Chapter V: Part 5

"I guess it was hard for him to say it," the woman finished with a laugh, "I used to wish he hadn't put in that 'enough.' But that moment--it was what I needed. There was always something big and simple about Calhoun Knox. My hand darted to his shoulder and closed there like a mountaineer's, 'You deserve more of a woman than I am, Calhoun,' I said impetuously, 'but you can have me when I come to marry--but, God, that's far off. I like you, Calhoun. I'd fight for you to the death--as you fought for me to-night and long ago. I think I'd hate any woman who got you--but there's no wife in me to-night. I have failed to win Danube, Kentucky, but I'll win the world. I may be a burnt-out hag then, but I'll come back--when I have won the world--and you can have me and it.... Listen, Calhoun Knox, if ever a man means _husband_ to me--you shall be the man, but to-night,' I ended with a flourish, and turned back home, 'I'm not a woman--just a devil at war with the world!'"

"But haven't you heard from him?" Paula asked, after a moment.

"Yes, he wrote and wrote. Calhoun Knox is the kind of stuff that remembers. The time came when I didn't have the heart to answer. I was afraid I'd ask him for money, or ask him to come to help me. Help out of Danube! I couldn't do that--better old Villiers.... But I mustn't lie to you. I went through the really hard part alone.... So Calhoun's letters were not answered, and maybe he has forgotten. Anyway, before I marry--he shall have his chance. Oh, I'll make it hard for him. I wouldn't open any letter from Danube now--but he shall have his chance----"

"What do you mean to do?"

"Why, we'll finish the season here--and Vhruebert has promised us a little run in the West during June. We touch Cincinnati. From there I'll take the Company down to Danube. I've got to win the world and Danube. After the play, I'll walk out on the Lone Ridge pike--among the hemp-fields--with Calhoun Knox----"

"But he may have married----"

"God, how I hope so! I shall wish him kingly happiness--and rush back to Stephen Cabot."

Paula could not be stirred by the story this morning. She missed, as never before, some big reality behind the loves of Selma Cross. There was too much of the sense of possession in her story--arm-possession. So readily, could she be transformed into the earthy female, fighting tooth and claw for her own. Paula could hardly comprehend in her present depression, what she had said yesterday about Stephen Cabot's capacity to forgive.... She was glad, when Selma Cross rose, yawned, stretched, and shook herself. The odor of sweet clover was heaviness in the room.... The long, bare arm darted over the reading-table and plucked forth the book Paula loved. The volume had not been hidden; there was no reason why she should not have done this, yet the action hurt the other like a drenching of icy water upon her naked heart.

"Ho-ho--Quentin Charter! So _A Damsel Came to Peter_?"

"I think--I hear your telephone,--Selma!" Paula managed to say, her voice dry, as if the words were cut from paper.

"Yes, yes, I must go, but here's another story. A rotten cad--but how he can write! I don't mean books--but letters!... He's the one I told you about--the Westerner--while the old man was in the South!"

The last was called from the hall. The heavy door slammed between them.

Paula could not stand--could not keep her mouth from dropping open. Her temples seemed to be cracking apart.... She saw herself in half-darkness--like _The Thing_ last night--beating her breast in the gloom. She felt as if she must laugh--in that same wind-blown, chattering way.

ELEVENTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS SWEPT DEEP INTO A DESOLATE COUNTRY BY THE HIGH TIDE, BUT NOTES A QUICK CHANGE IN SELMA CROSS

Paula wrote a short letter to Quentin Charter in the afternoon, and did not begin to regret it until too late. It was not that she had said anything unwise or discordant--but that she had written at all.... Her heart felt dead. She had trusted her all to one--and her all was lost. A little white animal that had always been warm and petted, suddenly turned naked to face the reality of winter,--this was the first sense, and the paramount trouble was that she could not die quickly enough. The full realization was slow to come. Indeed, it was not until the night and the next day that she learned the awful reaches of suffering of which a desolated human mind is capable. It was like one of those historic tides which rise easily to the highest landmarks of the shore-dweller, and not till then begin to show their real fury, devastating vast fields heretofore virgin to the sea. Along many coasts and in many lives there is one, called The High Tide.... Paula felt that she could have coped with her sorrow, had this been a personal blow, but her faith in the race of men, the inspiration of her work, her dream of service--all were uprooted.

She did not pretend to deny that she had loved Quentin Charter--her first and loftiest dream of a mate, the heart's cry of all her womanhood. True, as man and woman, they had made no covenant, but to her (and had he not expressed the same in a score of ways?), there had been enacted a more wonderful adjustment, than any words could bring about. This was the havoc. She had lost more than a mere human lover. She dared now to say it, because, in losing, she perceived how great it had become--the passion was gone from her soul. Her place in the world was desolate; all her labors pointless. As a woman, she had needed his arms, less than an anchorage of faith in his nobility. And how her faith had rushed forth to that upper window across the States!

