paula makes several discoveries in the charter heart-country, and is delighted by his letters to the skylark
the morning paper stated that dr. bellingham had suffered a fracture of the skull and internal injury, but might live. a note to paula from madame nestor late the next day contained the following paragraph: "i called at the hospital to inquire. a doctor told me that the case is likely to become a classic one. never in his experience, he stated, had he witnessed a man put up such a fight for life. it will be long, however, before he is abroad again. he must have been following you quite madly, because there never was a man more careful in the midst of city-dangers than bellingham. why, a scratched finger completely upset him—in the earlier days. inscrutable, but thrilling—isn't it, my dear paula?"
"did you follow moby dick's whale tracks around the wet wastes of the world?" reifferscheid asked several mornings later, as paula entered.
her face was flushed. a further letter from quentin charter had just been tucked into her bag. "yes, and mr. melville over trans-continental digressions," she answered. "he surely is neptune's own confrère."
"did you get the leviathan alongside and study the bewildering chaos of a ninety-foot nervous system?" reifferscheid went on with delight.
"exactly, and colored miles of sea-water with the emptyings of his vast heart. then, there was an extended process of fatty degeneration, which i believe they called—blubber-boiling."
they laughed together over the old whale-epic.
"they remember melville up in boston and nantucket," he added, "but he's about as much alive as a honey-bee's pulse elsewhere. the trouble is, you can't rectify this outrage by law. it isn't uxoricide or sheep-stealing—not to know melville—but it's the deadly sin of ingratitude. this is a raw age, we adorn—not to rock in the boat of that man's soul. why, he's worthy to stand with the angels on the point of the present."
the big editor always warmed her when he enthused. here, in the midst of holiday books pouring in by scores, he had time to make a big personal and public protest against a fifty-year-old novel being forgotten.
"but isn't melville acknowledged to be the headwaters of inspiration for all later sea-books?" paula asked.
"yes, to the men who do them, he's the big laughing figure behind their work, but the public doesn't seem to know.... of course, herman has faults—japan currents of faults—but they only warm him to a white man's heart. do you know, i like to think of him in a wide, windy room, tearing off his story long-hand, upon yard square sheets, grinning like an ogre at the soul-play, the pages of copy settling ankle-deep upon the floor. there's no taint of over-breeding in the unborn thing, no curse of compression, no aping addison—nothing but melville, just blown in with the gale, reeking with a big story which must be shed, before he blows out again, with straining cordage booming in his ears. he harnesses art. he man-handles power, makes it grovel and play circus. 'here it is,' he seems to say at the end. 'take it or leave it. i'm rotting here ashore.'"
"you ought to dictate reviews like that, mr. reifferscheid," paula could not help saying, though she knew he would be disconcerted.
he colored, turned back to his work, directing her to take her choice from the shelf of fresh books.... on the car going back, paula opened charter's letter. her fingers trembled, because she had been in a happy and daring mood five or six days before when she wrote the letter to which this was the reply.
... do you know, i really like to write to you? i feel untrammelled—turned loose in the meadows. it seems when i start an idea—that you've grasped it as soon as it is clear to me. piled sentences after that are unnecessary. it's a real joy to write this way, as spirits commune. it wouldn't do at all for the blessed multitude. you have to be a mineral and a vegetable and an animal, all in a paragraph, to get the whole market. but how generous the dear old multitude is—(if the writer has suffered enough)—with its bed and board and lamplight....
i have been scored and salted so many times that i heal like an earth-worm. tell me, can scar-tissue ever be so fine? fineness—that's the one excellent feature of being human! there's no other reason for being—no other meaning or reason for atomic affinity or star-hung space. true, the great conceiver of refining thought seems pleased to take all eternity to play in....
you've made me think of you out of all proportion. i don't want to help it. i'm very glad we hailed each other across the distance. there's something so entirely blithe and wise and finished about the personality i've builded from three little letters and a critique—that i refresh myself very frequently from them.... i think we must be old playmates. perhaps we plotted ghost-stories and pegged oranges at each other in atlantean orchards millenniums ago. i begin to feel as if i deserve to have my playmate back.... then, again, it is as though these little letters brought to my garret window the skylark i have heard far and faintly so long in the higher moments of dream. just a note here and there used to come to me from far-shining archipelagoes of cloud-land. i listen now and clearly understand what you have sung so long in the heights.... you are winged—that's the word! wing often to my window—won't you? life is peppering me with good things this year, i could not be more grateful.
