Paula could not be stirred by the story this morning. She missed, as never before, some big reality behind the loves of Selma Cross. There was too much of the sense of possession in her story—arm-possession. So readily, could she be transformed into the earthy female, fighting tooth and claw for her own. Paula could hardly comprehend in her present depression, what she had said yesterday about Stephen Cabot's capacity to forgive.... She was glad, when Selma Cross rose, yawned, stretched, and shook herself. The odor of sweet clover was heaviness in the room.... The long, bare arm darted over the reading-table and plucked forth the book Paula loved. The volume had not been hidden; there was no reason why she should not have done this, yet the action hurt the other like a drenching of icy water upon her naked heart.
"Ho-ho—Quentin Charter! SoA Damsel Came to Peter?"
"I think—I hear your telephone,—Selma!" Paula managed to say, her voice dry, as if the words were cut from paper.
"Yes, yes, I must go, but here's another story. A rotten cad—but how he can write! I don't mean books—but letters!... He's the one I told you about—the Westerner—while the old man was in the South!"
The last was called from the hall. The heavy door slammed between them.
Paula could not stand—could not keep her mouth from dropping open. Her temples seemed to be cracking apart.... She saw herself in half-darkness—likeThe Thinglast night—beating her breast in the gloom. She felt as if she must laugh—in that same wind-blown, chattering way.
Paula wrote a short letter to Quentin Charter in the afternoon, and did not begin to regret it until too late. It was not that she had said anything unwise or discordant—but that she had written at all.... Her heart felt dead. She had trusted her all to one—and her all was lost. A little white animal that had always been warm and petted, suddenly turned naked to face the reality of winter,—this was the first sense, and the paramount trouble was that she could not die quickly enough. The full realization was slow to come. Indeed, it was not until the night and the next day that she learned the awful reaches of suffering of which a desolated human mind is capable. It was like one of those historic tides which rise easily to the highest landmarks of the shore-dweller, and not till then begin to show their real fury, devastating vast fields heretofore virgin to the sea. Along many coasts and in many lives there is one, called The High Tide.... Paula felt that she could have coped with her sorrow, had this been a personal blow, but her faith in the race of men, the inspiration of her work, her dream of service—all were uprooted.
She did not pretend to deny that she had loved Quentin Charter—her first and loftiest dream of a mate, the heart's cry of all her womanhood. True, as man and woman, they had made no covenant, but to her (and had he not expressed the same in a score of ways?), there had been enacted a more wonderful adjustment, than any words could bring about. This was the havoc. She had lost more than a mere human lover. She dared now to say it, because, in losing, she perceived how great it had become—the passion was gone from her soul. Her place in the world was desolate; all her labors pointless. As a woman, she had needed his arms, less than an anchorage of faith in his nobility. And how her faith had rushed forth to that upper window across the States!
Words—the very word was poison to her. Writing—an emptiness, a treachery. Veritably, he had torn the pith out of all her loved books.... Bellingham had shown her what words meant—words that drew light about themselves, attracting a brilliance that blinded her; words that wrought devilishness in the cover of their white light—but Bellingham had not assailed her faith. This was the work of a man who had lifted her above the world, not one who called from beneath. Bellingham could not have crippled her faith like this—and left it to die.... Almost momentarily, came the thought of his letters—thoughtsfromthese letters. They left her in a dark—that was madness....
And if they were false, what was the meaning of her exaltations? Night and morning she had looked into the West, sending him all the graces of her mind, all the secrets of her heart. He had told her of the strange power that had come to him, of the new happiness—how, as never before, he had felt radiations of splendid strength. She had not hurried him to her, but had read with ecstasy, believing that a tithe of his new power was her gift.... Words, desolate, damnable words.... "And I had thought to heal and lift New York," she exclaimed mockingly, looking down into the gray streets after the age-long night. "New York holds fast to her realities—the things she has found sure. It is well to be normal and like New York!"
