Down Among Men by Will Levington Comfort - HTML preview

 

BOOK I.

 AFIELD

1

THE town of Rosario was ahead. The cavalry expected to sup and sleep there. Chance of firing presently from the natives was pure routine. John Morning, back in the second troop, on the horse of a missing soldier, wondered if years of service and exploration would make him ever as great a correspondent as Mr. Reever Kennard looked. The wide, sloping shoulders of the Personage were to be seen occasionally when the trail crooked, far forward and near the General.

The bit of fighting was over before the rear troopers got rightly into the skirmish-line (every fourth trooper holding four horses); and now the men breathed and smoked cigarettes in one more Luzon town; and another Alcalde’s house was turned into headquarters.... This was a brigade expedition of December, 1899. Two weeks before the General had ridden out of Manila. Various pieces of infantry had been left to garrison the many towns which would not stay held without pins. Two or three days more, then Batangas, and the big ride was over, the lower Luzon incision complete, and drainage established.

Morning, with the troopers, had to look to his mount in regulation fashion, and did not reach Headquarters until after the others. The Alcalde’s house in Rosario as usual stood large among the straw-thatched bamboo huts. The little upper room which Morning had come to expect through the courtesy of the staff, was easily found. The saddle-bags and blanket-rolls of Mr. Kennard and his companion, a civilian, named Calvert were already there, each in a corner. Morning’s thought was that he would hear these men talk after supper. In a third corner he placed his canteen, and shyly tucked away in the shadow, the limp haversack.

There was a small table in the room, of black wood worn shiny by the hands of the house, as the black wood of the floors was worn shiny by the bare feet of servants. Upon the table was a small sheath-knife, the brass handle of which was inscribed Mio Amigo.

It becomes necessary to explain that the human male is discriminating about his loot, by the time he has been afield two weeks in a tropical island, especially if he has camped in a fresh town every night. The day’s march makes him value every pound that he can throw away, for he has already been chafed by each essential button and buckle. A tin pail of silver pesos unearthed in a church had passed from hand to hand among the soldiers. As the stress of the days increased (and the artificial sense of values narrowed to the fundamentals such as food and tobacco and sleep), Morning had observed with curious approval that the silver hoard leaked out of the command entirely—to return to the natives for further offerings to the priests.

So the knife on the table aroused no desire. It was not even a good knife, but Mio Amigo took his eye, as if affording a bit of insight to the native mind. It could not have been wanted by Mr. Kennard or Mr. Calvert, since it lay upon the table. Morning put it in his coat, knowing he would toss it away before to-morrow’s sun was high. In his hot moist hand the brass-handle sent up a smell of verdigris. A little later in the village road, he encountered Mr. Reever Kennard in the act of purchasing ancient canned stuff from a native-woman, too lame to run before the cavalry. Morning was not natural in the Presence.

The great man was broad and round and thick. He criticised generals afield, and in Washington when times were dry. He had dined with the President and signed the interview. His head dropped forward slightly, his chin sunk in its own cushions. He bought the native wares with the air of a man who is keeping a city in suspense, and the city deserves it. Morning stood by and did not speak. There was no reason for him to stay; he did not expect companionship; he had nothing to say; no money with which to buy food—and yet, having established himself there, he could not withdraw without remark of some kind. At least he felt this; also he felt cruelly the cub. He was at home in this service with packers and enlisted men, but always as now, officers, and others of his own work, made him feel the upstart.

Mr. Kennard now turned to perceive him, his eyes opening in the “Bless me—what sort is this?” manner of the straying Englishman; and John Morning, quite in a funk, fell to enforcing an absurd interest in the native sheath-knife. Kennard was not drawn to such a slight affair, but perceiving the menial in Morning, allowed him to carry some of his purchases back to Headquarters.

Supper was a serious matter to the boy. He had no money nor provisions. In the usual case, money would have been no good—but there were a few things left in the shop of the lame woman. The field ration was light; and while he would not go hungry if the staff-officers knew, it was a delicate matter to make known his grubless state. Morning rambled over the town, after helping Mr. Kennard to quarters, and returned empty to the upper room. Mr. Calvert was there and appeared to see Morning for the first time. Calvert was a slender quiet chap, and believed in what he had to say.

“Where did you get that little sheath-knife you showed Mr. Kennard?” he asked abruptly.

Morning sickened before the man’s eyes. His life had been fought out in dark, rough places. He was as near twenty as twenty-five. He had the way of the under-dog, who does not expect to be believed, looking for the worst of it, whether guilty or not. He told Calvert he had found the knife on this table.

“I thought I put it in my saddle-bags,” Calvert said.

“You are very welcome to it. The Mio Amigo made me look at it twice——”

“That’s why I wanted it. Take this for your trouble.”

Calvert placed a bit of paper money on the table between them.

“It was no trouble. I don’t want the money.”

“Take it along. Don’t think of it again.”

Morning didn’t want to appear stubborn. This was the peculiarity of the episode. The thought of taking the money repelled him. The connection of the money with supper occurred, but not with the strength of his dislike to appear perverse or bad-tempered.... He saw all clearly after he had accepted the paper, but the matter was then closed. He was very miserable. He had proved his inferiority. The little brush with big men had been too much for him. He belonged among the enlisted....

He went to the lame woman and bought a bottle of pimientos and a live chicken. The latter he traded for a can of bacon with a soldier.

2

IMPERIAL HOTEL, Tokyo, early in March, 1904.... The Japanese war office had finally decided to permit six American correspondents to accompany each army. The Americans heard the news with gravity. There were two men for every place. Only three Japanese armies were in conception at this time. The first six Americans were easily chosen—names of men that allowed no doubt; and this initial group, beside being the first to take the field, was elected to act as a committee to appoint the second and third sets of six—twelve places and thirty waiting. The work at hand was delicate.

The committee was in session in the room of Mr. Reever Kennard. Five of the second list had been settled upon when the name of John Morning (of the Open Market) was brought up. It was Duke Fallows of San Francisco, who spoke:

“I don’t know John Morning, but I know his stuff. It’s big stuff; he’s the big man. We’ve gone too far without him already. He has more right to be on the committee than I. He was here before I was. He has minded his own business and taken quarters apart. I had no intention of breaking into the picture this way, but the fact is, I expected John Morning to go in first on the second list. Now that there is only one place left, there really can’t be any doubt about the name.”

Mr. Reever Kennard of the World-News now arose and waited for silence. He got it. The weight of Mr. Reever Kennard was felt in this room. Everything in it had weight—saddle and leggings of pigskin, gauntlets, typewriters, cameras, the broadside of riding-breeches, and a little arsenal of modern inventions which only stop firing upon formal request. Without his hat, Mr. Reever Kennard was different, however. Much weight that you granted under the big hat, had left that arid country for the crowded arteries of neck and jowl and jaw, or, indeed, for the belted cosmic center itself. He said:

“Mr. Fallows talks wide. This Morning is out on a shoe-string; and while he may have a bit of force to handle certain kinds of action, it isn’t altogether luck—his not getting a good berth. The young man hasn’t made good at home. He hasn’t the money backing to stand his share of the expense. The War Office suggests that each party of correspondents employ a sutler——”

Fallows was still standing and broke in:

“I’m interested in that matter of making good at home. I’ve seen the work of most Americans here, and I believe John Morning to be the best war-writer sent out from the States. As for the shoe-string, I’ll furnish his tooth-brush and dinnercoat—if the sutler insists——”

“We understand very clearly the enthusiasm of Mr. Fallows who wants a second column-man for his paper. Doubtless this Morning is open——”

“I hadn’t thought of it, but certainly the Western States would profit, if John Morning turned part of his product there. How about your World-News on that?”

“I favor Mr. Borden for the sixth place in second column,” Kennard said simply.

“Borden reached Tokyo three weeks after Morning—and never campaigned before.”

“He’s one of the best of the younger men in New York—a Washington correspondent of big influence——”

“I have no objection to him, except as one to take the place that belongs to John Morning. I can’t see him there.”

