She Buildeth Her House

  TWELFTH CHAPTER

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

  Charter had come a long way very swiftly in his search for realities. Ifit is required of man, at a certain stage of evolution, to possess aworking knowledge of the majority of possible human experiences, inorder 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 hadnot been initiated. His was the name of a race of wild, sensual,physical types; a name still held high in old-world authority, andidentified with men of heavy hunting, heavy dining and drinking. TheCharters had always been admired for high temper and fair women. True,there was not a germ of the present Charter mental capacity in the wholerace of such men commonly mated, but Quentin's father had married awoman with a marvellous endurance in prayer--that old, dull-lookingformula for producing sons of strength. A silent woman, she was, areverent woman, an angry woman, with the stuff of martyrdoms in herveins.

  Indeed, in her father, John Quentin, reformer, there were stirringmaterials for memory. His it was to ride and preach, to excoriate eviland depict the good, with the blessing of a living God shining brightand directly upon it. A bracing figure, this Grandfather Quentin, anethereal bloom at the top of a tough stalk of Irish peasantry. First, asa soldier in the British army he was heard of, a stripling with a girl'swaist, a pigeon breast, and the soul's divinity breathing itself awakewithin. His was a poet's rapture at the sight of morning mists,wrestling with the daybreak over the mountains; and everywhere hisregiment went, were left behind Quentin's songs--crude verses of a minorsinger, never seeking permanence more than Homer; and everywhere, he setabout to correct the degradations of men, absolutely unscared andgrandly improvident. A fighter for simple loving-kindness in the heartof man, a worshiper of the bright fragment of truth vouchsafed to hiseyes, a lover of children, a man who walked thrillingly with a personalGod, and was so glorified and ignited by the spirit that, every day, hestrode singing into battle. Such was John Quentin, and from him, aliving part of his own strong soul, sprang the woman who motheredQuentin Charter, sprang pure from his dreams and meditations, anddoubtless with his prayer for a great son, marked in the scroll of hersoul.... For to her, bringing a man into the world meant more than ableak passage of misery begun with passion and ended with pain.

  Her single bearing of fruit was a solitary pilgrimage. From the hour ofthe conception, she drew apart with her own ideals, held herself alooffrom fleshly things, almost as one without a body. Charter, thestrongly-sexed, her merchant-husband, the laughing, scolding, jokinggunner; admirable, even delightful, to Nineteenth Century men of hotdinners and stimulated nights--showed her all that a man must _not_ be.Alone, she crossed the burning sands; cleansed her body and brain in thecool of evenings, expanded her soul with dreams projected far into theglistening purple heavens and whispered the psalms and poems which hadfed 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 Whomsolar systems are but a glowworm swarm, and the soul of man mightierthan them all. Sometimes she carried the concept farther, until itseemed as if her heart must cease to beat: that this perfecting fruit ofthe universe, the soul of man, must be imprisoned for a time in the wombof woman; that the Supreme seemed content with this humble mystery, norcounted not aeons spent, nor burnt-out suns, nor wasting myriads thatdevastate 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 liftHis lustrous pinions and ascend out of chaos to the Father.

  The spirit of her own father was nearer to her in this wonderfulpilgrimage than her husband, to whom she was cold as Etruscan glasses inthe deep-delved earth (yet filled with what fiery potential wine!). Hecalled her Mistress Ice, brought every art, lure, and expression in theCharter evolution to bear upon her; yet, farther and farther intoheights he could not dream, she fled with her forming babe. Manymysteries were cleared for her during this exalted period--thoughclouded later by the pangs of parturition.... Once, in the night, shehad awakened with a sound in her room. At first she thought it was herhusband, but she heard his breathing from the next chamber. At lengthbefore her window, shadowed against the faint light of the sky, appearedthe head and shoulders of a man. He was less than ten feet from her, andshe heard the rustle of his fingers over the dresser. For an instant sheendured a horrible, stifling, feminine fright, but it was superseded atonce by a fine assembling of faculties under the control of genuinecourage. The words she whispered were quite new to her.