letters like these made paula think of that memorable first afternoon with grimm; and like it, too, the joy was so intense as to hold the suggestion that there must be something evil in it all. she laughed at this. what law, human or divine, was disordered by two human grown-ups with clean minds communing together intimately in letters? quentin charter might have been less imperious, or less precipitous, in writing such pleasing matters about herself, but had he not earned the boon of saying what he felt? still, paula would not have been so entirely feminine, had she not repressed somewhat. she even may have known that artful repression from without is stimulus to any man. occasionally, charter forgot his sense of humor, but the woman five years younger, never. the inevitable thought that in the ordinary sequence of events, they should meet face to face, harrowed somewhat with the thought that she must keep his ideals down—or both were lost. what could a mind like his not build about months of communion (eyes and ears strained toward flashing skies) with a skylark ideal?... she reminded charter that skylarks are little, brown, tame-plumaged creatures that only sing when they soar. she could not forbear to note that he was a bit sky-larky, too, in his letters, and observed that she had found it wise, mainly to keep one's wings tightly folded in new york. she signed her next letter, nevertheless, with a small pen-picture of the name he had given her—full-throated and ascending. also she put on her house address. some of the paragraphs from letters which came in the following weeks, she remembered without referring to the treasured file:
... bless the wings! may they never tire for long—since i cannot be there when they are folded.... often, explain it if you can, i think of you as some one i have seen in japan, especially in tokyo—hurrying through the dusk in the minimasakurna-cho, wandering through the tombs of the forty-seven ronins. or sipping tea in the kameido among the wistaria blooms. some time—who knows? i have made quite a delightful romance about it.... who is so wise as positively to say, that we are not marvellously related from the youth of the world? who dares declare we have not climbed cliffs of cathay to stare across the sky-blue water, nor whispered together in orient casements under constellations that swing more perilously near than these?... we may be a pair of foolish dreamers, but asia must have a cup of tea for us—asia, because she is so far and so still. we shall remember then....
and so you live alone? how strange, i have always thought of you so? from the number, i think you must overlook the park—don't you?... it may strike you humorously, but i feel like ordering you not to take too many meals alone. one is apt to be neglectful, and women lose their appetites easier than men. i used to be graceless toward the gift of health. perhaps i enjoy perfectly prepared food altogether too well for one of inner aspirations. the bit of a soul in which you see such glorious possibilities, packs rather an imperious animal this trip, i fear. however, i don't let the animal carry me—any more.
i see a wonderful sensitiveness in all that you write—that's why i suggest especially that you should never forget fine food and plentiful exercise. psychic activity in america is attained so often at the price of physical deterioration. this is an empty failure, uncentering, deluding. remember, i say in america.... pray, don't think i fail to worship sensitiveness—those high, strange emotions, the sense of oneness with all things that live, the vergings of the mind toward the intangible, the light, refreshing sleep of asceticism, subtle expandings of solitude and the mystical launchings,—anything that gives spread of wing rather than amplitude of girth—but i have seen these very pursuits carry one entirely out of rhythm with the world. the multitudes cannot follow us when there are stars in our eyes—they cannot see.
a few years ago i had a strange period of deep-delving into ancient wisdom. a lot of big, simple treasures unfolded, but i discovered great dogmas as well—the steel shirts, iron shields, mailed fists and other junk which lesser men seem predestined to hammer about the gentle spirit of truth. i vegetarianed, lived inside, practiced meditate, and became a sensitive, as it seems now, in rather a paltry, arrogant sense. the point is i lost the little appeal i had to people through writing. it came to me at length with grim finality that if a man means to whip the world into line at all, he must keep a certain brute strength. he must challenge the world at its own games and win, before he can show the world that there are finer games to play. you can't stand above the mists and call the crowd to you, but many will follow you up through them.... i truly hope, if i am wrong in this, that you will see it instantly, and not permit the edge and temper of your fineness to be coarsened through me. you are so animate, so delicately strong, and seem so spiritually unhurt, that it occurs to me now that there may be finer laws for you, than are vouchsafed to me. i interpreted my orders—to win according to certain unalterable rules of the world. balzac did that. i think some skylark sang to him at the last, when he did his seraphita....
i cannot help but tell you again of my gratitude. i am no impressionable boy. i know what the woman must be who writes to me.... isn't this an excellent world when the finer moments come; when we can think with gentleness of past failures of the flesh and spirit, and with joy upon the achievements of others; when we feel that we have preserved a certain relish for the rich of all thought, and a pleasure in innocence; when out of our errors and calamities we have won a philosophy which makes serene our present voyaging and gives us keen eyes to discern the coast-lights of the future?... with lifted brow—i harken for your singing.
paula knew that quentin charter was crying out for his mate of fire. she remembered that she had strangely felt his strength before there were any letters, but she could not deny that it since had become a greater and more intimate thing—her tower, white and heroic, cutting clean through the films of distance, and suggesting a vast, invisible city at its base. that she was the bright answer in the east for such a tower was incredible. she could send a song over on the wings of the morning—make it shine like ivory into the eyes of the new day, but she dared not think of herself as a corresponding fixture. a man like charter could form a higher woman out of dreams and letter-pages than the world could mold for him from her finest clays. always she said this—and forgot that the man was clay. a pair of dreamers, truly, and yet there was a difference in their ideals. if charter's vision of her lifted higher, it was also flexible to contain a human woman. as for hers—paula had builded a tower. true, there were moments of flying fog in which she did not see it, but clean winds quickly brushed away the obscurations, and not a remnant clung. when seen at all, her tower was pure white and undiminished.