Kennard looked about him. Morning was not well known, having been little seen at the Imperial in the last six weeks. Fallows had not helped him by saying he was the best war-writer sent out from the States; still in a general way he could not be put aside. Kennard saw this.

“I wasn’t going to hurt Morning badly, if I could help it,” he said, “but Mr. Fallows has rather forced it. This Morning isn’t straight. We caught him stealing a sheath-knife from the saddle-bags of Archibald Calvert down in Luzon four or five years ago. Morning said he found it on a table in the room assigned to us. He took money from Calvert for restoring the knife.”

Fallows laughed at this.

“I can’t believe the story,” he said. “The man who did the stuff I’ve read, isn’t stealing sheath-knives from another’s saddle-bags.... Oh, I don’t mean that it didn’t seem true to you, Kennard——”

Kennard had waited for the last, and was not good to look at until it came. He turned quickly to the others. Borden was chosen.

“You’ve still got a place to fill in the first list,” said Fallows.

The committee was now excited. The five faces turned to the Westerner.

“I repeat, Kennard, that your remarks may be within the letter of truth, but I wouldn’t campaign in the same army with a man who’d bring up a thing like that against a boy—and five years afterward. Understand, I have never spoken a word to John Morning——”

“You’re not giving up your place?” said the committee.

“Exactly.”

“Then you’ll take Borden’s with the second——?”

“I have nothing against Borden. I wouldn’t spoil the chance of a man already chosen.”

“Then first with the third army,” urged the committee.

“I can do better than that,” said Fallows. “Gentlemen, I thank you, and beg to withdraw.”

3

JOHN MORNING waved back the rickshaw coolie at the door of the little Japanese Inn, where he had been having his own way for several weeks, and walked down the Shiba road toward the Imperial hotel. He had half-expected to get on the committee, which meant work with the first army and a quick start; failing in that, he looked for his name to be called early in the second list, and was on the way now to find out. Morning shared the passion of the entire company to get afield at any cost.

Reasoning, however, did not lift his restlessness and apprehension. He had not been on the spot. He had been unable to afford life at the Imperial; and yet, the costliness of it was not altogether vain, since the old hotel had become a center of the world in the matter of war-correspondence. Japan reckoned with it as the point of foreign civilian force. While his brain could not organize a condition that would spoil his chance, Morning’s more unerring inner sense warned him that he was not established, as he walked in the rain.

His name was not posted in any of the three groups. The card blurred after his first devouring glance, so that he had to read again and a third time. For a moment he was out of hand—seething, eruptive. Yet there was nothing to fight....

Corydon Tait, a young Englishman with whom he had often talked and laughed, was standing by. Tait’s name was not down. Morning controlled himself to speak courteously.

The Englishman looked beyond him at the card. A chill settled upon Morning’s self-destructive heat. This was new in his world. In the momentary misunderstanding, he grasped Tait’s arm.

“Really, old chap, I’d prefer you not to do that,” the other said, drawing his arm away. “It must be plain that I don’t know you.”

“I thought you were joking,” said Morning.

4

BACK on Shiba Road in the beginning of dusk, he turned to the native inn. The door slid open before his hand touched the latch; his figure having been seen through the papered lattice. The proprietor bowed to the matting and hissed with prolonged seriousness, hissed in fact until the American had removed and exchanged his shoes for sandals. The hand-maidens appeared and bowed laughingly. The old kitchen drudge emerged from her chimney and ogled. The mother of the house took the place beside her lord on the rostrum-of-the-pencils.[Pg 9] She did not hiss, but it was very clear that the matting under the white man’s feet was far above her in worthiness.

There was something of this formality with his every entrance. Morning had felt silly during the first days as he passed through the hedge of bent backs; the empty cringing and favor-groveling had seemed indecent. But now (in the dusk of the house before the candles) a faint touch of healing came from it. They had all served him. He had been fearfully over-served. They had bothered his work through excessive service—so many were the hands and so little to do. The women were really happy to work for him. To-night, a queer gladness clung to their welcome. He had fallen indeed to sense it. He was starving for reality, for some holy thing. They had stripped him at the Imperial. In his heart he was trying to make a reality now of this mockery of Japanese self-extinction.

The bath-boy, wet from steam, with only a loin-cloth about him, followed Morning to his room. The American was not allowed to bathe alone; would not have been allowed to undress himself, had he not insisted upon the privilege. He sat in a tub, three walls of which were wood and the fourth of iron. Against the outside of the latter, burned a furious fire of charcoal. For the benefits of this bath, he was begged to make no haste and to occupy his mind with matters of the higher life. A moment or two before the water reached a boiling-point, Morning was allowed to escape. Exceeding pressure of business was occasionally accepted as precluding the chance of a bath for one day, but to miss two days in succession, without proving that he had bathed elsewhere, meant a loss of respect, and a start of household whispering.

He was sick to get back to work, turned to it for restoration and forgetfulness, as a man to a drug. Moreover, there was need, for he was on space. Two or three papers in the Mid-west used what he could write, though he had no holding contracts, and had left Chicago with such haste to catch a steamer, that there had been no chance to make an arrangement, whereby these papers might have used the same story simultaneously. And then, there had been a delay of nearly a day in Vancouver. This time in Chicago would have been enough for the establishment of a central office and an agent on percentage, who could have enlarged his market without limit, and cut down his work to one letter a day. Instead, he did the same story now, from three different angles. It had been this way before. With war in the air, Morning was unable to breathe at home. Off he went, without a return ticket—tourist cars and dingy second-class steamer passage—but with a strange confidence in his power to write irresistibly. It was like a mark—this faith of his in the ability to appeal.

All his life he had lived second-class. To-night he wondered if it would always be so; if there was not something in the face of John Morning, something that others saw at once, which placed him instantly among culls and seconds in the mysterious adjustments of the world. They had made him feel so at the Imperial, before this episode. Men who didn’t write ten lines a day were there on big incomes; and others, little older than he, with only two or three fingers of his ability, on a safe salary and flexible expense account.

The day was brought back to him again and again. The cut of Corydon Tait had crippled him. He felt it now crawling swiftly along the nerves of his limbs until it reached his brain, and remaining there coldly like undigested matter in a sick body. He felt his face queerly. There was neither fat nor flabbiness upon it. He could feel the bone. His fingers brushed his mouth, and a sort of burn came to him. It was the finest thing about John Morning. There was a bit of poetry about it, a touch of tenderness, finer than strength. Passion was in the mouth, intensity without intentness, not a trace of the boarish, nor bovine. It is true you often see the ruin of such a mouth in quiet places where those of drugs and drinks are served; but you see as well the finished picture upon the faces of those men lit with world’s service, who have heard the voice of the human spirit, and are loved by the race, because they have forgotten how to love themselves.

Morning knew it only as his weakness. It was the symbol to-night of his failure.... Those at the Imperial had seen it; they had dared to deny him because of it. The greatest among the war-men were thin-lipped and sinewy-jawed—the soldier face.... He knew much about war; none had campaigned more joyously than he. In the midst of peril, courage seemed altogether obvious and easy; his fearlessness was too natural for him to be surprised at it, though it surprised others....

The typewriter buzzed on. Wearily he caught up the trend, but the drive was gone, although there was hardly a lull in the registering of the keys for two-thirds of a page. Always before, this sort of hackwork had been done with a dream of the field ahead. His forces fused. He had been denied a column. His hand brushed across his face and John Morning was ashamed—ashamed of his poverty, of his work, of his own nature, which made a tragedy of the cut of Corydon Tait; ashamed of the heat in his veins from the stimulants he had drunk; ashamed because he had not instantly demanded his rights at the Imperial; ashamed of the mess of a man he was, a fool of his volition and vitality, commonness stamped on his every feature.

Morning’s affinity for alcohol was peculiar. He worked with it successfully. So resilient was his health that he was usually fresh in the morning. Often he had finished a long evening of work on pretty good terms with himself, the later pages of copy coming in a cloud of speed.... The copy-producing seemed to use up the whipping spirit, rather than himself; at least, he treasured this illusion. The first bottles of rice-beer lasted the longest.... He recalled now that the maid-servants had twice heated sake for him at supper; as for the rice-beer he had been more than ever thirsty to-night. He glanced into the corner where the bottles were and a sense of uncleanness came over him—as if his body were flowing with the slow spirit, like a sea-marsh at high tide.

