Chapter VI: Part 6

"_Tick--tick!... tick-tick-tick._" A spring rattled a disordered plaint; then after a silence: "I served you--did my work well--very well--very well!..." Charter writhed, wordlessly imploring it to be still. It was not the value, but the sentient complaining of a thing abused. Faithful, and he had crushed it. He felt at last in the silence that his heart would stop if it ticked again; and as he waited, staring at it, his mind rushed off to a morning of boyhood and terrible cruelty.... He had been hunting at the edge of a half-cleared bit of timber. A fat gray squirrel raced across the dead leaves, fully sixty yards away--its mate following blithely. The leader gained the home-tree as Charter shot, crippling the second--the male. It was a long shot and a very good one, but the boy forgot that. The squirrel tried to climb the tree, but could not. It crawled about, uncoupled, among the roots, and answered the muffled chattering from the hole above--this, as the boy came up, his breast filling with the deadliest shame he had ever known. The squirrel told him all, and answered his mate besides. It was not a chatter for mercy. The little male was cross about it--bewildered, too, for its life-business was so important. The tortured boy dropped the butt of his gun upon the creature's head.... Now the tone changed--the flattened head would not die.... He had fled crying from the thing, which haunted him almost to madness. He _begged_ now, as the old thoughts of that hour began to run about in the deep-worn groove of his mind....

Andas he had treated the squirrel, the watch--so he was treating his own life....

Again he was called to consciousness by some one uttering his name. He answered. The apartment echoed with the flat, unnatural cry of his voice; silence mocking him.... Then, in delusion, he would find himself hurrying across the yard, attracted by some psychic terror of warning. Finally, as he opened the stable-door, sounds of a panting struggle reached him from the box-stall where he kept his loved saddle-mare. Light showed him that she had broken through the flooring, and, frenziedly struggling to get her legs clear from the wreck, had torn the skin and flesh behind, from hoof to hock. He saw the yellow tendons and the gleaming white bone. She was half-up, half-down, the smoky look of torture and accusation in her brown eyes....

Finally came back his inexorable memories--one after another, his nights of degraded passion; the memory of brothels, where drunkenness had carried him; songs, words, laughter he had heard; pictures on the walls; combs, cards, cigarettes of the dressing-tables, low ceilings and noisome lamps; that individual something about each woman, and her especial perversion; peregrinations among the lusts of half the world's ports, where a man never gets so low that he cannot fall into a woman's arms. How they had clung to him and begged him to come back! His nostrils filled again with sickening perfumes that never could overpower the burnt odor of harlot's hair. Down upon him these horrors poured, until he was driven to the floor from the very foulness of the place wherein he lay, but a chill struck his heart and forced him back into the nest of sensual dreams....

Constantly he felt that dry direct need for cigarette inhalation--that nervous craving which makes a man curse viciously at the break of a match or its missing fire--but his heart responded instantly to the mild poisoning, a direct and awful pounding like the effect of cocaine upon the strong, and his sickness was intensified. So he would put the cigarette down, lest the aorta burst within him--only to light the pest again a moment later.

He could feel his liver, a hot turgid weight; even, mark its huge boundary upon the surface of his body. Back of his teeth, began the burning insatiable passage, collapsing for alcohol in every inch of its coiled length; its tissues forming an articulate appeal in his brain: "You have filled us with burning for weeks and months, until we have come to rely upon the false fire. Take this away suddenly now and we must die. We cannot keep you warm, even alive, without more of the fuel which destroyed us. We do not want much--just enough to help us until we rebuild our own energy." And his brain reiterated a warning of its own. "I, too, am charred and helpless. The devils run in and out and over. I have no resistance. I shall open entirely to them--unless you strengthen me with fire. You are doing a very wicked and dangerous thing in stopping short like this. Deserted of me, you are destitute, indeed."

Charter felt his unshaven mouth. It was soft and fallen like an imbecile's. A man in hell does not curse himself. He saw himself giving. He felt that he was giving up life and its every hope, but the fear of madness, or driveling idiocy, was worse than this. He would drink for nerve to kill himself decently. The abject powerlessness of his will was the startling revelation. He had played with his will many times, used it to drink when its automatic action was to refrain. Always he had felt it to be unbreakable, until now. He was a yellow, cowering elemental, more hideous and pitiable than prohibition-orator ever depicted in his most dreadful scare-climax. There is no will when Nature turns loose her dogs of fear upon a sick and shattered spirit--no more will than in the crisis of pneumonia or typhoid.

He wrapped the bed-clothes about him and staggered to the medicine-case. There was no pure alcohol; no wood-alcohol luckily. However, a quart bottle of liver-tonic--turkey rhubarb, gum guaiac, and aloes, steeped in Holland gin. A teaspoonful before meals is the dose--for the spring of the year. An old family remedy, this,--one of the bitterest and most potent concoctions ever shaken in a bottle, a gold-brown devil that gagged full-length. The inconceivable organic need for alcohol worked strangely, since Charter's stomach retained a half-tumbler of this horrible dosage. Possibly, it could not have held straight whiskey at once. Internally cleansed, he, of course, responded immediately to the warmth. Plans for whiskey instantly awoke in his brain. He touched the button which connected with his man in the stable; then waited by a rear window until the other appeared.

