FOURTEENTH CHAPTER
THE SINGING OF THE SKYLARK CEASES ABRUPTLY; CHARTER HASTENS EAST TO FINDA QUEER MESSAGE AT _THE GRANVILLE_
Charter, three years after the foregoing descent into realism, wasconfessedly as happy a man as the Mid-West held. He accepted hisserenity with a full knowledge of its excellence, and according to hispresent health and habits would not have been excited to find himselfstill among those present, had the curtain been lifted thirty or fortyyears away. In the year that followed the sanatorium experience, Charterin reality found himself. There were a few months in which work cameslowly and was uncertain in quality. In his entire conception, nothingworse could happen than an abatement of mental activity, but he did notwrithe, knowing that he richly deserved the perfect punishment. Soslowly and deeply did physical care and spiritual awakening restore theforces of mind, however, that he did not realize an expansion of poweruntil his first long work had received critical and popular acclaim, andhe could see it, himself, in perspective. So he put off the last andtoughest shackle of King Fear--the living death.
As for drinking, that had beaten him. He had no thought to re-challengethe champion. In learning that he could become abject, a creature ofparalyzed will, he had no further curiosity. This much, however, he hadrequired to be shown, and what a tender heart he had ever afterward forthe Lafe Schiels of this world. There were other vivid animals, strongand agile, in his quiver of physical passions, but he discovered thatthese could not become red and rending without alcohol. Such wereclubbed into submission accordingly. With alcohol, Charter could travelany one of seven sorry routes to the gutter; without it, none. This washis constant source of thankfulness--that he had refined his elementswithout abating their dynamics. The forces that might have proved sodeadly in mastery, furnished a fine vitality under the lash.
All was sanative and open about him. Charter knew the ultimate dozen ofthe hundred and forty-four thousand rules for health--and made these hishabit. The garret, so often spoken of, was the third-floor of hismother's mansion. Since he slept under the sky, his sleeping-room wasalso a solarium. There was a long, thickly-carpeted hall where he pacedand smoked meditatively; a trophy-room and his study and library.Through books and lands, he had travelled as few men of his years, andalways with an exploring mind. In far countries, his was an eye of quickfamiliarity; always he had been intensely a part of his present environ,whether Typee or Tibet. Then, the God-taught philosophers of Asia andEurope, and our own rousing young continent, were the well-beloved ofhis 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, orsubverted the least of his ideals, selling only the best of histhoughts, the expression of which polished the product and increased thecapacity. He fitted nothing to the fancied needs of marketing. Hismother began truly to live now, and her external nature manifested belowin fine grains and finished services. Between the two, the old Charterformalities were observed. She was royal steel--this white-hairedmother--and a cottage would have become baronial about her. Where shewas, there lived order and silence and poise.
After this enumeration of felicitous details, one will conclude thatthis has to deal with a selfish man; yet his gruelling punishments mustnot be forgotten, nor the Quentin spirit. It is true that he had emergedmiraculously unhurt from many dark explorations; but his appreciation ofthe innate treachery and perversion of events was sound and keen. By nomeans did he challenge any complication which might strip him toquivering nakedness again. Rather his whole life breathed gratitude forthe goodly days as they came, and glided into untormented nights. Nextin importance to the discovery that his will could be beaten was thiswhich the drinking temperament so hesitatingly grants--that there arethrilling hearts, brilliant minds, memorable conversations, and lovelyimpulses 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 hecontemplated the full promise of his maturity, the thought oftencame--indeed, he expressed it in one of the Skylark letters--that thiswas but a period of rest and healing in which he was storing power forsterner and more subtle trials.
Such is an intimation of the mental and moral state of Quentin Charterin his thirty-fourth year, when he began to open the Skylark letterswith more than curiosity.... He knew Reifferscheid, and admired him withthe familiar enthusiasm of one who has read the editor's workintermittently for years. Charter, of course, was delighted with thereview of his second book. It did not occur to him that it could havebeen written by other than the editor himself. Reifferscheid's reply toCharter's letter of thanks for the critique proved the key to the wholematter, since it gave the Westerner both focus and dimension for hisvisioning.
