THE HILL-CABIN
1
MORNING sat in the yielding leather of the _Boabdil_ library,
quite as if he had passed his youth in the midst of people who
talk of doing things. Liaoyang had been written, even the abandoned
impediments of retreat covered. It had all come to pass quite
according to the early ideas of Noyes and Field. John Morning was
Liaoyang in America. His book _Liaoyang_, magazine and newspaper
articles gathered together, was established as important authority in
encyclopædic and other reference books. The most captious must grant
that living man can do no more than this.
Morning had dined with the president. One after another he had made
every magazine of note, and much money. He had done his own story of
the journey, which proved more of a comment maker than the battle
description; and his article on the deck passages of the Chinese
coolies will always be an incentive to foreign missions. New York had
waited upon him, had exploited him, given him bewildering payments, and
called him everything, even Hugoesque and Tolstoianic. It was very hard
for Morning to retain the conviction that there wasn’t ten pages of all
this copy that ranked in sheer value with the ten pages of Fallows’
_Ploughman_. He didn’t for awhile.
Liaoyang was on in full magazine blast in America, while Mukden and
Sha River were being fought across the world. At this time Morning
spent an hour a day, as war-expert for a particularly incessant daily
newspaper of New York. So all people knew what the campaign was about,
and what certain generals might do, from past grooves of their wearing
in history. Also German gentlemen of military pasts wrote letters
disputing the prophecies. Morning had certainly arrived.
The condition or place of arrival was slippery. The peace of Portsmouth
had been protocoled.... Liaoyang, deep in the valley of desuetude, was
without even the interest of perspective. The name, Liaoyang, made the
mind of the world lame.... Even in the heat of arrival, the thing had
puzzled him. Money ceased to gladden him after a few mails; did not
spare him from the nearest irritation. Plainly he was quite the same
John Morning after appearing in the great magazines as before; and the
people whom he had interested were mainly of the same sort that had
come forward in the _Polander_ bar.
He had been a sick man since the Hun Crossing. When the big New York
task was finished, and it was done with something of the same drive
of will that characterized the second writing of the main story on
board the _Sickles_, he was again ready to break, body and
brain. Running down entirely, he had reached that condition which has
an aversion to any task. His productive motors had long lain in the
dark, covered from the dust. This was the time he clubbed about. The
_Boabdil_ was a favorite, but even here, men drew up their chairs
from time to time, day and night, dispatching the waiter for drink and
saying:
“Those Japs are pretty good fighters, aren’t they?” or, “What do you
consider will become of China in the event of----” or, very cheerily,
“Well, Mr. Morning, are you waiting for another war?”
He slept ill; drank a very great deal; the wound in his side had not
healed and he had made no great friends. He thought of these four
things on this particular mid-day in the _Boabdil_ library....
Nearby was old Conrad with the morning papers, summoning the strength
to dine. It was usually late in the afternoon, before he arose to
the occasion, but with each stimulant, he informed the nearest
fellow-member that he was going to eat something presently. The old
man stopped reading to think about it. After much conning, he decided
that he had better have just one more touch of this with a dash of
that--which he took slowly, listening for comment from within....
After dinner he would smoke himself to sleep and begin preparing for
the following morning’s chops. “Eat twice a day, sir--no more--not for
years.”
Conrad in his life had done one great thing. In war-time, before the
high duty was put on, he had accumulated a vast cellar full of whiskey.
That had meant his hour. Riches, a half century of rich dinners,
clean collars and deep leather chairs--all from that whiskey sale....
“Picturesque,” they said of Conrad at the _Boabdil_. “What would
the club do without him?”...
Morning watching him now, remembered an old man who used to sit at a
certain table in a Sixth avenue bar. The high price of whiskey had
reversed conditions in this case, and a changed collar meant funeral or
festivity. Forty years ago this old man had bred a colt that became a
champion. That was his hour, his answer for living. After all, Morning
concluded, having seen Conrad fall asleep one night, the old horseman
was less indecent.
Finally Morning thought of the little Englishman at Tongu and the
blanket; then of Fallows and Nevin--Fallows saying, “Come on upstairs,”
that day of their first meeting at the _Imperial_, and Nevin
saying, “Well, you gave me a night----” .... Morning began to laugh.
“Picturesque, what-would-we-do-without Conrad”--sitting five days and
nights on the deck passage from the mouth of the Pei-ho to the lowest
port of Japan....
He hadn’t thought much of Nevin and Fallows and the Tongu Endicott in
the months that followed his arrival from San Francisco, when the work
went with a rush. And Betty Berry--there were times when he was half
sure she--name, Armory and all--formed but an added dream that Nevin
had injected hypodermically the night before.
Morning could think about all these now. The editors had begun to tell
what _they_ wanted. He had sent in stuff which did not meet their
needs. He was linked to war in their minds. Moreover, plentiful money
had brought to the surface again his unfinished passion to gamble,
as his present distaste for work had increased the consumption of
alcohol.... It was _Reverses_ that reminded him of Fallows and
Nevin and the Tongu blanket and the angel he had entertained in the
Armory room.
Editors didn’t care for his fiction. “A good war story is all right
any time,” they said, but apparently his were not, for five or six
trials didn’t take. He had a tendency to remember Fallows when he
wrote fiction. The story of the Ploughman came curiously back to mind,
when he was turned loose from straight narrative, and he was “balled”
between planes.... He thought of a play....
Varce now came into the library and drew up a chair. Varce had
one of his stories; Varce edited a magazine that sold several
million every two weeks. Long ago, with great effort, and by paying
prodigiously, Varce had secured from Morning one of the final tiles
of the great Liaoyang mosaic.... Varce was tall, a girl’s dream of
poet-knight--black, wavy hair, straight excellent features, a figure
lean enough for modern clothes.
“Morning,” he said, “do you know the fighting game?”
“You mean pugilistically?”
“Yes.”
“I used to do fights.”
Varce went on presently:
“A great series of articles is to be written on the boyhood and general
atmosphere of the men who have made great ring history--big stuff, you
know--well written--from a man who can see the natural phenomena of
these bruisers--how they are bred and all that. Now three things go
into the fighter--punch, endurance, but, most of all, instinct--the
stuff that doesn’t let him ‘lay down’ when the going is rough, and
doesn’t keep him from putting the wallop on a groggy opponent. Many a
good fighter has missed championship because he was too tender-hearted
to knock-out a helpless----”
“Do you like that story of mine you have, Varce?” Morning asked yawning.
“Oh, it’s a good enough story--a bit socialistic--what are you trying
to get at?”
“No need of me furnishing diagrams, if the manuscript leaves you that
way,” Morning said. “You were just saying about the last touch to a
beating--yes, I’ve heard about those three things----”
“Do you want the series?”
“No, I’m doing a play.”
... After Varce had gone, Morning thought it all out again. Varce was
living a particularly unmitigated lie. Five years ago he had done
some decent verse. He had a touch of the real poetic vision, and he
had turned it to trade. He was using it now to catch the crowd. An
especially sensational prostitution, this--one that would make the
devil scratch his head.... And Varce could do without him. Liaoyang had
not made the name of John Morning imperative. Moreover, he himself was
living rotten. He wished he had told Varce what he thought of him and
his multi-millionaire subscription.... He hadn’t; he had merely spoken
of his play. The bridges were not burned behind him. He might be very
glad to do a series of “pug” stories for Varce. There were good stories
in these fighters--but the good stories, as he saw them, were not what
Varce saw in the assignment.
It summed up that he was just beginning over again; that he must beat
the game all over again in a different and larger dimension--or else
quit.... He ordered a drink.... He could always see himself. That was a
Morning faculty, the literary third eye. He saw himself doing a series
of the fighters--saw it even to the red of the magazine covers, and the
stuff of the announcements.... John Morning, the man who did fifty-mile
fronts at Liaoyang, putting all his unparalleled battle color in the
action of a 24-foot ring. Then the challenge to the reader: “Can
you stand a descriptive force of this calibre? If you can, read the
story of the great battle between Ambi Viles and Two-pill Terry in
next issue.”... He would have to tell seriously before the battle
description, however, how Ambi was a perfect gentleman and the sole
support of his mother, an almost human English gentlewoman. It is well
to be orthodox.
Somebody spoke of whiskey in the far end of the library, insisting
on a certain whiskey, and old Conrad cocked up his ears out of a
meaty dream.... Morning closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of a ship
beneath, the drive of the cold rain on deck and the heaving of the
sea. There was something almost sterile-clean about that deck-passage,
compared to this.... Then he remembered again the men he had known,
and the woman who came to the Armory room--and the long breath his
soul took, with her coming.... Finally he saw himself years hence,
as if he had quit the fight now and taken New York and Varce as they
meant to use him.... He was sunk in leather, blown up like an inner
tube and showing red, stalled in some club library, and forcing the
world to remember Liaoyang, bringing down the encyclopædia to show his
name, when extra drunk.... No, he would be hanging precariously to some
porter job on Sixth avenue, trying to make the worn and tattered edges
of his world believe how he had once carried the news from Liaoyang to
Koupangtse....
A saddle-horse racked by on the asphalt, and turned into the park.
Morning arose. There was stabbing and scalding from the unhealed wound
in his side. The pain reminded him of the giants he had once known and
of the woman who came to the Armory room. It had always been so; always
something about him unsound, something that would not heal. He had
accepted eagerly, but ever his giving had been paltry. And he had to
be pulled down, out of the shine of fortune, before he remembered how
great other men had been to him.
2
THAT night he dreamed that he had passed through death.... He was
standing upon a cliff, between the Roaming Country and a valley of
living earth. He did not want the spirit region; in his dream he turned
his back upon it. He did not want the stars. Illusion or not, he wanted
the earth. He looked down upon it through the summer night, down
through the tree-tops into a valley that lay in the soft warm dusk. He
watched with the passion and longing of a newly-dead mother, who hears
her child crying for her, and senses the desolation of her mate....
The breath of earth came up to him through the exhaling leaves--leaves
that whispered in the mist. He could have kissed the soil below for
sheer love of it. He wanted the cool, damp earth in his hands, and the
thick leaf-mould under his feet, and the calm wide listening of the
trees.... Stars were near enough, but earth was not. He wanted to be
down, down in the drip of the night. He would wait in ardor for the
rain of the valley.... Looking down through the tree-tops, he sensed
the earth passion, the lovely sadness of it--and desired it, even if he
must die again.... There was an ache in the desire--like the ache of
thirst that puts all other thoughts away, and turns the dream and the
picture to running water.
He awoke, and went to his window in the dark. He saw New York and
realized that he was dying for the country. His eyes smarted to tears,
when he remembered rides and journeys and walks he had taken over the
earth, so thoughtlessly, without knowing their boon and beauty and
privilege.... While he was standing there, that which he had conceived
as To-morrow, became To-day, and appeared over the rim of the opposite
gorge of apartments. The first light of it sank far down into the tarry
stuffiness of the pavement, but the dew that fell with the dawn-light
was pure as heaven to his nostrils.
