemed to project, Leilah’s silhouette, he wired for his yacht and sailed away in pursuit. But an accident supervening, the packet reached Samoa before him. When Verplank got there the boat was gone. Still in pursuit he started for the austral seas. There, the mistake discovered, hope for the time abandoned him and he landed in Melbourne, ignorant that the supremely surgical court of Nevada was amputating him from his wife.

In matters of this solemnity, the Nevada statutes require that one of the parties to the operation shall have resided for six months within the state. But at Carson, the capital, a town that has contrived to superpose the Puritan aspect of a New England village on the vices of a Malay port, in this city Leilah learned that statutes so severe were not enacted for such as she.

The information, tolerably consoling, was placed before her by a young Jew who, as she alighted from the train, divined her errand, addressed her with easy Western informality, put a card in her hand, offered his services, telling her as he did so that if she retained him he would have her free in no time, in three months, in less. It was a mere matter of money, he explained, and, what he did not explain, a mere matter of perjury as well, the perjury of local oafs ready to swear to whatever they were paid for, ready to testify for instance that they had known anybody for any required length of time. But the Jew in divining Leilah’s errand divined too her loyalty. In speaking of fees, he kept manœuvres and methods to himself.

Leilah, repelled yet beguiled, succumbed. The Jew was retained and in a wretched inn her things were unpacked. At once a rain of days began, long, loveless days in which she tried to starve her thoughts into submission and bear the cross that had been brought.

The effort was not very satisfactory. The reason why she should have a cross and why it should be borne had never even to her devout mind been adequately explained. Hitherto she had not required any explanation and not unnaturally perhaps since she had had no cross to bear. The dogma that she in common with the rest of humanity must suffer because of the natural propensities of beings that never were, she had accepted as only such dogmas can be accepted, on faith. But in the dismal solitudes of Carson, faith faded, the dogma seemed absurd.

Then suddenly that which in her ignorance she took to be chance, supplied a superior view. While waiting in a shop for a slovenly clerk to do up a package, she looked at a shelf on which were some books – frayed, bedrabbled, second hand. Among them was a treatise on metallurgy, another on horse-breeding, a string of paper covered novels and the Vidyâ.

The title, which conveyed nothing, for that reason attracted. At random she opened the book. A paragraph sprang at her:

“From debility to strength, from strength to power, from power to glory, from glory to perfection, from plane to plane, in an evolution proceeding from the outward to the inward, from the material to the spiritual, from the spiritual to the divine, such is the destiny of the soul.”

Leilah turned a page. Another paragraph leaped out.

“There is not an accident in our lives, not a sorrow, a misfortune, a catastrophe, a happiness that is not due to our own conduct in this existence or in a previous one. In accordance with the nature of our deeds there are thrown about us the tentacles of pain or the arms of joy.”

But the slovenly clerk was approaching. Leilah closed the book, asked the price, paid for it, paid for the other purchase and went back to the inn where during the rest of the day she read the drama of the soul, the story of its emanation from the ineffable, of its surrender to desire, of its fall into matter, of its birth and rebirth in the mansions of life which are death, of the persistence there of its illusory joys, of the recurrences of its unenlightening trials, until, at last, some memory returning of what it had been when it was other than what it had become, it learns at last to conquer desire and accomplish its own release.

The drama, however old, was new to Leilah, and at first not very clear. But beneath it was a chain of causality, the demonstration that this life is the sum of many others, the harvest after the sowing, and, joined to the demonstration were corollaries and deductions which showed that sorrow, when rightly viewed, is not a cross but a gift, a boon granted to the privileged.

It was a little before she mastered the idea. When she had, the novelty of it impressed. At the back of the Vidyâ was a list of cognate works. She wired to San Francisco for them. Shortly they came, and in their companionship the rain of long, loveless days fell by.

Ultimately she sat on a high chair. An oaf asked her questions. Others testified. On the morrow a paper was brought her. It had on it a large seal, the picture of a big building, words that were engrossed, others in script.

She was free.

The knowledge brought no exultation. It was a hostage to joy, one of the many that she was to give.

Meanwhile she had written to Violet Silverstairs telling her that she had separated from Verplank, and asking might she join her. The answer, which was cabled, told her to come. That day she started.

The town house of the Earls of Silverstairs is in Belgrave Square. There are worse places. But to the American countess the discomforts of the residence were not to be endured. After one season she declined to put up with them. Pending an entire modernisation of the house, she and Silverstairs migrated to Paris, where they took an apartment, and a very charming one, in the rue François Premier.

In this apartment Leilah was made to feel that she was with friends, one of whom, however, could not get over the fact that she could not get at the facts in the matter.

“See here, Leilah,” Violet Silverstairs said aggrievedly, not once, but fifty times, “it is downright mean of you to keep me in the dark. What was it that he did? Tell me.”

The lady had known Verplank, as she had known Leilah, ever since she had known anybody. They had grown up together. Though not related by blood, they were by choice, which is sometimes thicker. In the circumstances it was perhaps but natural that she should call it mean, perhaps but human that she should be aggrieved.

The puzzle of the situation she put before her husband.

“What do you suppose it can be?” she asked.

But Silverstairs had no surmises to hazard.

“It must be something quite too dreadful,” Violet continued. “One of those things, don’t you know, that are said to change your whole life. She just sits about and reads queer books.”