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 lostin the heights over by the seaboard, and only her singing came out ofthe blue.... There were fine feminine flashes in the letters Charterreceived, rare exquisite matters which can be given to the world, onlythrough the one who inspires their warm delicacy and charm. The circuitwas complete, and the voltage grew mightier and mightier.
There was a royal fall night, in which Charter's work came ill, becausethoughts of her monopolized. Life seemed warm and splendid within him.He turned off the electric bulb above his head, and the moonlight burstin--a hunting moon, full and red as Mars. There was thrilling glory inthe purple south, and a sense of the ineffable majesty of stellarmanagement. He banished the night panorama with the electric buttonagain, and wrote to the Skylark. This particular letter proved the kindwhich annihilates all sense of separateness, save the animal heavinessof 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 thathe yearned for a walk that night--and passed a mail-box, while thewitchery of the night still enchanted.
He felt dry, a bit burned the next morning, and saddled for a couple ofhours, transferring the slight strain of nerves to his muscles. Therewas a note from the Skylark. She had found an old picture of his in amagazine and commented on it deliciously.... "I wonder if you think ofme as I am--plain, _plain_?" she had asked.... No, he did not. Nor wasit Reifferscheid's words to the contrary that prevented him. It is notin man to correlate plainness with a mystic attraction. She had neverappeared to him as beautiful exactly, but fine, vivid, electric--amanifestation of eyes, lips, mind. All the poundage part of a humanbeing was utterly vague in his concept of the Skylark.... Charternatura
lly lost his perspective and penetration in dealing with his owninterlacing emotions.
The present letter thralled him. It was blithe in intent, butintuitively deep and keen. In a former letter, he had asked if therewere not a strain of Irish in her lineage, so mercurial did hertemperament play in all that she wrote. "No Irish," she had answered."Dutch--straight Dutch. Always New York--always Dutch. I praiseProvidence for this 'monkey-wrench to hang upon my safety valve.'"
The "red moon" letter seemed to have caught her on the wing--at herhighest and happiest--for she answered it in fine faith and lightness.Though it had carried her up and up; and though the singing came backfrom golden azure, yet she had not forgotten her humor. There was asuggestion 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 hisfingers only fluttered the space-bar. Let him begin a letter to theSkylark, however, and inspiration came, indeed. His thoughts marshalledlike a perfect army then, and passed out from under his hand in flashingreview.... He ate little, slept little, but his vitality was prodigious.A miracle matured in his breast. Had he not been more than usuallystubborn, he would have granted long before, that he loved a woman forthe 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 hedid not battle down an impulse to take a train for New York. This wasreal living. The destiny which had ruled him through so many darkwanderings, had waited until his soul was roused to dominance, before hewas permitted to enter earth's true treasury. It was now that heremembered his past, and many a mile and many an hour he paced the dimhall--wrestling to be clean of it. This was a Soul which called. He didnot dare to answer while a vestige of the old taints lingered.... He wasseldom troubled that she might prove less inspiring than he pictured. Hestaked every reliance in that he had lived thirty-three years andencountered nothing comparable with this before. Passions, fascinations,infatuations, were long put behind; these were classed now in his mindbeneath decent and frictionless partnerships between men and women.
The vision which inspired his romantic loneliness was all thatReifferscheid had suggested, and infinitely more which his own dreamingshad supplied. She was an adult frankly challenged by the mysteries ofcreation; often shocked by its revelations, never above pity nor beneathhumor, wonderful in her reality of culture, and wise above men with awoman's divination. But particularly, her ultimate meaning was for_him_; his quest, she was; his crown, to be. The world had preserved hersinging, until he was ready; and though singing, she must ever feel thepoverty of unfulfilment in her own breast, until he came. This was thestately form of the whole enchantment.