That day he crossed the river, and at the end of a car-line beyond
Hackensack, walked for a half-hour. It was thus that Morning found his
hill. Just a lifted corner of a broad meadow, with a mixed company of
fine trees atop. He bought it before dusk. The dairyman’s farmhouse was
a quarter-mile distant; the road, a hundred and fifty yards from the
crest of the hill, with trees thinly intervening. The south was open to
even wider fields; in the far distance to the west across the meadows,
the sky was sharpened by a low ribbon of woods and hill-land. In the
east was the suspended silence of the Hudson.
“I want a pump and a cabin, and possibly a shed for a horse,” he said,
drinking a glass of buttermilk, at the dairyman’s door.
He was directed to Hackensack.
With the falling darkness again upon the hills, he saw that certain
crowded, mid-growth trees were better down. The fine thought of
building his cabin of them occurred. By the time he reached Hackensack,
the house of logs was so dear in thought, that he wanted nothing short
of a cabinet-joiner for such a precious task. That night he met Jake
Robin, who was sick of nailing at houses in rows, a job that had long
since ceased to afford deep breaths to his capacity.
The next day Morning moved to Hackensack, and Jake was at work....
Three thousand he had lost gambling ... he wished he had it now.
Much more had been lost, and not so cleanly, in reaching the final
_Boabdil_ realization, but he had enough. Presently he was helping
Jake, and there was joy in it.
They tapped a spring some thirty feet beneath the humped shoulder of
the hill; built a shed for the horse he had not yet found, and then
fitted the cabin to the fire-place of concrete and valley stone. One
sizeable room it was, that faced the open south from the brow of the
hill.
A fine unfolding--this love of Morning’s for wood itself, and woods.
Over a half-hundred trees were his own--elm, beech, hickory, oak,
ash, and maple--and like a fine clean colony of idealists they stood
meditating.... One never knows the quality of wood until one builds
his own house. Opening the timbers for the big mortices--each was a
fresh and fragrant discovery. Jake and he lingered long, after the
cabin was roofed, over the heavy oak flooring, and the finishing of
windows and doors and frames. They built some furniture together of
hickory, which is a wood a man should handle with reverence, for it is
fine in its way as wheat and grapes and honey and wild olives. Hickory
answers graciously to the work of the hand, and, like a good dog,
flourishes with men.... They built a table and bed-frame and a chest
of drawers; and Morning at last went to Hackensack for pots, kettles,
and tea things. Jake Robin, like one who has built a ship, was loath to
leave without trying the cabin. Morning kept him busy in the clearing,
long after he was in the mood to start work on the play. There was a
platform to build for the pump; also a certain rustic bench. The shed
needed tinkering; an extra cabinet for books was indispensable--and
screens.... No one had ever let Jake play before in his life....
Moreover, he was paid for the extra hour required to walk to and from
town. All Hack heard about it.
“You’ll need a chicken-coop----”
“No,” said Morning. The look on Jake’s face was like old Amoya’s in
Tokyo, when the rickshaw-runner was forbidden to take him to the
Yoshuwara.
“I can fit you up a little ice-box near the spring--so’s you’ll pump it
full of water, and keep your vittles----”
Morning wanted the stillness for the play, but he couldn’t refuse. Two
days more. Then Jake scratched his head.
“You’ll be wantin’ a vine on the cabin,” he ventured. “I know the man
who has the little ivies.”
This was irresistible. “Can you see me owning a vine?” asked Morning.
Yet there was significance in the idea together with the play.
“And I’ll build a bit of a trainer to start it. By the end of
summer----”
“Bring it on, Jake----”
“An’ I’ll fetch a couple of rose vines, and dreen them with broken
crockery from the holler----”
The vine prospered and the play; and the roses began to feel for Jake’s
trellis. The tool-box was still there.
“You’ll be needin’ fire-wood for the winter. To be sure, you can buy
it, but what’s the good, with dead stuff to be knocked down and small
trees to be thinned out, and the shed gapin’ open for the saddle-horse
you’re not sure of findin’? It’s wood you ought to have in there----”
In fact, it was no small task to break Jake of the hill-habit. Morning
grew accustomed to the ax, and the crashing of branches, many of which
would have been sacrificed to the strong winds of the Fall. Meanwhile,
the shed had come into its own, and there were piles of firewood
seasoning in the sun and shade.
He was alone with the nights; sitting there in his doorway when it was
fine, studying the far lights of the city.... City lights meant Varce
and Conrad, not his great friends. Every hour that he looked, he liked
better the wind about the doorway and the open southern fields.
One night he felt his first twinge of sorrow for the big city.
Hatred, it had been before. Other men were tortured as he had been,
but somehow, the way didn’t get into their dreams and drive them
forth, as he had been driven. They were really not to blame for
_Boabdilling_; they sank into the cushions and lost the sense of
reality. And then the thousands in the hall-bedrooms and worse, to whom
_Boabdil_ was heaven’s farthest pavilion! Morning seemed to have
something to say to those thousands, but wasn’t ready yet.
He longed for Fallows, whom he saw more clearly every day--especially
since the _Ploughman_ had crept into the play.... He wanted to
wait upon the big sick man; to have him here, to prepare food for him,
and sit with him in these silences. He wanted Endicott at Tongu, too,
and Nevin--oh, yes, Nevin. It was like a prayer that he sent out some
nights--for the unearthing of these giants from their hiding--so that
he could listen to them, and serve them and make them glad for their
giving to him.
* * * * *
A deep summer night. The purple of the north seemed washed and thinned
in ether, (nothing else could bring out the heavenly lustre of it),
and the black, fragile top-foliage of the woods leaned against it,
listening, feminine. Darkness only on the ground; yet he loved it, the
heart of the dusk that throbbed there. He loved the earth and the water
that mingled in the hollows. He breathed with strange delight the air
that brushed the grass and the clover-scent that came to him around the
hill.... And this was the momentary passion--that he was going from all
this. He loved it as one who was passing beyond. It was like the dream
after all. Just as Mother Earth was unfolding, he was called. She was
like a woman long lived-with, but unknown, until the sudden revelation
of parting.... He touched the stones with his hand.
In the hush, waiting for a katydid to answer, that night, Morning fell
asleep.... He had climbed to his cabin, as if it were a room on an
upper floor. Before he opened the door, he knew someone was within.
Before the light, it was clear that someone was curled up asleep on the
foot of his hard bed.... Yes, it was she who had restored his soul,
that day at the Armory--and there she lay sleeping.... He did not call
her, as he had called Moto-san; there was no thought to waken her, for
everything was so pure and lovely about it. He stood there, and watched
her gratefully--it seemed a long time--until the katydid answered.
3
AFTER Markheim had kept the play three months--it was now
November--Morning crossed to the city to force the decision.
The producer was prevailed upon to see him.
“It will be read once more,” said Markheim. “It will go or not. We like
it, but we are afraid of it. To-morrow we will know or not.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I don’t know. I do not read plays.”
“To-morrow?”
“Yes.”
Markheim bought his opinions, and was attentive to those which cost the
most....
Morning drew a napkin the size of a doll’s handkerchief from a pile. A
plate of eggs and bacon rung, as if hitting a bull’s-eye upon the white
marble before him. He was still wondering what Markheim was afraid of.
He didn’t like the feel of it. The Lowenkampf of Duke Fallows’ had
crept into the play--Lowenkampf, whose heart was pulled across the
world by the mother and child. How they had broken his concentration on
the eve of the great battle.
At the time, he had seen the tragic sentimentalist as one caught in a
master weakness, but all that was gone. Lowenkampf still moved white in
his fancy, while the other generals, even Mergenthaler, had become like
the dim mounds in his little woodland.... And what a dramatic thing, to
have a woman and a child breaking in upon the poised force of a vast
Russian army. It was like Judith going down into the valley-camp of the
Assyrians and smiting the neck of Holofernes with his own fauchion.
Morning’s mind trailed away in the fascination of Fallows, and in the
dimension he had been unable to grasp in those black hours of blood....
So many things were different after this summer alone; yet he had never
seemed quite rested, neither in mind nor body.... He had been all but
unkillable like the sorrel Eve before that journey from Liaoyang to New
York. Now, even after the ease and moral healing of the summer alone,
his wound was unhealed....
The telephone-miss in Markheim’s reception-room was very busy when
he called the next afternoon.... Something about her reminded him
of _Mio Amigo_. She was a good deal sharper. Was it the brass
handle?... To hear her, one would think that she had come in late, and
that New York needed scolding, even spanking, which exigencies of time
and space deferred for the present. Her words were like the ‘spat,
spat, spat,’ of a spanking.... She was like an angry robin, too, at one
end of a worm. She bent and pulled, but the worm had a strangle-hold on
a stone. It gave, but would not break.... Morning saw the manuscript
at this point on her side-table, and the fun of the thing was done....
She looked up, trailed a soft _arpeggio_ on the lower-right of her
board, grasped the manuscript firmly, and shoved it to him.
“Mr. Morning to see Mr. Markheim,” he said.
“Mr. Markheim is----”
But the husky voice of the producer just now reached them from within.
“Busy----” she finished with a cough.... New York was at it again.
_Stuyvesant_ especially had a devil, and _Bryant_ was the
last word.
“... You can’t see Mr. Markheim. This is your message----”
“Oh, it really isn’t. This is just an incident. I hesitate to trouble
you, but I must see Mr. Markheim.”
The play was wrapped in the identical paper in which it had been
brought.
She must have touched something, for a boy came in--a younger brother,
past doubt--but so bewildered, as to have become habitually staring.
“Tell Mr. Markheim, Mr. Morning insists on seeing him.”
The boy seemed on the point of falling to his knees to beg for mercy.
Morning’s personal distemper subsided. Here was a drama, too--the great
American stage.... One word came out to him from Markheim:
“In-zists!”
“How do you do, Mr. Morning--good afternoon.”
Markheim had his hand in a near drawer, and was smiling with something
the same expression that old Conrad used when listening for the dinner
notice.
“You see we do not want it--we are afraid,” he began, and becoming
suddenly hopeful, since Morning drew forth no bomb, he added, “You have
a girl’s idea of war, Mr. Morning--good afternoon.”
He liked his joke on the name. “We were in doubt about the war
part--afraid--and so we consulted an expert--one who was on the spot,”
he said pleasantly.
Morning’s mind was searching New York; his idea was fateful.
“We are not bermidded to divulge who the expert is, but we did not
spare money----”
Morning’s eye was held to the desk over the shoulder of Markheim, to a
large square envelope, eminent in blue, upon the corner of which was
the name “Reever Kennard.”
“I’m sure you did not. He was always a high-priced man,” he said
idly.... And so this was the long-delayed answer to his appearance in
the _World-News_ to the extent of eighty thousand words. He had
heard that Mr. Reever Kennard was back on finance and politics....
Markheim had not followed his mind nor caught the sentence. Morning
passed out through the hush. He paused at the door to give the
office-boy a present--a goodly present to be divided with the sister,
just now occupied with a fresh outbreak of obstreperousness on the part
of _Gramercy_.
