She Buildeth Her House Part 13

"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 coa.r.s.ened 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 h.e.l.l.

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.

THIRTEENTH CHAPTER

"NO MAN CAN ENTER INTO A STRONG MAN'S HOUSE, AND SPOIL, HIS GOODS, EXCEPT HE WILL FIRST BIND THE STRONG MAN"

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 pa.s.sages 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 quant.i.ties 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, pa.s.sable 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 pa.s.sions, 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 l.u.s.t and despoil the alien decks--wingless, crawling abdomens, which, even in the shades, are but the ganglia of appet.i.te!... 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 a.s.sumed dimensions that the bells _had_ struck.

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--gla.s.s after gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sages 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 l.u.s.t, 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, G.o.d!--while the fair new day comes winging over mountains and lakes, bringing, cleansed from inter-stellar s.p.a.ces, 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 l.u.s.t; that you should run from clean gutters to drink this h.e.l.l-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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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; an _eye_, 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 m.u.f.fled 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 b.u.t.t 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. He _begged_ now, 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 pa.s.sion; 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 l.u.s.ts 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 pa.s.sage, 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 dest.i.tute, indeed."

Charter felt his unshaven mouth. It was soft and fallen like an imbecile's. A man in h.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.ton 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 G.o.d-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, gra.s.ses and skies to beauty; the blessed morning winds, lit with faint glory. The East was a great, gray b.u.t.terfly'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?"

"G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed. 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 being _without_. He was pitifully weak, but the stimulus had lifted his mind out of the h.e.l.ls 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 G.o.ds to their thinking, yet fail in the simple lessons that dogs and horses and cats have grasped! All the more foul and b.e.s.t.i.a.l are those whom G.o.ds 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.