_Words_--the very word was poison to her. Writing--an emptiness, a treachery. Veritably, he had torn the pith out of all her loved books.... Bellingham had shown her what words meant--words that drew light about themselves, attracting a brilliance that blinded her; words that wrought devilishness in the cover of their white light--but Bellingham had not assailed her faith. This was the work of a man who had lifted her above the world, not one who called from beneath. Bellingham could not have crippled her faith like this--and left it to die.... Almost momentarily, came the thought of his letters--thoughts _from_ these letters. They left her in a dark--that was madness....

And if they were false, what was the meaning of her exaltations? Night and morning she had looked into the West, sending him all the graces of her mind, all the secrets of her heart. He had told her of the strange power that had come to him, of the new happiness--how, as never before, he had felt radiations of splendid strength. She had not hurried him to her, but had read with ecstasy, believing that a tithe of his new power was her gift.... Words, desolate, damnable words.... "And I had thought to heal and lift New York," she exclaimed mockingly, looking down into the gray streets after the age-long night. "New York holds fast to her realities--the things she has found sure. It is well to be normal and like New York!"

The day after the door had shut upon Selma Cross, Paula was a betrayed spirit wandering alone in polar darkness. She had not slept, nor could she touch food. Twice the actress had rapped; repeatedly the telephone called--these hardly roused her. Letters were thrust under her door and lay untouched in the hall. She was lying upon the lounge in the little room of books, as the darkness swiftly gathered that second day. All the meanings of her childhood, all the promises for fulfillment with the years, were lost. The only passion she knew was for the quick end of life--to be free from the world, and its Bellinghams.

"God, tell me," she murmured, and her voice sounded dry and strange in the dark, "what is this thing, Soul, which cries out for its Ideal--builds its mate from all things pure, from dreams that are cleansed in the sky; dreams that have not known the touch of any earthly thing--what is this Soul, that, now bereft, cries with Rachel, 'Death, let me in!...' Oh, Death, put me to sleep--put me to sleep!"

* * * * *

Voices reached her from the hall:

"You can knock or ring, sir, if you like," the elevator-man was saying, "but I tell you Miss Linster is not there. She has not answered the 'phone, and there is one of the letters, sticking out from under the door, that I put there this morning, or yesterday afternoon."

"When did you see her last?" The voice was Reifferscheid's.

"Day before yesterday she was in and out. Miss Cross, the lady who lives in this other apartment, said she called on Miss Linster yesterday morning."

"The point is that she left no word--either with you or with us--before going away. We are very good friends of hers. I'll ring for luck----"

The bell rang long and loudly. Paula imagined the thick thumb pressed against it, and the big troubled face. She wanted to answer--but facing Reifferscheid was not in her that moment.... The elevator was called from below.

"No use," Reifferscheid said finally. "Here's a coin for your trouble. I'll call up the first thing in the morning----"

She heard the click of the elevator-door, and the quick whine of the car, sinking in the shaft. She recalled that she had not been at _The States_ for four or five days. She had intended going down-town yesterday.... She thought long of Reifferscheid's genuine and changeless kindness, of his constant praise for sincerity anywhere and his battling for the preservation of ideals in all work. His faith in Charter recurred to her--and his frequently unerring judgments of men and women she had known. All about him was sturdy and wholesome--a substance, this, to hold fast.... Reifferscheid had come in the crisis. Paula fell asleep, thinking of snails and stickle-backs, flowers and Sister Annie, big trees and solid friends.

She awoke in a different world--at least, a world in which tea and toast and marmalade were reckonable. Her thoughts went bravely down into the depression for salvage; and a mind that can do this is not without hope. It was only eight. Reifferscheid had not yet 'phoned.... Charter would have her letter now, or soon--that letter written seven eternities ago in the first hysteria, while she could yet weep. She could not have written in the ice-cold silence of yesterday. She wished that she had not let him see that she could weep. When the tragedy had risen to high-tide in her soul--there had been no words for him. Would she ever write again?...

Her mind reverted now to the heart of things. In the first place, Selma Cross would not intentionally lie. She asked so little of men--and had asked less a few years ago--that to have her call one "cad" with an adjective, was a characterscape, indeed. That she had intimately known Quentin Charter three years before, was unsettling in itself.... True, he made no pretensions to a righteous past. All his work suggested utter delvings into life. He had even hinted a background that was black-figured and restlessly stirring, but she had believed that he wrote these things in the same spirit which prompted the ascetic Thoreau to say, "I have never met a worse man than myself." She believed that the evils of sense were not so complicated, but that genius can fathom them without suffering their defilement. His whole present, as depicted in his letters, was a song--bright as his open prairies, and pure as the big lakes of his country.... Could she become reconciled to extended periods of physical abandonment in the Charter-past? Faintly her heart answered, but quickly, "Yes, if they are forever nameless...." "Specific abandonments?" Her mind pinned her heart to this, with the added sentence, "Is it fair for you not to hear what Selma Cross has to say--and what Quentin Charter may add?..."

The elevator-man was at the door with further letters. He did not ring, because it was so early. Softly, she went into the hall. There was an accumulation of mail upon the floor--two from _The States_; one from Charter.... This last was opened after a struggle. It must have been one of those just brought, for it was dated, the day before yesterday, and she usually received his letters the second morning. Indeed, this had been written on the very afternoon that she had penned her agony.