... He heard the shafts of a rickshaw grate upon the gravel outside. Amoya had come; it was midnight. He opened the papered lattice. The runner was bowing by his cart, holding his broad hat with both hands. Morning covered his machine, put fresh charcoal in the brazier, caught up his hat and overcoat, and shuffled down the stairway, holding his slippers on with his toes. The door-boy gave him his shoes and opened the way to the street. Morning greeted Amoya with a pat on the shoulder, and climbed into the cart.

“Yoshuwara?” the runner asked.

“No, you shameless ruffian!”

“No?” Amoya squeaked pleasantly.

“No—not—no must do.”

Morning waved his arm, signifying solitary and peaceful enjoyment of the night air and contemplation of the dark city. These night journeys had become the cooling features of his day. Amoya was a living marvel, the rickshaw runner incomparable—tireless, eager, very proud of his work; too old to be spoiled. He was old; indeed, enough to be Morning’s father, but his limbs were young, and his great trunk full of power unabated.

The night was dark, damp, no moon nor star. The cold which was almost tempted thinly to crust the open drains, was welcome to the man’s nostrils. Amoya warmed and gathered speed. Up the broad Shiba Road he sped, past the far dim lights of the highway, past Shiba temple, the tombs of the Ronins, past the cavalry barracks (by far the best joke on Japan), and the last of the known land-marks.

Now Morning suffered strange temptations. Few white men who have lived any time in Japan have escaped. A Japanese house with every creature comfort was within his resources even now; wholesome food, sake, rice-beer were cheap; excellent service, even such service as Amoya’s was laughably cheap. Why not sink into this life and quit the agony?... Why did he think of it as sinking into this life? Why did he agonize anyway?... There was always a fresh sore on him somewhere. Surely other men did not burn back and forth every day as he did.

The shame came again. He ordered Amoya back within an hour, left him at the door of the Inn, drenched with sweat and delighted with his extra fare.

Morning slid open the door of his room. Nothing could be seen but the glow of the brazier, yet he knew some one was within.... A series of mattresses and robes had been taken out from a chest of drawers and made up on the matting. The women as usual, had waited for him to go out. He lit the lamp.

A little Japanese maid-servant was curled up asleep at the foot of his bed. Morning sat down upon the cushion and mused curiously.... It was thus that Naomi had ordered Ruth to steal into the couch at the feet of Boaz. Ruth had found a home, and was not long allowed to make herself glad with mere gleanings.... It was this sort of thing that made Morning hate Japan. In the eyes of the old, limp-backed Inn-keeper, this child was a woman. He would not have dared to delegate a mere maid-servant to ply the ancient art with his guest, but there were extenuations here: the delicacy and subtlety of the little one’s falling asleep, and the child-like freshness of the offering. It was this last that stung Morning, because he knew the old Japanese found a commercial value in this very adolescence.

He had smiled at this child during the day, and asked her name—Moto-san—and repeated it after her, as one might have done the name of a child. She had just come in from the fields, reported the bath-boy who preëmpted any leakage of English whatsoever, and who was frequently on the verge of being understood.... Her hands showed labor, and she was not ashen as the Japanese beauties must be, but sweet and fragrant—and so little.

“It is the same the world over, when they come in from the fields,” he said. “Good God, she ought to be sleeping with her dolls.... Poor little bit of a girl in a man’s country ... and they sent you in here to keep me from night-riding. One cannot complain of hospitality ... Moto-san... Moto-san....”

She stirred, and snuggled deeper. “She is truly asleep,” he thought.

“Moto-san!” he said softly again.

The girl opened her eyes, which suddenly filled with fright. Morning patted her shoulder gently. And now she sat up staring at him, and remembering.

He leaned his head upon his palm and shut his eyes—sign of falling asleep—then pointed her to the door.... Morning could not tell if she were pleased. It all seemed very strange to her—her smile was frightened. He repeated the gesture. She had slid off the bed to the matting upon her knees, facing him. And now she bowed to the floor, and backed out so, bowing with frightened smile.... He reflected dismally that she had lost value for the eye of the Inn-keeper.

5

MORNING’S idea as he reached the Imperial next forenoon was to call the committee together, or a working part of it, and to demand why he had been barred from the projected columns.... The high and ancient lobby was practically empty. It appeared that the correspondents de rigeur and en masse were posing for a photograph on the rear balcony, which was reached through the billiard room. Morning went there and stood by the window while the picture was taken. It required an hour or more. He was passed and re-passed. Two or three Americans seemed on the point of asking him to take his place with the fifty odd war-men, but they checked themselves before speaking. Morning felt vilely marked. Stamina did not form within him. He did not realize that something finer than physical courage was challenged.

He watched the backs of the formation—the squared shoulders, the planted feet. He knew that in the minds of the posing company, each was looking at his own. From each individual to his lesser or greater circle, the finished picture would go. It would be reproduced in the periodicals which sent these men—“our special correspondent”—designated. Personal friends in each case would choose their own from the crowd. The little laughing chap in brown corduroys who arranged the group was the best and bravest man in field photography. He left the camera now to his assistant, and took place with the others. Men of twenty campaigns were there. The dim eyes of a certain little old man had looked upon more of war than any other living human being. In one brain or another, pictures were coiled from every campaign around the world during the past forty years. Never before in history had so many famous war-men gathered together. It would be a famous picture.... He, John Morning, would hear it in the future:

“... Why weren’t you in that picture?”

“I sat in the billiard room behind at a window. I had been barred out of a place among the first three columns. I was under a cloud of some kind.”

No, that would not be his answer. Various lies occurred.

This little mental activity completed itself without any volition. It was finished now, like the picture outside—the materials scattering. The idea of the truth merely appeared through a mental habit of looking at two sides—a literary habit. It had brought no direct relation to John Morning. But the lies had brought their direct relation.

He could not remain at his place by the window, now that the fifty came in for drink and play. He was afraid to demand what evil concerning him was in the minds of men; afraid something would be uncovered that was true. He felt the uncleanness of drink upon him, and a moral softening from years of newspaper work, a training begun in glibness, which does not recognize the rights of men, but obeys a City Desk. He could not organize a contending force; and yet loathed the thought of return to the Japanese Inn. He was not ready to face himself alone.

It had never come to him so stirringly as now—the sense of something within, utterly weary of imprisonment and forced companionship with the visible John Morning. His misery was a silent unswerving shame. A feverish impulse almost controlled him to take something either to lift him away, or permit him to sink in abandonment from the area of pain.

He stood near the desk in the lobby. Duke Fallows was coming. The Californian’s legs, in their worn corduroys, were far too lean for the big bony knees—a tall man of forty, with tired and sunken eyes and sunken mouth. Fallows had a reputation. Its strongly drawing side-issue was his general and encompassing, though fastidious, love of women. Someone had whispered that even if a man has the heart of a volcano, its outpouring must be spread rather thin in places to cover all women. He was out for the Western States, not only to show war, but to show it up. Certainly he loved the under-dog, which is an epigram for stating that he was an anarchist.

No anarchist could be gentler to meet, nor more terrible to read. Fallows owned a formidable interest in the Western States; otherwise he would have had to print himself. The rest of that San Francisco property was just an excellent newspaper. Its effort was to balance Duke Fallows; sometimes it seemed trying to extinguish him in order to save itself. It brought sanity and common-sense and the group-souled observation of affairs, to say nothing of news and advertising—all to cool the occasional column of this sick man. To a few, however, on the Pacific Coast, since his new assignment was announced—the Russo-Japanese war and Duke Fallows meant the same thing. The majority said: “Watch the Western States boom in circulation. They are sending Fallows to Asia.”

The two stood together, Fallows looking down. Morning was broad in brow and shoulder; slender otherwise and of medium height.

“I’m Fallows.”

“Yes.”

The tall man’s eyes turned upward so that only the whites were visible. He fingered his brow as if to pluck something forth through the bone.

