She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort

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 For an instant she endured a horrible, stifling, feminine fright, but it was superseded at once by a fine assembling of faculties under the control of genuine courage.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.