The day after the door had shut upon Selma Cross, Paula was a betrayed spirit wandering alone in polar darkness. She had not slept, nor could she touch food. Twice the actress had rapped; repeatedly the telephone called—these hardly roused her. Letters were thrust under her door and lay untouched in the hall. She was lying upon the lounge in the little room of books, as the darkness swiftly gathered that second day. All the meanings of her childhood, all the promises for fulfillment with the years, were lost. The only passion she knew was for the quick end of life—to be free from the world, and its Bellinghams.
"God, tell me," she murmured, and her voice sounded dry and strange in the dark, "what is this thing, Soul, which cries out for its Ideal—builds its mate from all things pure, from dreams that are cleansed in the sky; dreams that have not known the touch of any earthly thing—what is this Soul, that, now bereft, cries with Rachel, 'Death, let me in!...' Oh, Death, put me to sleep—put me to sleep!"
Voices reached her from the hall:
"You can knock or ring, sir, if you like," the elevator-man was saying, "but I tell you Miss Linster is not there. She has not answered the 'phone, and there is one of the letters, sticking out from under the door, that I put there this morning, or yesterday afternoon."
"When did you see her last?" The voice was Reifferscheid's.
"Day before yesterday she was in and out. Miss Cross, the lady who lives in this other apartment, said she called on Miss Linster yesterday morning."
"The point is that she left no word—either with you or with us—before going away. We are very good friends of hers. I'll ring for luck——"
The bell rang long and loudly. Paula imagined the thick thumb pressed against it, and the big troubled face. She wanted to answer—but facing Reifferscheid was not in her that moment.... The elevator was called from below.
"No use," Reifferscheid said finally. "Here's a coin for your trouble. I'll call up the first thing in the morning——"
She heard the click of the elevator-door, and the quick whine of the car, sinking in the shaft. She recalled that she had not been atThe Statesfor four or five days. She had intended going down-town yesterday.... She thought long of Reifferscheid's genuine and changeless kindness, of his constant praise for sincerity anywhere and his battling for the preservation of ideals in all work. His faith in Charter recurred to her—and his frequently unerring judgments of men and women she had known. All about him was sturdy and wholesome—a substance, this, to hold fast.... Reifferscheid had come in the crisis. Paula fell asleep, thinking of snails and stickle-backs, flowers and Sister Annie, big trees and solid friends.
She awoke in a different world—at least, a world in which tea and toast and marmalade were reckonable. Her thoughts went bravely down into the depression for salvage; and a mind that can do this is not without hope. It was only eight. Reifferscheid had not yet 'phoned.... Charter would have her letter now, or soon—that letter written seven eternities ago in the first hysteria, while she could yet weep. She could not have written in the ice-cold silence of yesterday. She wished that she had not let him see that she could weep. When the tragedy had risen to high-tide in her soul—there had been no words for him. Would she ever write again?...
Her mind reverted now to the heart of things. In the first place, Selma Cross would not intentionally lie. She asked so little of men—and had asked less a few years ago—that to have her call one "cad" with an adjective, was a characterscape, indeed. That she had intimately known Quentin Charter three years before, was unsettling in itself.... True, he made no pretensions to a righteous past. All his work suggested utter delvings into life. He had even hinted a background that was black-figured and restlessly stirring, but she had believed that he wrote these things in the same spirit which prompted the ascetic Thoreau to say, "I have never met a worse man than myself." She believed that the evils of sense were not so complicated, but that genius can fathom them without suffering their defilement. His whole present, as depicted in his letters, was a song—bright as his open prairies, and pure as the big lakes of his country.... Could she become reconciled to extended periods of physical abandonment in the Charter-past? Faintly her heart answered, but quickly, "Yes, if they are forever nameless...." "Specific abandonments?" Her mind pinned her heart to this, with the added sentence, "Is it fair for you not to hear what Selma Cross has to say—and what Quentin Charter may add?..."
The elevator-man was at the door with further letters. He did not ring, because it was so early. Softly, she went into the hall. There was an accumulation of mail upon the floor—two fromThe States; one from Charter.... This last was opened after a struggle. It must have been one of those just brought, for it was dated, the day before yesterday, and she usually received his letters the second morning. Indeed, this had been written on the very afternoon that she had penned her agony.