That there existed in creation a _completing_ feminine for all hislonely and divided forces; that there lived one woman who could evenlyignite his body, brain, and spirit; that there was hidden in thesplendid plan of things, a Union of Two to form One; all this which hadbeen drifting star-stuff before, became sparks now for new and terrificenergies of mind; energies, however, which could be trained and directedonly in her presence.
Man cannot live altogether in the altitudes. There were brief periodswherein Charter remembered the mad, drink-tainted trifler with lyricsand women. It had been a past, surely, filled with soul-murderingillusions. Those who had known him then, would have had to see him nowto find faith. There had been letters about his recent books from menand women who had known him in the darker, less-spacious days. Failingto adjust this new and lusty spirit with the man they had known, theyhad 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-editormany personal notices concerning one whose work is being talked about.Indeed, such are handled as a matter of routine. The Skylark could notbe expected always to wing aloof from these. All that was vague andindefinite did not matter; such might even be accounted as admirablespecializations in life, but his acquaintance had been prodigious, andmany 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; andevery fresh letter lifted him higher and higher. In his own letters, hedid not fail to incorporate a buffer against indefinite revelations.Moreover, he had never ceased to call it wonderful--this capacity, ofeven the purest women, to lock the doors against the ugliestgeneralities of a man's past, and to reckon only with specificinstances. It is here that the mother looks out through the eyes of amaid.
One April morning, he encountered a depression more formidable invitality than ever before. Beth had just had her shoes set, and Chartertried to ride off the blue devil. He steadied his mount out of town,until she struck the ringing country road. The instant she felt hercalks bite into the frosty turf, the mare flirted her head, took thebit, and became a veritable glowing battery of beautiful energy. Twelvemiles he gave her, but the blue devil rode equally well and sat downagain 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; onlyit was a more poignant than physical agony--a sense of spiritualisolation.
This study had become to him the place of his dearest revelations oflife. Here, of late especially, he had found refuge from every discord,and here invariably were opened the letters from the Skylark. The placeof a man's work becomes a grand, quiet solace as he grows older, butcalm and poise were wrested from the room to-day. He fought thedepression with every trained faculty, but was whipped by it. Color andsunlight were gone from within; the zeal from future work, the warmthfrom every promise, the changing lustre from words, and the excellentenergy of thought which impels their weaving. Twilight in mid-afternoon.He turned on the lights impatiently. Meaning and beauty were bereft fromall his possessions, as buoyancy was gone from his own breast. There wassomething pitifully boyish in the trophies he had treasured--so much ofthe college cub, and the youth who refuses to permit his travels to beforgotten. He regarded his past work, as one grown out of it, regrettingthat it had ever attracted the materials of permanence. Smugness in histeachings; cold intellectuality brazen in all his attainments;everything about him suddenly become sinister from the old life!... Helooked into the East--his country of singing, of roses, cedars, andfountains--but the gray-black twilight was a damnable intervention....It was in this spirit, or lack of it, that he wrote the letter whichrevealed to Paula his inner responsiveness, as she was tossed in TheHigh Tide.
The letter which she had written almost at the same time, reached him onthe second morning thereafter; and his suffering in the interval hecould only liken to one of the old sieges of reaction after dissipation.The fine, angular writing, which he never regarded without a sense ofthe 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 fr
agrant 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 satthinking for several moments, but only because he knew there was ampletime to catch the noon-train for New York. That he should do this hadformed in mind before he had read five lines of the letter. This thoughtof action steadied him; and the proof that he had sensed her agony andreflected it throughout the past forty-eight hours made the call of theEast instant and irresistible. It did not come to him at first that hewas now entering the greater conflict, for which Nature had trained himin tranquillity and fed his soul unto replenishment during threeyears.... His first quick thought came out of old habits of mind: _Anhour with her, and her heart will be healed!_ Here was the old trifler.He suffered for this instant faltering of the brighter manhood. Man'sfineness is not accentuated by the fact that a woman sacrifices herpower within him, when she falls to pleading a little. Charter couldhave torn out the old mental fibres upon which played the thought of herswiftly renewed happiness by his presence.