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

  The burglar fled quietly down the front stairs, and she heard the doorshut behind him. Out of her trembling was soon evolved the consciousnessof some great triumph, the nature of which she did not yet know. It waspure ecstasy that the realization brought. The courage which hadsteadied her through the crisis was not her own, but from the man's soulshe 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, eventhough a great transport filled the days and nights. The completealienation of her husband was a fact. This estranged the boy from hisfather. Except as the sower, the latter had no part in the life-gardenof Quentin Charter. The mother realized in later years that she mighthave ignored less and explained more. The fear of a lack of sympathy hadgiven her a separateness which her whole married life afterwardreflected. She had disdained even the minor feminine prerogative ofacting. Her husband had a quick, accurate physical brain which, while itcould not have accompanied nor supported in her sustained inspiration,might still have comprehended and laughingly admired. Instead, she hadbeen as wholly apart from him as a memory. Often, in the great wearinessof continued contemplation, her spirit had cried out for the sustenancewhich only a real mate could bring, the gifts of a kindred soul. Manytimes she asked: "Where is the undiscovered master of my heart?"

  There was no one to replenish within her the mighty forces she expendedto nurture the spiritual elements of her child. A lover of changelesschivalry might have given her a prophet, instead of a genius, pitifullyenmeshed in fleshly complications. In her developed the concept (and themark of it lived afterward with glowing power in the mind of herson)--the thrilling possibility of a union, in the supreme sense of theword, a Union of Two to form One....

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

  His mother's abhorrence for the gross animalism of drink, as shediscovered it in her husband (though the tolerant world did not call hima drunkard), was by no means reflected intact in the boy's mind. A vastfield of surface-tissue, however, was receptive to the subject. Quentinwas early interested in the effects of alcohol, and entirely unafraid.He had the perversity to believe that many of his inclinations must beworn-out, instead of controlled. As for his ability to control anythingabout him, under the pressure of necessity, he had no doubt of this.Drink played upon him warmly. His young men and women associates foundthe stimulated Charter an absolutely new order of human enchantmen
t--ayoung man lit with humor and wisdom, girded with chivalry, and a delightto the emotions. Indeed, it was through these that the young man'sspirit for a space lost the helm. It was less for his fine physicalattractions than for the play of his emotions that his intimates lovedhim. 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 Charterdwelt in a house of dreams, to which came fine friendships, passionateamours, the truest of verses and the sweetest songs. Often he came todwell in this house, calling it life--and his mother wept her nightsaway. Her husband was long dead, but she felt that something, namedCharter, was battling formidably for the soul of her boy. She wasgrateful for his fine physique, grateful that his emotions were moredelicately attuned than any of his father's breed, but she had notprayed for these. She knew the ghastly mockeries which later come tohaunt these houses of dreams. Such was not her promise of fulfilment.She had not crossed the deserts and mountains alone to Mecca for averse-maker--a bit of proud flesh for women to adore.... Charter,imperious with his stimulus, wise in his imagined worldliness, thoughthe laughed away his mother's fears.

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

  And the yellow devil who built for him his house of dreams coarsened hisdesires as well, and wove a husk, fibrous, warm, and red, about hissoul. The old flesh-mother, Earth, concentred upon him her subtlestcurrents of gravity; showed him her women in garments of crushed lilies;promised him her mysteries out of Egypt--how he should change the basemetal of words into shining gold; sent unto him her flatterers callinghim great, years before his time; calling him Emotion's Own Master andAction's Apostle; and her sirens lured him to the vine-clad cliffs withsoft singing that caressed his senses. Because his splendid young bodywas 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 devilswith glory for the eye of a big-souled boy; painting dawns above hermountains of dirt, and sunsets upon her drowning depths of sea; paintingscarlet the lips of insatiable women, and roses in the heart of herdevouring wines--always painting! Look to Burns and Byron--who bravelysang her pictures--and sank.

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