She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort

One April morning, he encountered a depression more formidable in vitality than ever before. Beth had just had her shoes set, and Charter tried to ride off the blue devil. He steadied his mount out of town, until she struck the ringing country road. The instant she felt her calks bite into the frosty turf, the mare flirted her head, took the bit, and became a veritable glowing battery of beautiful energy. Twelve miles he gave her, but the blue devil rode equally well and sat down again with Charter in his study. It was like a desert-island loneliness, this which beset him, as if his ship were sinking into the horizon; only it was a more poignant than physical agony—a sense of spiritual isolation.

This study had become to him the place of his dearest revelations of life. Here, of late especially, he had found refuge from every discord, and here invariably were opened the letters from the Skylark. The place of a man's work becomes a grand, quiet solace as he grows older, but calm and poise were wrested from the room to-day. He fought the depression with every trained faculty, but was whipped by it. Color and sunlight were gone from within; the zeal from future work, the warmth from every promise, the changing lustre from words, and the excellent energy of thought which impels their weaving. Twilight in mid-afternoon. He turned on the lights impatiently. Meaning and beauty were bereft from all his possessions, as buoyancy was gone from his own breast. There was something pitifully boyish in the trophies he had treasured—so much of the college cub, and the youth who refuses to permit his travels to be forgotten. He regarded his past work, as one grown out of it, regretting that it had ever attracted the materials of permanence. Smugness in his teachings; cold intellectuality brazen in all his attainments; everything about him suddenly become sinister from the old life!... He looked into the East—his country of singing, of roses, cedars, and fountains—but the gray-black twilight was a damnable intervention.... It was in this spirit, or lack of it, that he wrote the letter which revealed to Paula his inner responsiveness, as she was tossed in The High Tide.

The letter which she had written almost at the same time, reached him on the second morning thereafter; and his suffering in the interval he could only liken to one of the old sieges of reaction after dissipation. The fine, angular writing, which he never regarded without a sense of the darting swiftness of her hand; the thin, tough sheets that crinkled, came like bounty to the starving; yet he was deathly afraid.

Something of the long ago has just come to me—to my very rooms. It would not have been believed, had I sought it. I might have endured it, if you had told me. It is dreadful to play with illusions. Oh, why must we keep our gods so far away—lest we lose them? Had I waited longer, I could not have written. It seems now that you have a right to know—before my pride dries up all expression. You are not to blame—except that you were very reckless in adding happinesses one upon the other. It was all quite ridiculous. I trusted my intuition—allowed myself to think of a table spread in the wilderness of the world with you. My intuitions! I used to be so proud of them. I see now that sometimes they're quite as fallible as plain thinking, after all.

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....