Part 12
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.