I know I shall be sorry that I have permitted you to find me in a black mood like this, but I feel that I must tell you. A sense of isolation, altogether new, since first your singing came, flooded over me this afternoon. It is as though the invisible connections between us were deranged—as if there had been a storm and the wires were down. It began about noon, when the thought of the extreme youth of my soul, beside yours, began to oppress me. I perceived that my mind is imperiously active rather than humbly wise; that I am capable of using a few thoughts flashily, instead of being great-souled from rich and various ages. Ordinarily, I should be grateful for the gifts I have, and happy in the bright light from you—but this last seems turned away. Won't you let me hear at once, please?
I know I shall be sorry that I have permitted you to find me in a black mood like this, but I feel that I must tell you. A sense of isolation, altogether new, since first your singing came, flooded over me this afternoon. It is as though the invisible connections between us were deranged—as if there had been a storm and the wires were down. It began about noon, when the thought of the extreme youth of my soul, beside yours, began to oppress me. I perceived that my mind is imperiously active rather than humbly wise; that I am capable of using a few thoughts flashily, instead of being great-souled from rich and various ages. Ordinarily, I should be grateful for the gifts I have, and happy in the bright light from you—but this last seems turned away. Won't you let me hear at once, please?
She was not given long to ponder upon this strange proof of his inner responsiveness; yet the deep significance of it remained with her, and could not but restore in part a certain impressive meaning of their relation. Selma Cross called, and Reifferscheid 'phoned, as Paula was just leaving for down-town. It had been necessary, she explained, to the literary editor in his office, for her to make a sorry little pilgrimage during the past few days. She was very grateful it was over. Reifferscheid said abruptly that pilgrimages were nefarious when they made one look so white and trembly.
"The point is, you'd better make another to Staten Island," he added. "Nice rough passage in a biting wind, barren fields, naked woods, and all that. Besides, you must see my system of base-burners——"
"I'll just do that—when I catch up a little on my work," Paula said. "I'm actually yearning for it, but there are so many loose ends to tie up, that I couldn't adequately enjoy myself for a day or two. Really, I'm not at all ill. You haven't enough respect for my endurance, which is of a very good sort."
"Don't be too sure about that," Reifferscheid said quickly. "It's altogether too good to be hurt.... Do you realize you've never had your hat off in this office?"
"I hadn't thought of it," she said, studying him. Plainly by his bravado he wasn't quite sure of his ground.
"There ought to be legislation against people with hair the color of yours——" Reifferscheid regarded her a moment before he added, "wearing hats. You must come over to Staten—if for no other reason——"
"Oh, I begin to see perfectly now," Paula observed. "You want to add me to your system of base-burners."
He chuckled capaciously. "Early next week, then?"
"Yes, with delight"
He did not tell her of being worried to the point of travelling far up-town to ring the bell of her apartment. She could not like him less for this.... There was a telegram from Charter, when she reached home. In the next two hours, a thought came to Paula and was banished a score of times; yet with each recurrence it was more integrate and compelling. This was Saturday afternoon. Selma Cross returned from her matinée shortly before six and was alone. Paula met her in the hall, and followed into the other's apartment.
"I have just an hour, dear. Dimity has supper ready. Stay, won't you?"
"Yes," Paula forced herself to say. "I wanted to ask you about Quentin Charter. You were called away—just as you were speaking of him the other morning.... I have not met him, but his two recent books are very wonderful. I reviewed the second forThe States. He thanked me in a letter which was open to answer."
Selma Cross stretched out her arms and laughed mirthlessly. "And so you two have been writing letters?" she observed. "I'm putting down a bet that his are rich—if he's interested."
Paula had steeled herself for this. There were matters which she must learn before making a decision which his telegram called for. Her mind held her inexorably to the work at hand, though her heart would have faltered in the thick cloud of misgivings.
