She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort

Charter rubbed the steam from the bath-room window, shaded his eyes, and looked for the daylight which was not there. Stars still shone clear in the unwhitened distances. Why was he so eager for the dawn? It was the drunkard in him—always frightened and restless, even in sleep, while buffets are closed. This is so, even though a filled flask cools the fingers that grope under the pillow.... Any man who has ever walked the streets during the two great cycles of time between three and five in the morning, waiting for certain sinister doors to open, does not cease to shiver at the memory even in his finer years. It is not the discordant tyranny of nerves, nor the need of the body, pitiful and actual though it is, wherein the terror lies,—but living, walking with the consciousness that the devil is in power; that you are the debauched instrument of his lust, putting away the sweet fragrant dawn for a place of cuspidors, dormant flies, sticky woods, where bleared, saturated messes of human flesh sneak in, even as you, to lick their love and their life.... That you have waited for this moment for hours—oh, God!—while the fair new day comes winging over mountains and lakes, bringing, cleansed from inter-stellar spaces, the purity of lilies, new mysteries of love, the ruddy light of roses and heroic hopes for clean men—that you should hide from this adoring light in a dim place of brutes, a place covered with the psychic stains of lust; that you should run from clean gutters to drink this hell-seepage.

He asked himself why he thirsted for light. If every door on his floor were a saloon, he would not have entered the nearest. And yet a summer dawn was due. Hours must have passed since midnight. He glanced into the medicine-case before turning off the lights in the bath-room. Alcohol was the base in many of the bottles; this thought incited fever in his brain.... He could hardly stand. A well-man would have been weakened by the processes of cleansing he had endured. The blackness, pressing against the outer window, became the form of his great trouble. "I wish the day would come," he said aloud. His voice frightened him. It was like a whimper from an insane ward. He hastened to escape from the place, now hateful.

The chill of the hall, as he emerged, struck into his flesh, a polar blast. Like an animal he scurried to the bed and crawled under cover, shaking convulsively. His watch ticked upon the bed-post. Presently he was burning—as if hot cloths were quickly being renewed upon his flesh. Yet instantaneously upon lifting the cover, the chill would seize him again. Finally he squirmed his head about until he could see his watch. Two-fifteen, it said. Manifestly, this was a lie. He had not wound the thing the night before, though its ticking filled the room. He recalled that when he was drinking, frequently he wound his watch a dozen times a day, or quite as frequently forgot it entirely. At all events, it was lying now. Thoughts of the whiskey he had poured out, of the drugs in the medicine-case, controlled. He needed a drink, and nothing but alcohol would do. This is the terrible thing. Without endangering one's heart, it is impossible to take enough morphine to deaden a whiskey reaction. A little only horrifies one's dreams. There is no bromide. He cried out for the poison he had washed away from his veins. This would have been a crutch for hours. In the normal course of bodily waste, he would not have been brought to this state of need in twenty-four hours. He felt the rapping of old familiar devils against his brain. He needed a drink.

The lights were turned on full in his room. The watch hanging above his head ticked incessant lies regarding the energy of passing time. He could lose himself in black gorges of agony, grope his way back to find that the minute hand had scarcely stirred.... He lay perfectly rigid until a wave, half of drowsiness, half of weakness, slowed-down the vibrations of his mind.... Somewhere in the underworld, he found a consciousness—a dank smell, the dimness of a cave; the wash of fins gliding in lazy curves across the black, sluggish water; an eye, green, steadfast, ashine like phosphor which is concentrated decay,—the eye of rapacity gorged. His nostrils filled with the foreign odor of menageries and aquariums. A brief hiatus now, in which objects altered. A great weight pressed against his chest, not to hurt, but to fill his consciousness with the thought of its cold crushing strength; the weight of a tree-trunk, the chill of stone, the soft texture of slimy flesh.... Full against him upon the rock, in his half-submerged cavern, lay the terror of all his obsessions—the crocodile. Savage incarnations were shaken out of his soul as he regarded this beast, a terror so great that his throat shut, his spine stiffened. Still as a dead tree, the creature pressed against him, bulging stomach, the narrow, yellow-brown head, moveless, raised from the rock. This was the armed abdomen he feared most—cruelty, patience, repletion—and the dirty-white of nether parts!... He heard the scream within him—before it broke from his throat.

Out of one of these, Charter emerged with a cry, wet with sweat as the cavern-floor from which he came—to find that the minute-hand of his watch had not traversed the distance between two Roman numerals. He seized the time-piece and flung it across the room, lived an age of regret before it struck the walnut edge of his dresser and crashed to the floor.... The sounds of running-down fitted to words in his brain.

"Tick—tick!... tick-tick-tick." A spring rattled a disordered plaint; then after a silence: "I served you—did my work well—very well—very well!..." Charter writhed, wordlessly imploring it to be still. It was not the value, but the sentient complaining of a thing abused. Faithful, and he had crushed it. He felt at last in the silence that his heart would stop if it ticked again; and as he waited, staring at it, his mind rushed off to a morning of boyhood and terrible cruelty.... He had been hunting at the edge of a half-cleared bit of timber. A fat gray squirrel raced across the dead leaves, fully sixty yards away—its mate following blithely. The leader gained the home-tree as Charter shot, crippling the second—the male. It was a long shot and a very good one, but the boy forgot that. The squirrel tried to climb the tree, but could not. It crawled about, uncoupled, among the roots, and answered the muffled chattering from the hole above—this, as the boy came up, his breast filling with the deadliest shame he had ever known. The squirrel told him all, and answered his mate besides. It was not a chatter for mercy. The little male was cross about it—bewildered, too, for its life-business was so important. The tortured boy dropped the butt of his gun upon the creature's head.... Now the tone changed—the flattened head would not die.... He had fled crying from the thing, which haunted him almost to madness. He begged now, as the old thoughts of that hour began to run about in the deep-worn groove of his mind....

Andas he had treated the squirrel, the watch—so he was treating his own life....

Again he was called to consciousness by some one uttering his name. He answered. The apartment echoed with the flat, unnatural cry of his voice; silence mocking him.... Then, in delusion, he would find himself hurrying across the yard, attracted by some psychic terror of warning. Finally, as he opened the stable-door, sounds of a panting struggle reached him from the box-stall where he kept his loved saddle-mare. Light showed him that she had broken through the flooring, and, frenziedly struggling to get her legs clear from the wreck, had torn the skin and flesh behind, from hoof to hock. He saw the yellow tendons and the gleaming white bone. She was half-up, half-down, the smoky look of torture and accusation in her brown eyes....

Finally came back his inexorable memories—one after another, his nights of degraded passion; the memory of brothels, where drunkenness had carried him; songs, words, laughter he had heard; pictures on the walls; combs, cards, cigarettes of the dressing-tables, low ceilings and noisome lamps; that individual something about each woman, and her especial perversion; peregrinations among the lusts of half the world's ports, where a man never gets so low that he cannot fall into a woman's arms. How they had clung to him and begged him to come back! His nostrils filled again with sickening perfumes that never could overpower the burnt odor of harlot's hair. Down upon him these horrors poured, until he was driven to the floor from the very foulness of the place wherein he lay, but a chill struck his heart and forced him back into the nest of sensual dreams....

Constantly he felt that dry direct need for cigarette inhalation—that nervous craving which makes a man curse viciously at the break of a match or its missing fire—but his heart responded instantly to the mild poisoning, a direct and awful pounding like the effect of cocaine upon the strong, and his sickness was intensified. So he would put the cigarette down, lest the aorta burst within him—only to light the pest again a moment later.