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