Part 13

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."