I know I shall be sorry that I have permitted you to find me in
a black mood like this, but I feel that I must tell you. A
sense of isolation, altogether new, since first your singing
came, flooded over me this afternoon. It is as though the
invisible connections between us were deranged--as if there had
been a storm and the wires were down. It began about noon, when
the thought of the extreme youth of my soul, beside yours,
began to oppress me. I perceived that my mind is imperiously
active rather than humbly wise; that I am capable of using a
few thoughts flashily, instead of being great-souled from rich
and various ages. Ordinarily, I should be grateful for the
gifts I have, and happy in the bright light from you--but this
last seems turned away. Won't you let me hear at once, please?

She was not given long to ponder upon this strange proof of his inner responsiveness; yet the deep significance of it remained with her, and could not but restore in part a certain impressive meaning of their relation. Selma Cross called, and Reifferscheid 'phoned, as Paula was just leaving for down-town. It had been necessary, she explained, to the literary editor in his office, for her to make a sorry little pilgrimage during the past few days. She was very grateful it was over. Reifferscheid said abruptly that pilgrimages were nefarious when they made one look so white and trembly.

"The point is, you'd better make another to Staten Island," he added. "Nice rough passage in a biting wind, barren fields, naked woods, and all that. Besides, you must see my system of base-burners----"

"I'll just do that--when I catch up a little on my work," Paula said. "I'm actually yearning for it, but there are so many loose ends to tie up, that I couldn't adequately enjoy myself for a day or two. Really, I'm not at all ill. You haven't enough respect for my endurance, which is of a very good sort."

"Don't be too sure about that," Reifferscheid said quickly. "It's altogether too good to be hurt.... Do you realize you've never had your hat off in this office?"

"I hadn't thought of it," she said, studying him. Plainly by his bravado he wasn't quite sure of his ground.

"There ought to be legislation against people with hair the color of yours----" Reifferscheid regarded her a moment before he added, "wearing hats. You must come over to Staten--if for no other reason----"

"Oh, I begin to see perfectly now," Paula observed. "You want to add me to your system of base-burners."

He chuckled capaciously. "Early next week, then?"

"Yes, with delight"

He did not tell her of being worried to the point of travelling far up-town to ring the bell of her apartment. She could not like him less for this.... There was a telegram from Charter, when she reached home. In the next two hours, a thought came to Paula and was banished a score of times; yet with each recurrence it was more integrate and compelling. This was Saturday afternoon. Selma Cross returned from her matinee shortly before six and was alone. Paula met her in the hall, and followed into the other's apartment.

"I have just an hour, dear. Dimity has supper ready. Stay, won't you?"

"Yes," Paula forced herself to say. "I wanted to ask you about Quentin Charter. You were called away--just as you were speaking of him the other morning.... I have not met him, but his two recent books are very wonderful. I reviewed the second for _The States_. He thanked me in a letter which was open to answer."

Selma Cross stretched out her arms and laughed mirthlessly. "And so you two have been writing letters?" she observed. "I'm putting down a bet that his are rich--if he's interested."

Paula had steeled herself for this. There were matters which she must learn before making a decision which his telegram called for. Her mind held her inexorably to the work at hand, though her heart would have faltered in the thick cloud of misgivings.

"Yes, there is much in his letters--so much that I can't quite adjust him to the name you twice designated. Remember, you once before called him that--when I didn't know that you were speaking of Quentin Charter."

"I'll swear this much also," Selma Cross said savagely, "he has found your letters worth while."

"Is that to the point?"

"Why, yes Paula," the other replied, darting a queer look at her. "If I am to be held to a point--it is--because, as a writer, he uses what is of value. He makes women mad about him, and then goes back to his garret, and sobers up enough to write an essay or a story out of his recent first-hand studies in passion."

"You say he was drinking--when you knew him?"

"Enough to kill another man. It didn't seem to make his temperament play less magically. He was never silly or limp, either in mind or body, but he must have been burned to a cinder inside. He intimated that he didn't dare to go on exhibition any day before mid-afternoon."

Paula, very pale, bent forward and asked calmly as she could: "I wish you would tell me _just_ what Quentin Charter did to make you think of him always--in connection with that name."

"On condition that you will recall occasionally that you have a plate before you--also supper, which won't stay hot." Selma Cross spoke with some tension, for she felt that the other was boring rather pointedly, and it was not her time of day for confessions. Still, the quality of her admiration for Paula Linster involved large good nature. ".... Extraordinary, as it may seem, my dear, Charter made me believe that he was passionately in love. I was playing Sarah Blixton in _Caller Herrin_,--my first success. It was a very effective minor part and an exceptionally good play. It took his eye--my work especially--and he arranged to meet me. Felix Larch, by the way, took care of this formality for him. Incidentally, I didn't know Felix Larch, but my cue was greatly to be honored. Charter told me that Larch said I was peculiar for an actress and worth watching, because I had a brain.... The man, Charter, was irresistible in a wine-room. I say in a wine-room, not that his talk was of the sort you might expect there, but that he was drinking--and was at home nowhere else. You see, he has a working knowledge of every port in the world, and to me it seemed--of every book. Then, he has a sharp, swift, colorful way of expressing himself.... I told you, Villiers was away. I couldn't realize that it was merely a new type Charter found in me.... We were together when I wasn't at work. It was a wild and wonderful fortnight--to me. He used to send notes in the forenoon--things he thought of, when he couldn't sleep, he said. I knew he was getting himself braced in those early hours.... Then, one night at supper, he informed me that he was leaving for the West that night. He had only stopped in New York, on the way home from Asia, via Suez. I was horribly hurt, but there was nothing for me to say. He was really ill. The drink wouldn't bite that night, he said. We finished the supper like two corpses, Charter trying to make me believe he'd be back shortly. I haven't seen him since."