* * * * *
Morning had moments of something like the old rage; but the extreme
naturalness of the thing, and its touch of humor, helped him over for
the next hour or so. Apparently, the opportunity had fallen into the
lap of Mr. Reever Kennard; come to him with homing familiarity. The
war-expert had spoken, not as one offering his values gratuitously,
but as one called and richly paid. Morning reflected that the summer
alone on his hill must have subdued him. As a matter of fact, he was
doubtful about the play; not because Markheim was afraid; not by any
means because Mr. Reever Kennard had spoken, but because it had not
come easily, and the three incidents which made the three acts did
not stand up in his mind as the exact trinity for the integration of
results. But one cannot finally judge his own work.
He wandered straight east from that particular theatre of Markheim’s
where the offices were and passed Fourth Avenue. He never went quite
that way again, but remembered that there was an iron picket-fence of
an old residence to lean against; and at the corner of it, nearer town,
the sidewalk sank into a smoky passage where lobsters, chops, and a
fowl or two were tossed together in front. It was all but dark. He was
averse to taking his present mood across the river. It wasn’t fair to
the cabin. _Mio Amigo_ recurred queerly and often to mind....
“Look--there’s Mr. Morning----”
“Sh-sh--oh, Charley--sh-sh!”
Morning was compelled. Could this little shrinking creature, beside
whom the under-sized brother now appeared hulking, be the same who had
bossed Manhattan to a peak in his presence such a little while ago? She
seemed terrified, all pointed for escape, sick from the strain of the
street.
“Why, hello!” Morning said.
She pulled her brother on, saying with furious effort of will, “I’m
sure we’re much obliged for your present----”
“I had forgotten that,” Morning said.
“We’re going to take in the show,” the boy remarked, drawing back. At
large, thus, he was much better to look upon.
“Come on, Charley--we mustn’t detain----”
Morning had an idea, and looked at the sister as he said, “Won’t you
have supper with me somewhere? I have nothing----”
Her face was livid--as if all the fears of a lifetime had culminated
into the dreadful impendings of this moment. She tried to speak....
Then it came to Morning in a belated way that she thought she was
accosted; that she connected his gift with this meeting. He couldn’t
let her go now--and yet, it was hard for him to know what to say.
“I mean we three,” he began hastily. “This play being refused rather
knocked me out, and I didn’t know what to do with the evening. I don’t
live in New York, you know. I thought you and your brother--that we
might have supper together----”
He spoke on desperately, trying to stir to life the little magpie
sharpness again. It was more to her brother she yielded. New York
must have frightened her terribly.... Morning managed to get down to
the pair that night. He was clumsy at it, however, for it was a new
emprise. Mostly John Morning had been wrapped and sealed in his own
ideas. The boy was won with the first tales of war, but the sister
remained apart with her terrors. No one had taught her that kindness
may be a motive in itself.
And now Morning was coping with what seemed a real idea: What was the
quality of the switch-board that harnessed her character? Here she was
wild and disordered--like a creature denied her drug. With that mystic
rumble of angry New York in her ears--the essential buzz of a million
desires passing through her--she was a force, flying and valuable
force. Was she lain open to obsession now because she was removed from
that slavery? Was that maddening vibration the lost key to her poise?
He tried hard, not daring to be attentive in the least. She would have
fled, if he had. He was boyishly kind to her brother. That awed, and
was beginning to hold her.
Morning saw clearly that she stood like a stretched wing between her
brother’s little soul and the world. She could be brave in sheltering
Charley. The boy was really alive. He ate and answered and listened
and lived, the show ahead.... In the midst of it, Morning awoke to the
fact that he was having a good time; and here was the mystery--with
the last two people in New York he would have chosen; a two, his
whole life-business had taught him to employ thoughtlessly, as other
metropolitan adjuncts--pavements, elevators, messengers. Here was life
in all its terror and complication, the same struggles he had known;
yet he had always seen himself as a sort of Titan alone in the great
destroying elements. The joke was on him.
Charley left them for just a moment. The sister said, as if thinking
aloud:
“... And yet, he cries every morning because he has to go to the
office. Oh, he wouldn’t go there without me----”
A world of meaning in that. They were sitting in the dark of the
_Charity Union_ play-house, with Charley between them. The aims
and auspices of the performance were still indefinite to Morning, who
had not ceased to grapple with his joke--the seriousness with which he
had habitually regarded John Morning, his house, his play, his unhealed
wound, his moral debility....
For fifteen minutes a giant had marvelously manhandled his companion.
The curtain dropped an instant, and in the place where the giant had
performed now stood a ’cello and a chair.... She came on like the
wraith of an angel--and sat down and played.... How long she played
Morning never knew, but somewhere in it he caught his breath as one
who had come back to life.... And then she was gone. The audience was
mildly applauding. He turned to the sister leaning on the knees of the
boy:
“I know her. She is very dear to me. If you don’t mind, I’ll leave you
now. You are safe with Charley--and some time again I’ll come. I thank
you very much. I really want to do this again--we three----”
Even though his own joy was bewildering, he saw the sudden happiness
of Charley’s sister, who, in spite of all, had been haunted by the
dread of the _afterward_. Now that was gone from her. Relief was
in her face. It was all so much better than she had dared to hope. He
had wanted nothing--except to be kind--and now he was going. She gave
her hand impulsively.... Charley did, too, and was ordered to call a
carriage for his sister if he wished; at all events, the means was
attended.... Then they saw him making his way forward--putting money
into the hands of ushers, and inquiring the way to the stage.... And
she was there, playing again.
4
SHE was making the people like her. Her effect was gradual.
They had been held by more obvious displays. The instrument seemed
very big for her, but the people liked her all the better for this....
He could not be one with the audience, but the old watching literary
eye--the third eye--caught the sense of the people’s growing delight.
She made them feel that she belonged to them; as if she said:
“I have come back to you. I will do just what you ask. Everything I
have is yours----”
It was different and dearer to John Morning than anything he had ever
known. The picture came clearly to him as he walked around behind....
This was the hour of her return. She had gone from the hearts of her
people long ago to bring back music. It was the beautiful old story
of their sacrifice to send her away. How splendidly she had learned;
how thrillingly they remembered her beginnings. And she had never
forgotten; she would always love and thank them--indeed, she was
happier than any now.... Morning was lost for a moment in his story.
She was approaching, but did not see him yet. The house was pleased
with her, not noisily, but pleasantly. She turned to bow to the
people--and then back toward the wings. She saw him standing there.
Her arms went out to him, though she had not quitted the stage.... The
gesture was new to the people.... It was different from her coming to
him at the Armory.... They were standing together.
“Why don’t you go on again?” a voice said, and with a queer irritation
in the tone.
... She was playing again--and with dash and power.
Morning had to shut his eyes now, really to hear; and yet, he could
not summon her face to mind when his eyes were shut. He thought with
a quick burn of shame that he had once wished her prettier. Sadness
followed, for, it seemed to him, their meeting had been broken. She
belonged to the people and not to him. They loved her.... She was
different. He saw it now. The audience, so pleased and joyous, lifted
her in a way perhaps that he could never do.
It was everywhere--the music. It filled the high, brick-walled stage,
vibrated in the spiral stairways, moved mysteriously in the upper
darkness and immensity. Behind the far wings a man was moving up and
down in a sort of enchantment--no, he was memorizing something. A few
of the far front rows were visible from where Morning stood, and the
forward boxes opposite....
Morning was wandering in a weird land, a hollow land. The woman’s
playing was between him and the world of men; half for them, half for
him. The Memorizer was but another phantom, wandering with the ghost of
a manuscript. Between Morning and the player was only the frail, fluent
current of music. This was a suspense of centuries.... Would she go to
_Them_, or return to Him? The tall, dim canvases were fields of
emptiness and silence, in which he wandered listening, tortured with
tension; and the loft was sunless, moonless, unearthly....
The music ceased. He heard the calling of the other world to her. He
was apart in the shadows. Would she go to them, or would she remember
him, waiting?... She was coming. He heard her step behind the wings.
It was light as a gloved hand upon a table. He was hungry and athirst
and breathless. For the first time he saw that her throat and arms
were bare.... They were standing together again, but the Other Phantom
intercepted.
It was the Memorizing Man. He came forward in an agony of excitement.
“You’ll have to prompt me,” he said to Betty Berry, speaking roughly in
his tension. “It’s my first time with this new dope. I thought I had
it, but I ain’t--and there’s a barrel of it.”
The stage was slightly changed. Morning was thinking how hideous the
work of some men. The Phantom was scourged with the fear of one who was
to do imperfectly what another had written. The woman had carried a
small table and chair to the wings, out of view of the audience and as
near as possible to the Memorizer.... Morning found something soft and
fragrant in his hands. Betty Berry’s wrap, which she had given to him
before going to the table. And now the monologue had begun.... It was
to be humorous.
Betty Berry, standing beside the table, raised her eyes from the paper,
and beckoned to Morning. His first thought was that he might disturb
her prompting, and he hesitated. She looked up again. Then he thought
she might want her wrap. He tiptoed forward and put it around her
shoulders.
“It wasn’t that,” she whispered, her eyes upon the paper. “I wanted you
to keep me company. This is long. Sit down.”
“Won’t _you_--sit down?” he said from behind, very close to her
hair.
She shook her head.... It was peculiar--she standing, and he in the
chair. The soft wrap winged out, and her arm beneath slid across his
shoulder; the hollow of her left arm against his cheek. He kissed it,
and his face burned against its coolness.
She shivered slightly, but did not take her arm away. Now he looked
up into her face--her eyelids drawn, her lips compressed, her gaze
steadily held to the manuscript. The Phantom was carried on by the
alien humor. Laughter was beginning to crackle here and there through
the house. Betty Berry followed with her eyes--just the words.
“I was so glad to find you,” Morning whispered.
Her lips moved.
Matters tumbled over each other in his mind to say to her; he was
thinking sentences rather than words. He knew that it was not well
to talk now, but there seemed so much to say, and so little time. He
caught himself promising to give her understanding, and he told her
that she seemed everything he wanted to know. His cheek was burning as
never before....
The remotest happened. The Phantom faltered in a climax, and covered
the difficulty with a trick--awaiting the line from the wings. Betty
Berry had become rigid. Her eyes would not see the page.
Morning spoke a sentence in a low, carrying way. He had plucked it from
the page painfully near his own eyes. It may be that the Memorizer
righted himself, or that the prompted line was what he needed. Anyway,
he was going again, and rising to the end....
* * * * *
The two stood together while the house laughed, recalling the performer.
“Thanks. I caught it fine,” the Phantom said hastily. “Not even the
front rows knew. I was listening for Miss Berry--and your cue came----”
“It went all right,” said Morning.
The other took the manuscript and passed on, rolling a cigarette....
