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.
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!"