"Bob," he called down shakily, "have you got any whiskey?"

"The half of a half-pint, sir."

"Bring it up quickly. Here--watch close--I'm tossing down my latch-key."

The key left his hand badly. He could have embraced Bob for finding it in the dark as he did. Charter then sat down--still with the bed-clothes wrapped about him--to wait for the other's step. He felt close to death in the silence.... Bob poured and held the single drink to his lips. Charter sat still, swallowing for a moment. Part remained within him.

"Now, Bob," he said, "run across the street to Dr. Whipple, and tell him I need some whiskey. Tell him he needn't come over--unless he wants to. I'm ill, and I've got to get out of here. Hurry back."

He dared not return to bed now--fear of dreams. To draw on parts of his clothing was an heroic achievement, but he could not bend forward to put on stockings or shoes without overturning his stomach, the lining of which was sore as a festering wound. His nostrils, with their continual suggestions, now tortured him with a certain half-cooked odor of his own inner tissues. The consciousness of having lost his will--that he was thirty years old, and shortly to be drunk again--became the nucleus for every flying storm-cloud in his brain. He knew what it would be now. He would drink regularly, fatten, redden, and betray every remnant of good left within him--more and more distended and brutalized--until his heart stopped or his liver hardened. And the great work? He tried to smile at this. Those who had looked for big things from his maturity had chosen a musty vessel. He would write of the loves of the flesh, and of physical instincts--one of the common--with a spark of the old genius now and then to light up the havoc--that he might writhe! Yes, he would never get past that--the instantaneous flash of his real self to lift him where he belonged--so he would not forget to suffer--_when he fell back_.... "I'll break that little system," he muttered angrily, as to an enemy in the room, "I'll drink my nerve back and shoot my head off...." But bigger, infinitely more important, than any of these thoughts, was the straining of every sense for Bob's step in the hall--Bob with the whiskey from his never-failing friend, Dr. Whipple.... Yes, he had chosen whiskey to drive out the God-stuff from his soul. What a dull, cheap beast he was!

The day was breaking--a sweet summer morning. He wrapped the bed-clothes closer about him, and lifted the window higher. The nostrils that had brought him so much of squalor and horror now expanded to the new life of the day--vitality that stirred flowers and foliage, grasses and skies to beauty; the blessed morning winds, lit with faint glory. The East was a great, gray butterfly's wing, shot with quivering lines of mauve and gold. It shamed the hulk huddled at the window. Bob's foot on the stairs was the price of his brutality.

"Great mornin' for a ride. Beth is fit as a circus. I'd better get her ready, hadn't I, sir?"

"God, no!" Charter mumbled. "Help me on with my boots, and pour out a drink. Bring fresh water.... Did Doctor----"

"Didn't question me, sir. Brought what you wanted, and said he'd drop over to see you to-day."

Charter held his mouth for the proffered stimulant, and beckoned the other back.

"Let me sit still for a minute or two. Don't joggle about the room, Bob."

Revulsion quieted, the nausea passed. Bob finished dressing him, and Charter moved abroad. He took the flask with him, lest it be some forgotten holiday and the bars closed. A man who has had such a night as his is slavish for days before the fear of being _without_. He was pitifully weak, but the stimulus had lifted his mind out of the hells of obsession.

The morning wind had sweetened the streets. Lawns, hedges, vines, and all the greens seemed washed and preened to meet the sun. To one who has hived with demons, there is something so simple and sanative about the restoring night--the rest of healing and health. He could have wept at the virtue of simple goodness--so easy, so vainly sought amid the complications of vanity and desire. Well and clearly he saw now that mild good, undemonstrative, unaggressive good--seventy years of bovine plodding, sunning, grazing, drowsing--is a step toward the Top. What a travesty is genius when it is arraigned by an august morning; men who summon gods to their thinking, yet fail in the simple lessons that dogs and horses and cats have grasped! All the more foul and bestial are those whom gods have touched within; charged with treason of manhood by every good and perfect thing, when they cannot rise and meet the day with clean hearts. Charter would have given all his evolution for the simple decency of his man, Bob, or his mare, Beth.

The crowd of thoughts incensed him, so he hurried.... Dengler was sweeping out his bar. Screen-doors slammed open, and a volume of dust met the early caller as he was about to enter. Dengler didn't drink, and he was properly pleased with the morning. Lafe Schiel, who was scrubbing cuspidors for Dengler, drank. That's why he cleaned cuspidors. Dengler greeted his honored patron effusively.

"Suppose you've been working all night, Mr. Charter. You look a little roughed and tired. You work while we sleep--eh? That's the way with you writer-fellows. I've got a niece that writes. I told you about her. She's ruined her eyes. She says she can get her best thoughts at night. You're all alike."

"Have a little touch, Lafe?" Charter asked, turning to the porter, who wiped his hands on his trousers and stepped forward gratefully.