Paula began to breathe a bit more freely. "Didn't he write?"

"Yes, at first, but I saw at once he was forcing. Then he dictated an answer to one of mine--dictated a letter to me----" Selma Cross halted. The lids narrowed across her yellow eyes.

"He had said he loved you?" Paula asked with effort.

"By the way," Selma Cross retorted, "did you notice that word 'love' in either of his recent books--except as a generality?"

"Since you speak of it, I do recall he markedly avoided it," Paula said with consuming interest.

"No, he didn't use it to me. He said he never put it in a man's or woman's mouth in a story. Ah, but there are other words," she went on softly. "The man was a lover--beyond dreams--impassioned."

"About that dictated letter?" Paula urged hastily.

"Yes, I told him I didn't want any more that way. Then Villiers was back, and beckoning again. The last word I received was from Charter's stenographer. She said he was ill. Oh, I did hear afterward--that he was in a sanatorium. God knows, he must have landed there--if he kept up the pace he was going when I knew him."

In the moment of silence which followed, Paula was hoping with all her might--that this was the end.

"Oh, I know what you're thinking!" Selma said suddenly. "He has fascinated you, and you can't see that he's a rotten cad--from what I've said so far. A woman can never see the meanness of a man from another woman's experience with him. She forgives him for calling forth all another woman has--and then shaking her loose like a soiled bath-robe when one's tub is ready. But it's different when she's the discarded woman!... He was so deep, I can't believe he didn't know that episodes were new to me. Likely, he's had so many around the world, that he can't take them more seriously from the woman's angle--than from his own.... Quentin Charter was the first man to arouse all my dreams. Can't you see how it hurt when he turned out to be--well, that name you refuse to utter?"

"Yes, of course, yes, but you suggest more, Selma!"

"He used me for 'copy,' as they call it. His article on the 'acting of stage-folk after hours,' appeared in a magazine a few weeks later. He's always a saint in his garret, you know. The article was filled with cutting cynicism about stage-matters, many of which he had discovered in the two weeks with me--and laughed over with his wine. I could have forgiven that, only he made me believe that there was not a thought apart from Selma Cross in his mind when we were together.... Oh, what's the use of me lying? I could have forgiven that, anyway!"

"What was it, you could not forgive?" Paula's face was bloodless.

"He told it all about--how easy I had proved in his hands!" the actress revealed with suppressed fury.

The other shrank back.

"That's where the expression comes in, Paula--the expression you hate. Drunk or sober--cad's the word. What a woman gives to a _man_ is put in his inner vault forever. What she gives to a _cad_--is passed on to his friends."

Paula arose, tortured as if branded within. Here was a defection of character which an entire incarnation of purity could not make whole. It was true that in her heart, she had not been mortally stricken before; true, as Selma Cross had so bitterly declared, that a woman is not stayed from mating with a man because a sister has suffered at his hands.

"I have nothing to say about the word, if that is true." Paula spoke with difficulty, and in a hopeless tone.

"Please, eat some supper, dear----"

There was heart-break in the answer: "I cannot. I'm distressed, because I have spoiled yours.... You have answered everything readily--and it has hurt you.... I--feel--as--if--I--must--tell--you--why--I--asked--or I wouldn't have dared to force questions upon you. His letters made me think of him a great deal. When you picked up his book the other morning and said _that_--why, it was all I could stand for the time. His work is so high and brave--I can hardly understand how he could talk about a woman whose only fault was that she gave him what he desired. Are you sure he cannot prove that false?"

Selma Cross left her seat at the table and took Paula in her arms.

"How can he?" she whispered. "The old man knew all about us. One of his friends heard Charter talking about the easy virtue of stage women--that there were scarcely no exceptions! Charter hinted in his article that acting is but refined prostitution. Villiers said because I had a name for being square Charter had chosen to prove otherwise!... Then see how he dropped me--not a word in three years from my memorable lover! And Villiers knew about us--first and last!... I could murder that sort--and to think that his devil's gift has been working upon you----"

"You have told me quite enough, thank you." Paula interrupted in a lifeless voice. "I shall not see him."

Selma Cross held her off at arms' length to glance at her face. "You what?" she exclaimed.

"He is on the way to New York and will be at the _Granville_ to-morrow afternoon, where he hopes to find a note saying he may call here to-morrow night. There shall be no note from me----"

"But did you write to him, Paula?" the actress asked strangely excited.

"Yes--a little after you left me the other morning. It was silly of me. Oh, but I did not tell him what I had heard--or who told me!... Finish your supper--you must go."

"And how did you learn of his coming?"