“Come on upstairs.”

Morning followed the large, slow knees. It was less that the knees wobbled—rather the frailty of the hangings and pinnings. They did the three high flights and began again, finally drawing up in a broad roof-room that smelled of new harness and overlooking an especially hard-packed part of Tokyo, toward the Ginza. Fallows lit the fire that was ready in the grate and sprawled wearily.

“Where did you study religion, Morning?”

“I didn’t.”

“That’s one way to get it.”

The sound of his own laugh came to Morning’s ears and hurt him. Fallows’ eyes were shut. There was no trace of a smile around the wan mouth.

“You’ll likely be more religious before you’re done. I mean many things by being religious—a man’s inability to lie to himself for one; a passion for the man who’s down—that’s another.... I’ve read your stuff. It’s full of religion——”

Now it seemed to Morning as if he had just entered a fascinating wilderness; apart from this, he saw something about the worn, distressed mouth of Fallows that made him think of himself last night. There was one more effect from this first brush. Something happened in Morning’s mind with that sentence about the inability to lie to one’s self. It was like a shot in the midst of a flock of quails. A pair of birds was down, but the rest of the flock was off and away, like the fragments of an explosive.

“I read some of your stuff about the Filipino woman—‘woman of the river-banks,’ you called her. Another time you looked into a nipa-shack where an old man was dying of beri-beri, and an old woman sat at bay at the door——”

These brought back the pictures to Morning, and the dimension behind the actual light and shade and matter. The healing, too, was that someone had seen his work, and seen from it all that he saw,—the artist’s true aliment, which praise of the many cannot furnish. It gave him heart like an answer to prayer, because he had been very needful.

“You must have come up hard. Did you, boy?” Fallows asked after a moment.

“Perhaps you would say so.”

“Farm first?”

“Yes——”

“And a father who misunderstood?”

“A good deal of the misunderstanding was my own bull-headedness, I see now——”

“And the mother, John Morning?”

“I was too little——”

“Ah——”

Morning found himself saying eagerly a little later:

“And then the city streets—selling newspapers, errands, sick all the time, though I didn’t know it. Then I got to the horses.... I found something in the stables good for me. I liked horses so well that it hurt. I learned to sleep nights and eat regularly—but read so much rot. Still, it was all right to be a stable-boy. A big race-horse man took me on to ship with stock. I’ve been all over America by freight with the racers—from track to track. I used to let the tramps ride, but they were dangerous—especially the young ones. I had to stay awake. An old tramp could come in anytime—and go to sleep—but younger ones are bad. They beat you up for a few dimes. I was bad, too, bad as hell.... And then I rode—there was money, but it went. I got sick keeping light. The pounds over a hundred beat me out of the game—except the jumps. I’ve ridden the jumpers in England, too—been all broken up. In a fall you can’t always get clear.... All this was before I was eighteen—it was my kind of education.”

“I like it,” said Fallows.

“One night in New York I heard a newspaper man talk.... It was in a back-room bar on Sixth avenue. I see now he was a bit broken down. He looked to me then all that was splendid and sophisticated. I wanted to be like him——”

Fallows bent forward, his face tender as a father’s. “You poor little chap,” he said, as if he did not see Morning now, but the listening boy in the back-room bar.

“You see, I never really got the idea of having money—it went so quickly. The idea of a big bundle didn’t get a chance to sink in. I’ve had several hundred dollars at once from riding—but the next day’s races, or the next, got it. What I’m trying to say is—winnings didn’t seem to belong to me. Poverty was a habit. I always think yet in nickels and dimes. I seem to belong—steerage. It wasn’t long after I listened to that reporter, that I got a newspaper job, chasing pictures. A year after that the wars began. I went out first on my own hook; in fact, I think you’d call it that now. I seem to get into a sort of mania to be off—when the papers begin to report trouble. I didn’t know I was poorly fixed this time, until here in Tokyo I saw how the others go about it. Dinner-clothes, and all sorts of money invested in them—whether the war makes good or not——”

“I was right,” Fallows said finally. He had listened as a forest in a drouth listens for rain.

Morning was embarrassed. He had been caught in the current of the other’s listening. It was not his way at all to talk so much. He wasn’t tamed altogether; and then he had been extra hurt by the night and the day. An element of savagery arose, with the suspicion that Fallows might be making fun of him.

“What were you right about, Mr. Fallows?”

“You’ve got an especial guardian.”

Morning waited. The fuel was crackling. The Californian watched the fire and finally began to talk.

“You’re one of them. I saw it in your stuff. Then they told me here that you lived in a little Japanese hotel alone. That’s another reason. Your kind come up alone—always alone. To-day I saw you watching that picture business. You looked tired—as if you had a long way yet to swim against the current. You had a fight on—inside and out. You’ll keep on fighting inside, long after the world outside has called a truce. When you’re as old as I am—maybe before—you’ll have peace inside and out.”

Morning was bewildered; and had somewhat braced himself in scepticism, as if the other were reading a fortune out of a cup.

“You’re one of them, and you’ve got a guardian—greater than ten of these militia press-agents. You don’t know it yet, but your stuff shows it; your life shows it. You try to do what you want—and you’re forced to do better. You’ll be kept steerage, as you call it,—kept down among men—until you see that it’s the place for a white man to be, and that all these other things—dinner-coats and expense accounts—are but tricks to cover a weakness. You’ll be held down among men until you love them, and would be sick away from service with them. You won’t be able to rest unless you’re helping. You’ll choke when you say ‘Brother.’ You’ll answer their misery and cry from your sleep, ‘I’m coming.’ You hear them with your soul now, but the brain won’t listen yet. You’ll go it blind for the under-dog—and find out afterwards that you were immortally right.”

Morning’s breast was burning. It was more the fiery flood of kindness than the words. He had been roughed so thoroughly that he couldn’t take words; he needed a sign.

“The time will come when you’ll hear your soul saying, ‘Get down among men, John, and help.’ You’ll jump. A storm of hell will follow you if you don’t. They’ll throw you overboard and even the whale won’t stomach you if you don’t. ‘Get down among men, John’; that’s your orders to Nineveh.”

The Californian changed the subject abruptly:

“They were good enough to give me a place with the first column, but I can’t see it quite. There’s going to be too much supervision. These Japanese are rivet-headed. I like the other end. New Chwang is still open. Lowenkampf is in command there. I knew him years ago in Vienna. Good man for a soldier—old Lowenkampf. He’ll take us in. Let’s go over——”

“I won’t be exactly ‘healed’ for a long stay. My money is coming here——”

“Let it pile up. I’ll stake you for the Russian picnic.”

Morning wanted it so intensely that he feared Duke Fallows might die before they got to Lowenkampf and New Chwang.... He was terrorized by this thought: “Fallows has somehow failed to understand about me not getting a column, and not being asked into the picture. When he finds out, he’ll change his mind....”

He wanted to speak, gathered strength with violent effort, but Fallows just now was restlessly eager to go below.

6

SECOND class, that night, on the Pacific liner Manchuria, forward among the rough wooden bunks, eating from tin-plates.... It had been Morning’s suggestion. Fallows had accepted it laughingly, but as a good omen.

“Two can travel cheaply as one,” he said. “I’m quite as comfortable as usual.”

Morning realized that his friend was not comfortable at best. He was too well himself, too ambitious, quite to realize the other’s illness. Morning found a quality of understanding that he had expected vaguely to find sometime from some girl, but he could not return the gift in kind, nor right sympathy for the big man’s weakness. Fallow’s didn’t appear to expect it.

They left the Manchuria at Nagasaki, after the Inland Sea passage, found a small ship for Tientsin direct; also a leftover winter storm on the Yellow Sea. Morning, at work, typewriter on his knees, looked up one night as they neared the mouth of the Pei-ho. An oil-lamp swung above them smokily; the tired ship still creaked and wallowed in the gale. Fallows has been regarding him thoughtfully from time to time.