Bottles were piled on the bar, still beer-stained from the night before. Dengler put forward clean, dripping glasses from below, and stroked the bottle with his palm, giving Lafe water, and inquiring of Charter what he would have "for a wash...." Dengler, so big-necked, healthy, and busy, talking about his breakfast and not corrupting his body with the stuff others paid for; Lafe Schiel in his last years--nothing but whiskey left--no thought, no compunction, no man, no soul, just a galvanic desire--these three in a tawdry little up-town bar at five in the morning--and he, Quentin Charter, with a splendid mare to ride, a mother to breakfast with, a world's work to do; he, Quentin Charter, in this diseased growth upon the world's gutter, in this accumulation of cells which taints all society.

Charter drank and glanced at the morning paper. The sheet still damp from the press reminded him of the night's toil in the office down-town (a veritable strife of work, while he had grovelled)--copy-makers, copy-readers, compositors, form-makers, and pressmen--he knew many of them--all fine fellows, decently resting now, deservedly resting. And the healthy little boys, cutting their sleep short, to deliver from door to door, even to Dengler's, this worthy product for the helpful dollar! Ah, God, the world was so sweet and pure in its worthier activities! God only asked that--not genius, just slow-leisured decency would pass with a blessing. God had eternity to build men, and genius which looked out upon a morning like this, from a warm tube of disease, was concentrated waste! Charter cleared his throat. Thoughts were pressing down upon him too swiftly again. He ordered another drink, and Dengler winked protestingly as he turned to call Lafe Schiel. The look said, "Don't buy him another, or I won't get my cuspidors cleaned."

So Charter felt that he was out of range and alignment everywhere, and the drink betrayed him, as it always does when in power. Not even in Lafe Scheil was the devil surer of his power this day. The whiskey did not brighten, but stimulated thought-terrors upon the subject of his own shattering.... Dengler found him interesting--this man so strangely honored by others; by certain others honored above politicians. He wondered now why the other so recklessly plied the whip.... The change that came was inevitable.

"There now, old fellow," Dengler remonstrated familiarly, "I don't like to turn you down, but you can't--honest, you can't--stand much more."

This was at seven-thirty. Charter straightened up, laughed, and started to say, "This is the first----"

But he reflected that once before this same thing had happened somewhere: he had been deemed too drunk to drink--somewhere before.... He wabbled in the memory, and mumbled something wide to the point of what he had meant to say, and jerked out.... That buttoning of his coat about his throat (on a brilliant summer morning); that walking out swiftly with set jaw and unseeing eyes, was but one of many landmarks to Dengler--landmarks on the down-grade. He had seen them all in his twenty years; seen the whole neighborhood change; seen clean boys redden, fatten, and thrive for a time; watched the abyss widen between young married pairs, his own liquors running in the bottom; seen men leave their best with him and take home their beast.... Dengler, yes, had seen many things worth telling and remembering. They all owed him at the last.... In some ways, this man, Charter, was different. He tried to remember who it was who first brought Charter in, and who that party of swell chaps were who, finding Charter there one day, had made a sort of hero out of him and tarried for hours.... The beer-man, in his leather apron, entered to spoil this musing. He put up the old square-face bottle, and served for a "chaser" a tall shell of beer.... Even beer-men could not last. Dengler had seen many who for a year or two "chased" gin with beer at every call. There was Schultz, a year ago about this time. He'd been driving a wagon for a couple of years. Schultz had made too many stops before he reached Dengler's that day. A full half-barrel had crushed him to the pavement just outside the door.

"Put two halves in the basement, and leave me a dozen cases of pints," Dengler ordered.

* * * * *

Charter was met at the door by his mother. She had expected to find him suffering from nerves, but clean. He had always kept his word, and she had waited for this day. She did not need to look at him twice, but put on her bonnet and left the house. She returned within an hour with three of Charter's men friends. Bob, whom she had left to take care of her son, reported that he had a terrible time. Charter, unable to find his six-shooter, had overturned the house and talked of conspiracy and robbery. He had fallen asleep within the last few minutes. Strange that the mother had thought to hide the six-shooter....

The men lifted him to a closed carriage. Charter was driven to a sanatorium. One of the friends undertook to stay with him for a day or two. Charter did not rightly realize where he was until evening. He appeared to take the news very quietly. Whiskey was allowed him when it was needed. Other patients in various states of convalescence offered assistance in many ways. That night, when the friend finally fell asleep in the chair at the bedside, Charter arose softly, went into a hall, _where a light was burning_, and plunged down into the dark--twenty-two brass-covered steps. His head broke the panel of the front door at the foot. His idea was the same which had made him hunt for his six-shooter the morning before. Besides the door, he broke his nose, his arm, and covered himself with bruises, but fell short, years yet unnumbered, from his intent. Under the care of experts after that, he was watched constantly, and given stimulus at gradually lengthening intervals--until he refused it himself on the seventh day. Three weeks later, still, he left the place, a man again, with one hundred and twenty needle punctures in the flesh of his unbroken arm.