For just a moment, the two were alone. Into each other’s arms they
went, with the superb thoughtlessness of children ... and then they
heard steps and voices.... He wondered that Betty Berry could laugh and
reply to those who spoke to her.... He wanted to escape with her. Never
had he wanted anything so much. He was exhausted, humbled, inspired. To
be out in the street with her--it seemed almost too good to be.... She
was saying good-night and good-bye. He followed, carrying the ’cello.
5
MORNING remembered that he had thought of her once before as having
braids down behind--as if they were boy and girl together, and now it
seemed as if they were wandering through some Holland street. He had
never been in a Holland street, but the sense of it came to him--as he
walked with her, carrying her instrument. His primary instinct was to
turn away from the noise of the cars, and where the lights were less
glaring. Moreover, now that they were alone, the impulse to say many
things had left him.
“We must hurry to the ferry--there is only a few minutes----”
He had known somehow that she was going away--perhaps from something
she had said to the others at the theatre.
“You’re not going way back to--to the Armory?”
“No, to Europe just for a few weeks. I sail to-morrow morning from
Baltimore. All we have to do is to catch the ferry and train. I have
sleeper-tickets--and berth and all----”
“I’ll--I’ll go across on the ferry with you,” he said huskily.
She felt his suffering by her own, and said:
“My old master is there. I am to meet him--I think in Paris--I shall
know when I reach London. There is to be just a few private concerts
and some lessons further from him. For two years we’ve planned to do
this. I go to Baltimore, because it is cheaper to sail from there----”
“And you’ll be back--when?”
“By the first of March--just a few days over three months----”
He was silent for a time, and then asked: “Do you think this is just
like a chance meeting to me--as one meets an old friend in New York?”
“No.”
“I was in a whirl when I saw you,” he said desperately. “It was such a
pretty thing, too--the way I happened to come to the theatre ... and
now you’re going away----”
“Yes--yes--but it’s only a little while----”
“Did you know I was here in New York?”
“I knew you had been. I saw your work----”
“But anywhere my work appears--a letter sent in care of the paper or
magazine would find me----”
“We--I mean women--do not write that way----”
“I know--I know.... But _I_ didn’t have anything but the name,
‘Betty Berry’----”
* * * * *
“It seemed that night after I left you at the Armory everyone was
talking about John Morning. And to think I supposed you just a
soldier. Everywhere, it was what John Morning had done, and what he
had endured--and I had spent the afternoon with you. I started to read
that story about your journey, but I couldn’t go on. It seemed that I
would die before I was half through your sufferings.... I would try
to think of the things we said, but they didn’t come back. I couldn’t
rest. I was glad you asked me to come again. I could hardly wait for
the morning--to go back to the Armory----”
He had no answer. They were in a cross-town car.
“But I think I understand. We won’t say anything of that again....”
“You went back to the Armory that next morning?”
“Yes----”
“Oh, but I wasn’t ready,” he said at last, as if goaded by pain. “I had
so much to learn. Why, I had to learn this--how little this means----”
He pointed out of the windows to the city streets.
“You mean New York?”
“Yes----”
“It really seems as if men must learn that, first of all. You have done
well to learn so soon.”
“It’s so different now. I must have been half-unconscious that day when
you came. You were like an angel. I didn’t know until afterward what
it really meant to me.... You remember the men who came--newspaper
men? They showed me what I could do in New York--how I could make the
magazines and the big markets. I was knocked-out. You must see it--all
I wanted to do in coming years--to make what seemed the real literary
markets--all was to be done in a few weeks.... It was not until I was
on the train that night that I remembered you were a living woman, and
had come to me.... Then I didn’t know what to do.... But ever since I
have thought of that afternoon, every day....”
They boarded the ferry and moved away from the rest of the people.
“I hate to have you go,” he said. The words were wrung from him. They
were such poor and common words, but his every process of thought
repeated them. He looked back the years, and found a single afternoon
in the midst of passionate waste--the single afternoon in which she
came.... She was everything to him. He wanted to go on and on this way,
carrying her ’cello. He could ask no more than to have her beside him.
He had learned the rest--it was trash and suffering. He wanted to tell
her all he knew--not in the tension of this momentary parting--but
during days and years, to tell his story and have her sanction upon
what was done, and to be done. She was dear; peace was with her.... She
would tell him all that was mysterious; together they would be One Who
Knew. Together they would work--do the things that counted, and learn
faith....
She took the ’cello from him, so that he could carry to the Pullman her
large case checked in the Jersey station.... It was very quiet and dark
in the coach. All the berths were made up but one, in which they sat
down.... They were alone. It was perfect.
“I can’t go back now. I’ll go on with you to Trenton.... I have thought
so much of meeting you.... When the men came that day to the Armory
they showed me everything that seemed good then--fame and money waiting
in New York. It seemed that it couldn’t wait another day--that I must
go that night.... When the train started (it was like this in Oakland)
I thought of you--of you, back in ’Frisco and coming to the Armory in
the morning. It broke me. But I wasn’t right--not normal. I had worked
like a madman--wounds and all. I worked like a madman in New York----”
She put her hand on his. Her listening centered him. That was it--as if
he had not been whirling true before.... Her hand, her listening, and
he was himself--eager to give her all that was real.
“It’s so good to have you here,” she said in a low, satisfied way.
“Will you be able to get a train back all right?”
“Yes.” Now he thought of Charley and his sister.
“It was such a good little thing that brought me to you,” he said.
“One of the little things that I never thought of before,” he told her
hurriedly.
“They are very wonderful--those little things, as you call them.... A
person is so safe in doing them----”
“I must tell Duke Fallows about that,” he added. “About that word
‘safe,’ as you just said it.... Did you read his story?”
“About the _Ploughman_?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, it was wonderful!” Betty Berry said. “He made me see it. It was
almost worth a war to make people see that----”
She stopped strangely. He was bending close, watching her.
“Do you know you are a love-woman?”
“You mean something different?” she asked queerly.
“I mean you are everything--don’t you see? You know everything at once
that I have to get bruised and tortured to know. And when you are here,
I know where I am. It’s different from any kind of resting to be here
with you. It’s kind of being made over. And then you are so--tender----”
“You make the tears come, John Morning.”
Now, it was very dark where they were; the real silences began. He knew
the most wonderful thing about her--her listening.... Sometimes, she
seemed hardly there. Sometimes the love for her and the sweet quality
of it all--shut his throat, and he stared away in the dark. It came to
him that Betty Berry--left to herself--would be infallible. She might
do wrong, through the will of someone else, but her own impulses were
unerringly right. There was delicacy, perhaps, from the long summer
alone, in this sense that he must not impose his will. She would be
unable to refuse anything possible. If ever Betty Berry were forced to
refuse anything he asked, they would never be the same together. And
so he studied her. Her nature was like something that enfolded. It was
like an atmosphere--his own element.
“Betty----”
“Yes.”
“Betty----”
“Yes-----”
And then she laughed and kissed him. He was saying her name in the very
hush of contemplation; so real that the name was all....
6
THE Pullman conductor passing through after Trenton gave
Morning further passage, and moved on with a smile. A wonderful old
darkey was the porter, very huge, past seventy, with a voice purringly
kind, and the genial deference of the Old South. Morning was thinking
there couldn’t be better hands in which to leave the Betty Berry....
Fifteen minutes at Philadelphia; they hurried out for a cup of coffee.
As one of the big station clocks marked the minutes, Morning felt havoc
with a new and different force.
“I can’t go back now,” he said.
“You look so tired--the long night journey back----” she faltered.
“Would you like to have me go farther--to Wilmington--to Baltimore?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And you won’t mind staying up?”
Betty Berry covered her eyes.... “I never rested in quite the same way
as to-night,” she said. “It has been happy--so happy, unexpected. I
shall have nine days at sea to think of it--to play and think of it,
moment by moment.”
“I’ll go with you clear through to the ship then.”
The clock ceased its torment.
“Have you plenty of money to get back--and all?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure--because I could loan you some?”
He told her again, but the thought held a comradeship that gripped him.
It happened that he was plentifully supplied; though he would have
walked back rather than confess otherwise--a peculiar stupidity. The
beaming of the old porter made the moment at the steps of the coach so
fine, Morning found himself explaining:
“The lady is sailing from Baltimore in the morning. I’ve decided to go
clear through to the pier.”
This was an extraordinary thing for him to explain.
They sat in silence until the train moved, and they could forget the
snoring.... The coach grew colder, and Betty unpacked a steamer rug
which they used for a lap-robe. Even the old darkey went to sleep after
Wilmington.
“Letters--” she said at last. “I have been thinking about that....
There’s no way to tell where I am to be. I won’t know until London,
where I am to meet my old master. Perhaps then I could tell you--but
I daren’t think of letters and risk disappointment.... You must wait
until I write you----”
Morning began to count the days, and she knew what was in his mind.
“That’s just it--one gets to lean on letters. One’s letters are never
one’s self. I know that extended writing throws one out from the true
idea of another. I shall think of to-night during the weeks.... It
seems, we forgot the world to-night. There--behind the scenes--how
wonderful.... There was no thought about it. I just found myself in
your arms----”
“Then I am not to write--until I hear from you?” he asked. It had not
occurred to him before that she could have any deeper reason than an
uncertain itinerary.
“That will be best.... Don’t you see, writing is your work. It will
make you turn your training upon me. Something tells me the peril of
that. As to-night dimmed away--you would force the picture.... Trained
as you, one writes to what he wishes one to be, not to what one is....
You would make me all over to suit--and when I came, there would be a
shock.... And then think if some night--very eager and heart-thumping,
I should reach a city--so lonely and hungry for my letter--and it
shouldn’t be there.... No, to-night must do for me. I shall go on my
way playing and biding my time, until the return steamer. Then some
morning, about the first of March, you shall hear that I am back--and
that I am waiting for my real letter----”
“And where did you learn all this--about a man writing himself out of
the real?” John Morning asked wonderingly.
“If I were to be in one place to receive your letters, I might not have
thought of it--yet it is true.... Then, my letters are nothing. Perhaps
I am a little afraid to write to you. I think with the ’cello----”
“All that seems very old and wise, beyond my kind of thinking,” he said.
For a long time she was listening. It was like that first afternoon....
What did Betty Berry hear continually? It gave him a conception of
what receptivity meant--that quiescence of all that is common, that
abatement of the world and the worldly self, that quality purely
feminine. It was like a valley receiving the afternoon sunlight. He
realized vaguely at first that the mastery of self, necessary for such
listening, is the very state of being saints pray for, and practice
continually to attain.... Perhaps, he thought, this is the way great
powers come--from such listening--the listening of the soul; perhaps
such power would come again and again, if only the strength of it were
turned into service for men; perhaps it was a kind of prayer.... It was
all too vague for him to speak....
She was first to whisper that the dawn had come.
“I love you,” he said.
He saw her eyes with the daylight, as he had not seen them since that
first afternoon--gray eyes, very deep. The same strange hush came to
him from them. And there was a soft gray lustre with the morning about
her traveling-coat; and her brown hair seemed half-transparent against
the panes. No one was yet abroad in the coach.