“You keep bolstering me up, Duke, and I don’t seem to help you any,” Morning said. “Night and day, I worry you with the drum of this machine—when you’re too sick to work; and here you are traveling like a tramp for me. I’m used to it, but it makes you worse. You staked me and made possible a bit of real work this campaign—why won’t you let me do some stuff for you?”

“Don’t you worry about what I’ve done—that’s particularly my affair. Call it a gamble. Perhaps I chose you as a man chooses his place to build a house....”

Morning wondered at times if the other was not half dead with longing for a woman.... In the fifteen years which separated the two men in age lay all the difference between a soldier and an artist. Morning had to grant finally that the Californian had no abiding interest in the war they were out to cover; and this was so foreign that the rift could not be bridged entirely.

“War—why, I love the thought!” Fallows exclaimed. “The fight’s the thing—but this isn’t it. This is just a big butchery of the blind. The Japanese aren’t sweet in this passion. We won’t see the real Russia out here in Asia. Real Russia is against all this looting and lusting. Real Russia is at home singing, writing, giving itself to be hanged. Real Russia is glad to die for a dream. This soldier Russia isn’t ready to die. Just a stir in the old torpor of decadence—this Russia we’re going to. You’ll see it—its stench rising.... I want the other war. I want to live to fight in the other war, when the under-dog of this world—the under-dog of Russia and England and America, runs no more, cowers no more—but stops, turns to fight to the death. I want the barricades, the children fired with the spirit, women coming down to the ruck, the girls from the factories, harlots from the slums. The women won’t stay at home in the war I mean—and you and I, John, must be there,—to die every morning——”

Yet Fallows didn’t write this. He lay on his back dreaming about it. Always the women came into his thoughts. Morning held hard to the game at hand.... Lying on his back—thus the Californian became identified in his mind. And strange berths they found, none stranger than the one at last in the unspeakable Chinese hotel at New Chwang. Morning remembered the date—4/4/’04—for he put it down in the black notebook, after smashing a centipede on the wall with it. They were awakened the next morning by the passing of a brigade of Russian infantry in full song. Each looking for “good-morning” in the eyes of the other, found that and tears.

The Chinese house stirred galvanically at mid-day—from the farthest chicken-coop to the guest-chamber of the most revered. Lowenkampf, commanding the port, in sky-blue uniform, entered with his orderly and embraced a certain sick man lying on a rough bench, between his own blankets. It was just so and not otherwise, nor were the “European” strangers of distinguished appearance. They had come in the night, crossing the river in a junk, instead of waiting for the Liao-launch. They had not sought the Manchurian hotel, where Europeans of quality usually go, but had asked for native quartering. So rarely had this happened, that the tradition was forgotten in New Chwang about angels appearing unheralded.

It was a great thing to John Morning, this coming of General Lowenkampf. He had not dared to trust altogether in the high friend of Duke Fallows—nor even in finding such a friend in New Chwang. The actual fact meant that they would not be sent out of the zone of war, when the Russians evacuated from New Chwang, if Lowenkampf could help it; and who could help it if not the commander of the garrison? It meant, too, that everything Duke Fallows had said in his quiet and unadorned way when speaking of purely mundane affairs had turned out true.

Fallows sat up in his bunk to receive the embrace he knew was coming. The General was a small man. He must have been fifty. He appeared a tired father,—the father who puts his hands to his ears and looks terrified when his children approach, but who loves them with secret fury and prays for them in their beds at night. He had suffered; he had a readiness to tears; he needed much brandy at this particular interval, as if his day had not begun well. He spoke of the battle of the Yalu and his tears were positive. It was a mistake, a hideous mistake. He said this in English, and with the frightened intensity of a woman whose lover has died misunderstanding her.... No, they were not to stay at New Chwang.... He would make them comfortable.... Yes, he had married a woman six years ago.... It murders the soldier in a man to marry a woman and find her like other women. You may think on the mystery of childbirth a whole life—but when your own woman, in your own house, brings you a child, it is all different. A thing to be awed at.... It draws the soldier-pith out of one’s spine, as you draw the nerve out of a tooth.... You are never the same afterward.

Fallows sank back smiling raptly.

“You’re the same old nervous prince of realizers—Lowenkampf—always realizing your own affairs with unprecedented realism. God knows, I’m glad to see you.... John Morning, here is a man who can tell you a thing you have heard before, in a way that you’ll never forget. It’s because he only talks about what he has realized for himself. His name is blown in the fabric of all he says.... Lowenkampf, here’s a boy. I’ve been looking for him, years—ever since I found my own failure inevitable. John Morning—Lowenkampf, the General. If you both live to get back to your babies—Morning’s are still in the sky, their dawn is not yet—you will remember this day—for it is a significant Trinity.... General, how many babies have you?”

“Oh, my God—one!”

Fallows seemed unspeakably pleased with that excited remark. Lowenkampf glanced at the shut eyes of his old friend, and then out of the window to the sordid Chinese street, where the Russian soldiers moved to and fro in the unwieldy disquiet of a stage mob in its first formation.

“But they’re all my babies——”

John Morning had a vision of a battle with that sentence. All the rest of the day he thrilled with it. Work was so pure in his heart from the vision, that he left his machine that night (Duke Fallows seemed asleep) and touched the brow of his friend....

7

AUGUST—Liaoyang, the enemy closing in.... There were times when John Morning doubted if he had ever been away from the sick man, Duke Fallows, and the crowds of Russian soldiery. Individually the days were long. Often in mid-afternoon, he stopped to think if some voice or picture of to-day’s dawning did not belong to yesterday or last week. Yet routine settled upon all that was past, and the days accumulated into a quantity of weeks that grew like the continual miracle of a hard man’s savings.

Always he missed something. He was hard in health, but felt white nowhere, in nor out, so much had he been played upon by sun and wind and dust. The Russian officers were continually asking him to try new horses—the roughest of the untamed purchases brought in by the Chinese. It had become quite the custom among the officers to advise with Morning on matters of horse-flesh. Fallows had started it by telling Lowenkampf that Morning formerly rode the jumpers in England, but the younger man had since earned his reputation in the Russian post.

A sorrel mare had appeared in the city. Rat-tailed and Roman-nosed she was, and covered with wounds. They had tried to ride her in from the Hun. Her skin was like satin and she had not been saddled decently. Just a wild, head-strong young mare in the beginning, but bad handling had made her a mankiller. Lieutenant Luban, soft with vodka and cigarettes, had dickered for the mare, and drunkenly insisted upon mounting at once. Morning caught the bridle after the first fight, and Luban slid off in his arms in a state of collapse. Clearly an adult devil lived in the sorrel. She was red-eyed in her rage, past pain, and walked like a man. She would have gone over backwards with Luban, and yet she was lovely to Morning’s eye, perfect as a yellow rose. He knew her sort—the kind that runs to courage and not to hair; the kind of individual that rarely breeds.

He led her apart, talked to her; knew that she only cared to kill him and be free. She was outrage; hate was the breath of her nostrils; but she made Morning forget his work.... Thirty officers were gathered in the compound. Morning had saddled her afresh; her back was easier—yet she was up, striking, pawing. He knew she meant to go back. Stirrup-free, he held her around the neck as she stood poised. His weight was against her toppling, but sheer deviltry hurled back her head, breaking the balance. They saw him push the hot yellow neck from him as she fell. He landed on his feet, facing her from the side, leaped clear—and then darted forward, catching the bridle-rein before she straightened her first front leg. Morning was in the saddle before she was up. Then the whole thing was done over again as perfectly as one with his hand in repeats a remarkable billiard-shot.

“It’s only a question of time—she’ll kill you,” said Fallows.

“How she hates the Chinese, but she’s the gamest thing in Asia,” Morning answered. “I’d like to be away alone with her.”

“You’d need a new continent for a romance like that,” Fallows said, and that night, in their room of Lowenkampf’s headquarters, he resumed the subject, his eyes lost in the dun ceiling.

“There’s only one name for that sorrel mare, if I’m consulted.”

“Name her,” Morning said.

“The one I’m thinking of—her name is Eve.”

