CERTAIN ELEMENTS FOR THE CHARTER CRUCIBLE, AND HIS MOTHER'S PILGRIMAGE
ACROSS THE SANDS ALONE TO MECCA
Charter had come a long way very swiftly in his search for realities. If
it is required of man, at a certain stage of evolution, to possess a
working knowledge of the majority of possible human experiences, in
order to choose wisely between good and evil, Charter had, indeed,
covered much ground in his thirty-three years. As a matter of fact,
there were few degrees in the masonry of sensation, into which he had
not been initiated. His was the name of a race of wild, sensual,
physical types; a name still held high in old-world authority, and
identified with men of heavy hunting, heavy dining and drinking. The
Charters had always been admired for high temper and fair women. True,
there was not a germ of the present Charter mental capacity in the whole
race of such men commonly mated, but Quentin's father had married a
woman with a marvellous endurance in prayer--that old, dull-looking
formula for producing sons of strength. A silent woman, she was, a
reverent woman, an angry woman, with the stuff of martyrdoms in her
veins.
Indeed, in her father, John Quentin, reformer, there were stirring
materials for memory. His it was to ride and preach, to excoriate evil
and depict the good, with the blessing of a living God shining bright
and directly upon it. A bracing figure, this Grandfather Quentin, an
ethereal bloom at the top of a tough stalk of Irish peasantry. First, as
a soldier in the British army he was heard of, a stripling with a girl's
waist, a pigeon breast, and the soul's divinity breathing itself awake
within. His was a poet's rapture at the sight of morning mists,
wrestling with the daybreak over the mountains; and everywhere his
regiment went, were left behind Quentin's songs--crude verses of a minor
singer, never seeking permanence more than Homer; and everywhere, he set
about to correct the degradations of men, absolutely unscared and
grandly improvident. A fighter for simple loving-kindness in the heart
of man, a worshiper of the bright fragment of truth vouchsafed to his
eyes, a lover of children, a man who walked thrillingly with a personal
God, and was so glorified and ignited by the spirit that, every day, he
strode singing into battle. Such was John Quentin, and from him, a
living part of his own strong soul, sprang the woman who mothered
Quentin Charter, sprang pure from his dreams and meditations, and
doubtless with his prayer for a great son, marked in the scroll of her
soul.... For to her, bringing a man into the world meant more than a
bleak passage of misery begun with passion and ended with pain.
Her single bearing of fruit was a solitary pilgrimage. From the hour of
the conception, she drew apart with her own ideals, held herself aloof
from fleshly things, almost as one without a body. Charter, the
strongly-sexed, her merchant-husband, the laughing, scolding, joking
gunner; admirable, even delightful, to Nineteenth Century men of hot
dinners and stimulated nights--showed her all that a man must _not_ be.
Alone, she crossed the burning sands; cleansed her body and brain in the
cool of evenings, expanded her soul with dreams projected far into the
glistening purple heavens and whispered the psalms and poems which had
fed the lyric hunger of her father.
It glorified her temples to brood by an open window upon the night-sky;
to conceive even the garment's hem of that Inspiring Source, to Whom
solar systems are but a glowworm swarm, and the soul of man mightier
than them all. Sometimes she carried the concept farther, until it
seemed as if her heart must cease to beat: that this perfecting fruit of
the universe, the soul of man, must be imprisoned for a time in the womb
of woman; that the Supreme seemed content with this humble mystery, nor
counted not aeons 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.