“I don’t seem to belong at all--except that I love you,” he whispered.
“Tell me--what that means--oh, please----”
“When I think of what I am, and who I am, and what I have been--and
what common things I have done in the stupidity of thinking they were
good,” he explained with a rush of words: “when I think of the dozen
turnings in my life, when little things said or done by another have
kept me from greater shame and nothingness--oh, it doesn’t seem to me
that I belong at all to such a night as this! But when I feel myself
here, and see you, and how dear you are to me, how you wait for my
words, and what happiness this is together--then it comes to me that
I don’t belong to those other things, but only to this--that I could
never be a part of those old thoughts and ways, if you were always
near----”
“And I have waited a long time.... The world has said again and again,
‘He will never come,’ but something deeper of me--something deeper
than plays the ’cello, kept waiting on and on. That deeper me seemed to
know all the time.”
Talking and listening carried them on. John Morning had the different
phases of self segregated in an astonishing way. He spoke of himself
as man can only with a woman--making pictures of certain moments, as a
writer does. Volumes of emotion, they burned, talking and listening,
leaning upon each other’s words and thoughts. They were one, in a very
deep sense of joy and replenishment. They touched for moments the plane
of unity in which they looked with calm upon the parting, but the woman
alone poised herself there. They left the old darkey--a blessing in
his voice and smile. Such passages of the days’ journeys were always
important to Betty Berry.
Morning fell often from the heights to contemplate the journey’s
end and the dividing sea. In spite of his words, in spite of his
belief--his giving was not of her quality of giving. His replenishment
was less therefore.... They moved about the streets of Baltimore in
early morning. The baggage went on to the ship. An hour remained.
Sounds and passing people distracted him. The woman was fresher than
when he had seen her last night, but Morning was haggard and full of
needs.... She was a continual miracle, unlike anything that the world
held--different in every word and nestling and intonation. Much of her
was the child--yet from this _naive_ sweetness, her mood would
change to a womanhood which enfolded and completed him, so that they
were as a globe together. In such instants she brought vision to his
substance; mind to his brain, intuition to his logic, divination to his
reason, affinity to each element--enveloping him as water an island.
The touch of her hand was a kiss; and of her kiss itself, passion was
but the atmosphere; there was earth below and sky above.... She took
him to the state-room where she was to be, “so you will know where I
am when you think of me.”... They heard the knock of heels on the deck
above....
He could not think. He heard them calling for visitors to go ashore....
He thought once it was too late, and when he was really below on the
wharf and she above, and he realized that the wild hope of being taken
away with her, (his own will not entering, as the serpent entered
Eden,) he could hardly see her for the blur--not of tears, but of his
natural rending. Her voice was but one of many good-byes to the shore,
yet it came to him out of the tumult of voices and whistles--as a ewe
to find her own.
7
MORNING heard some one nearby say that so-and-so had not
really sailed, but was just going down the bay.... It was thus he
learned that he might have passed the forenoon with Betty Berry on
the Chesapeake. In fact, there was no reason for him not taking the
voyage.... In a quick rush of thinking, as he stood there on the
piers, all his weaknesses paraded before him, each with its particular
deformity. The sorry pageant ended with a flourish, and he was left
alone with the throb of the unhealed wound in his side.
Betty Berry would not have agreed to let him take the voyage, just for
the sake of being with her. He knew this instinctively, but perhaps it
might have been managed.... To think he had missed the chance of the
forenoon.... The liner was sliding down the passage, already forgotten
by the lower city.... Morning found himself looking into the window of
a drink-shop. Bottles and cases of wine in their dust and straw-coats
were corded in the window, which had an English dimness and look of
age. A quiet place; the signs attested that ales were drawn from
the wood and that many whiskeys of quality were within. Something
of attraction for the spirituous imagination was in the sweet woody
breath that reached him when he opened the door. A series of race-horse
pictures took his mind from himself to better things.
These influences played merely upon the under-surfaces of an
intelligence whose thoughts followed the steamer down the Chesapeake
as certainly as the flock of gulls.... It was that quiet time in the
morning, after the floors are washed. The day was bright, with just a
touch of cold in the air.
... A drink improved him generally. He examined the string of horses
again, and talked to the man behind. The man declared it was his law
not to drink oftener than once in the half-hour, during the forenoon;
he stated that it paid to exert this self-control, as his appetite was
better and he was less liable to “slop over” in the afternoon. Morning
was then informed that oysters were particularly good just now, and
that a man with a weak stomach could live on oysters.... There was just
one little flange of an oyster that was indigestible. The man knew
this because drink makes one dainty about his eating, and one can tell
what agrees with him or otherwise. Furthermore, one could detach the
indigestible flange in one’s mouth before swallowing--anyone could with
practice. The man glanced frequently at the clock.... Well, he would
break over, just once, and make up later. A half hour was sometimes a
considerable portage.... They became companionable.
Morning started back for New York at noon. The particular train he
caught was one of the best of its kind. The buffet, the quality of
service and patronage had a different, an intimate appeal to-day.
He sat there until dark--in that sort of intensive thinking which
seemed very measured and effective to Morning. His chief trend was
a contemplation, of course, of the night before. Aspects appeared
that did not obtrude at all with the woman by him. Considering the
opportunity, he had kissed her very rarely, as he came to think of
it....
His fellow-passengers let him alone. He reflected that he could always
get along with the lower orders of men--with sailors, soldiers,
bartenders; with the Jakes, Jethros, and Jerries of the world. Duke
Fallows had remarked this.... Duke Fallows ... the old Liaoyang
adventure came back more clearly than it had for months.... That
_was_ a big set of doings. Certainly there was a thrill about
those days, when one stopped to think.
At dinner time, approaching the end of the journey, Morning met a
pronounced disinclination to stay on the Jersey side. The little cabin
on the hill was certainly not for this condition of mind. He had
to stop and think that it was only yesterday noon when he left the
cabin. A period of time that flies rapidly, appears strangely long
when regarded from the moments of its closing. The period of the past
thirty hours since he had left the hill was like a sea-voyage. The
lights across the river had a surprising attraction. When he realized
the old steam of alcohol, his mind glibly explained that it was merely
an episode of a sick and overwrought body; that the real John Morning,
of altruism and aspiration, was away at sea with the love-woman, much
cherished, the very soul of him.
More than a half-year before he had fled to the country, weary
to nausea of men in chairs and buffets. The animalism of it had
utterly penetrated him at last; the Conrad study was but one of many
revelations. He had hated the _Boabdil_; and hated more the
processes of his own mind when alcohol impelled. Only yesterday morning
he had hated the whole vanity of New York leisure, with the same
freshness that had characterized his first month of cleanliness. Yet
he found novelty in the present adventure; the prevailing illusion of
which was that he was wrong yesterday rather than now. That night he
sought his old haunts. There was a gladness about it.
“One mustn’t be too much alone,” he decided, “especially if he
is to write.... I must have got cocky sitting there alone by the
cabin-door.... These fellows aren’t so bad....”
Presently he was telling the old story of Liaoyang. That roused him
a little and pulled upon mental fibers still lame.... Was he to be
identified always with that?... A week later he was telling the story
of breaking away from the Russians at Liaoyang and making the journey
alone to Koupangtse. This was in a strangely quiet bar on Eighth
Avenue, in the Forties. A peculiarity about this particular telling of
the story was that he remembered the ferryman on the Hun--the one who
had wakened the river-front as he led Eve down to drink--the ferryman
who was a leper....
As days passed he went down deeper than ever before. “I must have had
this coming----” he would say, and refused to cross the river to rest.
There were moments when he felt too unutterably dirty to go to the
cabin. One day, he kept saying, “I’m going to see this through.” And
on another day he reflected continually (conscious of the cleverness
of the thought) that this drink passage was like the journey to
Koupangtse.... Then there was the occasion when it broke upon him
suddenly that he was being avoided at the _Boabdil_. He never went
back.... One morning he joined some sailors who had breezed in from
afar. They brought him memories and parlances; their ways were his
ways all that day, whose long drift finally brought them to Franey’s
_Lobelia_, as tough and tight a little bar as you would ask any
modern metropolis to furnish. The sailors were down and done-for now,
but Morning stood by for the end, enjoying the place and the wide
bleakness of it.... A slumming party came in about midnight--young men
and women of richness and variety, trying to see bottom by looking
straight down--as if one could see through such dirty water.
The city’s dregs about him--a fabric of idiocy and perversion and
murder--did not look so fatuous nor wicked to Morning’s eye, as did
this perfumed company. They thought they were seeing life, but, deeper
than brain, they knew better; their laughter and their voices were
off the key, because they were not being true to themselves. Franey’s
regulars were glad for the extra drinks, but Morning had a fury. His
shame for the party was akin to the shame he had held for Lowenkampf on
the eve of battle long ago. He arose, short and flaming, yet conscious
even in his rage of the brilliance of his idea.
“You people make me sick,” he said, lurching out. “You’d have to be
_slumee_ to see how silly you look----”
They tried to detain him--to laugh at him--but one woman knew better.
Her low voice of rebuke to her companions was a far greater rebuke to
John Morning at the door.
... Finally he began to wonder how long they would keep on giving him
money at the bank. He turned up every day. No matter what he drew it
was always gone. Sometimes a holiday tricked him, and he suffered. He
watched for Sundays, after he learned.... The banking business was a
hard process, because he had to emerge; had to come right up to the
window and speak to a clean, white man--who had known him before. It
became the sole ascent of Morning’s day--a torturing one. He washed and
shaved for it, when possible, and after a time managed frequently to
save enough to steady his nerves for the ordeal. Then he had to write
his name, and always a blue eye was leveled at him, and he felt the
dirt in his throat.... So he drifted for six weeks, and it was winter.
His descent was abrupt and deep. He tried to get back, and found his
will treacherous. He was prey at times to abominable fears. His body
was unmanageable from illness. There were times when it would have
meant death or insanity not to drink. For the first time in his life
he encountered an inertia that could not be whipped to the point of
reconstructivity. His thoughts cloyed all fine things; his expression
made them mawkish and teary; his emotions overflowed on small matters.
Betty Berry, around whom all this brooding revolved, hardly reached
a plane worthy of interpretation. Morning’s conception of the woman
on the afternoon she came to the Armory, or on the night-trip to
Baltimore, contrasted with this mental apparition of the sixth week:
“She is a professional musician, making her own way in the world, and
taking, as many a man would, the things that please her as she passes.
This is not the great thing to her that it is to me. Other men have
doubtless interested her suddenly and rousingly, and have gone their
way.... Had she been a stranger to a man’s sudden loving she would
never have beckoned me to the chair in the wings that night. She would
never have come to my arms--as I went to hers----”
Sweat broke from him. The savage and abandoned company of thoughts
had ridden down all else, like a troop of raiders, destroying as they
went.... The troop was gone; the shouting died away--but he was left
more lewd and low than the worst. He had defiled the image of the
woman who had given herself so eagerly. He recalled how he had talked
of understanding, how he had praised her in his thoughts because she
was brave enough to be natural, and to act as a natural woman who has
found her own, after years of repression. The other side of the shield
was turned to torture him--the sweet, low-leaning, human tenderness of
Betty Berry, her patience, her endless and ever-varying bestowals. She
had called his the voice of reality, and become silent before it; had
proved great enough to remain undestroyed in a man’s world; her faith
and spirit arose above centuries of lineage in a man’s world--and she
was Betty Berry who knew her lover’s presence, though they were almost
strangers to each other, and opened her arms to him....