"Yes, there is much in his letters—so much that I can't quite adjust him to the name you twice designated. Remember, you once before called him that—when I didn't know that you were speaking of Quentin Charter."
"I'll swear this much also," Selma Cross said savagely, "he has found your letters worth while."
"Is that to the point?"
"Why, yes Paula," the other replied, darting a queer look at her. "If I am to be held to a point—it is—because, as a writer, he uses what is of value. He makes women mad about him, and then goes back to his garret, and sobers up enough to write an essay or a story out of his recent first-hand studies in passion."
"You say he was drinking—when you knew him?"
"Enough to kill another man. It didn't seem to make his temperament play less magically. He was never silly or limp, either in mind or body, but he must have been burned to a cinder inside. He intimated that he didn't dare to go on exhibition any day before mid-afternoon."
Paula, very pale, bent forward and asked calmly as she could: "I wish you would tell mejustwhat Quentin Charter did to make you think of him always—in connection with that name."
"On condition that you will recall occasionally that you have a plate before you—also supper, which won't stay hot." Selma Cross spoke with some tension, for she felt that the other was boring rather pointedly, and it was not her time of day for confessions. Still, the quality of her admiration for Paula Linster involved large good nature. ".... Extraordinary, as it may seem, my dear, Charter made me believe that he was passionately in love. I was playing Sarah Blixton inCaller Herrin,—my first success. It was a very effective minor part and an exceptionally good play. It took his eye—my work especially—and he arranged to meet me. Felix Larch, by the way, took care of this formality for him. Incidentally, I didn't know Felix Larch, but my cue was greatly to be honored. Charter told me that Larch said I was peculiar for an actress and worth watching, because I had a brain.... The man, Charter, was irresistible in a wine-room. I say in a wine-room, not that his talk was of the sort you might expect there, but that he was drinking—and was at home nowhere else. You see, he has a working knowledge of every port in the world, and to me it seemed—of every book. Then, he has a sharp, swift, colorful way of expressing himself.... I told you, Villiers was away. I couldn't realize that it was merely a new type Charter found in me.... We were together when I wasn't at work. It was a wild and wonderful fortnight—to me. He used to send notes in the forenoon—things he thought of, when he couldn't sleep, he said. I knew he was getting himself braced in those early hours.... Then, one night at supper, he informed me that he was leaving for the West that night. He had only stopped in New York, on the way home from Asia, via Suez. I was horribly hurt, but there was nothing for me to say. He was really ill. The drink wouldn't bite that night, he said. We finished the supper like two corpses, Charter trying to make me believe he'd be back shortly. I haven't seen him since."
Paula began to breathe a bit more freely. "Didn't he write?"
"Yes, at first, but I saw at once he was forcing. Then he dictated an answer to one of mine—dictated a letter to me——" Selma Cross halted. The lids narrowed across her yellow eyes.
"He had said he loved you?" Paula asked with effort.
"By the way," Selma Cross retorted, "did you notice that word 'love' in either of his recent books—except as a generality?"
"Since you speak of it, I do recall he markedly avoided it," Paula said with consuming interest.
"No, he didn't use it to me. He said he never put it in a man's or woman's mouth in a story. Ah, but there are other words," she went on softly. "The man was a lover—beyond dreams—impassioned."
"About that dictated letter?" Paula urged hastily.
"Yes, I told him I didn't want any more that way. Then Villiers was back, and beckoning again. The last word I received was from Charter's stenographer. She said he was ill. Oh, I did hear afterward—that he was in a sanatorium. God knows, he must have landed there—if he kept up the pace he was going when I knew him."
In the moment of silence which followed, Paula was hoping with all her might—that this was the end.
"Oh, I know what you're thinking!" Selma said suddenly. "He has fascinated you, and you can't see that he's a rotten cad—from what I've said so far. A woman can never see the meanness of a man from another woman's experience with him. She forgives him for calling forth all another woman has—and then shaking her loose like a soiled bath-robe when one's tub is ready. But it's different when she's the discarded woman!... He was so deep, I can't believe he didn't know that episodes were new to me. Likely, he's had so many around the world, that he can't take them more seriously from the woman's angle—than from his own.... Quentin Charter was the first man to arouse all my dreams. Can't you see how it hurt when he turned out to be—well, that name you refuse to utter?"
