PAULA MAKES SEVERAL DISCOVERIES IN THE CHARTER HEART-COUNTRY, AND IS DELIGHTED BY HIS LETTERS TO THE SKYLARK
The morning paper stated that Dr. Bellingham had suffered a fracture of the and internal injury, but might live. A note to Paula from Madame Nestor late the next day contained the following paragraph: "I called at the hospital to inquire. A doctor told me that the case is likely to become a classic one. Never in his experience, he stated, had he witnessed a man put up such a fight for life. It will be long, however, before he is abroad again. He must have been following you quite madly, because there never was a man more careful in the midst of city-dangers than Bellingham. Why, a scratched finger completely upset him—in the earlier days. Inscrutable, but thrilling—isn't it, my dear Paula?"
"Did you follow Moby Dick's whale tracks around the wet wastes of the world?" Reifferscheid asked several mornings later, as Paula entered.
Her face was flushed. A further letter from Quentin Charter had just been tucked into her bag. "Yes, and Mr. Melville over trans-continental digressions," she answered. "He surely is Neptune's own confrère."
"Did you get the leviathan alongside and study the bewildering of a ninety-foot nervous system?" Reifferscheid went on with delight.
"Exactly, and colored miles of sea-water with the emptyings of his vast heart. Then, there was an extended process of fatty degeneration, which I believe they called—blubber-boiling."
They laughed together over the old whale-epic.
"They remember Melville up in Boston and Nantucket," he added, "but he's about as much alive as a honey-bee's pulse elsewhere. The trouble is, you can't this by law. It isn't uxoricide or sheep-stealing—not to know Melville—but it's the deadly sin of . This is a raw age, we adorn—not to rock in the boat of that man's soul. Why, he's to stand with the angels on the point of the present."
The big editor always warmed her when he enthused. Here, in the midst of holiday books pouring in by scores, he had time to make a big personal and public protest against a fifty-year-old novel being forgotten.
"But isn't Melville acknowledged to be the headwaters of inspiration for all later sea-books?" Paula asked.
"Yes, to the men who do them, he's the big laughing figure behind their work, but the public doesn't seem to know.... Of course, Herman has faults—Japan currents of faults—but they only warm him to a white man's heart. Do you know, I like to think of him in a wide, windy room, tearing off his story long-hand, upon yard square sheets, grinning like an ogre at the soul-play, the pages of copy settling ankle-deep upon the floor. There's no of over-breeding in the unborn thing, no curse of compression, no aping Addison—nothing but Melville, just blown in with the , with a big story which must be shed, before he blows out again, with straining cordage booming in his ears. He harnesses Art. He man-handles Power, makes it and play circus. 'Here it is,' he seems to say at the end. 'Take it or leave it. I'm rotting here .'"
"You ought to reviews like that, Mr. Reifferscheid," Paula could not help saying, though she knew he would be disconcerted.
He colored, turned back to his work, directing her to take her choice from the shelf of fresh books.... On the car going back, Paula opened Charter's letter. Her fingers trembled, because she had been in a happy and daring mood five or six days before when she wrote the letter to which this was the reply.
... Do you know, I really like to write to you? I feel untrammelled—turned loose in the meadows. It seems when I start an idea—that you've grasped it as soon as it is clear to me. Piled sentences after that are unnecessary. It's a real joy to write this way, as spirits commune. It wouldn't do at all for the blessed multitude. You have to be a mineral and a vegetable and an animal, all in a paragraph, to get the whole market. But how generous the dear old multitude is—(if the writer has suffered enough)—with its bed and board and lamplight....
I have been scored and salted so many times that I heal like an earth-worm. Tell me, can scar-tissue ever be so fine? Fineness—that's the one excellent feature of being human! There's no other reason for being—no other meaning or reason for atomic or star-hung space. True, the great Conceiver of Refining Thought seems pleased to take all to play in....
You've made me think of you out of all proportion. I don't want to help it. I'm very glad we hailed each other across the distance. There's something so and wise and finished about the personality I've builded from three little letters and a critique—that I refresh myself very frequently from them.... I think we must be old playmates. Perhaps we plotted ghost-stories and oranges at each other in Atlantean millenniums ago. I begin to feel as if I deserve to have my playmate back.... Then, again, it is as though these little letters brought to my garret window the Skylark I have heard far and faintly so long in the higher moments of dream. Just a note here and there used to come to me from far-shining archipelagoes of cloud-land. I listen now and clearly understand what you have sung so long in the Heights.... You are winged—that's the word! Wing often to my window—won't you? Life is peppering me with good things this year, I could not be more grateful.
Letters like these made Paula think of that first afternoon with Grimm; and like it, too, the joy was so intense as to hold the suggestion that there must be something evil in it all. She laughed at this. What law, human or divine, was disordered by two human grown-ups with clean minds communing together intimately in letters? Quentin Charter might have been less imperious, or less precipitous, in writing such pleasing matters about herself, but had he not earned the of saying what he felt? Still, Paula would not have been so entirely feminine, had she not repressed somewhat. She even may have known that artful from without is to any man. Occasionally, Charter forgot his sense of humor, but the woman five years younger, never. The thought that in the ordinary sequence of events, they should meet face to face, harrowed somewhat with the thought that she must keep his ideals down—or both were lost. What could a mind like his not build about months of communion (eyes and ears strained toward flashing skies) with a Skylark ideal?... She reminded Charter that skylarks are little, brown, tame-plumaged creatures that only sing when they soar. She could not forbear to note that he was a bit sky-larky, too, in his letters, and observed that she had found it wise, mainly to keep one's wings tightly folded in New York. She signed her next letter, nevertheless, with a small pen-picture of the name he had given her—full-throated and . Also she put on her house address. Some of the paragraphs from letters which came in the following weeks, she remembered without referring to the treasured file:
... Bless the wings! May they never tire for long—since I cannot be there when they are folded.... Often, explain it if you can, I think of you as some one I have seen in Japan, especially in Tokyo—hurrying through the dusk in the Minimasakurna-cho, wandering through the tombs of the Forty-seven Ronins. or tea in the Kameido among the wistaria blooms. Some time—who knows? I have made quite a romance about it.... Who is so wise as to say, that we are not marvellously related from the youth of the world? Who dares declare we have not climbed cliffs of Cathay to stare across the sky-blue water, nor whispered together in orient under that swing more near than these?... We may be a pair of foolish dreamers, but Asia must have a cup of tea for us—Asia, because she is so far and so still. We shall remember then....
And so you live alone? How strange, I have always thought of you so? From the number, I think you must overlook the Park—don't you?... It may strike you humorously, but I feel like ordering you not to take too many meals alone. One is apt to be neglectful, and women lose their appetites easier than men. I used to be graceless toward the gift of health. Perhaps I enjoy prepared food altogether too well for one of inner . The bit of a soul in which you see such glorious possibilities, packs rather an imperious animal this trip, I fear. However, I don't let the animal carry me—any more.
I see a wonderful sensitiveness in all that you write—that's why I suggest especially that you should never forget fine food and exercise. activity in America is so often at the price of physical . This is an empty failure, uncentering, . Remember, I say in America.... Pray, don't think I fail to worship sensitiveness—those high, strange emotions, the sense of oneness with all things that live, the vergings of the mind toward the intangible, the light, sleep of , subtle expandings of and the mystical launchings,—anything that gives spread of wing rather than of girth—but I have seen these very pursuits carry one entirely out of rhythm with the world. The multitudes cannot follow us when there are stars in our eyes—they cannot see.
A few years ago I had a stra............