It was a hell that he vividly reviewed for seven weeks, and with no
Virgil to guide. A scene or two from the final day is enough:
... He had come from the bank about one in the afternoon, and had taken
a chair in the bar of the _Van Antwerp_. He was neither limp
nor sprawling, but in a condition of queer detachment from exterior
influences. He knew that it was daylight; heard voices but no words,
and carried himself with the rigid effort of one whose limbs are
habitually flippant. Perhaps it was because he was so very generous
to the waiter that he was allowed to close his eyes without being
molested. In any event, his consciousness betrayed him, and away he
went in the darkness of dream: The Ferryman of the Hun was poling
away at the stream and he, John Morning, was but one of a company in
passage. It was not the Hun river this time; the sorrel Eve was not
there. Not alone the Ferryman, but all on board were lepers--he, John
Morning in the midst of them, a leper. The old wound was witness to
this.... They tried to land at the little towns but natives came forth
and drove them away. Down, down stream they went and always natives
came forth to warn them as they neared the land.... Even when they drew
in to the marshes and the waste-places natives appeared and stoned them
away.... And so they went down--to the ocean and the storm and Morning
opened his eyes.
Opposite, his back to the marble bar, his elbows braced against the
rail, stood Mr. Reever Kennard, watching him, and the look upon the
face of the famous correspondent was that of scornful pity--as if there
was a truce to an old enmity, no longer worth while.
Still later on that day, over on Second Avenue, Morning almost bumped
into a small yellow sign at the elevator entrance to the Metal Workers’
Hall, to the effect that Duke Fallows was to address a gathering there
that night.
8
A FLASH of love came to his heart for Duke Fallows at the
sight of the name. There was nothing maudlin about this; rather, a
decent bit of stamina in the midst of sentimental overflows. It was
the actual inside relation, having nothing to do with the old surface
irritation.... Morning took care of himself as well as he could during
the day. He meant to mix with the crowd at the meeting, but not to make
himself known until he was free from vileness. He would keep track of
the other’s place and movements in New York. When he was fit--there
would be final restoration in the meeting. His heart thumped in
anticipation. The yellow poster had turned the corner for him. These
first thoughts of the upward trend are interesting:
He meant to cross the river and build a big fire in the cabin. There
he would fight it out and cleanse the place meanwhile, in preparation.
He pictured the cabin-door open, water on the floor, the fire burning,
the smell of soap. He would heat water, wash his blankets, put them out
in the sun; polish his kettles with water and sand. Every detail was
important, and how strangely his mind welcomed the freshness of these
simple thoughts. The glass of the windows would flash in the morning,
and the door of oak would gleam with its oil.... Finally he would bring
Duke there.
This was the triumph of it all. He would bring the sick man home;
tend the fire for him, go to the dairyman’s for milk and eggs. They
could call Jake and talk to him--seeing the heart of a simple man....
They would talk and work together ... the sick man looking up at the
ceiling, and he, Morning, at the machine as in the old days. Spring
would come, the big trees would break their buds and sprinkle the
refuse down--and, God, it would be green again--all this rot ended....
So the days would pass quickly until Betty Berry came.... Duke would be
glad to hear of her.
... That night Morning went in with the workers to their Hall and sat
far back. The meeting had been arranged under socialistic auspices;
seven hundred men at least were present. Through the haze of pipe,
cigarette, and cigars, Duke Fallows came forth.
And this was no sick man. His knees were strong, and there was a
lightness of shoulder that did away with the huddle of old times. His
eyes shone bright under the hanging lamp, and his laugh was as far as
Asia from scorn. There was brown upon him; his hands, when they fell
idle, were curved as if to fit a broad-ax, and “I’m glad to be with
you, men,” he said.
“... I have come to tell you a story--my story. Every man has one. I
never tell mine twice the same, but some time I shall tell it just
right, and then the answer shall come.”
Power augmented in the silence of the smoky hall. The gathering
recognized the artist that had come down to them, because he loved
the many and belonged with them. They gave him instinctively the rare
homage of uncritical attention. Fallows told of Liaoyang--of the whole
preparation--of the Russian singing, the generals, the systems by
which men were called to service. Always the theme that played through
this prelude was the millet of Manchuria. He told of the great grain
fields, the feeding troop-horses, the hollows between the hills--how
the ancient Chinese city stood in a bend of the river--of the outer
fighting, the rains, the mass of men, the Chinese.
This new Duke Fallows hated no man; had no scorn for the Russian
chiefs. His ideas of service and humanity concerned Russia rather than
Japan--and not the imperialistic Russia, but the real spirit--the
toiler, the dreamer, the singer, the home-maker--the Russia that was
ready, perhaps as ready as any people in the world, to put away envy,
hatred, war; to cease lying to itself, and to grasp the reality that
there is something immortal about simplicity of life and service for
others. What concerned this Russia, Fallows declared, concerned the
very soul of the western world.
He placed the field for the battle in a large way--the silent, watery
skies, all-receiving _kao-liang_, and the moist earth that held
the deluges. Morning choked at the picture; the action came back again
as Fallows spoke--Lowenkampf himself--the infantry of Lowenkampf
slipping down the ledges into the grain--Luban, machine-guns, rout--the
little open place in the millet where the Fallows part of the battle
was fought.
“... He was a young Russian peasant. If he came into this hall now,
we would all know instinctively that he belonged to us. He was fine
to look upon that day, coming out of the grain--earnest, glad, his
heart turned homeward. His enemy was not Japan, but Imperialism, and
defeat was upon it. This defeat meant to him, as it did to hundreds
of soldiers in that hour--the beginning of the road home. Luban was
burning with the shame of detected cowardice. A common soldier had
commented upon it in passing. And now this young Russian peasant met
the eyes of Luban, and the two began to speak, and I was there to
listen.
“The peasant said that this was not his war; that he had been forced
to come; that it meant nothing to him if Russia took Manchuria; but
that it meant a very great deal to him--this being away--because his
six babies were not being fed by the Fatherland, and his field was not
being ploughed.
“It was very simple. You see it all. The Fatherland forced starvation
upon a man’s children, while his field remained unploughed. Only a
simple man could say it. You must be straight as a child to speak such
epics. It is what you men have thought in your hearts.
“Of course, Luban only knew he was an officer and the man was not.
Machine-guns were drumming in the distance, and the grain was hot and
breathless all about. The forward ranks were terribly broken--the
soldiers streaming back past us. Luban, who opened the discussion, was
getting the worst of it, and his best reply was murder. He handled the
little automatic gun better than the cause of the Fatherland--shot the
_Ploughman_ through the breast. I thrust him back to take the
falling one in my arms....
“We seemed alone together. There was power upon me. Even in the
swiftness and tumult of the passing I made the good man see that I
would father his babes, look to the ploughing of his field, and be
the son of his mother. His passing made all clear to me. His message
was straight from the heart of the world’s suffering poor, from the
heavy-laden. He spoke to kings and generals, and to all who have and
are blind. There in the havoc of the retreat, dying in my arms--he
made it vivid as the smiting sun of Saul--that this hideous disorder
of militia was not his Fatherland. He would have fought for the real
Fatherland. He was a son in spirit, and a state-builder; he would have
fought for that; he was not afraid to die....
“Love for him had come strangely to my heart, men. I said to him--words
I cannot remember now--something I had never been able to write,
because I had not written for men before, but for some fancied elect.
I made him know that he had done well, that his field would bring
forth, and that his house would glow red with firelight.... I think my
Ploughman felt as I did even before his heart was still--that there is
something beyond death in the love of men for one another.... It was
wonderful. We forgot the battle. We forgot Luban and the firing. We
were one. His spirit was upon me--and the good God gave him peace.
“I tell you quietly, but don’t you see--this that I bring so quietly
is the message from the Ploughman who passed--the message of Liaoyang?
And this is the sentence of it: Where there is a real Fatherland--there
will be Brotherhood.
“The world is so full of pallor and agony and sickness and stealing.
First, it is because of the Lubans. The Lubans are sick for power--sick
with their desires. Having no self-mastery, they are lost and full of
fear. They fear the whip, they fear poverty and denial; theirs is a
continual fear of being stripped to the nakedness of what they are--as
old Mother Death strips a man. In the terror of all these things they
seek to turn the whip upon others, to reinforce their emptiness with
exterior possessions. Because their souls are dying, and because they
feel the terror of sheer mortality, they seek to kill the virtue in
other men. Because they cannot master themselves, they rise in passion
to master others. They could not live but for the herds.
“We who labor are the strength of the world. I say to you, men, poverty
is the God’s gift to His elect. It is to us who have only ourselves
to master--that the dream of Brotherhood can come true. It is alone
to us, who have nothing, that these possessions can come, which old
Mother Death is powerless to take away. And we who labor and are
heavy-laden are making our colossal error to-day. We are the muttering
herds. Standing with the many we may not know ourselves. We look upon
the cowardice and emptiness of the Lubans and call it Power. We see
the ways of the Herd-drivers--and dream of driving others, instead of
ourselves. We look upon the Herd-drivers--and turn upon them the same
thoughts of envy and hatred and cruelty--which cuts them off from
every source of power and leaves them empty and cowardly indeed.
“These are the thoughts of the herds--and yet down in the muscling
mass men are not to blame. It takes room for a man to be himself--it
takes room for a man to love his neighbor and to master himself.
Terrified, whipped, packed, sick with the struggle and the strain of it
all--how can men, turning to one another, find brotherhood in the eyes
of their fellows. Living the life of the laboring herds in the great
cities--why, it would take Gods to love men so!... The world is so full
of pallor and agony and sickness and stealing--first, because of the
Lubans, and, second, because of the City.... And after Liaoyang, I went
straight to the Ploughman’s house--for I had given my word. And now I
will tell you what I found on the little hill-farm up in the Schwarenka
district among the toes of the Bosk mountains, a still country.”
9
“I REMEMBER the soldiers at Liaoyang, the last thing, the many
who had grasped at the hope that defeat meant the end of the war. They
were learning differently as I left. Hundreds gave up from the great
loneliness.... I carried the name of my Ploughman across the brown
country, and the northern autumn was trying to hold out against the
frosts. Asia is desolate. We who are white men, and who know a bit of
the loveliness of life--even though we labor at that which is not our
life--we must grant that the Northern Chinese have learned this: To
suffer quietly.