FOURTEENTH CHAPTER

THE SINGING OF THE SKYLARK CEASES ABRUPTLY; CHARTER HASTENS EAST TO FIND A QUEER MESSAGE AT _THE GRANVILLE_

Charter, three years after the foregoing descent into realism, was confessedly as happy a man as the Mid-West held. He accepted his serenity with a full knowledge of its excellence, and according to his present health and habits would not have been excited to find himself still among those present, had the curtain been lifted thirty or forty years away. In the year that followed the sanatorium experience, Charter in reality found himself. There were a few months in which work came slowly and was uncertain in quality. In his entire conception, nothing worse could happen than an abatement of mental activity, but he did not writhe, knowing that he richly deserved the perfect punishment. So slowly and deeply did physical care and spiritual awakening restore the forces of mind, however, that he did not realize an expansion of power until his first long work had received critical and popular acclaim, and he could see it, himself, in perspective. So he put off the last and toughest shackle of King Fear--the living death.

As for drinking, that had beaten him. He had no thought to re-challenge the champion. In learning that he could become abject, a creature of paralyzed will, he had no further curiosity. This much, however, he had required to be shown, and what a tender heart he had ever afterward for the Lafe Schiels of this world. There were other vivid animals, strong and agile, in his quiver of physical passions, but he discovered that these could not become red and rending without alcohol. Such were clubbed into submission accordingly. With alcohol, Charter could travel any one of seven sorry routes to the gutter; without it, none. This was his constant source of thankfulness--that he had refined his elements without abating their dynamics. The forces that might have proved so deadly in mastery, furnished a fine vitality under the lash.

All was sanative and open about him. Charter knew the ultimate dozen of the hundred and forty-four thousand rules for health--and made these his habit. The garret, so often spoken of, was the third-floor of his mother's mansion. Since he slept under the sky, his sleeping-room was also a solarium. There was a long, thickly-carpeted hall where he paced and smoked meditatively; a trophy-room and his study and library. Through books and lands, he had travelled as few men of his years, and always with an exploring mind. In far countries, his was an eye of quick familiarity; always he had been intensely a part of his present environ, whether Typee or Tibet. Then, the God-taught philosophers of Asia and Europe, and our own rousing young continent, were the well-beloved of his brain, so that he saw many things with eyes lit by their prophecies. As for money, he was wealthy, as Channing commends, rather than rich, and for this competence of late, he had made not a single concession, or subverted the least of his ideals, selling only the best of his thoughts, the expression of which polished the product and increased the capacity. He fitted nothing to the fancied needs of marketing. His mother began truly to live now, and her external nature manifested below in fine grains and finished services. Between the two, the old Charter formalities were observed. She was royal steel--this white-haired mother--and a cottage would have become baronial about her. Where she was, there lived order and silence and poise.

After this enumeration of felicitous details, one will conclude that this has to deal with a selfish man; yet his gruelling punishments must not be forgotten, nor the Quentin spirit. It is true that he had emerged miraculously unhurt from many dark explorations; but his appreciation of the innate treachery and perversion of events was sound and keen. By no means did he challenge any complication which might strip him to quivering nakedness again. Rather his whole life breathed gratitude for the goodly days as they came, and glided into untormented nights. Next in importance to the discovery that his will could be beaten was this which the drinking temperament so hesitatingly grants--that there are thrilling hearts, brilliant minds, memorable conversations, and lovely impulses among men and women who will not tarry long over the wine. Simple as this seems, it was hard for a Charter to learn.... As he contemplated the full promise of his maturity, the thought often came--indeed, he expressed it in one of the Skylark letters--that this was but a period of rest and healing in which he was storing power for sterner and more subtle trials.

Such is an intimation of the mental and moral state of Quentin Charter in his thirty-fourth year, when he began to open the Skylark letters with more than curiosity.... He knew Reifferscheid, and admired him with the familiar enthusiasm of one who has read the editor's work intermittently for years. Charter, of course, was delighted with the review of his second book. It did not occur to him that it could have been written by other than the editor himself. Reifferscheid's reply to Charter's letter of thanks for the critique proved the key to the whole matter, since it gave the Westerner both focus and dimension for his visioning.

I haven't read your book yet, old friend, but I'm going to
shortly. Your fine letter has been turned over to Miss Paula
Linster, a young woman who has been doing some reviews for me,
of late; some of the most important, in which lot your book, of
course, fell. The review which pleased you is only one of a
hundred that has pleased me. Miss Linster is the last word--for
fineness of mind. Incidentally, she is an illumination to look
at, and I haven't the slightest doubt but that she sings and
paints and plays quite as well as she writes book notices. If
she liked a work of mine as well as she likes yours, I should
start on a year's tramp, careless of returns from States yet to
be heard from. The point that interests me is that you could do
a great book about women, away off there in the Provinces--_and
without knowing her_.

You may wonder at this ebullition. Truth is, I'm backing down,
firmly, forcefully, an inclination to do an essay on the
subject. This is the first chance I ever had to express matters
which have come forth from the Miraculous in the past year. All
that she does has the ultimate feminine touch,--but I'll stop
before I get my sleeves up again about this new order of being.
Perhaps you deserve to know Miss Linster. You'd never be the
same afterwards, so I'm not so sure whether I'd better
negotiate it or not. I'm glad to see your book has left the
post so perfectly. Always come to see me when in town. Yours
solid, Reifferscheid.

And so she became the Skylark to Quentin Charter, because she was lost in the heights over by the seaboard, and only her singing came out of the blue.... There were fine feminine flashes in the letters Charter received, rare exquisite matters which can be given to the world, only through the one who inspires their warm delicacy and charm. The circuit was complete, and the voltage grew mightier and mightier.