“Queer books!” Silverstairs surprisedly repeated.

“Yes, books that tell of planes and rounds and cycles and chains of lives and rebirths and redeaths. She believes in them, too. She told me so.”

Silverstairs tugged at his moustache. “She might as well believe in the music of the spheres.”

Violet looked at her lord. She loved him as certain delicately organized women do love men who are merely robust. But her affection did not warp her judgment. She knew that within his splendid physique was a spirit, valiant perhaps, but obtuse.

“Well, why not?” she retorted. “Let a microphone receive from a steel plate the reflection of a star, and sounds are emitted, tones peculiar to the star itself. Those of the sun are blatant. Those of Arcturus are like little bells. Those of Sirius are as sobs from a zither. Everybody knows that. Why shouldn’t she believe in the music of the spheres?”

“Gammon!” cried this man who at Eton and Christ Church had abundantly acquired everything which is most useless. “I never heard such rot.”

“I daresay, but that is not the point. The point is that it is no joke to her.”

Nor was it. Leilah at first refused to go anywhere, to see any one, to be present when there were guests. But Violet, declaring that she would have no moping in her diggings, forced her. It was very reluctantly that Leilah acceded. After a while she did so as a matter of course. Finally, as was inevitable, she accepted invitations elsewhere.

It was what Violet had aimed at, though not at all at the result. Yet that, Leilah, who had come to believe in karma, afterward regarded as fate.

Presently, it so fell about that at one dinner she had at her left a man whom she did not know, whose name she had not caught and with whom, during the preliminary courses, she had not exchanged a word. As the dinner progressed, cigarettes were served. Twice she refused them. The second time, as she turned again to the man at her right, she heard a cry, across the table she saw a face, the eyes staring, the features elongated. At once there was an uproar, behind her there was a crash, she was torn bodily from her chair, a piece of tapestry had been thrown about her and in it she was rolled on the floor by the man whom she did not know.

Probably, at no dinner, anywhere, had a woman suffered such indignities. She was so telling herself when she realised, as she immediately did realise, that the man and others who had joined him, were but occupied in saving her life. Her dress had caught fire and it was in this flaming fashion, hurled on the floor by a stranger and there brutalised by him, that she made the acquaintance of Count Kasimiérz Barouffski.

The sack of her costume forced her to return to the rue François Premier, where at five o’clock the next day, Barouffski appeared. He appeared the day following, the day after, the day after that.

These attentions Violet Silverstairs viewed with suspicion.

“I verily believe,” she said to Leilah, “that it was that polecat who set you on fire, and if he did no one can convince me that he did not do it on purpose.”

“Violet!”

“That’s right, fly at me. I thought you would. Are you going to take him?”

In an elaborate drawing room in the rue François Premier the two women were having tea. Leilah, without replying, raised her cup.

Violet cocked an eye at her. “One would have thought that you had had enough of matrimony. But perhaps your intentions are not honourable.”

Leilah reddened. “Violet!” she again exclaimed.

“My dear,” Lady Silverstairs resumed, “remember that you are no longer in the States. England is the most hypocritical country in Europe. America is the most hypocritical country in the world. That is what we call progress. But France being old-fashioned and behind the times is not censorious. I admit, I used to be. But I am not censorious any longer. I am not because any such état d’âme while advanced is not becoming.

“I am an old married woman,” added the lady who was not twenty-two. “But if I were not, if for instance I were like you, free, independent and not a fright, and I had to choose between love and matrimony, it would not take me a moment to decide. Not one.”

Leilah put down her cup. “Of course it would not. If you had it to do again you would marry Silverstairs and you would marry for love. That is over for me, over forever.”

Narrowly, out of a corner of an eye, Violet considered her. “He was such a brute, was he?”

“Who? Gulian, do you mean?”

“I suppose so. There has been no other, has there?”

“Violet!”

It was at this juncture, for the fiftieth time, that Lady Silverstairs exclaimed:

“It is downright mean of you to keep me in the dark. What was it that happened? Make a soiled breast of it. Do!”

For the fiftieth time Leilah protested:

“Don’t ask me. Don’t. He knows and that is enough. As for me I am trying to forget.”

“And you think Barouffski will help you. But has it ever occurred to you that if you were not very rich he might lack the incentive?”

To this Leilah assented. “He said he is poor.”

“At least he does not exaggerate. I told Silverstairs that he was after you for your money and he said that was what he married me for. So he did and I married him for his title. It was a fair bargain. Now if we had it to do over I would say – I would say – well, I would say that it is better to have loved your husband than never to have loved at all. But six months hence, if you had it to do over, do you think you could say as much – or as little?”

“At least I could say that I did not marry for a title.”

“Well, hardly, particularly a Polish one, though I daresay even that might be useful in the servants’ hall. But what could you say you married for? It isn’t love?”

“No.”

“Nor position?”

“No.”

“Then what on earth – ”

“Violet, how hard you make it for me. Can’t you see that if I do, it will be for protection?”

“For protection! Merciful fathers! You talk like a chorus girl! Protection against what? Against whom? Verplank?”

“No.” Leilah choking down something in her throat, replied: “Against myself.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Violet slowly. But she did or thought she did, and that night told Silverstairs that Leilah was still in love with her ex.