I always felt you alone. I seemed to know your voice after centuries. Yes, I am sure it was that which affected me so deeply in your work and made me answer your letters with such faith. _I knew your voice._ I thought of you alone--your spirit hungry.... It makes one feel so common, when one's intuitions betray this way. The heart for writing further is cold and heavy. Once, down the wind, came a fragrant pollen, but the blowing summer is gone from my garden....

No signature.

She had not penned a skylark with a folded or broken wing. Charter sat thinking for several moments, but only because he knew there was ample time to catch the noon-train for New York. That he should do this had formed in mind before he had read five lines of the letter. This thought of action steadied him; and the proof that he had sensed her agony and reflected it throughout the past forty-eight hours made the call of the East instant and irresistible. It did not come to him at first that he was now entering the greater conflict, for which Nature had trained him in tranquillity and fed his soul unto replenishment during three years.... His first quick thought came out of old habits of mind: _An hour with her, and her heart will be healed!_ Here was the old trifler.

He suffered for this instant faltering of the brighter manhood. Man's fineness is not accentuated by the fact that a woman sacrifices her power within him, when she falls to pleading a little. Charter could have torn out the old mental fibres upon which played the thought of her swiftly renewed happiness by his presence.

The reality of her suffering slowly penetrated his mind. He perceived that she could not express the actuality; that her thoughts had winged ineffectually about the immovable disorder--like bees over the clumsy corpse of a rodent in the hive. It was not to be lifted, and the inspiration hermetically to seal the monster and resume activities as well as possible, had not yet come.... "I might have endured it, if _you_ had told me!"

He wasted no energy trying to think exactly what had happened. It was all he could bear to grasp the full meaning that this inspiring creature who had soared and sung so long, was crushed and cold. Every sentence in her letter revealed the bruise of her heart, the absence of spontaneity.... She was as different from other women he had known--the women who had been healed by his word or his caress--as he was different in this attraction. He telegraphed that he was coming, begged that she would see him the following evening, and instructed her to leave word for him at the _Granville_. Then he packed his bag and told his mother.

She laughed quietly.

"On the spur of the moment as usual, Quentin.... It will be good for you. You've been home a long time. Are you going--beyond New York?"

"I haven't a thought now of going farther, Mother," he answered....

Again twilight in mid-afternoon--as he crossed the river from Jersey. It had been a day and night to age the soul--with its inexorable stretch of material miles. New York had a different look, a different atmosphere, than ever before. Huge and full of horrible grinding; sick with work and sick with damp--but above this, the magic of her presence was over all.

It was only four in the afternoon, and he had not asked to see her until seven. Might she not have watched for him or be near him now? She would know him from his pictures, and observe him as a stranger, but he had only his visions.

On the Cross-town to the _Granville_, emotions played upon him of a kind that he could not have understood in another man a few months before.

Moreover, he felt himself giving way before the vibrations of the big city. Harried and shrunken, he was, like a youth from the fields; and the voice he had raised so valiantly from afar against this tremendous ma.s.sed soul, seemed now but the clamor of a boy in the safety of his own door. To and fro along his inflamed nerves crept the direct need of a drink and a cigarette--old wolves forever on the watch for the spent and the wounded.... Actually terrorized, he was, at the thought she might not see him; that there might be no note for him at the _Granville_.

What a voyage in the dark.

For the time, his excellent moral balance had deserted shamelessly. An adequate perception of his own position and att.i.tude in the eyes of high womanhood had unhelmed him, quite properly. Nature had finally found a hot retort which just fitted his case--and in he went.... No purely physical ardor could have called Quentin Charter out of his study and far across the continent. Lesser loves than this have plunged nations into war, and broken the main trend of history into pregnant digressions. The more penetratingly one regards the man in his present consuming, the more formidable becomes the conviction that the human cosmos in the beginning was cleft in twain: one to grope to the light, a male; the other to suffer the way, her burden, the curse of Eve. When these mates of fire fulfil their divided destinies and sweep into the zone of mutual attraction, woe to the satellites and asteroids in the inevitable cataclysm which follows.... Yet it is out of such solar throes that G.o.ds and prophets are born.... He gave his bag to a boy at the _Granville_ entrance, and stepped forward to the desk, clearing his throat and repeating his question.... The clerk rushed through the letters in "C."

"No, Mr. Charter,--not a letter, but wait just a moment; there was a telephone-call."

A chill had swept through him as the man spoke. It had not occurred to him that the word would come in other than her handwriting. This was an unsigned note, written by the telephone-girl:

Mr. Quentin Charter: A lady who says you will understand, 'phoned that she will be home at seven to-night--if you think it wise and kind to come to her.

The message was dated at two P. M. Both chill and burning were in the words. It was strangely unlike her; yet in pa.s.sing through the operator's mind, it might have become routine. The word "kind" was a torturing curb. It placed him on ugly quaking ground. How weak, how ancient and commonplace, is the human lord after all, when in doubt regarding his lady's reception of him! Where is his valor now, his taking of cities, his smiling deaths for honor? Most of all times, he is man, the male; not man, the soul. Half-way out on the surface-car, he discovered one of the big "Selma Cross" bill-boards. It was intimate, startling, an evil omen--great black letters out of the deathless past.... He stood on the fourth floor of the _Zoroaster_. The elevator-man had shown him a certain door which was slightly ajar. He was ill, breathless, and his heart sank strangely with the lights in the shaft from the descending car.... He tapped on the designated door, and a deep melodious voice, instantly identified with ancient abandonments, called gently:

"Come in!"