There was a royal fall night, in which Charter's work came ill, because thoughts of her monopolized. Life seemed warm and splendid within him. He turned off the electric bulb above his head, and the moonlight burst in--a hunting moon, full and red as Mars. There was thrilling glory in the purple south, and a sense of the ineffable majesty of stellar management. He banished the night panorama with the electric button again, and wrote to the Skylark. This particular letter proved the kind which annihilates all sense of separateness, save the animal heaviness of miles, and makes this last, extra carking and pitiless for the time. It may have been that Charter would have hesitated to send this letter, had he read it over again in the cool of morning, but it happened that he yearned for a walk that night--and passed a mail-box, while the witchery of the night still enchanted.

He felt dry, a bit burned the next morning, and saddled for a couple of hours, transferring the slight strain of nerves to his muscles. There was a note from the Skylark. She had found an old picture of his in a magazine and commented on it deliciously.... "I wonder if you think of me as I am--plain, _plain_?" she had asked.... No, he did not. Nor was it Reifferscheid's words to the contrary that prevented him. It is not in man to correlate plainness with a mystic attraction. She had never appeared to him as beautiful exactly, but fine, vivid, electric--a manifestation of eyes, lips, mind. All the poundage part of a human being was utterly vague in his concept of the Skylark.... Charter naturally lost his perspective and penetration in dealing with his own interlacing emotions.

The present letter thralled him. It was blithe in intent, but intuitively deep and keen. In a former letter, he had asked if there were not a strain of Irish in her lineage, so mercurial did her temperament play in all that she wrote. "No Irish," she had answered. "Dutch--straight Dutch. Always New York--always Dutch. I praise Providence for this 'monkey-wrench to hang upon my safety valve.'"

The "red moon" letter seemed to have caught her on the wing--at her highest and happiest--for she answered it in fine faith and lightness. Though it had carried her up and up; and though the singing came back from golden azure, yet she had not forgotten her humor. There was a suggestion of world-wisdom here, or was it world-wear?

For hours at a time, Charter was now stripped of his capacity for work. This is fine torment. Mostly there was a sheet in his type-mill, but his fingers only fluttered the space-bar. Let him begin a letter to the Skylark, however, and inspiration came, indeed. His thoughts marshalled like a perfect army then, and passed out from under his hand in flashing review.... He ate little, slept little, but his vitality was prodigious. A miracle matured in his breast. Had he not been more than usually stubborn, he would have granted long before, that he loved a woman for the first time in his life--and this a woman he had never seen.

By New Year's there was no dissembling. No day passed now in which he did not battle down an impulse to take a train for New York. This was real living. The destiny which had ruled him through so many dark wanderings, had waited until his soul was roused to dominance, before he was permitted to enter earth's true treasury. It was now that he remembered his past, and many a mile and many an hour he paced the dim hall--wrestling to be clean of it. This was a Soul which called. He did not dare to answer while a vestige of the old taints lingered.... He was seldom troubled that she might prove less inspiring than he pictured. He staked every reliance in that he had lived thirty-three years and encountered nothing comparable with this before. Passions, fascinations, infatuations, were long put behind; these were classed now in his mind beneath decent and frictionless partnerships between men and women.

The vision which inspired his romantic loneliness was all that Reifferscheid had suggested, and infinitely more which his own dreamings had supplied. She was an adult frankly challenged by the mysteries of creation; often shocked by its revelations, never above pity nor beneath humor, wonderful in her reality of culture, and wise above men with a woman's divination. But particularly, her ultimate meaning was for _him_; his quest, she was; his crown, to be. The world had preserved her singing, until he was ready; and though singing, she must ever feel the poverty of unfulfilment in her own breast, until he came. This was the stately form of the whole enchantment.

That there existed in creation a _completing_ feminine for all his lonely and divided forces; that there lived one woman who could evenly ignite his body, brain, and spirit; that there was hidden in the splendid plan of things, a Union of Two to form One; all this which had been drifting star-stuff before, became sparks now for new and terrific energies of mind; energies, however, which could be trained and directed only in her presence.

Man cannot live altogether in the altitudes. There were brief periods wherein Charter remembered the mad, drink-tainted trifler with lyrics and women. It had been a past, surely, filled with soul-murdering illusions. Those who had known him then, would have had to see him now to find faith. There had been letters about his recent books from men and women who had known him in the darker, less-spacious days. Failing to adjust this new and lusty spirit with the man they had known, they had tried to bring a laugh from him and answers to futile questions.

Charter could not forget that there come to the desk of a review-editor many personal notices concerning one whose work is being talked about. Indeed, such are handled as a matter of routine. The Skylark could not be expected always to wing aloof from these. All that was vague and indefinite did not matter; such might even be accounted as admirable specializations in life, but his acquaintance had been prodigious, and many clippings came home to him which he was not pleased to read.... Still, in the main, he relied upon Paula's solid sense of justice; and every fresh letter lifted him higher and higher. In his own letters, he did not fail to incorporate a buffer against indefinite revelations. Moreover, he had never ceased to call it wonderful--this capacity, of even the purest women, to lock the doors against the ugliest generalities of a man's past, and to reckon only with specific instances. It is here that the mother looks out through the eyes of a maid.