Fallows shivered, and turned the subject, but Morning knew he would come back.... They heard the sentries on the stone flags below. It was monotonous as the sound of the river. An east wind had blown all afternoon. Dust was gritty in the blankets, sore in the rifts of lip and nostril caused by the long baking wind. Their eyes felt old in the dry heat. Daily the trains had brought more Russians; daily more Chinese refugees slipped out behind. Liaoyang was a mass of soldiery—heavy and weary with soldiers—dull with its single thought of defense. For fifty or more miles, the southern arc of the circle about the old walled city was a system of defense—chains of Russian redoubts, complicated entanglements, hill emplacements and rifle-pits. Beyond this the Japanese gathered openly and prepared. It seemed as if the earth itself would scream from the break in the tension when firing began....

“John—a man must be alone——” Fallows said abruptly.

“That’s one of the first things you told me—and that a man mustn’t lie to himself.”

“It must be thinking about your romance with that sorrel fiend—that brings her so close to-night, I mean the real Eve. I had to put the ocean between us—and yet she comes. Listen, John, when you are dull and tired after a hard day, you take a drink or two of brandy. You, especially you, are new and lifted again. That’s what happens to me when a woman comes into the room....”

Twice before Morning had been on the verge of this, and something spoiled it. He listened now, for Fallows opened his heart. His eyes held unblinkingly the dim shadows of the ceiling. The step of the sentries sank into the big militant silence—and this was revelation:

“God, how generous women are with their treasures! They are devils because of their great-heartedness. So swift, so eager, so delicate in their giving. They look up at you, and you are lost. My life has been gathering a bouquet—and some flowers fade in your hand.... I hated it, but they looked up so wistfully—and it seemed as if I were rending in a vacuum.... Always the moment of illusion—that this one is the last, that here is completion, that peace will come with this fragrance; always their giving is different and very beautiful—and always the man is deeper in hell for their bestowal.... A day or a month—man’s incandescence is gone. Brown eyes, blue eyes—face pale or ruddy—lips passionate or pure—their giving momentary or immortal—and yet, I could not stay. Always they were hurt—less among men, less among their sisters, and no strangers to suffering—and always hell accumulated upon my head.... Then she came. There’s a match in the world for every man. Her name is Eve. She is the answer of her sisterhood to such as I.

“She was made so. She will not have me near. And yet with all her passion and mystery she is calling to me. The rolling Pacific isn’t broad enough. She has bound me by all that I have given to others, by all that I have denied others. She was made to match me, and came to her task full-powered, as the sorrel mare came to corral to-day for you.... Oh, yes, I honor her.”

There was silence which John Morning could not break. Fallows began to talk of death—in terms which the other remembered.

“... For the death of the body makes no difference. In the body here we build our heaven or hell. If we have loved possessions of the earth—we are weighted with them afterward,—imprisoned among them. If we love flesh here, we are held like shadows to fleshly men and women, enmeshed in our own prevailing desire. If our life has been one of giving to others, of high and holy things—we are at the moment of the body’s death, like powerful and splendid birds suddenly hearing the mystic call of the South. Death, it is the great cleansing flight into the South....”

This from the sick man, was new as the first rustle of Spring to John Morning; yet within, he seemed long to have been expectant. There was thrill in the spectacle of the other who had learned by losing....

Morning’s mind was like the beleaguered city—desperate with waiting and potential disorder, outwardly arrogant, afraid in secret.... Duke Fallows was thinking of a woman, as he visioned his lost paradise. The younger man left the lamp-light to go to him, and heard as he leaned over the cot:

“... Like a lost traveler to the single point of light, John, I shall go to her. Eve—the one red light—I will glow red in the desire of her. She is my creation. Out of the desire of my strength she was created. As they have mastered me in the flesh, this creation of mine shall master me afterward—with red perpetual mastery.”

Lowenkampf came in. They saw by his eyes that he was more than ever drawn, in the tension and heart-hunger. He always brought his intimacies to the Americans. A letter had reached him from Europe in the morning, but the army had given him no time to think until now. It was not the letter, but something in it, that reminded him of a story. So he brought his brandy and the memory:

“... It was two or three evenings before I left Petersburg to come here. I had followed him about—my little son who is five years. I had followed him about the house all day. Every little while at some door, or through some curtain—I would see the mother smiling at us. It was new to me—for I had been seldom home in the day-time—this playing with one’s little son through the long day. But God, I knew I was no longer a soldier. I think the little mother knew. She is braver than I. She was the soldier—for not a tear did I see all that day.... And that night I lay down with my little son to talk until he fell asleep. It was dark in the room, but light was in the hall-way and the door open.... You see, he is just five—and very pure and fresh.”

Fallows sat up. He was startling in the shadow.

“... For a long time my little man stirred and talked—of riding horses, when his legs were a little longer, and of many things to do. He would be a soldier, of course. God pity the little thought. We would ride together soon—not in front of my saddle, but on a pony of his own—one that would keep up. I was to take him out to swim ... and we would walk in the country to see the trees and animals.... My heart ached for love of him—and I, the soldier, wished there were no Asia in this world, no Asia, nor any war or torment.... He had seen a gray pony which he liked, because it had put its head down, as if to listen. It didn’t wear any straps nor saddle, but came close, as one knowing a friend, and put its head down—thus the child was speaking to me.

“And I heard her step in the hall—the light, quick step. Her figure came into the light of the door-way. She looked intently through the shadows where we lay, her eyelids lifted, and a smile on her lips. Our little son saw her and this is what he said so drowsily:

“‘We are talking about what we will do—when we get to be men.’”

Fallows broke this silence:

“‘When we get to be men.’ Thank you, General. That was good for me.... Our friend John needed that little white cloud, too. I’ve just been leading him among the wilted primroses.”

Morning did not speak.

Lowenkampf said the fighting would begin around the outer position to-morrow.... But that had been said before.

8

ON the night of August 31st, for all the planning, the progress of the battle was not to the Russian liking. All that day the movements of the Russians had mystified John Morning. The broad bend of the river to the east of the city had been crowded with troops—seemingly an aimless change of pastures. He felt that after all his study of the terrain and its possibilities, the big thing was getting away from him. When he mentioned this ugly fear to Fallows, the answer was:

“And that’s just what the old man feels.”

Fallows referred to Kuropatkin.

The monster spectacle had blinded Morning. He had to hold hard at times to keep his rage from finding words in answer to Duke Fallows’ scorn for the big waiting-panorama which had enthralled him utterly—the fleeing refugees, singing infantry, the big gun postures, the fluent cavalry back along the railroad, the armored hills, the whole marvelous atmosphere.... None of this appeared to matter to Fallows. He had written little or nothing. God knew why he had come. He would do a story, of course.... Morning had written a book—the climax of which would be the battle. He had staked all on the majesty of the story. His career would be constructed upon it. He would detach himself from all this and appear suddenly in America—the one man in America who knew Liaoyang. He would be Liaoyang; his mind the whole picture. He knew the wall, the Chinese names of the streets, the city and its tenderloin, where the Cantonese women were held in hideous bondage. He knew the hills and the river—the rapid treachery of the Taitse. He had watched the trains come in from Europe with food, horses, guns and men; had even learned much Russian and some Chinese. He had studied Lowenkampf, Bilderling, Zarubaieff, Mergenthaler; had looked into the eyes of Kuropatkin himself....

Duke Fallows said:

“All this is but one idea, John—one dirty little idea multiplied. Don’t let a couple of hundred thousand soldiers spoil the fact in your mind. Lowenkampf personally isn’t capable of fighting for himself on such a rotten basis. Fighting with a stranger on a neighbor’s property—that’s the situation. Russia says to Old Man China, ‘Go, take a little airing among your hills. A certain enemy of mine is on the way here, and I want to kill him from your house. It will be a dirty job, but it is important to me that he be killed just so. I’ll clean up the door-step afterward, repair all damages, and live in your house myself.... And the Japanese have trampled the flowers and vegetable-beds of the poor old Widow Korea to get here——’”

Thus the Californian took the substance out of the hundred thousand words Morning had written in the past few months. Dozens of small articles had been sent out until a fortnight ago through Lowenkampf, via Shanghai, but the main fiber of each was kept for this great story, which he meant to sell in one piece in America.