"He telegraphed me to-day. That's why I bothered you at your supper----"

"What a dramatic situation--if you decided to see him!" Selma Cross said intensely. "And to think--that to-morrow is Sunday night and I don't work!"

Paula felt brutalized by the change in the other's manner. "I have decided not to see him," she repeated, and left the apartment.

TWELFTH CHAPTER

CERTAIN ELEMENTS FOR THE CHARTER CRUCIBLE, AND HIS MOTHER'S PILGRIMAGE ACROSS THE SANDS ALONE TO MECCA

Charter had come a long way very swiftly in his search for realities. If it is required of man, at a certain stage of evolution, to possess a working knowledge of the majority of possible human experiences, in order to choose wisely between good and evil, Charter had, indeed, covered much ground in his thirty-three years. As a matter of fact, there were few degrees in the masonry of sensation, into which he had not been initiated. His was the name of a race of wild, sensual, physical types; a name still held high in old-world authority, and identified with men of heavy hunting, heavy dining and drinking. The Charters had always been admired for high temper and fair women. True, there was not a germ of the present Charter mental capacity in the whole race of such men commonly mated, but Quentin's father had married a woman with a marvellous endurance in prayer--that old, dull-looking formula for producing sons of strength. A silent woman, she was, a reverent woman, an angry woman, with the stuff of martyrdoms in her veins.

Indeed, in her father, John Quentin, reformer, there were stirring materials for memory. His it was to ride and preach, to excoriate evil and depict the good, with the blessing of a living God shining bright and directly upon it. A bracing figure, this Grandfather Quentin, an ethereal bloom at the top of a tough stalk of Irish peasantry. First, as a soldier in the British army he was heard of, a stripling with a girl's waist, a pigeon breast, and the soul's divinity breathing itself awake within. His was a poet's rapture at the sight of morning mists, wrestling with the daybreak over the mountains; and everywhere his regiment went, were left behind Quentin's songs--crude verses of a minor singer, never seeking permanence more than Homer; and everywhere, he set about to correct the degradations of men, absolutely unscared and grandly improvident. A fighter for simple loving-kindness in the heart of man, a worshiper of the bright fragment of truth vouchsafed to his eyes, a lover of children, a man who walked thrillingly with a personal God, and was so glorified and ignited by the spirit that, every day, he strode singing into battle. Such was John Quentin, and from him, a living part of his own strong soul, sprang the woman who mothered Quentin Charter, sprang pure from his dreams and meditations, and doubtless with his prayer for a great son, marked in the scroll of her soul.... For to her, bringing a man into the world meant more than a bleak passage of misery begun with passion and ended with pain.

Her single bearing of fruit was a solitary pilgrimage. From the hour of the conception, she drew apart with her own ideals, held herself aloof from fleshly things, almost as one without a body. Charter, the strongly-sexed, her merchant-husband, the laughing, scolding, joking gunner; admirable, even delightful, to Nineteenth Century men of hot dinners and stimulated nights--showed her all that a man must _not_ be. Alone, she crossed the burning sands; cleansed her body and brain in the cool of evenings, expanded her soul with dreams projected far into the glistening purple heavens and whispered the psalms and poems which had fed the lyric hunger of her father.

It glorified her temples to brood by an open window upon the night-sky; to conceive even the garment's hem of that Inspiring Source, to Whom solar systems are but a glowworm swarm, and the soul of man mightier than them all. Sometimes she carried the concept farther, until it seemed as if her heart must cease to beat: that this perfecting fruit of the universe, the soul of man, must be imprisoned for a time in the womb of woman; that the Supreme seemed content with this humble mystery, nor counted not aeons spent, nor burnt-out suns, nor wasting myriads that devastate the habitable crusts--if only One smile back at Him at last; if only at last, on some chilling planet's rim, One Worthy Spirit lift His lustrous pinions and ascend out of chaos to the Father.

The spirit of her own father was nearer to her in this wonderful pilgrimage than her husband, to whom she was cold as Etruscan glasses in the deep-delved earth (yet filled with what fiery potential wine!). He called her Mistress Ice, brought every art, lure, and expression in the Charter evolution to bear upon her; yet, farther and farther into heights he could not dream, she fled with her forming babe. Many mysteries were cleared for her during this exalted period--though clouded later by the pangs of parturition.... Once, in the night, she had awakened with a sound in her room. At first she thought it was her husband, but she heard his breathing from the next chamber. At length before her window, shadowed against the faint light of the sky, appeared the head and shoulders of a man. He was less than ten feet from her, and she heard the rustle of his fingers over the dresser. For an instant she endured a horrible, stifling, feminine fright, but it was superseded at once by a fine assembling of faculties under the control of genuine courage. The words she whispered were quite new to her.

"I don't want to have to kill you," she said softly. "Put down what you have and go away--hurry."

The burglar fled quietly down the front stairs, and she heard the door shut behind him. Out of her trembling was soon evolved the consciousness of some great triumph, the nature of which she did not yet know. It was pure ecstasy that the realization brought. The courage which had steadied her through the crisis was not her own, but from the man's soul she bore! There was never any doubt after that, she was to bear a son.