One April morning, he encountered a depression more formidable in vitality than ever before. Beth had just had her shoes set, and Charter tried to ride off the blue devil. He steadied his mount out of town, until she struck the ringing country road. The instant she felt her calks bite into the frosty turf, the mare flirted her head, took the bit, and became a veritable glowing battery of beautiful energy. Twelve miles he gave her, but the blue devil rode equally well and sat down again with Charter in his study. It was like a desert-island loneliness, this which beset him, as if his ship were sinking into the horizon; only it was a more poignant than physical agony--a sense of spiritual isolation.

This study had become to him the place of his dearest revelations of life. Here, of late especially, he had found refuge from every discord, and here invariably were opened the letters from the Skylark. The place of a man's work becomes a grand, quiet solace as he grows older, but calm and poise were wrested from the room to-day. He fought the depression with every trained faculty, but was whipped by it. Color and sunlight were gone from within; the zeal from future work, the warmth from every promise, the changing lustre from words, and the excellent energy of thought which impels their weaving. Twilight in mid-afternoon. He turned on the lights impatiently. Meaning and beauty were bereft from all his possessions, as buoyancy was gone from his own breast. There was something pitifully boyish in the trophies he had treasured--so much of the college cub, and the youth who refuses to permit his travels to be forgotten. He regarded his past work, as one grown out of it, regretting that it had ever attracted the materials of permanence. Smugness in his teachings; cold intellectuality brazen in all his attainments; everything about him suddenly become sinister from the old life!... He looked into the East--his country of singing, of roses, cedars, and fountains--but the gray-black twilight was a damnable intervention.... It was in this spirit, or lack of it, that he wrote the letter which revealed to Paula his inner responsiveness, as she was tossed in The High Tide.

The letter which she had written almost at the same time, reached him on the second morning thereafter; and his suffering in the interval he could only liken to one of the old sieges of reaction after dissipation. The fine, angular writing, which he never regarded without a sense of the darting swiftness of her hand; the thin, tough sheets that crinkled, came like bounty to the starving; yet he was deathly afraid.

Something of the long ago has just come to me--to my very
rooms. It would not have been believed, had I sought it. I
might have endured it, if _you_ had told me. It is dreadful to
play with illusions. Oh, why must we keep our gods so far
away--lest we lose them? Had I waited longer, I could not have
written. It seems now that you have a right to know--before my
pride dries up all expression. You are not to blame--except
that you were very reckless in adding happinesses one upon the
other. It was all quite ridiculous. I trusted my
intuition--allowed myself to think of a table spread in the
wilderness of the world with you. My intuitions! I used to be
so proud of them. I see now that sometimes they're quite as
fallible as plain thinking, after all.

I always felt you alone. I seemed to know your voice after
centuries. Yes, I am sure it was that which affected me so
deeply in your work and made me answer your letters with such
faith. _I knew your voice._ I thought of you alone--your spirit
hungry.... It makes one feel so common, when one's intuitions
betray this way. The heart for writing further is cold and
heavy. Once, down the wind, came a fragrant pollen, but the
blowing summer is gone from my garden....

No signature.

She had not penned a skylark with a folded or broken wing. Charter sat thinking for several moments, but only because he knew there was ample time to catch the noon-train for New York. That he should do this had formed in mind before he had read five lines of the letter. This thought of action steadied him; and the proof that he had sensed her agony and reflected it throughout the past forty-eight hours made the call of the East instant and irresistible. It did not come to him at first that he was now entering the greater conflict, for which Nature had trained him in tranquillity and fed his soul unto replenishment during three years.... His first quick thought came out of old habits of mind: _An hour with her, and her heart will be healed!_ Here was the old trifler. He suffered for this instant faltering of the brighter manhood. Man's fineness is not accentuated by the fact that a woman sacrifices her power within him, when she falls to pleading a little. Charter could have torn out the old mental fibres upon which played the thought of her swiftly renewed happiness by his presence.

The reality of her suffering slowly penetrated his mind. He perceived that she could not express the actuality; that her thoughts had winged ineffectually about the immovable disorder--like bees over the clumsy corpse of a rodent in the hive. It was not to be lifted, and the inspiration hermetically to seal the monster and resume activities as well as possible, had not yet come.... "I might have endured it, if _you_ had told me!"

He wasted no energy trying to think exactly what had happened. It was all he could bear to grasp the full meaning that this inspiring creature who had soared and sung so long, was crushed and cold. Every sentence in her letter revealed the bruise of her heart, the absence of spontaneity.... She was as different from other women he had known--the women who had been healed by his word or his caress--as he was different in this attraction. He telegraphed that he was coming, begged that she would see him the following evening, and instructed her to leave word for him at the _Granville_. Then he packed his bag and told his mother. She laughed quietly.

"On the spur of the moment as usual, Quentin.... It will be good for you. You've been home a long time. Are you going--beyond New York?"

"I haven't a thought now of going farther, Mother," he answered....