Kuropatkin—both Morning and Fallows saw him as the mighty beam in the world’s eye at this hour. To Morning he was the risen master of events; to Fallows merely a figure tossed up from the moil. Morning saw him as the source of power to the weak, as a silencer of the disputatious and the envious, as the holding selvage to the vast Russian garment, worn, stained and ready to ravel, the one structure of hope in a field of infinite failures. Fallows saw him as an integral part of all this disorder and disruption, one whose vision was marvelous only in the detection of excuses for himself in the action of others; whose sorrow was a pose and whose self was far too imperious for him firmly to grip the throat of a large and vital obstacle. What Morning called the mystical somberness of the chief, Fallows called the sullen silence of dim comprehension. Somewhere between these notations the Commander stood.... They had seen him at dusk that day. “He seems to be repressing himself by violent effort,” the younger man whispered.

“What would you say he were repressing, John—his appetite?”

The answer was silence, and late that night, (the Russian force was now tense and compact as a set spring), Fallows dropped down upon his cot, saying:

“You think I’m a scoffer, don’t you?”

“You break a man’s point, that’s all——”

“I know—but we’re not to be together always.... Listen, don’t think me a scoffer, even now. These big, bulky things won’t hold you forever. Perhaps, if I were a bigger man, I’d keep silent. You’ll write them well, no doubt about that.... But don’t get into the habit of thinking me a scoffer. There’s such a lot of finer things to fall for. John, I wasn’t a scoffer when I first read your stuff—and saw big forces moving around you.... A man who knows a little about women, knows a whole lot about men.... To be a famous soldier, John, a man can’t have any such forces moving around him. He must be an empty back-ground. All his strength is the compound of meat and eggs and fish; his strength goes to girth and jowl and fist——”

“You’re a wonderful friend to me, Duke.”

“That’s just what I didn’t want you to say.... There’s no excellence on my part. Like a good book, I couldn’t riddle you in one reading.”

Morning found himself again, as he wrote on that last night of preparation; that last night of summer. It was always the way, when the work came well. It brought him liveableness with himself and kindness for others. He had his own precious point of view again, too. He pictured Kuropatkin ... sitting at his desk, harried by his sovereign, tormented by princes, seeing as no other could see the weaknesses in the Russian displays of power, and knowing the Japanese better than any other; the man who had come up from Plevna fighting, who had written his fightings, who was first to say, “We are not ready,” and first to gather up the unpreparedness for battle.

Morning felt himself the reporter of the Fates for this great carnage. He wanted to see the fighting, to miss no phase of it—to know the mechanics, the results, the speed, the power, weakness and every rending of this great force. He did not want the morals of it, the evil spirit behind, but the brute material action. He wanted the literary Kuropatkin, not a possible reality. He wanted the one hundred thousand words driven by the one-seeing, master-seeing reporter’s instinct. He was Russian in hope and aspiration—but absolutely negative in what was to take place. He wanted the illusion of the service; he saw the illusion more clearly; so could the public. The illusion bore out every line of his work so far. To laugh at the essence of the game destroyed its meaning, and the huge effect he planned to make in America.

Morning was sorry now for having lost during the day the sense of fine relation with Fallows, but everything he had found admirable—from toys and sweets to wars and women—the sick man had found futile and betraying; everything that his own mind found good was waylaid and diminished by the other. Fallows, in making light of the dramatic suspense of the city, had struck at the very roots of his ambition. The work of the night had healed this all, however.

The last night of summer—joyously he ended the big picture. Three themes ran through entire—Nodzu’s artillery, under which the Russians were willingly dislodging from the shoulders and slopes of Pensu-marong; the tread of the Russian sentries below, (a real bit of Russian bass in the Liaoyang symphony), and the glissando of the rain.

He sat back from his machine at last. There were two hundred and seventy sheets altogether of thin tough parchment-copy—400 words to the page, and the whole could be folded into an inside pocket. It was ready for the battle itself.... All the Morning moods were in the work—moments of photographic description, of philosophic calm, instant reversals to glowing idealism—then the thrall of the spectacle—finally, a touch, just a touch to add age, of Fallows’ scorn. It was newspaper stuff—what was wanted. He had brought his whole instrument up to concert-pitch to-night. The story was ready for the bloody artist.

His heart softened emotionally toward Fallows lying on his back over in the shadows.... Lowenkampf came in for a queer melting moment.... Morning looked affectionately at his little traveling type-mill. It had never faltered—a hasty, cheap, last-minute purchase in America, but it had seen him through. It was like a horse one picks up afield, wears out and never takes home, but thinks of many times in the years afterward. Good little beast.... And this made him think with a thrill of Eve, brooding in the dark below.... She was adjusted to a thought in his mind that had to do with the end of the battle. It was a big-bored, furious idea. Morning glanced at his watch. Two-fifteen on the morning of September. He unlaced one shoe, but the idea intervened again and he moved off in the stirring dream of it. It was three o’clock when he bent to the other shoe.

9

ALL the next day, Liaoyang was shelled from the south and southeast; all day Eve shivered and sweated in the smoky turmoil. At dusk, Morning, to whom the mare was far too precious to be worn out in halter, rode back to Yentai along the railroad. She operated like a perfect toy over that twelve miles of beaten turf. The rain ceased for an hour or two, and the dark warmth of the night seemed to poise her every spring. The man was electric from her. At the station Morning learned that Lowenkampf, with thirteen battalions, already had occupied the lofty coal-fields, ten miles to the east on a stub of the railroad. He had first supposed the force of Siberians now crowding the station to be Lowenkampf’s men; instead it was his reserve. Eve had lathered richly, so that an hour passed before she was cool enough for grain or water. He rubbed her down, meanwhile, talked to her softly and made plans. Her eye flashed red at the candle, as he shut the door of the stable. That night on foot he did the ten miles to the collieries, joining Fallows and the General at midnight.... Morning was struck with the look of Lowenkampf’s face. He wasn’t taking a drink that night; his mouth was old and white. A thin bar of pallor stretched obliquely from chin to cheek-bone. The chin trembled, too; the eyes were hungerful, yet so kind. Desperate incongruity somewhere. This man should have been back in Europe with his neighbors about the fire—his comrade tucked in up-stairs, the little mother pouring tea. And yet, Lowenkampf—effaced with his anguish and dreamy-eyed, as if surveying the distance between his heaven and hell—was the brain of the sledge that was to break the Flanker’s back-bone to-morrow.

“The Taitse is only ten miles south,” said Fallows, as they turned in. “Bilderling is there. Kuroki is supposed to poke his nose in between, and Lowenkampf is to smash it against Bilderling. Mergenthaler’s Cossacks are here to take the van in the morning, and we’re backed up by a big body of Siberians, stretching behind to Yentai station——”

“I saw ’em,” said Morning. “Lowenkampf looks sick with strain.”

Day appeared, with just the faintest touch of red showing like a broken bit of glass. Rain-clouds, bursting-heavy, immediately rolled over it,—a deluge of grays, leisurely stirring with whitish and watery spots. Though his troops were taking the field, Lowenkampf had not left his quarters in the big freight go-down. Commanders hurried in and out. Fallows was filling two canteens with diluted tea, when an old man entered, weeping. It was Colonel Ritz, bent, red-eyed, nearly seventy, who had been ordered, on account of age and decrepitude, to remain with the staff. Brokenly, he begged for his command.

“I have always stayed with the line, General. I shall be quick as another. Don’t keep an old man, who has always stuck to the line—don’t keep one like that back in time of battle.”

Lowenkampf smiled and embraced him—sending him out with his regiment.