The reality of her suffering slowly penetrated his mind. He perceivedthat she could not express the actuality; that her thoughts had wingedineffectually about the immovable disorder--like bees over the clumsycorpse of a rodent in the hive. It was not to be lifted, and theinspiration hermetically to seal the monster and resume activities aswell 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 wasall he could bear to grasp the full meaning that this inspiring creaturewho had soared and sung so long, was crushed and cold. Every sentence inher letter revealed the bruise of her heart, the absence ofspontaneity.... She was as different from other women he had known--thewomen who had been healed by his word or his caress--as he was differentin this attraction. He telegraphed that he was coming, begged that shewould see him the following evening, and instructed her to leave wordfor 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 foryou. 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. Ithad been a day and night to age the soul--with its inexorable stretch ofmaterial miles. New York had a different look, a different atmosphere,than ever before. Huge and full of horrible grinding; sick with work andsick 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 untilseven. Might she not have watched for him or be near him now? She wouldknow him from his pictures, and observe him as a stranger, but he hadonly his visions.
On the Cross-town to the _Granville_, emotions played upon him of a kindthat he could not have understood in another man a few months before.Moreover, he felt himself giving way before the vibrations of the bigcity. Harried and shrunken, he was, like a youth from the fields; andthe voice he had raised so valiantly from afar against this tremendousmassed soul, seemed now but the clamor of a boy in the safety of his owndoor. To and fro along his inflamed nerves crept the direct need of adrink and a cigarette--old wolves forever on the watch for the spent andthe wounded.... Actually terrorized, he was, at the thought she mightnot 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. Anadequate perception of his own position and attitude in the eyes of highwomanhood had unhelmed him, quite properly. Nature had finally found ahot retort which just fitted his case--and in he went.... No purelyphysical ardor could have called Quentin Charter out of his study andfar across the continent. Lesser loves than this have plunged nationsinto war, and broken the main trend of history into pregnantdigressions. The more penetratingly one regards the man in his presentconsuming, the more formidable becomes the conviction that the humancosmos in the beginning was cleft in twain: one to grope to the light, amale; the other to suffer the way, her burden, the curse of Eve. Whenthese mates of fire fulfil their divided destinies and sweep into thezone of mutual attraction, woe to the satellites and asteroids in theinevitable cataclysm which follows.... Yet it is out of such solarthroes that gods and prophets are born.... He gave his bag to a boy atthe _Granville_ entrance, and stepped forward to the desk, clearing histhroat and repeating his question.... The clerk rushed through theletters in "C."
"No, Mr. Charter,--not a letter, but wait just a moment; there was atelephone-call."
A chill had swept through him as the man spoke. It had not occurred tohim that the word would come in other than her handwriting. This was anunsigned 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 thewords. It was strangely unlike her; yet in passing through theoperator's mind, it might have become routine. The word "kind" was atorturing curb. It placed him on ugly quaking ground. How weak, howancient and commonplace, is the human lord after all, when in doubtregarding his lady's reception of him! Where is his valor now, histaking of cities, his smiling deaths for honor? Most of all times, he isman, the male; not man, the soul. Half-way out on the surface-car, hediscovered one of the big "Selma Cross" bill-boards. It was intimate,startling, an evil omen--great black letters out of the deathlesspast.... He stood on the fourth floor of the _Zoroaster_. Theelevator-man had shown him a certain door which was slightly ajar. Hewas ill, breathless, and his heart sank strangely with the lights in theshaft from the descending car.... He tapped on the designated door, anda deep melodious voice, instantly identified with ancient abandonments,called gently:
"Come in!"