The Slayer of Souls | Page 8

Cleves's duty plain
enough.
For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne.
And they had learned practically nothing about her.
And now the girl had come within Cleves's sphere of operation. She
had been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in
Chicago, and from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.
He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eight
Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the theatre,
where every evening, at 10:45, herentr'acte was staged. He knew where
to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the man Sanang;
and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New York, although
warned that he had arrived.
So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his
evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patroons'
Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was
in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine
he strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of
the popular show without being too late to see the curious little entr'acte
in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.

He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the
main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered
the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the
descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.
Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne
stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an
expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.
The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere
child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway--her
winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world's wisdom.
Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes
darkened to a remoter blue--the brooding iris hue of far horizons.
She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold
pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat,
slipper-shaped footgear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at the
toes.
All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no firmer
contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity; her limbs
were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so that the
embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her chest to a
few inches above the ankles.
She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the
performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve
herself with any magician's patter. She did her work close to the
footlights.
Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare
even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.
But when she needed anything--a little table, for example--well, it was
suddenly there where she required it--a tripod, for instance, evidently
fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed little

tropical fishes--and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She merely
placed her hands before her as though ready to support something
weighty which she expected and--suddenly, the huge crystal bubble
was visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding
it, she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing
to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air
appeared a tripod to support it.
Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience
which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an
entr'acte is an audience responsive only to the obvious.
Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People
scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of
innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of
innovation--always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made
up by somebody else.
So in this typical New York audience approbation was cautious, but
every fascinated eye remained focused on this young girl who
continued to do incredible things, which seemed to resemble "putting
something over" on them; a thing which no uneducated American
conglomeration ever quite forgives.
The girl's silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to gabble,
to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant metropolitan
clamour which fills ever second with sound in a city whose only
distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social existence unless
noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure, repose are the three
lost arts. The megaphone is the city's symbol; its chiefest crime,
silence.
The girl having finished with