"NO MAN CAN ENTER INTO A STRONG MAN'S HOUSE, AND SPOIL, HIS GOODS, EXCEPT HE WILL FIRST THE STRONG MAN"
Charter had always been able to stop drinking when disgusted with its effects, but his final abandonment, three years before the Skylark letters, had lasted long—up the Yangtse to the , back to Shanghai, and around the Straits and 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 . 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 , a condition of mind 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 . In a word, an occasional flashy peak 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 , he swallowed a 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 restraint, drinking as frequently as the impulse came. Clumsiness of the fingers therefore frequently intervened just as his mind unfolded; and in the of calling his 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 preparation for a long, productive evening. The room was at a proper temperature; the admirably stocked; pipes, cigars, and cigarettes at hand; his stenographer in her usual mood of negation—when an 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 of correspondence, or some little 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 ebullition—and cast the thing aside, never to be finished, at the first 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 feel the coming storm. Alone, he would give way to furious for himself and his , and by the startling of the drunken, hurry into a to . 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 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 that could not sleep was with passions, even perversions—how are these abominations—until a place where the wreck lay seemed with the conceptions of the dark. What pirates board the unhelmed mind of the drunken to and and the alien decks—wingless, crawling , 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 .
At the end of months of swift and dreadful dissipation, Charter 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 that the hour of fighting-it-out-alone was upon him. He and tried to sleep, cursed himself for losing consciousness so early in the day without having prepared his mind for the . 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 , poured the remaining liquor into the washbasin, and turned on the water to 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 , 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 plate. The flaccid passages in due time were flushed free from its sustaining alcohol; and every pore 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 .
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 are closed. This is so, even though a filled 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 doors to open, does not cease to shiver at the memory even in his finer years. It is not the 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 dawn for a place of cuspidors, flies, sticky woods, where bleared, messes of human flesh 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, 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 , a place covered with the stains of lust; that you should run from clean 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 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 . 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 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 . 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 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 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 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 until a wave, half of , half of weakness, slowed-down the of his mind.... Somewhere in the underworld, he found a consciousness—a dank smell, the dimness of a cave; the wash of in lazy curves across the black, sluggish water; an eye, green, , ashine like phosphor which is concentrated decay,—the eye of . His filled with the foreign odor of menageries and . 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 of slimy flesh.... Full against him upon the rock, in his half-submerged , lay the terror of all his obsessions—the crocodile. incarnations were shaken out of his soul as he regarded this beast, a terror so great that his throat shut, his . Still as a dead tree, the creature pressed against him, stomach, the narrow, yellow-brown head, moveless, raised from the rock. This was the armed he feared most—cruelty, patience, repletion—and the dirty-white of 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 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 a disordered plaint; then after a silence: "I served you—did my work well—very well—very well!..." Charter , wordlessly it to be still. It was not the value, but the 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, sixty yards away—its mate following . 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 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 for mercy. The little male was cross about it—bewildered, too, for its life-business was so important. The tortured boy dropped the of his gun upon the creature's head.... Now the tone changed—the 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 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, cry of his voice; silence mocking him.... Then, in , 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-. 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 to hock. He saw the yellow tendons and the gleaming white bone. She was half-up, half-down, the smoky look of torture and in her brown eyes....
Finally came back his inexorable memories—one after another, his nights of ............