"Yes, of course, yes, but you suggest more, Selma!"
"He used me for 'copy,' as they call it. His article on the 'acting of stage-folk after hours,' appeared in a magazine a few weeks later. He's always a saint in his garret, you know. The article was filled with cutting cynicism about stage-matters, many of which he had discovered in the two weeks with me—and laughed over with his wine. I could have forgiven that, only he made me believe that there was not a thought apart from Selma Cross in his mind when we were together.... Oh, what's the use of me lying? I could have forgiven that, anyway!"
"What was it, you could not forgive?" Paula's face was bloodless.
"He told it all about—how easy I had proved in his hands!" the actress revealed with suppressed fury.
The other shrank back.
"That's where the expression comes in, Paula—the expression you hate. Drunk or sober—cad's the word. What a woman gives to amanis put in his inner vault forever. What she gives to acad—is passed on to his friends."
Paula arose, tortured as if branded within. Here was a defection of character which an entire incarnation of purity could not make whole. It was true that in her heart, she had not been mortally stricken before; true, as Selma Cross had so bitterly declared, that a woman is not stayed from mating with a man because a sister has suffered at his hands.
"I have nothing to say about the word, if that is true." Paula spoke with difficulty, and in a hopeless tone.
"Please, eat some supper, dear——"
There was heart-break in the answer: "I cannot. I'm distressed, because I have spoiled yours.... You have answered everything readily—and it has hurt you.... I—feel—as—if—I—must—tell—you—why—I—asked—or I wouldn't have dared to force questions upon you. His letters made me think of him a great deal. When you picked up his book the other morning and saidthat—why, it was all I could stand for the time. His work is so high and brave—I can hardly understand how he could talk about a woman whose only fault was that she gave him what he desired. Are you sure he cannot prove that false?"
Selma Cross left her seat at the table and took Paula in her arms.
"How can he?" she whispered. "The old man knew all about us. One of his friends heard Charter talking about the easy virtue of stage women—that there were scarcely no exceptions! Charter hinted in his article that acting is but refined prostitution. Villiers said because I had a name for being square Charter had chosen to prove otherwise!... Then see how he dropped me—not a word in three years from my memorable lover! And Villiers knew about us—first and last!... I could murder that sort—and to think that his devil's gift has been working upon you——"
"You have told me quite enough, thank you." Paula interrupted in a lifeless voice. "I shall not see him."
Selma Cross held her off at arms' length to glance at her face. "You what?" she exclaimed.
"He is on the way to New York and will be at theGranvilleto-morrow afternoon, where he hopes to find a note saying he may call here to-morrow night. There shall be no note from me——"
"But did you write to him, Paula?" the actress asked strangely excited.
"Yes—a little after you left me the other morning. It was silly of me. Oh, but I did not tell him what I had heard—or who told me!... Finish your supper—you must go."
"And how did you learn of his coming?"
"He telegraphed me to-day. That's why I bothered you at your supper——"
"What a dramatic situation—if you decided to see him!" Selma Cross said intensely. "And to think—that to-morrow is Sunday night and I don't work!"
Paula felt brutalized by the change in the other's manner. "I have decided not to see him," she repeated, and left the apartment.
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 mustnotbe. 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.
