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 passages 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 snatch 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 quantities 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, passable 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 passions, 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 lust and despoil the alien decks—wingless, crawling abdomens, which, even in the shades, are but the ganglia of appetite!... 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 assumed 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—glass after glass 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 passages 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.