“Baikal was crossed at last. On and on by train into the West--until I
came to the little village that he had said. For days it had been like
following a dream. Sometimes it seemed to me so wonderful--that young
man coming out of the millet, and what he said--that I thought it must
have come to me in a vision, that I was mad to look for his town and
the actual house in the country beyond. Yet they knew his name in the
little town, and said that early next morning I could get a wagon to
take me to the cabin, which was some _versts_ away.
“I had known so much of cities. For weeks I had been in the noises
of the Liaoyang fighting and in trains. Moreover, I had been ill
for a long time, too--a crawling, deadly illness. But that night my
soul breathed. I ate black bread by candle-light and drank milk. The
sharpness of mid-October was in the air. You will laugh when I say it
seemed to me, an American, as if I had come home. In the morning early
I looked away to the East, from whence I had come, and where the sun
was rising. (The ceiling of the little room was so low I had to bend my
head.) To the north the mountains were sharp in the morning light and
shining like amethyst.... I left the wagon at the first sight of the
hut in the distance, and I reached there in the warmth of the morning.
“An old man was sitting in the sun. He asked me to have bread, and said
they had some sausage for the coming Sunday. This was mid-week. A child
brought good water. Then I heard the cane of the old woman, and saw
her hand first, as it thrust the cane out from the door--all brown and
palsied, the hand, its veins raised and the knuckles twisted from the
weight that bent her fingers against the curve of the stick. The rest
was so pure. She had been a tall woman--very thin and bent and white
now. When I looked into that face I saw the soul of the Ploughman. I
can tell you I wanted to be there. It was very strange.... I can see
her now, looking up at me, as the old do from their leaning. It was
like the purity and distance of the morning. I trembled, too, before
this old wife, for the fact in my mind about her son. I tell you, old
mother-birds are wise.
“It was as if my garments smelled of the fighting. She knew whence I
had come; she looked into my soul and found the death of her son. Her
soul knew it, but not her brain yet. She may have found my love for
him, too--the deep bond between us.
“‘Ask the stranger to stay. We will have sausage by the Sunday,’ said
the old man. His thought was held by hunger.
“‘Hush, Jan--he comes from our son----’
“‘And where are the children and the young mother?’ I asked.
“‘They are out for faggots in the bush--they will come----’
“I had thought, as I traveled, (the thoughts of the weeks on the road,)
to do many things; to give them plentifully of money; to arrange for
someone to do the late fall and winter work. I had intended to go on,
when sure that everything was at hand to make them comfortable. I
tell you, men, it was all too living for that. One could not perform
unstudied benefits for the mother of the Ploughman. There was more than
money wanted there.
“‘We would like to have you stay with us,’ the mother said, ‘but our
poverty is keen, and we have not bread enough now for the winter.... He
was taken long before the harvest, and it is long until the grain comes
again----’
“‘But if he were here--what would be done, Mother?’
“‘Ah, if he came,’ she said strangely. ‘If he came----’
“The father now spoke:
“‘He would cut wood for our neighbors this winter--when the ploughing
was finished. That would provide food--good food. Oh, he would know
what to do--our Jan would know----’
“I won’t soon forget that high, wavering voice of the old man--‘Oh, he
would know what to do--our Jan is a good son----’ and the shake of his
head.
“‘But may I not do some of the things that he would do?’
“I had to say it twice, for I spoke their language poorly. I had
understood the son at Liaoyang--but all moments were not like those in
which he spoke to me.
“‘And then,’ I added hastily, ‘he sent you some money----’
“I dared not offer much with that pure old face looking at me. The
silver and gold that was in my purse I put in her lap.
“‘Oh, it is very much--the good God brought you from him, did he not?’
“‘And we will not need to wait until Sunday for----’
“‘Hush--Jan--no, we will not need to wait.’
“... And then the young mother came. I saw her steps quicken when
yet she was far off. The little ones were about her--all carrying
something. The older children were laughing a little, but the others
were quiet in their haste and effort to keep up.... There was one
little boy, but I will tell you afterward of the littlest Jan.... There
was a pallor over the brood. Their health was pure, and their blood
strong, but that pallor had come. Men, it was hunger already. Here were
the fields, and the Fatherland had taken him before the harvest. This
thing, the shocking truth of it; that this actually could be; that
a country could do such a thing--made me forget everything else for
the moment. Then I realized that I must keep the truth from the young
mother. Before I spoke at all they told her that I had come from her
husband.
“Her lips were white, her breasts wasted. She was lean from hunger,
lean from her bearing. Young she was for the six, but much had she
labored, and there was a mountain wildness in her eyes. She was
stilled, as the old mother had been, by the fear of hearing her man’s
death. She dared not ask. She accepted what was said--that I had come
from him, that I had brought money, and wished to stay for a little....
She leaned against the door, the smaller children gathering at her
knees, the others putting away the wood. Her single skirt hung square,
and her arms seemed very long, nearly to her knees; her hands loose
and tired. Her hair was yellow; the wind had tossed it. You know how
a horse that has been listening, suddenly catches his breath again.
The same sound came from her as she started to breathe again.... One
of the smaller children laughed, and I looked down. It was the little
four-year-old, the third Jan of that house, and he was close to my
knees, looking up at me ... and we were all together.
“I loved the world better after that look of the child into my eyes....
I took him on my shoulder. We went to the village together. That night
the wagon brought us back; there was much food.... And that was my
house. I looked out on the mountains the next day, and for many days to
come, and, men--their grand sky-wide simplicity poured into my heart. I
took the old horse out, and we ploughed during the few days remaining.
There was not much land--but we ploughed it together to the end, when
the frost made the upturned clods ring. Then I strawed up the shed for
the old horse to pass his winter in warmth, and brought blankets for
him. I respected that old horse. Health and good-fellowship had come
to me as we worked together. I remember the sharp turning of the early
afternoons from yellow to gray and to dark.... Then we went into the
bush together in the early winter days. The ax rang, and the snow-bolt
was piled high each day with wood. The smell of the wood-smoke in the
morning air had a zest for my nostrils I had never known before, and
at night the cabin windows were red with fire-light. We were all one
together. And I think the spirit of the Ploughman was there in the
happiness.
“Sometimes in the night when I would get up to replenish the fire--the
mystery of plain goodness would come to me. I would see the children
and others all around. Then at the frosty window, shading the fire
from my eyes, I looked out upon the snows. I was unable to contain the
simple grandeurs that had unfolded to me day by day.... And then I
would go back to the blankets where the little boy lay--his hand always
fumbling for me as I crept in. The love that I felt for this child was
beyond all fear. We could stand together against any fate. And one
night it came to me that from much loving of one a man learns to love
the many, and that I would really be a man when I learned to love the
world with the same patience and passion that I loved the little boy.
The Ploughman came along in a dream that night and said it was all
quite true.
“And that was the winter.... I wish you could have seen this sick
man who had come. I had lain on my back for months, except when some
great effort aroused me. I had that coming on, men, which makes a man
walk--as a circus bear turns and totters on his back feet. The house,
the field, the plough, the horse, woods, winter, and mountains, love
for the child, love for all the others--the much that my hands found to
do and the heart found to give--these things made me new again. These
simple sound and holy things.
“I had been a sick man mentally and morally, too, sick with ego and
intellect--a nasty sickness. But one could not look, feeling the joy
in which I lived, upon the snows of the foothills, nor afar through
the yellow winter noons to the gilded summits of the Bosks; one could
not look into the eyes of the children, the last vestige of hunger
pallor gone from them; one could not talk of tobacco-and-sausage with
the old man by his fireside; nor watch the mysterious great givings
of the two mothers--their whole lives giving--pure instruments of
giving--passionate givers, they were; givers of life and preservers of
life--I say, men, one could not live in this purity and not put away
such evil and cruel things.... As the sickness of the blood went from
me--so that sickness of mind.... And, I tell you, we were ready as a
house could be, when the news came officially that our Ploughman was
among the missing from the battle of Liaoyang.
“It was sharper than any winter night. We stood in the cabin and
wept together. Then in the hush--the real thought of it all came
to one--to whom, do you think?... She was on her knees--_the old
mother_--praying for the other peasant cabins in Russia--the
thousands of others from which a son and husband was gone--‘cabins to
which the good God has not sent such a friend.’... I tell you, men,
all the evil of past days seemed washed from me in that hour.... And
that is my home. (The old horse and I opened the fields again in the
springtime.)
“After that I went down to Petersburg to tell my story, and to Moscow.
I have told it in cellars and stables--in Berlin, in Paris, and London.
I am making the great circle--to tell it here--and on, when we are
finished, to Chicago, to Denver and San Francisco--and then the long
sail homeward, following the first journey to the foothills of the Bosk
range. I will go to my old mother there, and to the little boy, who
looked up into my eyes--as if we were born to play and talk and sleep
together.
“The days of the conscript gangs are over here, men. Such days are
numbered, even in Russia. They don’t come to your door in this country
and take you away from your work to fight across the world--but the
Lubans are here--and the cities are full of horror. It is in the
cities where the herds are, where the little Lubans whip, and the
bigger Lubans thrive. In the pressure and heaviness of the cities--the
thought that comes to the herd is the old hideous conception of the
multitude--that the way of the Lubans is the way of life.... It isn’t
the way. The way of life has nothing to do with greed, nor with envy,
nor with schemes against the bread of other men. It is a way of peace
and affiliation--of standing together. And you who have little can go
that way; you who labor can go that way--because you are the strength
of the world. Don’t resist your enemies, men--leave them. The Master
of us all told us that. And when the herds break, and this modern hell
of the city is diminished--the Lubans will follow you out--whining and
bereft, they will follow you out, as the lepers of Peking follow the
caravans to the gates and beyond.... I have told you of my home--the
little cabin that came to me from the beginnings of compassion. And
there is such a home for every man of you--in the still countries where
the voice of God may be heard.”
Morning, desperately ill, rose to leave the hall. In the momentary
hush, as he reached the door, the voice of Duke Fallows was raised
again, calling his name.
10
“JOHN----” a second time.
Morning turned, his arms lifted despairingly.
“Wait, John, I’ll join you!”
Fallows came down.... The man who gently held the door shut smiled with
strange kindness. There was a shining of kindness in men’s faces....
Morning did not feel that he belonged. He was broken and shamed.... The
big man was upon him--the long arms tossed about him.
“I’ve been looking and listening for you too long, John, to let you go.”
“... I just wanted to hear you. I’m shot to pieces, Duke; I’ll get a
few drinks and wait for you. Then, you’ll see, I’m all out of range of
the man you are----”
There was no answer. Morning looked up to find the long bronzed face
laughing, the eye gleaming. Fallows turned to the doorman and another,
saying:
“Both of you go with him. He needs a drink or two, and one of you come
back to show me the way to him--when I’m through here.... This is a
great night for us, John.”
The three went down in the elevator.... And so the sick man had not
come back--the dithyrambic Duke Fallows was gone for good. The sick
man was strong; the impassioned phrase-maker had risen to the simple
testimony of service. From scorn and emotion, from judgment and
selection, he had risen to the plane of loving kindness.... The air in
the street refreshed him a little. Morning found a bar.