Charter had always been able to stop drinking when thoroughly disgusted with its effects, but his final abandonment, three years before the Skylark letters, had lasted long—up the Yangtse to the Gorges, back to Shanghai, and around the Straits and Mediterranean to New York, where he had met Selma Cross; indeed, for many weeks after he had reached his own city in the Mid-West. He had now fallen into the condition in which work was practically impossible. In the early stages, he had known brief but lightning passages of expression, when his hands moved with magical speed upon his machine, and his thoughts even faster, breaking in upon achievement three or four times in a half-hour to snatch his stimulant. Always in the midst of this sort of activity, he felt that his work was of the highest character. The swift running of his brain under the whip appeared record-breaking to the low vanity of a sot. It was with shame that he regarded his posted time-card, after such a race. Yet he had this to say of the whole work-drink matter: When at his brief best under stimulus, a condition of mind precarious to reach and never to be counted upon, the product balanced well with the ordinary output, the stuff that came in quantities from honest, healthy faculties. In a word, an occasional flashy peak standing forth from a streaky, rime-washed pile reckoned well with the easy levels of highway routine.
During his first days at home he would occupy entire forenoons in the endeavor to rouse himself to a pitch of work. Not infrequently upon awakening, he swallowed a pint of whiskey in order to retain four or five ounces. Toward mid-afternoon, still without having eaten, he would draw up his chair before the type-mill to wait, and only a finished curse would evolve from the burned and stricken surfaces of his brain. If, indeed, passable copy did come at last, Charter invariably banished restraint, drinking as frequently as the impulse came. Clumsiness of the fingers therefore frequently intervened just as his sluggish mind unfolded; and in the interval of calling his stenographer out of the regular hours, the poor brain babes, still-born, were fit only for burial.
Often, again (for he could not live decently with himself without working), he would spend the day in fussy preparation for a long, productive evening. The room was at a proper temperature; the buffet admirably stocked; pipes, cigars, and cigarettes at hand; his stenographer in her usual mood of delightful negation—when an irresistible impulse would seize his mind with the necessity of witnessing a certain drama, absolutely essential to inspiration. Again, with real work actually begun, his mind would bolt into the domains of correspondence, or some little lyric started a distracting hum far back in his mind. The neglected thing of importance would be lifted from the machine, and the letters or the verses put under weigh. In the case of the latter, he would often start brilliantly with a true subconscious ebullition—and cast the thing aside, never to be finished, at the first hitch in the rhyme or obscurity in thought. Then he would find himself apologizing slavishly for Asiatic fever to the woman who helped him—whose unspoken pity he sensed, as hardened arteries feel the coming storm. Alone, he would give way to furious hatred for himself and his degradation, and by the startling perversity of the drunken, hurry into a stupor to stifle remorse. Prospecting thus in the abysses, Charter discovered the outcroppings of dastardly little vanities and kindred nastiness which normally he could not have believed to exist in his composite or in the least worthy of his friends. A third trick drink played upon him when he was nicely prepared for a night of work. The summons which he dared not disregard since it came now so irregularly—to dine—would sound imperiously in the midst of the first torture-wrung page, probably for the first time since the night before. In the actual illness, which followed partaking of the most delicate food, work was, of course, out of the question.
Finally, the horrors closed in upon his nights. The wreck that could not sleep was obsessed with passions, even perversions—how curiously untold are these abominations—until a place where the wreck lay seemed permeated with the foulest conceptions of the dark. What pirates board the unhelmed mind of the drunken to writhe and lust and despoil the alien decks—wingless, crawling abdomens, which, even in the shades, are but the ganglia of appetite!... A brand of realism, this, whose only excuse is that it carries the red lamps of peril.
At the end of months of swift and dreadful dissipation, Charter determined abruptly to stop his self-poisoning on the morning of his Thirtieth birthday. Coming to this decision within a week before the date, so confident was he of strength, that instead of making the end easy by graduating the doses in the intervening days, he dropped the bars of conduct altogether, and was put to bed unconscious late in the afternoon of the last. He awoke in the night, and slowly out of physical agony and mental horror came the realization that the hour of fighting-it-out-alone was upon him. He shuddered and tried to sleep, cursed himself for losing consciousness so early in the day without having prepared his mind for the ordeal. Suddenly he leaped out of bed, turned on the lights, and found his watch. With a cry of joy, he discovered that it was seven minutes before twelve. In the next seven minutes, he prepared himself largely from a quart bottle, and lay down again as the midnight-bells relayed over the city. Ordinarily, sleep would have come to him after such an application in the midst of the night, but the thought assumed dimensions that the bellshadstruck. He thought of his nights on the big, yellow river in China, and of the nearer nights in New York. There was a vague haunt about the latter—as of something neglected. He thought of the clean boy he had been, and of the scarred mental cripple he must be from now on.... In all its circling, his mind invariably paused at one station—the diminished quart bottle on the buffet. He arose at last, hot with irritation, poured the remaining liquor into the washbasin, and turned on the water to cleanse even the odor away. For a moment he felt easier, as if the Man stirred within him. Here he laughed at himself low and mockingly—for the Man was the whiskey he had drunk in the seven minutes before twelve.