There is a rather vital defect in her pursuing the way alone, even though a great transport filled the days and nights. The complete alienation of her husband was a fact. This estranged the boy from his father. Except as the sower, the latter had no part in the life-garden of Quentin Charter. The mother realized in later years that she might have ignored less and explained more. The fear of a lack of sympathy had given her a separateness which her whole married life afterward reflected. She had disdained even the minor feminine prerogative of acting. Her husband had a quick, accurate physical brain which, while it could not have accompanied nor supported in her sustained inspiration, might still have comprehended and laughingly admired. Instead, she had been as wholly apart from him as a memory. Often, in the great weariness of continued contemplation, her spirit had cried out for the sustenance which only a real mate could bring, the gifts of a kindred soul. Many times she asked: "Where is the undiscovered master of my heart?"

There was no one to replenish within her the mighty forces she expended to nurture the spiritual elements of her child. A lover of changeless chivalry might have given her a prophet, instead of a genius, pitifully enmeshed in fleshly complications. In her developed the concept (and the mark of it lived afterward with glowing power in the mind of her son)--the thrilling possibility of a union, in the supreme sense of the word, a Union of Two to form One....

Charter, the boy, inherited a sense of the importance of the "I." In his earlier years all things moved about the ego. By the time of his first letter to Paula Linster, the world had tested the Charter quality, but to judge by the years previous, more specifically by the decade bounded by his twentieth and thirtieth birthdays, it would have appeared that apart from endowing the young man with a fine and large brain-surface, the Charter elements had triumphed over the mother's meditations. To a very wise eye, acquainted with the psychic and material aspects of the case, the fact would have become plain that the hot, raw blood of the Charters had to be cooled, aged, and refined, before the exalted spirit of the Quentins could manifest in this particular instrument. It would have been a very fascinating natural experiment had it not been for the fear that the boy's body would be destroyed instead of refined.

His mother's abhorrence for the gross animalism of drink, as she discovered it in her husband (though the tolerant world did not call him a drunkard), was by no means reflected intact in the boy's mind. A vast field of surface-tissue, however, was receptive to the subject. Quentin was early interested in the effects of alcohol, and entirely unafraid. He had the perversity to believe that many of his inclinations must be worn-out, instead of controlled. As for his ability to control anything about him, under the pressure of necessity, he had no doubt of this. Drink played upon him warmly. His young men and women associates found the stimulated Charter an absolutely new order of human enchantment--a young man lit with humor and wisdom, girded with chivalry, and a delight to the emotions. Indeed, it was through these that the young man's spirit for a space lost the helm. It was less for his fine physical attractions than for the play of his emotions that his intimates loved him. From his moods emanated what seemed to minds youthful as his own, all that was brave and true and tender. An evening of wine, and Charter dwelt in a house of dreams, to which came fine friendships, passionate amours, the truest of verses and the sweetest songs. Often he came to dwell in this house, calling it life--and his mother wept her nights away. Her husband was long dead, but she felt that something, named Charter, was battling formidably for the soul of her boy. She was grateful for his fine physique, grateful that his emotions were more delicately attuned than any of his father's breed, but she had not prayed for these. She knew the ghastly mockeries which later come to haunt these houses of dreams. Such was not her promise of fulfilment. She had not crossed the deserts and mountains alone to Mecca for a verse-maker--a bit of proud flesh for women to adore.... Charter, imperious with his stimulus, wise in his imagined worldliness, thought he laughed away his mother's fears.

"I am a clerk of the emotions," he once told her. "To depict them, I must feel them first."

And the yellow devil who built for him his house of dreams coarsened his desires as well, and wove a husk, fibrous, warm, and red, about his soul. The old flesh-mother, Earth, concentred upon him her subtlest currents of gravity; showed him her women in garments of crushed lilies; promised him her mysteries out of Egypt--how he should change the base metal of words into shining gold; sent unto him her flatterers calling him great, years before his time; calling him Emotion's Own Master and Action's Apostle; and her sirens lured him to the vine-clad cliffs with soft singing that caressed his senses. Because his splendid young body was aglow, he called it harmony--this wind wailing from the barrens.... As if harmony could come out of hell.

Old Mother Earth with her dead-souled moon--how she paints her devils with glory for the eye of a big-souled boy; painting dawns above her mountains of dirt, and sunsets upon her drowning depths of sea; painting scarlet the lips of insatiable women, and roses in the heart of her devouring wines--always painting! Look to Burns and Byron--who bravely sang her pictures--and sank.

There are vital matters of narrative in this decade of Charter's between twenty and thirty. Elements of the world-old conflict between the animal and the soul are never without human interest; but this is a history of a brighter conquest than any victory over the senses alone.... Even restless years of wandering are only suggested. Yet one cannot show how far into the heights Charter climbed, without lifting for a moment the shadow from the caverns, wherein he finally awoke, and wrestled with demons towards the single point of light--on the rising road.