of necessity there were reactions. his familiarity with the petty intensities of the average man often startled her. he seemed capable of dropping into the parlance of any company, not as one who had listened and memorized, but as an old familiar who had served time in all societies. in the new aspect of personal letters, his book revealed a comprehension of women—that dismayed. of course, his printed work was filled with such stuff as her letters were made of, but between a book and a letter, there is the same difference of appeal as the lines read by an actor, however gifted, are cold compared to a friend's voice. though she wondered at charter giving his time to write such letters to her, this became very clear, if his inclination were anything like her own to answer them. all the thinking of her days formed itself into compressed messages for him; and all the best of her sprang to her pen under his address. the effort then became to repress, to keep her pages within bounds, and the ultimate effort was to wait several days before writing again. his every sentence suggested pleasure in writing; and as a matter of fact, he repressed very little.... was it through letters like hers in his leisure months that charter amassed his tremendous array of poignant details; was it through such, that he reared his imposing ranges of feminine understanding? this was a question requiring a worldlier woman than paula long to hold in mind. in the man's writing, regarded from her critical training, there was no betrayal of the literary clerk dependent upon data.
"i am no impressionable boy. i know what the woman must be who writes to me." there was something of seership in his thus irrevocably affixing his ideal to the human woman who held the pen.... his photograph was frequently enough in the press—a big browed, plain-faced young man with a jaw less aggressive than she would have imagined, and a mouth rather finely arched for a reformer who was to whip the world into line. and then there was a discovery. in a magazine dated a decade before, she ran upon his picture among the advertising pages. verses of his were announced to appear during the year to come. he could not have been over twenty for this picture, and to her it was completely charming—a boy out of the past calling blithely; a poetic face, too, reminding her of prints she had seen of an early drawing of keats's head now in london—eager, sensitive, all untried!... it was not without resistance that she acknowledged herself closer to the boy—that something of the man was beyond her. there was a mystery left upon the face by the intervening years, "while the tireless soul etched on...." should she ever know? or must there always be this dim, hurting thing? was it all the etching of the soul—that this later print revealed?... these were but bits of shadow—ungrippable things which made her wings falter for a moment and long for something sure to rest upon, but reifferscheid's first talk about charter, the latter's book, and the letters—out of these were reconstructed her tower of shining purity.
there were times when paula's heart, gathering all its tributary sympathies, poured out to the big figure in the west in a deep and rushing torrent. her entire life was illuminated by these moments of ardor. here was a giving, in which the thought of actual possession had little or no part. her finest elements were merged into one-pointed expression. it is not strange that she was dismayed by the triumphant force of the woman within her, nor that she recalled one of the first of madame nestor's utterances, "nonsense, paula, the everlasting feminine is alive in every movement of you." yet this outpouring was lofty, and noon-sky clear. an emotion like this meant brightness to every life that contacted it.... but ruthlessly she covered, hid away even from her own thoughts, illuminations such as these. here was a point of tragic significance. out of the past has come this great fear to strong women—the fear to let themselves love. this is one of the sorriest evolutions of the self-protecting instinct. so long have women met the tragic fact of fickleness and evasion in the men of their majestic concentrations—that fear puts its weight against the doors that love would open wide.
almost unconsciously the personal tension of the correspondence increased. not infrequently after her letters were gone, paula became afraid that this new, full-powered self of hers had crept into her written pages with betraying effulgence, rising high above the light laughter of the lines. how she cried out for open honesty in the world and rebelled against the garments of falsity which society insists must cover the high as well as the low. charter seemed to say what was in his heart; at least, he dared to write as the woman could not, as she dared not even to think, lest he prove—against the exclaiming negatives of her soul—a literary craftsman of such furious zeal that he could tear the heart out of a woman he had not seen, pin the quivering thing under his lens, to describe, with his own responsive sensations.
so the weeks were truly emotional. swiftly, beyond any realization of her own, paula linster became full-length a woman. reifferscheid found it harder and harder to talk even bossily to her, but cleared his voice when she entered, vented a few booky generalities, and cleared his voice when she went away. keen winter fell upon his system of emptied lakes; gusty winter harped the sound of a lonely ship in polar seas among the naked branches of the big elms above his cottage; indeed, gray winter would have roughed it—in the big chap's breast, had he not buckled his heart against it.... for years, tim reifferscheid had felt himself aloof from all such sentiment. weakening, he had scrutinized his new assistant keenly for the frailties with which her sex was identified in his mind. in all their talks together, she had verified not one, so that he was forced to destroy the whole worthless edition. she was a discovery, thrillingly so, since he had long believed such a woman impossible. now he felt crude beside her, remembered everything that he had done amiss (volumes of material supposed to be out of print). frankly, he was irritated with any one in the office who presumed to feel himself an equal with miss linster.... but all this was reifferscheid's, and no other—as far from any expression of his, as thoughtless kisses or thundering heroics.