FIFTEENTH CHAPTER

QUENTIN CHARTER AND SELMA CROSS JOIN ISSUE ON A NEW BATTLE-GROUND, EACH LEAVING THE FIELD WITH OPEN WOUNDS

Charter was seized with vertigo. It was his sorry thought that the old scar-tissues, however bravely they sufficed in the days of easy-going, could not endure a crux like this. But he was wrong. It was the shock to his spirit, which made of Selma Cross a giantess of vague outlines in a room filled with swimming objects. Need for the woman of his visions had culminated in the outer hall. In the subst.i.tution there was an inner wrench, which to one of Charter's intense concentration was like a stroke; and then, too, the horrible outburst of energy in adjusting the Skylark spirit to the eminent flesh of this old plaything of his, left him drained. He steadied himself into the music-room, and sank into a deep chair, where his heart pumped furiously, but light and empty, as if it could not grip the blood locked in his veins.

He sat in a sort of trance, glimpses of many thoughts running through his brain. He deserved punishment. That was all very well, but something was wrong here. The premonition became a reality in his consciousness that he had entered upon a great desert; that he was to endure again one of his terrible thirsts; not a throat-thirst alone, but a soul-thirst.

In the atmosphere of the woman, in the very odor of the room, he felt the old impa.s.sioned lyric-maker crush back into the dominance of his mind with all the impish exultation of that lower self. Pride a.s.serted itself now. What an idiot pa.s.sage in the career of a rising writer! He should always remember with shame this coming to New York--a youthful Marius in whose veins was injected mid-summer madness--coming to this city (where dollar-work is king and plumaged-woman queen) with an abortive conception from garret dreams.... A strong white light fell upon the leather cover of her reading-table, but their faces were in shadow, like the hundred actor faces in photograph upon the wall and mantel. Selma Cross was studying him keenly. The emptiness of it all was so pervading--as his blood began to move again--that he laughed aloud.

"Do you know," Selma Cross said softly, "I thought at first you had been drinking too much. I hardly knew you otherwise, remember. Shall I tell you what added thought came to me, as you crossed the floor so unsteadily--looking so white?"

"Locomotor ataxia, I suppose. I hear it is getting quite the thing for middle-generation New Yorkers.... I expected to see you a little later in your new play, but not here--to-night----"

"That is what I thought--that incurable thing. You seem floored. I didn't know a woman could do that. In the old days, you were adaptable--if nothing else."

His collar felt tight, and he stretched it out, needing more air in his lungs and more blood in his brain. It was clear enough to him now how Skylark had been stricken. The real devastation was that she belonged to this sort of thing at all; that she could consent to this trick, this trap. It was all so different from the consummate fineness, the pervading delicacy, of all Skylark thoughts. Having consented to the trick, _might she not be listening_?... He did not mind her hearing; indeed, he might say things which were needful for her to know--but that she should listen! He writhed. This was not his Skylark at all.... It was hardly Charter's way now to plunge into the centre of things. There was a feline elegance in the manner and movement of Selma Cross; she seemed so delightfully at ease, that he was willing to make it a bit harder for her.

"I suppose I was more adaptable formerly," he said slowly. "It is something, however, suddenly to encounter an old friend who has made good so fearfully and tremendously in the past week. Of course, I had read all about it. Still, I repeat it was an experience to encounter your stardom actually on the boards; and more of an experience to find you here. I'm really very glad that you secured the one great vehicle.

As for your work--few know its quality better than I."

She studied him long, her eyes glowing behind the narrowed lids. "As for that, you've been biting the flaky top-crust, too," she said finally. "I never doubted what you could do in your game, but I confess I feared that whiskey would beat you to it.... Do you know you are wonderfully changed--so white, so lean? Your work has come to me since you went away; what else have you been doing?--I mean, to change you so finely."

"Garret."

Her brow clouded at the word. It was as if she had expected to laugh at him long before this. "Did any woman ever tell you that you're rather a mean sort, Quentin Charter?"

"Doubtless I have deserved it," he answered. "What are you thinking?"

"I was thinking of your garret--where you gather your victims for vivisection."

"That's put very clearly."

"Do you think this is big-man stuff?"

"My case is rather an ugly one to look back upon, truly," Charter granted. "For a long time, it appeared to me that I must learn things at first-hand. With first-water talents, perhaps this is not necessary."

"A woman finally brings a man face to face," she said with sudden scorn, "and he becomes limp, agrees with everything she says.... 'Yes, it is quite true, I was an awful beast. What else, dear?'--ugh!"

Charter smiled. She was very swift and deft in supplying a man's evil motives. It is a terrible feminine misfortune--this gift of imputing--and happy women do not possess it. Few men, incidentally, are deep enough to avail themselves of all the crafts and cunnings with which they may be accredited.

"I have no intention of destroying the slightest gratification you may draw, Selma, from questioning me," he said. "If I appear limp, please remember that I'm a bit in the dark as yet. I came to this floor on a different errand. I had this errand in mind--not self-examination.

However, I'll attend now in all sincerity. You were speaking of my victims for vivisection in the garret."

She appeared not to trust him in the least. "I've always wanted to know if you believed--what an apprentice I really was in love--give-and-take--when you came?"

"That was easily believed, Selma----"

"Then you grant I wasn't acting--when I gave myself to you?"

"I didn't think you were acting----"

"Then _you_ were acting, because when the time came--you dropped me quite as easily as you would drop a street-cur you had been pleased to feed."

"Just there you are a bit in error. I was furiously interested, and certainly not acting altogether, until----"

"Enter--the wine," she said with a sneer.

"Yes, if you will." He was irritated for a second, having meant to say something entirely different.

"A woman so loves to hear that a man's pa.s.sion for her depends upon his drinking!"