THIRTEENTH CHAPTER

"NO MAN CAN ENTER INTO A STRONG MAN'S HOUSE, AND SPOIL, HIS GOODS, EXCEPT HE WILL FIRST BIND THE STRONG MAN"

Charter had always been able to stop drinking when thoroughly disgusted with its effects, but his final abandonment, three years before the Skylark letters, had lasted long--up the Yangtse to the Gorges, back to Shanghai, and around the Straits and Mediterranean to New York, where he had met Selma Cross; indeed, for many weeks after he had reached his own city in the Mid-West. He had now fallen into the condition in which work was practically impossible. In the early stages, he had known brief but lightning passages of expression, when his hands moved with magical speed upon his machine, and his thoughts even faster, breaking in upon achievement three or four times in a half-hour to snatch his stimulant. Always in the midst of this sort of activity, he felt that his work was of the highest character. The swift running of his brain under the whip appeared record-breaking to the low vanity of a sot. It was with shame that he regarded his posted time-card, after such a race. Yet he had this to say of the whole work-drink matter: When at his brief best under stimulus, a condition of mind precarious to reach and never to be counted upon, the product balanced well with the ordinary output, the stuff that came in quantities from honest, healthy faculties. In a word, an occasional flashy peak standing forth from a streaky, rime-washed pile reckoned well with the easy levels of highway routine.

During his first days at home he would occupy entire forenoons in the endeavor to rouse himself to a pitch of work. Not infrequently upon awakening, he swallowed a pint of whiskey in order to retain four or five ounces. Toward mid-afternoon, still without having eaten, he would draw up his chair before the type-mill to wait, and only a finished curse would evolve from the burned and stricken surfaces of his brain. If, indeed, passable copy did come at last, Charter invariably banished restraint, drinking as frequently as the impulse came. Clumsiness of the fingers therefore frequently intervened just as his sluggish mind unfolded; and in the interval of calling his stenographer out of the regular hours, the poor brain babes, still-born, were fit only for burial.

Often, again (for he could not live decently with himself without working), he would spend the day in fussy preparation for a long, productive evening. The room was at a proper temperature; the buffet admirably stocked; pipes, cigars, and cigarettes at hand; his stenographer in her usual mood of delightful negation--when an irresistible impulse would seize his mind with the necessity of witnessing a certain drama, absolutely essential to inspiration. Again, with real work actually begun, his mind would bolt into the domains of correspondence, or some little lyric started a distracting hum far back in his mind. The neglected thing of importance would be lifted from the machine, and the letters or the verses put under weigh. In the case of the latter, he would often start brilliantly with a true subconscious ebullition--and cast the thing aside, never to be finished, at the first hitch in the rhyme or obscurity in thought. Then he would find himself apologizing slavishly for Asiatic fever to the woman who helped him--whose unspoken pity he sensed, as hardened arteries feel the coming storm. Alone, he would give way to furious hatred for himself and his degradation, and by the startling perversity of the drunken, hurry into a stupor to stifle remorse. Prospecting thus in the abysses, Charter discovered the outcroppings of dastardly little vanities and kindred nastiness which normally he could not have believed to exist in his composite or in the least worthy of his friends. A third trick drink played upon him when he was nicely prepared for a night of work. The summons which he dared not disregard since it came now so irregularly--to dine--would sound imperiously in the midst of the first torture-wrung page, probably for the first time since the night before. In the actual illness, which followed partaking of the most delicate food, work was, of course, out of the question.

Finally, the horrors closed in upon his nights. The wreck that could not sleep was obsessed with passions, even perversions--how curiously untold are these abominations--until a place where the wreck lay seemed permeated with the foulest conceptions of the dark. What pirates board the unhelmed mind of the drunken to writhe and lust and despoil the alien decks--wingless, crawling abdomens, which, even in the shades, are but the ganglia of appetite!... A brand of realism, this, whose only excuse is that it carries the red lamps of peril.

At the end of months of swift and dreadful dissipation, Charter determined abruptly to stop his self-poisoning on the morning of his Thirtieth birthday. Coming to this decision within a week before the date, so confident was he of strength, that instead of making the end easy by graduating the doses in the intervening days, he dropped the bars of conduct altogether, and was put to bed unconscious late in the afternoon of the last. He awoke in the night, and slowly out of physical agony and mental horror came the realization that the hour of fighting-it-out-alone was upon him. He shuddered and tried to sleep, cursed himself for losing consciousness so early in the day without having prepared his mind for the ordeal. Suddenly he leaped out of bed, turned on the lights, and found his watch. With a cry of joy, he discovered that it was seven minutes before twelve. In the next seven minutes, he prepared himself largely from a quart bottle, and lay down again as the midnight-bells relayed over the city. Ordinarily, sleep would have come to him after such an application in the midst of the night, but the thought assumed dimensions that the bells _had_ struck. He thought of his nights on the big, yellow river in China, and of the nearer nights in New York. There was a vague haunt about the latter--as of something neglected. He thought of the clean boy he had been, and of the scarred mental cripple he must be from now on.... In all its circling, his mind invariably paused at one station--the diminished quart bottle on the buffet. He arose at last, hot with irritation, poured the remaining liquor into the washbasin, and turned on the water to cleanse even the odor away. For a moment he felt easier, as if the Man stirred within him. Here he laughed at himself low and mockingly--for the Man was the whiskey he had drunk in the seven minutes before twelve.

