certain elements for the charter crucible, and his mother's pilgrimage across the sands alone to mecca
charter had come a long way very swiftly in his search for realities. if it is required of man, at a certain stage of evolution, to possess a working knowledge of the majority of possible human experiences, in order 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 had not been initiated. his was the name of a race of wild, sensual, physical types; a name still held high in old-world authority, and identified with men of heavy hunting, heavy dining and drinking. the charters had always been admired for high temper and fair women. true, there was not a germ of the present charter mental capacity in the whole race of such men commonly mated, but quentin's father had married a woman with a marvellous endurance in prayer—that old, dull-looking formula for producing sons of strength. a silent woman, she was, a reverent woman, an angry woman, with the stuff of martyrdoms in her veins.
indeed, in her father, john quentin, reformer, there were stirring materials for memory. his it was to ride and preach, to excoriate evil and depict the good, with the blessing of a living god shining bright and directly upon it. a bracing figure, this grandfather quentin, an ethereal bloom at the top of a tough stalk of irish peasantry. first, as a soldier in the british army he was heard of, a stripling with a girl's waist, a pigeon breast, and the soul's divinity breathing itself awake within. his was a poet's rapture at the sight of morning mists, wrestling with the daybreak over the mountains; and everywhere his regiment went, were left behind quentin's songs—crude verses of a minor singer, never seeking permanence more than homer; and everywhere, he set about to correct the degradations of men, absolutely unscared and grandly improvident. a fighter for simple loving-kindness in the heart of man, a worshiper of the bright fragment of truth vouchsafed to his eyes, a lover of children, a man who walked thrillingly with a personal god, and was so glorified and ignited by the spirit that, every day, he strode singing into battle. such was john quentin, and from him, a living part of his own strong soul, sprang the woman who mothered quentin charter, sprang pure from his dreams and meditations, and doubtless with his prayer for a great son, marked in the scroll of her soul.... for to her, bringing a man into the world meant more than a bleak passage of misery begun with passion and ended with pain.
her single bearing of fruit was a solitary pilgrimage. from the hour of the conception, she drew apart with her own ideals, held herself aloof from fleshly things, almost as one without a body. charter, the strongly-sexed, her merchant-husband, the laughing, scolding, joking gunner; admirable, even delightful, to nineteenth century men of hot dinners and stimulated nights—showed her all that a man must not be. alone, she crossed the burning sands; cleansed her body and brain in the cool of evenings, expanded her soul with dreams projected far into the glistening purple heavens and whispered the psalms and poems which had fed 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 whom solar systems are but a glowworm swarm, and the soul of man mightier than them all. sometimes she carried the concept farther, until it seemed as if her heart must cease to beat: that this perfecting fruit of the universe, the soul of man, must be imprisoned for a time in the womb of woman; that the supreme seemed content with this humble mystery, nor counted not æons spent, nor burnt-out suns, nor wasting myriads that devastate 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 lift his lustrous pinions and ascend out of chaos to the father.
the spirit of her own father was nearer to her in this wonderful pilgrimage than her husband, to whom she was cold as etruscan glasses in the deep-delved earth (yet filled with what fiery potential wine!). he called her mistress ice, brought every art, lure, and expression in the charter evolution to bear upon her; yet, farther and farther into heights he could not dream, she fled with her forming babe. many mysteries were cleared for her during this exalted period—though clouded later by the pangs of parturition.... once, in the night, she had awakened with a sound in her room. at first she thought it was her husband, but she heard his breathing from the next chamber. at length before her window, shadowed against the faint light of the sky, appeared the head and shoulders of a man. he was less than ten feet from her, and she heard the rustle of his fingers over the dresser. for an instant she endured a horrible, stifling, feminine fright, but it was superseded at once by a fine assembling of faculties under the control of genuine courage. the words she whispered were quite new to her.