“I’ve been drinking,” he said to the men. “Fallows is a king. I
was there with him at Liaoyang.... Maybe you saw my story in the
_World-News_.... He stayed in the grain with Luban. I went on to
see the cavalry fight.... I came back home to do the story. He went on
to Russia on the _Ploughman_ story----”
“Is he a preacher?” said one of the men.
“Yes--but he learned about war and women first.”
“I’ll take a soft drink and go back. You stay here, and I’ll bring him
to you,” the same one went on.
The other drank with Morning and agreed that they would not leave until
Fallows came.
“And so he learned about war and women first,” he said queerly, when
they were alone. “But he has been a laboring man----”
“Yes. You heard him.”
“But before that farm in Russia----”
“Oh, yes; he was a laborer.”
“Well, he certainly got the crowd with him,” the man acknowledged.
“You know why, don’t you?” Morning said impressively.
“No.”
“He’s _for_ the crowd. People feel it.”
“Oh, I knew that.”
There was quiet, and then the face turned to Morning:
“Say, how did you get such a start as this? This kind means weeks----”
“It got away from me before I knew it. I must have got to gambling with
myself to see how far I could go.”
“Are you going to quit?”
A mist filled Morning’s mind. The question seemed an infringement. Then
it occurred to him how he had fallen to lying to himself.
“He’ll make you quit, but don’t let him stop you too short. You’d be a
wreck in a few hours. You see how you needed these two or three drinks?”
... Fallows entered with several of the committee. He had promised to
speak to them again.
“It’s what I came for,” he was saying. “So long as I am wanted I’ll
stay.... Yes, I’m a socialist.... Yes, I believe in fighting, but when
our kind of men stand together, there won’t be anything big enough to
give us a fight. When our kind of men look into one another’s eyes and
find service instead of covetousness--there’s nothing in the world to
stand against us.”
Fallows and Morning were in a steam-room together two hours afterward.
Morning was limp and light-headed. He had told of some of the
things that had happened since Baltimore--of men he had met--of the
slummers--of harrowing nights and waiting for the bank to open.
“You had to have it, John?”
There was something in the way Fallows spoke the word, _John_,
that made Morning weaker and filled his throat. He had to speak loudly
for the hissing of the steam.
“Why, if you didn’t get humble and stay humble after such a
training--you’d be the poorest human experiment ever undertaken by
the Master. But you can’t fail. It isn’t in the cards to fail. You’ve
ridden several monsters--Drink, Ambition, Literature--but they won’t
get you down. Why, even the sorrel mare didn’t kill you, as I promised
aforetime. I saw a lot in that story. You loved her to the last. You
left her dead and hunched on an alien road. You’ve loved these others
long enough. You’ll leave them dead--even that big fame stuff. I think
you’ve ridden that pompous fool to death already. They are all passages
on the way to Initiation. Your training for service is a veritable
inspiration--and you’ll write to men--down among men. I love that
idea--you’ll write the story of Compassion--down among men----”
Fallows’ face came closer through the steam. He scrutinized the wound
that wouldn’t heal. “Did you ever hear about Saint Paul’s thorn in the
flesh?... ‘And lest I be exalted above measure through the abundance of
revelations, there was given me a thorn in the flesh--?’ It all works
out. You’ll have to excuse me. The Bible was the only book I had with
me up in the Bosk country. I found it all I wanted. I would take it
again.... Yes, John, it’s all right with you.”
Morning was telling of that afternoon at the Armory. He passed over
quickly the period of worldly achievement in New York to the quiet
blessedness he had hit upon, finding the hill and the elms.
“That’s the formula--to get alone and listen----”
“That’s what you preached to-night, wasn’t it?”... Presently he was
back to Betty Berry again--finding her at the ’cello--the wonderful
ride to Baltimore--which brought him to the drink chapter once
more.... He couldn’t see Duke’s face as he spoke of the woman. There
was a peculiar need of the other saying something when he had finished.
This only was offered:
“We won’t talk about that now, John.... You’d better take another
little drink. Your voice is down.... You’ll be through after a day or
two, and I’ll stay with you----”
“We’ll go over to the cabin to-morrow,” said Morning.
They were lying cot by cot in the cooling-room, and the talk for a time
concerned Lowenkampf, his court-martial and discharge.
“Do you know how I thought of you coming back, Duke?” Morning whispered
afterward.
“Tell me.”
“I always thought of you coming back a sick man--staring at the ceiling
as you used to--sometimes talking to me, sometimes listening to what
I had written. But the main thought was how I would like to take care
of you. I was rotten before. I wanted you sick, so I could show you
better.”
The huge hand stretched across from cot to cot.
“It was afterward--that all the things you said in Liaoyang came back
to me right.... We were lying in ’Frisco waiting for quarantine, and my
stuff was finished the second time, before I read your letter to me and
the one to Noyes--and the Ploughman story. That was the first time I
really saw it right. There was a little doctor with me--Nevin--who got
it all from the first reading. At Liaoyang we were down too low among
the fighting to get it. That Ploughman story made my big yarn look like
a death-mask of the campaign. Betty Berry got it too.... It was the
same to-night--why, you got those men, body and soul.”
“I’d like to think so, John; but I’m afraid you’re wrong. It was just
a seed to-night. Men need to be cultivated every day in a thousand
ways.... Women get things quicker; they can listen better.... The last
night before Jesus was taken by the Roman soldiers, he told the Eleven
that he could be sure only of them. He knew that of the multitude that
heard him--most would sink back. He counted on just the Eleven, and
built his church on the weakest, upon the most unstable--counting only
on the strength of the weakest link.... The fact is, John, I’m only
counting on you. I’ve got to count on you.”
* * * * *
Less than five weeks had elapsed, and yet the worst seemed as far
back, in some of Morning’s moments, as the deck-passage out of China.
He had suffered abominably. Fallows stood by night and day at first.
He brought back a certain quality from the Russian farm that was pure
inspiration to the other. They spoke about the Play. Morning was more
than ever glad that Markheim had refused it. They sat long by the
fire. More happened than modern America would believe off-hand--for
John Morning began to learn to listen. Fallows was happy. His presence
in the room was like the fire-light. Twice more he went across to the
Metal Workers’ Hall, and still the New York group would not let him
go. The Socialists brought him their ideas. He was in the heart of
threatening upheavals. He reiterated that they must be united in one
thing first; they must have faith in one another. They must not answer
greed with greed. They must be sure of themselves; they must have
a pure voice; they must know first what was wanted, and follow the
vision.... Duke Fallows knew that it was all the matter of a leader....
He told them of the men and women in Russia who have put off self.
Finally Duke appeared to see that his work was done, and he retired
from them.
“It is delicate business,” he said to Morning. “There’s fine stuff
in the crowd--then there’s the rest. If I should show common just
once--all my work would be spoiled, and even the blessed few would
forget the punch of my little story. They think I’ve gone on west.”
Still he didn’t leave the cabin on the hill.
It was only when Morning undertook to touch upon the love story--that
Fallows looked away.... Morning tried to comprehend this. Something
had happened. The big man who had stared at so many ceilings of Asia,
breaking out from time to time in strange utterances all colored with
desire; the man who had met his Eve, and talked of being controlled by
her even after death--shuddered now at the mention of Betty Berry....
Morning even had a suspicion at last that the other construed a
relation between the woman’s influence and the excess of alcohol. These
moments dismayed him.
There is a dark spot in every man’s radiance--and this was the
Californian’s, Morning concluded. In the transformation which the
journey to Russia had effected, his particular weakness seemed hardened
into a crust of exceptional austerity. The only women he ever spoke
of in the remotest personal fashion belonged to the peasant family of
the Ploughman. His audiences were unmixed by his own arrangement. In
tearing out his central weakness, a certain madness on the subject had
rushed in, a hatred that knew no quarter, and a zeal in denial that
only one who has touched the rim of ruin can know.
On the last night of February they talked and read late. The reading
was from Saint Paul in the different letters. Fallows seemed
impassioned with the figure.
“I understand him,” he said.
“He was afraid of women. Sometimes he seems to hate women,” Morning
remarked. Certain lines of Paul’s on the subject had broken the
perfection of the message for him.
A strange look came to Fallows. The finger that was turning a page
drew in with the others, and the hand that rested upon the book was
clenched.... “Paul knew women,” he muttered.
“You think before he took that road to Damascus--he knew women?”
“Yes----”
“Even the Paul who stood by holding the garments of the stoners of
Stephen?”
“He was a boy then. He learned afterward, I think.”
“He couldn’t have known the saints among them,” said Morning, who was
smiling in his heart.
“Perhaps some saint among them was the one who made him afraid. You
know women won’t have men going alone--not even the saints among
women.... There may have been one who refused to be dimmed altogether
even by that great light.”
“But he went alone----”
“In that way she wouldn’t be the Thorn,” Fallows said slowly. “She
would be greater power for him. Yes, Saint Paul went alone. We wouldn’t
be reading him to-night--had he turned back to her.”
That hurt. Morning was no longer smiling within. “I didn’t learn
women--even as a boy,” he said.
Fallows was unable to speak. He had never loved Morning as at this
moment. He was tender enough to catch the strange pathos of it, which
the younger man could not feel.
“You’re a natural drunkard, John,” he said presently. “You are by
nature ambitious, as it is intimated Cæsar was; but you are naturally a
monk, too. I say it with awe.”
“You are wrong,” Morning said with strength. “When this woman came into
the room at the Armory that first day--it was as if she brought with
her the better part of myself----”
“You said that same before. You were sick. You were torn by exhaustion
and by that letter of mine about Reever Kennard. It was the peace and
mystery a woman always brings to a sick man.... _Your_ woman
is your genius, John. Any rival will stifle and defame it. It’s the
woman in a man that makes him a prophet or a great artist. Your ego is
masculine; your soul is feminine. When you learn to keep the ego out
of the brain, and use the soul, you will become an instrument, more or
less perfect, for eternal utterances. When you achieve the union of the
man and woman in you--that will be your illumination. You will have
emerged into the larger consciousness. You are not so far as you think
from that high noon-light. If you should take a woman in the human
way, you will not achieve in this life the higher marriage, of which
the union of two is but a symbol. That would be turning back, with the
spiritual glory in your eyes--back to the shadow of flesh.”
“How do you know that?” Morning asked coldly.
“Because of the invisible restraints that have kept you from women so
far.... I believe you are prepared to tell men something about the
devils of drink and ambition--having met them?”
“It is possible.”
“I speak with the same authority.”
Morning did not accept this authority, but was long disturbed after the
light was out.... Her ship had been six days at sea.
They opened the door wide to the first morning of March. Snow was upon
the hill, but there was a promise in the air, even in the sharpness
of it. The wind came in, searched among the papers of the table,
disordered the draughts of the chimney, filling the room with a faint
flavor of wood-smoke, that perfect incense. They stood there, testing
the day, and each was thinking of the things of the night before.
Fallows said:
“John, you didn’t build this cabin with the idea of a woman coming?”