Again twilight in mid-afternoon--as he crossed the river from Jersey. It had been a day and night to age the soul--with its inexorable stretch of material miles. New York had a different look, a different atmosphere, than ever before. Huge and full of horrible grinding; sick with work and sick with damp--but above this, the magic of her presence was over all. It was only four in the afternoon, and he had not asked to see her until seven. Might she not have watched for him or be near him now? She would know him from his pictures, and observe him as a stranger, but he had only his visions.

On the Cross-town to the _Granville_, emotions played upon him of a kind that he could not have understood in another man a few months before. Moreover, he felt himself giving way before the vibrations of the big city. Harried and shrunken, he was, like a youth from the fields; and the voice he had raised so valiantly from afar against this tremendous massed soul, seemed now but the clamor of a boy in the safety of his own door. To and fro along his inflamed nerves crept the direct need of a drink and a cigarette--old wolves forever on the watch for the spent and the wounded.... Actually terrorized, he was, at the thought she might not see him; that there might be no note for him at the _Granville_. What a voyage in the dark.

For the time, his excellent moral balance had deserted shamelessly. An adequate perception of his own position and attitude in the eyes of high womanhood had unhelmed him, quite properly. Nature had finally found a hot retort which just fitted his case--and in he went.... No purely physical ardor could have called Quentin Charter out of his study and far across the continent. Lesser loves than this have plunged nations into war, and broken the main trend of history into pregnant digressions. The more penetratingly one regards the man in his present consuming, the more formidable becomes the conviction that the human cosmos in the beginning was cleft in twain: one to grope to the light, a male; the other to suffer the way, her burden, the curse of Eve. When these mates of fire fulfil their divided destinies and sweep into the zone of mutual attraction, woe to the satellites and asteroids in the inevitable cataclysm which follows.... Yet it is out of such solar throes that gods and prophets are born.... He gave his bag to a boy at the _Granville_ entrance, and stepped forward to the desk, clearing his throat and repeating his question.... The clerk rushed through the letters in "C."

"No, Mr. Charter,--not a letter, but wait just a moment; there was a telephone-call."

A chill had swept through him as the man spoke. It had not occurred to him that the word would come in other than her handwriting. This was an unsigned note, written by the telephone-girl:

Mr. Quentin Charter: A lady who says you will understand,
'phoned that she will be home at seven to-night--if you think
it wise and kind to come to her.

The message was dated at two P. M. Both chill and burning were in the words. It was strangely unlike her; yet in passing through the operator's mind, it might have become routine. The word "kind" was a torturing curb. It placed him on ugly quaking ground. How weak, how ancient and commonplace, is the human lord after all, when in doubt regarding his lady's reception of him! Where is his valor now, his taking of cities, his smiling deaths for honor? Most of all times, he is man, the male; not man, the soul. Half-way out on the surface-car, he discovered one of the big "Selma Cross" bill-boards. It was intimate, startling, an evil omen--great black letters out of the deathless past.... He stood on the fourth floor of the _Zoroaster_. The elevator-man had shown him a certain door which was slightly ajar. He was ill, breathless, and his heart sank strangely with the lights in the shaft from the descending car.... He tapped on the designated door, and a deep melodious voice, instantly identified with ancient abandonments, called gently:

"Come in!"

FIFTEENTH CHAPTER

QUENTIN CHARTER AND SELMA CROSS JOIN ISSUE ON A NEW BATTLE-GROUND, EACH LEAVING THE FIELD WITH OPEN WOUNDS

Charter was seized with vertigo. It was his sorry thought that the old scar-tissues, however bravely they sufficed in the days of easy-going, could not endure a crux like this. But he was wrong. It was the shock to his spirit, which made of Selma Cross a giantess of vague outlines in a room filled with swimming objects. Need for the woman of his visions had culminated in the outer hall. In the substitution there was an inner wrench, which to one of Charter's intense concentration was like a stroke; and then, too, the horrible outburst of energy in adjusting the Skylark spirit to the eminent flesh of this old plaything of his, left him drained. He steadied himself into the music-room, and sank into a deep chair, where his heart pumped furiously, but light and empty, as if it could not grip the blood locked in his veins.

He sat in a sort of trance, glimpses of many thoughts running through his brain. He deserved punishment. That was all very well, but something was wrong here. The premonition became a reality in his consciousness that he had entered upon a great desert; that he was to endure again one of his terrible thirsts; not a throat-thirst alone, but a soul-thirst. In the atmosphere of the woman, in the very odor of the room, he felt the old impassioned lyric-maker crush back into the dominance of his mind with all the impish exultation of that lower self. Pride asserted itself now. What an idiot passage in the career of a rising writer! He should always remember with shame this coming to New York--a youthful Marius in whose veins was injected mid-summer madness--coming to this city (where dollar-work is king and plumaged-woman queen) with an abortive conception from garret dreams.... A strong white light fell upon the leather cover of her reading-table, but their faces were in shadow, like the hundred actor faces in photograph upon the wall and mantel. Selma Cross was studying him keenly. The emptiness of it all was so pervading--as his blood began to move again--that he laughed aloud.