Now the thought evolved to hasten the work of systemic cleansing, begun with denial. At the same time, he planned that this would occupy his mind until daylight. He prepared a hot tub, drinking hot water at the same time--glass after glass until he was as sensitive within as only a fresh-washed sore can be. Internally, the difference between hot and cold water is just the difference between pouring the same upon a greasy plate. The charred flaccid passages in due time were flushed free from its sustaining alcohol; and every exterior pore cratered with hot water and livened to the quick with a rough towel. Long before he had finished, the trembling was upon him, and he sweated with fear before the reaction that he had so ruthlessly challenged in washing the spirit from his veins.

Charter rubbed the steam from the bath-room window, shaded his eyes, and looked for the daylight which was not there. Stars still shone clear in the unwhitened distances. Why was he so eager for the dawn? It was the drunkard in him--always frightened and restless, even in sleep, _while buffets are closed_. This is so, even though a filled flask cools the fingers that grope under the pillow.... Any man who has ever walked the streets during the two great cycles of time between three and five in the morning, waiting for certain sinister doors to open, does not cease to shiver at the memory even in his finer years. It is not the discordant tyranny of nerves, nor the need of the body, pitiful and actual though it is, wherein the terror lies,--but living, walking with the consciousness that the devil is in power; that you are the debauched instrument of his lust, putting away the sweet fragrant dawn for a place of cuspidors, dormant flies, sticky woods, where bleared, saturated messes of human flesh sneak in, even as you, to lick their love and their life.... That you have waited for this moment for hours--oh, God!--while the fair new day comes winging over mountains and lakes, bringing, cleansed from inter-stellar spaces, the purity of lilies, new mysteries of love, the ruddy light of roses and heroic hopes for clean men--that you should hide from this adoring light in a dim place of brutes, a place covered with the psychic stains of lust; that you should run from clean gutters to drink this hell-seepage.

He asked himself why he thirsted for light. If every door on his floor were a saloon, he would not have entered the nearest. And yet a summer dawn was due. Hours must have passed since midnight. He glanced into the medicine-case before turning off the lights in the bath-room. Alcohol was the base in many of the bottles; this thought incited fever in his brain.... He could hardly stand. A well-man would have been weakened by the processes of cleansing he had endured. The blackness, pressing against the outer window, became the form of his great trouble. "I wish the day would come," he said aloud. His voice frightened him. It was like a whimper from an insane ward. He hastened to escape from the place, now hateful.

The chill of the hall, as he emerged, struck into his flesh, a polar blast. Like an animal he scurried to the bed and crawled under cover, shaking convulsively. His watch ticked upon the bed-post. Presently he was burning--as if hot cloths were quickly being renewed upon his flesh. Yet instantaneously upon lifting the cover, the chill would seize him again. Finally he squirmed his head about until he could see his watch. Two-fifteen, it said. Manifestly, this was a lie. He had not wound the thing the night before, though its ticking filled the room. He recalled that when he was drinking, frequently he wound his watch a dozen times a day, or quite as frequently forgot it entirely. At all events, it was lying now. Thoughts of the whiskey he had poured out, of the drugs in the medicine-case, controlled. He needed a drink, and nothing but alcohol would do. This is the terrible thing. Without endangering one's heart, it is impossible to take enough morphine to deaden a whiskey reaction. A little only horrifies one's dreams. There is no bromide. He cried out for the poison he had washed away from his veins. This would have been a crutch for hours. In the normal course of bodily waste, he would not have been brought to this state of need in twenty-four hours. He felt the rapping of old familiar devils against his brain. He needed a drink.

The lights were turned on full in his room. The watch hanging above his head ticked incessant lies regarding the energy of passing time. He could lose himself in black gorges of agony, grope his way back to find that the minute hand had scarcely stirred.... He lay perfectly rigid until a wave, half of drowsiness, half of weakness, slowed-down the vibrations of his mind.... Somewhere in the underworld, he found a consciousness--a dank smell, the dimness of a cave; the wash of fins gliding in lazy curves across the black, sluggish water; an _eye_, green, steadfast, ashine like phosphor which is concentrated decay,--the eye of rapacity gorged. His nostrils filled with the foreign odor of menageries and aquariums. A brief hiatus now, in which objects altered. A great weight pressed against his chest, not to hurt, but to fill his consciousness with the thought of its cold crushing strength; the weight of a tree-trunk, the chill of stone, the soft texture of slimy flesh.... Full against him upon the rock, in his half-submerged cavern, lay the terror of all his obsessions--the crocodile. Savage incarnations were shaken out of his soul as he regarded this beast, a terror so great that his throat shut, his spine stiffened. Still as a dead tree, the creature pressed against him, bulging stomach, the narrow, yellow-brown head, moveless, raised from the rock. This was the armed abdomen he feared most--cruelty, patience, repletion--and the dirty-white of nether parts!... He heard the scream within him--before it broke from his throat.

Out of one of these, Charter emerged with a cry, wet with sweat as the cavern-floor from which he came--to find that the minute-hand of his watch had not traversed the distance between two Roman numerals. He seized the time-piece and flung it across the room, lived an age of regret before it struck the walnut edge of his dresser and crashed to the floor.... The sounds of running-down fitted to words in his brain.