"i don't want to have to kill you," she said softly. "put down what you have and go away—hurry."
the burglar fled quietly down the front stairs, and she heard the door shut behind him. out of her trembling was soon evolved the consciousness of some great triumph, the nature of which she did not yet know. it was pure ecstasy that the realization brought. the courage which had steadied her through the crisis was not her own, but from the man's soul she 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, even though a great transport filled the days and nights. the complete alienation of her husband was a fact. this estranged the boy from his father. except as the sower, the latter had no part in the life-garden of quentin charter. the mother realized in later years that she might have ignored less and explained more. the fear of a lack of sympathy had given her a separateness which her whole married life afterward reflected. she had disdained even the minor feminine prerogative of acting. her husband had a quick, accurate physical brain which, while it could not have accompanied nor supported in her sustained inspiration, might still have comprehended and laughingly admired. instead, she had been as wholly apart from him as a memory. often, in the great weariness of continued contemplation, her spirit had cried out for the sustenance which only a real mate could bring, the gifts of a kindred soul. many times she asked: "where is the undiscovered master of my heart?"
there was no one to replenish within her the mighty forces she expended to nurture the spiritual elements of her child. a lover of changeless chivalry might have given her a prophet, instead of a genius, pitifully enmeshed in fleshly complications. in her developed the concept (and the mark of it lived afterward with glowing power in the mind of her son)—the thrilling possibility of a union, in the supreme sense of the word, a union of two to form one....
charter, the boy, inherited a sense of the importance of the "i." in his earlier years all things moved about the ego. by the time of his first letter to paula linster, the world had tested the charter quality, but to judge by the years previous, more specifically by the decade bounded by his twentieth and thirtieth birthdays, it would have appeared that apart from endowing the young man with a fine and large brain-surface, the charter elements had triumphed over the mother's meditations. to a very wise eye, acquainted with the psychic and material aspects of the case, the fact would have become plain that the hot, raw blood of the charters had to be cooled, aged, and refined, before the exalted spirit of the quentins could manifest in this particular instrument. it would have been a very fascinating natural experiment had it not been for the fear that the boy's body would be destroyed instead of refined.
his mother's abhorrence for the gross animalism of drink, as she discovered it in her husband (though the tolerant world did not call him a drunkard), was by no means reflected intact in the boy's mind. a vast field of surface-tissue, however, was receptive to the subject. quentin was early interested in the effects of alcohol, and entirely unafraid. he had the perversity to believe that many of his inclinations must be worn-out, instead of controlled. as for his ability to control anything about him, under the pressure of necessity, he had no doubt of this. drink played upon him warmly. his young men and women associates found the stimulated charter an absolutely new order of human enchantment—a young man lit with humor and wisdom, girded with chivalry, and a delight to the emotions. indeed, it was through these that the young man's spirit for a space lost the helm. it was less for his fine physical attractions than for the play of his emotions that his intimates loved him. 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 charter dwelt in a house of dreams, to which came fine friendships, passionate amours, the truest of verses and the sweetest songs. often he came to dwell in this house, calling it life—and his mother wept her nights away. her husband was long dead, but she felt that something, named charter, was battling formidably for the soul of her boy. she was grateful for his fine physique, grateful that his emotions were more delicately attuned than any of his father's breed, but she had not prayed for these. she knew the ghastly mockeries which later come to haunt these houses of dreams. such was not her promise of fulfilment. she had not crossed the deserts and mountains alone to mecca for a verse-maker—a bit of proud flesh for women to adore.... charter, imperious with his stimulus, wise in his imagined worldliness, thought he laughed away his mother's fears.
"i am a clerk of the emotions," he once told her. "to depict them, i must feel them first."
and the yellow devil who built for him his house of dreams coarsened his desires as well, and wove a husk, fibrous, warm, and red, about his soul. the old flesh-mother, earth, concentred upon him her subtlest currents of gravity; showed him her women in garments of crushed lilies; promised him her mysteries out of egypt—how he should change the base metal of words into shining gold; sent unto him her flatterers calling him great, years before his time; calling him emotion's own master and action's apostle; and her sirens lured him to the vine-clad cliffs with soft singing that caressed his senses. because his splendid young body was 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 devils with glory for the eye of a big-souled boy; painting dawns above her mountains of dirt, and sunsets upon her drowning depths of sea; painting scarlet the lips of insatiable women, and roses in the heart of her devouring wines—always painting! look to burns and byron—who bravely sang her pictures—and sank.
there are vital matters of narrative in this decade of charter's between twenty and thirty. elements of the world-old conflict between the animal and the soul are never without human interest; but this is a history of a brighter conquest than any victory over the senses alone.... even restless years of wandering are only suggested. yet one cannot show how far into the heights charter climbed, without lifting for a moment the shadow from the caverns, wherein he finally awoke, and wrestled with demons towards the single point of light—on the rising road.
