With Silverstairs and Tempest at her heels, she went to her brougham. Leilah entered the motor.
At the door of the latter Barouffski stood. He raised his hat. Leilah looked at him. She had had, she thought, her last glimpse of the world and this was her last glimpse of him. The sight was so repugnant that she almost sickened and the nausea which she felt, her face expressed.
Barouffski tried to smile but the unconcealed candour of her abhorrence made his lips twitch. Now, though, the motor was starting. As it whirred away, he drew his coat closely about him, turned up the collar and stuck his hands deep in the pockets. There had come to him that odd sensation which homely fancy attributes to someone walking on your grave.
XIII
The next day, Violet, entering the brilliant room, gazed first about it and then at Leilah.
“Aurelia is not here? That’s odd. She is simply horrid but so reliable. You don’t mind my having told her to meet me?”
Leilah sighed. “I am getting so that soon I shan’t mind anything.”
Violet, seating herself, nodded vivaciously.
“I call that very fine. But there is something finer. Never mind anybody. Silverstairs now—” and as the lady spoke she summoned a smile feline and Cheshire—“he fancied I would be a good, obedient little wife. Instead of which he is a good, obedient big husband.” In entire self-appreciation she exhibited the tip of her tongue and moistened her lips with it. “It takes us, doesn’t it? But forgive me, dear, us is perhaps an exaggeration. I am afraid you have made rather a mess of things. Now what are you going to do?”
Without replying, Leilah looked away. During the night she had barely slept. The incident in the restaurant, events that had preceded it, anterior complications, subsequent developments, these things, like the Bohemians at Paillard’s, had stormed at her, attacked her fibres, wrenched her nerves, striating the darkness of her room with variations on the tragedy of her life.
In what manner the affair in the restaurant had terminated, she had no one to inform her but she could readily fancy that shortly d’Arcy and Barouffski would go somewhere and fight, or pretend to, and then return, none the worse and none the better, but with honour satisfied and their names in print.
The entire episode was shameful. But though provoked by her she had not premeditated it. In offering d’Arcy her glass, she had wished solely to display her independence. Subsequently, in going over the matter, she had realised that the wish, while human, had not been nice. Then, a bit conscience-stricken, she had wondered how she could have behaved as she had.
“I did it without thinking,” was her immediate excuse. But that, she told herself was untrue. Ever since the duel and the blow and the nightmare that followed, some such wish had been fermenting in her. The wish, reasonable in itself, though in her case unreasoned, persisted, as in certain natures a wish will persist, until, after the fashion of a constantly recurring idea, the individual becomes so saturated with it that, given the impulse, given less than that, given a vibration, some effect, perhaps wholly atmospheric, and suddenly the idea has solidified into an act, an act noble, degrading or merely banal, according to the influence that produced it, but an act which, whatever its character, has then become inevitable, even involuntary, its constant mental recurrence having exhausted the ability to choose between it and another.
Leilah had thought of this and, in search of comfort, had groped for another excuse. As an Oriental will say: “My body is tired.” “My body is hungry,” so Leilah decided: “It was my nerves that did it.”
But the sophistry displeased her. She knew that she had judged and condemned Barouffski and she knew also that she had no right to do either. The man was clearly a cad, a scoundrel and a brute, yet even though he were these things and worse and more besides, he so became in her eyes merely because her consciousness had evolved to a point higher than his own. Seen from a different angle, she might appear only a shade less reprehensible, and it might be, even equally vile. Moreover, according to the Upanishads, this consciousness of hers and that consciousness of his were fundamentally one. Both had come from the same source. To that source both would ultimately return. They would be fused there, as originally there they had been merged.
At the apperception of that, the curious lines which occur in the Book of Dzyan suggested themselves:
“Said the Flame to the Spark: ‘I have clothed myself in thee, thou art my image, my body, until that day when thou shalt rebecome myself and others, thyself and me.’ ”
In the penetrating beauty of the allegory Leilah told herself that she, Barouffski, Verplank, the Silverstairs, the Helley-Quetgens, everybody whom she knew, everyone whom she did not know, all the fillers of space, were sparks of one Flame, the Flame from which they had been formerly emitted and into which they would finally return. That, she felt she must believe, if she were to believe anything. But she felt too that though she did believe it, she believed also that for the present there were sparks better parted than united, as there were also others better united than apart.
On the table before her was a treatise on the Paramitas—which are The Blessed Things. She looked at it, knowing that what she had done was wrong and what she was about to do was evil. But she felt also that she could not help herself. Whatever the penalty, it was impossible for her to live with Barouffski. Whatever the punishment, it was impossible for her not to live with Verplank. At the moment it seemed to her as though the high fates had set her in a circle from which she could not escape except by
