Phases of an Inferior Planet. Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
has once conceived the magnitude of the universe he can never bow his head to a creed? Don't you see that when he has grasped the essential verity in all religions he no longer allies himself to a single one? Don't you see that when he has realized the dominance of law in religions – the law of their growth and decay, of their evolution and dissolution, when he has once grasped the fact that man creates, and is not created by, his god – don't you see that he can never bind himself to the old beliefs?"
"I see that he can awake to the knowledge of the spiritual life as well as to the physical – that he can grasp the existence of a vital ethical principle in nature. I shall pray for you, and I shall hope – "
Algarcife frowned. "I am sick of it," he said – "sick to death. To please you, I plodded away at theology for three solid years. To please you, I weighed assumptions as light as air. To please you, I read all the rot of all the Fathers – and I am sick of it. I shall live my own life in my own way."
"And may God help you!" said the elder man; and then, "Where will you go?"
"To Egypt – to India – to the old civilizations."
"And then?"
"I do not know. I shall work and I shall succeed – with or without the help of God."
And he had gone. During the next few years he travelled in Africa and Asia, when the sudden loss of his income recalled him to America. Finding it fruitless to rebel, he resigned himself philosophically, secured a position as instructor in a woman's college, made up an annual deficit by writing for the scientific reviews, and continued his studies. His physical nature he believed he had rendered quiescent.
Some days after his encounter with Mariana he came upon her again. He had just entered the park at the Seventy-second Street entrance, on his way from his lecture at the Bodley College. The battered bonnet of a beggar-woman had blown beneath the horses' hoofs in the drive, and he had stopped to rescue it, when he heard his name called, and saw Mariana beside him.
She spoke impulsively.
"I have been watching you," she said.
He looked at her in perplexity.
"Indeed! And what have you discovered?"
"I discovered that you are a gentleman."
He laughed outright.
"Your powers of intuition are positively miraculous," he replied.
She upbraided him with a glance.
"You are unkind," she said.
"Am I?"
"You are unkind to me." Her manner had grown subtly personal. He felt suddenly as if he had known her from the beginning of time and through various transmigrations.
"You laugh at me," she added. "You were kinder to that woman – "
He broke in upon her, perplexity giving place to amusement.
"Oh!" he said; "so that is what you mean! Why, if you were to lose your hat, I shouldn't laugh, I assure you."
Mariana walked on silently. Her eyes were bent upon the gray sidewalk, there was a faint flush in her face. A line of men seated upon the benches beside the way surveyed her with interest.
"Miss Musin!"
Her face quickened.
"I have a confession to make."
She looked up inquiringly. A finger of sunlight pierced the branches of an elm and pointed to her upraised face.
"I have rather bad manners," he went on. "It is a failing which you must accept as you accept the color of my hair – "
Mariana smiled.
"I say just what I think," he added.
Mariana frowned.
"That is what I complain of," she responded. Then she laughed so brightly that a tiny child, toddling with a toy upon the walk, looked up and clapped its hands.
His eyes warmed.
"But you will take me for better or for worse?" he demanded.
"Could it be better?" she asked, demurely.
"That is a matter of opinion."
They left the park and turned into a cross-town street. The distant blocks sloped down into the blue blur of the river, from which several gaunt, gray masts rose like phantom wrecks evolved from the mist. Beyond them the filmy outline of the opposite shore was revealed.
Suddenly Mariana stopped.
"This is Morani's, and I must go in." She held out her hand.
"How is the voice?" he asked.
"I am nursing it. Some day you shall hear it."
"I have heard it," he responded.
She smiled.
"Oh, I forgot. You are next door. Well, some day you shall hear it in opera."
"Shall I?"
"And I shall sing Elsa with Alvary. My God! I would give ten years of my life for that – to sing with Alvary."
He smiled at the warmth in her words and, as he smiled he became conscious that her artistic passion ignited the fire of a more material passion in himself. A fugitive desire seized him to possess the woman before him, body and brain. From the quivering of his pulses he knew that the physical nature he had drugged had stirred in response to a passing appeal.
"Good-bye," said Mariana. She tripped lightly up the brown-stone steps. As she opened the outer door she turned with a smile and a nod. Then the door closed and he went on his way. But the leaping of his pulses was not appeased.
CHAPTER VIII
One morning, several days later, Mariana, looking from her window, saw Anthony standing upon the fire-escape. He had thrown a handful of crumbs to a swarm of noisy sparrows quarrelling about his feet.
As he stood there with the morning sunlight flashing upon his face and gilding the dark abundance of his hair, the singularly mystic beauty of his appearance was brought into bold relief. It was a beauty which contained no suggestion of physical supremacy. He seemed the survival of a lost type – of those purified prophets of old who walked with God and trampled upon the flesh which was His handiwork. It was the striking contrast between the intellectual tenor of his mind and its physical expression which emphasized his personality. To the boldest advance in scientific progress he had the effect of uniting a suggestion of that poetized mysticism which constitutes the charm of a remote past. With the addition of the yellow robe and a beggar's bowl, he might have been transformed into one of the Enlightened of nigh on three thousand years ago, and have followed the Blessed One upon his pilgrimage towards Nirvana. The modernity of his mind was almost tantalizing in its inconsistency with his external aspect.
Mariana, looking through the open window, smiled unconsciously. Anthony glanced up, saw her, and nodded.
"Good-morning," he called. "Won't you come out and help quiet these rogues?"
Mariana opened the little door beneath the window and stepped outside. She looked shy and girlish, and the flutter with which she greeted him had a quaint suggestion of flattery.
He came towards her, and they stood together beside the railing. Beneath them the noise of trade and traffic went on tumultuously. Overhead the sky was of a still, intense blueness, the horizon flecked by several church-spires, which rose sharply against the burning remoteness. Across the tenement roofs lines of drying garments fluttered like banners.
Mariana, in her cotton gown of dull blue, cast a slender shadow across the fire-escape. In the morning light her eyes showed gray and limpid. The sallow tones of her skin were exaggerated, and the peculiar harmony of hair and brows and complexion was strongly marked. She was looking her plainest, and she knew it.
But Anthony did not. He had seen her, perhaps, half a dozen times, and upon each occasion he had discovered his previous conceptions of her to be erroneous. Her extreme mobility of mood and manner at once perplexed and attracted him. Yesterday he had resolved her character into a compound of surface emotions. Now he told