Now the thought evolved to hasten the work of systemic cleansing, begun with denial. At the same time, he planned that this would occupy his mind until daylight. He prepared a hot tub, drinking hot water at the same time—glass after glass until he was as sensitive within as only a fresh-washed sore can be. Internally, the difference between hot and cold water is just the difference between pouring the same upon a greasy plate. The charred flaccid passages in due time were flushed free from its sustaining alcohol; and every exterior pore cratered with hot water and livened to the quick with a rough towel. Long before he had finished, the trembling was upon him, and he sweated with fear before the reaction that he had so ruthlessly challenged in washing the spirit from his veins.
Charter rubbed the steam from the bath-room window, shaded his eyes, and looked for the daylight which was not there. Stars still shone clear in the unwhitened distances. Why was he so eager for the dawn? It was the drunkard in him—always frightened and restless, even in sleep,while buffets are closed. This is so, even though a filled flask cools the fingers that grope under the pillow.... Any man who has ever walked the streets during the two great cycles of time between three and five in the morning, waiting for certain sinister doors to open, does not cease to shiver at the memory even in his finer years. It is not the discordant tyranny of nerves, nor the need of the body, pitiful and actual though it is, wherein the terror lies,—but living, walking with the consciousness that the devil is in power; that you are the debauched instrument of his lust, putting away the sweet fragrant dawn for a place of cuspidors, dormant flies, sticky woods, where bleared, saturated messes of human flesh sneak in, even as you, to lick their love and their life.... That you have waited for this moment for hours—oh, God!—while the fair new day comes winging over mountains and lakes, bringing, cleansed from inter-stellar spaces, the purity of lilies, new mysteries of love, the ruddy light of roses and heroic hopes for clean men—that you should hide from this adoring light in a dim place of brutes, a place covered with the psychic stains of lust; that you should run from clean gutters to drink this hell-seepage.
He asked himself why he thirsted for light. If every door on his floor were a saloon, he would not have entered the nearest. And yet a summer dawn was due. Hours must have passed since midnight. He glanced into the medicine-case before turning off the lights in the bath-room. Alcohol was the base in many of the bottles; this thought incited fever in his brain.... He could hardly stand. A well-man would have been weakened by the processes of cleansing he had endured. The blackness, pressing against the outer window, became the form of his great trouble. "I wish the day would come," he said aloud. His voice frightened him. It was like a whimper from an insane ward. He hastened to escape from the place, now hateful.
The chill of the hall, as he emerged, struck into his flesh, a polar blast. Like an animal he scurried to the bed and crawled under cover, shaking convulsively. His watch ticked upon the bed-post. Presently he was burning—as if hot cloths were quickly being renewed upon his flesh. Yet instantaneously upon lifting the cover, the chill would seize him again. Finally he squirmed his head about until he could see his watch. Two-fifteen, it said. Manifestly, this was a lie. He had not wound the thing the night before, though its ticking filled the room. He recalled that when he was drinking, frequently he wound his watch a dozen times a day, or quite as frequently forgot it entirely. At all events, it was lying now. Thoughts of the whiskey he had poured out, of the drugs in the medicine-case, controlled. He needed a drink, and nothing but alcohol would do. This is the terrible thing. Without endangering one's heart, it is impossible to take enough morphine to deaden a whiskey reaction. A little only horrifies one's dreams. There is no bromide. He cried out for the poison he had washed away from his veins. This would have been a crutch for hours. In the normal course of bodily waste, he would not have been brought to this state of need in twenty-four hours. He felt the rapping of old familiar devils against his brain. He needed a drink.