"Do you know," Selma Cross said softly, "I thought at first you had been drinking too much. I hardly knew you otherwise, remember. Shall I tell you what added thought came to me, as you crossed the floor so unsteadily--looking so white?"

"Locomotor ataxia, I suppose. I hear it is getting quite the thing for middle-generation New Yorkers.... I expected to see you a little later in your new play, but not here--to-night----"

"That is what I thought--that incurable thing. You seem floored. I didn't know a woman could do that. In the old days, you were adaptable--if nothing else."

His collar felt tight, and he stretched it out, needing more air in his lungs and more blood in his brain. It was clear enough to him now how Skylark had been stricken. The real devastation was that she belonged to this sort of thing at all; that she could consent to this trick, this trap. It was all so different from the consummate fineness, the pervading delicacy, of all Skylark thoughts. Having consented to the trick, _might she not be listening_?... He did not mind her hearing; indeed, he might say things which were needful for her to know--but that she should listen! He writhed. This was not his Skylark at all.... It was hardly Charter's way now to plunge into the centre of things. There was a feline elegance in the manner and movement of Selma Cross; she seemed so delightfully at ease, that he was willing to make it a bit harder for her.

"I suppose I was more adaptable formerly," he said slowly. "It is something, however, suddenly to encounter an old friend who has made good so fearfully and tremendously in the past week. Of course, I had read all about it. Still, I repeat it was an experience to encounter your stardom actually on the boards; and more of an experience to find you here. I'm really very glad that you secured the one great vehicle. As for your work--few know its quality better than I."

She studied him long, her eyes glowing behind the narrowed lids. "As for that, you've been biting the flaky top-crust, too," she said finally. "I never doubted what you could do in your game, but I confess I feared that whiskey would beat you to it.... Do you know you are wonderfully changed--so white, so lean? Your work has come to me since you went away; what else have you been doing?--I mean, to change you so finely."

"Garret."

Her brow clouded at the word. It was as if she had expected to laugh at him long before this. "Did any woman ever tell you that you're rather a mean sort, Quentin Charter?"

"Doubtless I have deserved it," he answered. "What are you thinking?"

"I was thinking of your garret--where you gather your victims for vivisection."

"That's put very clearly."

"Do you think this is big-man stuff?"

"My case is rather an ugly one to look back upon, truly," Charter granted. "For a long time, it appeared to me that I must learn things at first-hand. With first-water talents, perhaps this is not necessary."

"A woman finally brings a man face to face," she said with sudden scorn, "and he becomes limp, agrees with everything she says.... 'Yes, it is quite true, I was an awful beast. What else, dear?'--ugh!"

Charter smiled. She was very swift and deft in supplying a man's evil motives. It is a terrible feminine misfortune--this gift of imputing--and happy women do not possess it. Few men, incidentally, are deep enough to avail themselves of all the crafts and cunnings with which they may be accredited.

"I have no intention of destroying the slightest gratification you may draw, Selma, from questioning me," he said. "If I appear limp, please remember that I'm a bit in the dark as yet. I came to this floor on a different errand. I had this errand in mind--not self-examination. However, I'll attend now in all sincerity. You were speaking of my victims for vivisection in the garret."

She appeared not to trust him in the least. "I've always wanted to know if you believed--what an apprentice I really was in love--give-and-take--when you came?"

"That was easily believed, Selma----"

"Then you grant I wasn't acting--when I gave myself to you?"

"I didn't think you were acting----"

"Then _you_ were acting, because when the time came--you dropped me quite as easily as you would drop a street-cur you had been pleased to feed."

"Just there you are a bit in error. I was furiously interested, and certainly not acting altogether, until----"

"Enter--the wine," she said with a sneer.

"Yes, if you will." He was irritated for a second, having meant to say something entirely different.

"A woman so loves to hear that a man's passion for her depends upon his drinking!"

"I have always been very fond of and grateful to you. It was the whole life that the drinking carried me into--that I had such horror for when, when I became well."

"You got well very suddenly after you left me," she told him. Her huge face was livid, and her lips dry.

"On the contrary, I was a long time ill." Her temper chilled his attempts at sincerity.

"It looked so from those first few--letters, is rather a dignified word."

"I say it with shame, I was practically unable to write. I was burnt out when I left here. I had been to Asia--gone from home seven months--and the returning fool permitted the bars to welcome him----"

"You seized a moment to dictate a letter----"

"Silence would have been far better," he said. "I see that now. My only idea was to let you hear. Writing myself was out of the question by that time."

"You wrote an article about stage people--with all the loftiness of an anaemic priest."

"That was written before I left here--written and delivered----"

"All the worse, that you could write such an article--while you were spending so much time with me."

"I have never belittled what you gave me, Selma. I could praise you, without admiring the stage. You are amazingly different. I think that's why New York is talking about you to-night. I had made many trips to New York and knew many stage people, before I met you. If you had belonged to the type familiar to me, I should have needed a stronger stimulus than drink to force an interest. Had there been others like you--had I even encountered 'five holy ones in the city'--I should not have written that stage article, or others before it."

"You were one with the Broadway Glowworms, Quentin Charter. Few of them drank so steadily as you."

"I have already told you that for a long time I was an unutterable fool. Until three years ago, I did not begin to know--the breath of life."