The lights were turned on full in his room. The watch hanging above his head ticked incessant lies regarding the energy of passing time. He could lose himself in black gorges of agony, grope his way back to find that the minute hand had scarcely stirred.... He lay perfectly rigid until a wave, half of drowsiness, half of weakness, slowed-down the vibrations of his mind.... Somewhere in the underworld, he found a consciousness—a dank smell, the dimness of a cave; the wash of fins gliding in lazy curves across the black, sluggish water; aneye, green, steadfast, ashine like phosphor which is concentrated decay,—the eye of rapacity gorged. His nostrils filled with the foreign odor of menageries and aquariums. A brief hiatus now, in which objects altered. A great weight pressed against his chest, not to hurt, but to fill his consciousness with the thought of its cold crushing strength; the weight of a tree-trunk, the chill of stone, the soft texture of slimy flesh.... Full against him upon the rock, in his half-submerged cavern, lay the terror of all his obsessions—the crocodile. Savage incarnations were shaken out of his soul as he regarded this beast, a terror so great that his throat shut, his spine stiffened. Still as a dead tree, the creature pressed against him, bulging stomach, the narrow, yellow-brown head, moveless, raised from the rock. This was the armed abdomen he feared most—cruelty, patience, repletion—and the dirty-white of nether parts!... He heard the scream within him—before it broke from his throat.
Out of one of these, Charter emerged with a cry, wet with sweat as the cavern-floor from which he came—to find that the minute-hand of his watch had not traversed the distance between two Roman numerals. He seized the time-piece and flung it across the room, lived an age of regret before it struck the walnut edge of his dresser and crashed to the floor.... The sounds of running-down fitted to words in his brain.
"Tick—tick!... tick-tick-tick." A spring rattled a disordered plaint; then after a silence: "I served you—did my work well—very well—very well!..." Charter writhed, wordlessly imploring it to be still. It was not the value, but the sentient complaining of a thing abused. Faithful, and he had crushed it. He felt at last in the silence that his heart would stop if it ticked again; and as he waited, staring at it, his mind rushed off to a morning of boyhood and terrible cruelty.... He had been hunting at the edge of a half-cleared bit of timber. A fat gray squirrel raced across the dead leaves, fully sixty yards away—its mate following blithely. The leader gained the home-tree as Charter shot, crippling the second—the male. It was a long shot and a very good one, but the boy forgot that. The squirrel tried to climb the tree, but could not. It crawled about, uncoupled, among the roots, and answered the muffled chattering from the hole above—this, as the boy came up, his breast filling with the deadliest shame he had ever known. The squirrel told him all, and answered his mate besides. It was not a chatter for mercy. The little male was cross about it—bewildered, too, for its life-business was so important. The tortured boy dropped the butt of his gun upon the creature's head.... Now the tone changed—the flattened head would not die.... He had fled crying from the thing, which haunted him almost to madness. Hebeggednow, as the old thoughts of that hour began to run about in the deep-worn groove of his mind....
Andas he had treated the squirrel, the watch—so he was treating his own life....
Again he was called to consciousness by some one uttering his name. He answered. The apartment echoed with the flat, unnatural cry of his voice; silence mocking him.... Then, in delusion, he would find himself hurrying across the yard, attracted by some psychic terror of warning. Finally, as he opened the stable-door, sounds of a panting struggle reached him from the box-stall where he kept his loved saddle-mare. Light showed him that she had broken through the flooring, and, frenziedly struggling to get her legs clear from the wreck, had torn the skin and flesh behind, from hoof to hock. He saw the yellow tendons and the gleaming white bone. She was half-up, half-down, the smoky look of torture and accusation in her brown eyes....
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 beingwithout. 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.