Mergenthaler now came in. There was something icy and hateful about this Roman-faced giant. His countenance was like a bronze shield—so small the black eyes, and so wide and high the cheek-bones. For months his Cossacks had done sensational work—small fighting, far scouting, desperate service. He despised Lowenkampf; believed he had earned the right to be the hammer to-day; and, in truth, he had, but Lowenkampf, who ranked him, had been chosen. Bleak and repulsive with rage, the Cossack chief made no effort to repress himself. Lowenkampf was reminded that he had been policing the streets of Liaoyang for weeks, that his outfit was “fat-heeled and duck-livered.”... More was said before Mergenthaler stamped out, his jaw set like a stone balcony. It seemed as if he tore from the heart of Lowenkampf the remnant of its stamina.... For a moment the three were alone in the head-quarters. Fallows caught the General by the shoulders and looked down in his face:

“Little Father—you’re the finest and most courageous of them all.... It will be known and proven—what I say, old friend—‘when we get to be men.’”

The masses of Lowenkampf’s infantry, forming on the heights among the coal-fields, melted at the outer edges and slid downward. Willingly the men went. They did not know that this was the day. They had been fearfully expectant of battle at first—ever since Lake Baikal was crossed. Battalion after battalion slid off the heights, and were lost in the queer lanes running through the rocks and low timber below. The general movement was silent. The rain held off; the air was close and warm. Lowenkampf, unvaryingly attentive to the two Americans, put them in charge of Lieutenant Luban, the young staff officer, whom Morning had caught in his arms from the back of the sorrel. Down the ledges they went, as the others.

Morning was uneasy, as one who feels he has forgotten something—a tugging in his mind to go back. He was strongly convinced that Lowenkampf was unsubstantial in a military way. He could not overcome the personal element of this dread—as if the General were of his house, and he knew better than another that he was ill-prepared for the day’s trial.

Fallows welcomed any disaster. As he had scorned the army in its waiting, he scorned it now in its strike. He looked very lean and long. The knees were in corduroy and unstable, but his nerve could not have been steadier had he been called to a tea-party by Kuroki. As one who had long since put these things behind him, Fallows appeared; indeed, as one sportively called out by the younger set, to whom severing the spine of a flanker was fresh and engrossing business.... Morning choked with suppressions. Luban talked low and wide. He was in a funk. Both saw it. Neither would have objected, except that he monopolized their thoughts with his broken English, and to no effect.

Now they went into the kao liang—vast, quiet, enfolding. It held the heat stale from yesterday. The seasonal rains had filled the spongy loam at the roots, with much to spare blackening the lower stems.... For an hour and a half they sunk into the several paths and lost themselves, Lowenkampf’s untried battalions. The armies of the world might have vanished so, only to be seen by the birds, moving like vermin in a hide.... Men began to think of food and drink. The heights of Yentai, which they had left in bitter hatred so shortly ago, was now like hills of rest on the long road home. More and more the resistance of men shrunk in the evil magic of this pressure of grain and sky and holding earth—a curious, implacable unworldliness it was, that made the flesh cry out.

“They should have cut this grain,” Luban said for the third time.

Fallows had said it first. Anyone should have seen the ruin of this advance, unless the end of the millet were reached before the beginning of battle. They had to recall with effort at last, that there was an outer world of cities and seas and plains—anything but this hollow country of silence and fatness.

If you have ever jumped at the sudden drumming of a pneumatic hammer, as it rivets a bolt against the steel, you have a suggestion of the nervous shock from that first far machine-gun of Kuroki’s—just a suggestion, because Lowenkampf’s soldiers at the moment were suffocating in kao liang.... In such a strange and expensive way, they cut the crops that day.

Morning trod on the tail of the battalion ahead. It had stopped; he had not. The soldier in front whom he bumped turned slowly around and looked into his face. The wide, glassy blue eyes then turned to Fallows, and after resting a curious interval, finally found Luban.

The face was broad and white as lard. Whatever else was in it, there was no denying the fear, the hate, the cunning—all of a rudimentary kind. Luban was held by the man’s gaze. The fright in both hearts sparked in contact. The stupid face of the soldier suddenly reflected the terror of the officer. And this was the result: The wide-staring suddenly altered to a squint; the vacant, helpless staring of a bewildered child turned into the bright activity of a trapped rodent.

Luban had failed in his great instant. His jaw was loose-hinged, his mouth leaked saliva.

Now Morning and Fallows saw other faces—twenty faces in the grain, faces searching for the nearest officer. Their eyes roved to Luban; necks craned among the fox-tails. There was a slow giving of the line, and bumping contacts from ahead like a string of cars.... Morning recalled the look of Luban, as he had helped him down from the sorrel. He had helped then; he hated now. Fallows was better. He plumped the boy on the shoulder and said laughingly:

“Talk to ’em. Get ’em in hand—quick, Luban—or they’ll be off!”

It was all in ten seconds. The nearest soldiers had seen Luban fail. Other platoons, doubtless many, formed in similar tableaux to the same end. A second machine-gun took up the story. It was far-off, and slightly to the left of the Russian line of advance. The incomprehensible energy of the thing weakened the Russian column, although it drew no blood.

A roar ahead from an unseen battalion-officer—the Russian Forward. Luban tried to repeat it, but pitifully. A great beast rising from the ooze and settling back against the voice—such was the answer.

The Thought formed. It was the thought of the day. None was too stupid to catch the spirit of it. Certain it was, and pervading as the grain. Indeed, it was conceived of kao liang. The drum of the machine-gun, like a file in a tooth, was but its quickener. It flourished under the ghostly grays and whites of the sky. In the forward battalions the Thought already clothed itself in action:

To run back—to follow the paths back through the grain—to reach the decent heights again. And this was but a miniature of the thought that mastered the whole Russian army in Asia—to go back—to rise from the ghastly hollows of Asia and turn homeward again.

It leaped like a demon upon the unset volition of the mass. Full-formed, it arose from the lull. It effected the perfect turning.

Morning saw it, and wanted the source. He had planned too long to be denied now. The rout was big to handle, but he wanted the front—a glimpse of the actual inimical line. It was not enough for him to watch the fright and havoc streaming back. Calling a cheery adieu to Fallows, he bowed against the current—alone obeying the Russian Forward.

10

AT the edge of the trampled lane, often shunted off into the standing crop, Morning made his way, running when he could.... The pictures were infinite; a lifetime of pictures; hundreds of faces and each a picture. Men passed him, heads bowed, arms about their faces, like figures in the old Dore paintings, running from the wrath of the Lord. Here and there was [Pg 43]pale defiance. Nine sheepish soldiers carried a single wounded man, the much-handled fallen one looking silly as the rest.

The utter ghostliness of it all was in Morning’s mind.... Gasping for breath, after many minutes of running, he sank down to rest. Soldiers sought to pick him up and carry him back. There were others who could not live with themselves after the first panic. They fell out of the retreat to join him. Others stopped to fire—a random emptying of magazines in the millet. Certain groups huddled when they saw him—mistaking a civilian for an officer—and covered their faces. Officers begged, prayed for the men to hold, but the torrent increased, individuals diving into the thick of the grain and leaking around behind. White showed beneath the beards, and white lips moved in prayer. The locked bayonets of the Russians had never seemed so dreadful as when low-held in the grain.... One beardless boy strode back jauntily, his lips puckered in a whistle.

The marvelous complexity of common men—this was the sum of all pictures, and the great realization of John Morning. His soul saw much that his eyes failed. The day was a marvelous cabinet of gifts—secret chambers to be opened in after years.

Now he was running low, having entered the zone of fire. He heard the steel in the grain; stems were snapped by invisible fingers; fox-tails lopped. He saw the slow leaning of stems half-cut.... Among the fallen, on a rising slope, men were crawling back; and here and there, bodies had been cast off, the cloth-covered husks of poor driven peasants. They had gone back to the soil, these bodies, never really belonging to the soldiery. It was only when they writhed that John Morning forgot himself and his work. The art of the dead was consummate.

The grain thinned. He had come to the end of Lowenkampf’s infantry. It had taken an hour and a half for the command to enter in order; less than a half-hour to dissipate. The rout had been like a cloud-burst.

And this was the battle. (Morning had to hold fast to the thought.) Long had he waited for this hour; months he had constructed the army in his story for this hour of demolition. It was enough to know that Lowenkampf had failed. Liaoyang, the battle, was lost.... Old Ritz went by weeping—he had been too old, they said; they had not wanted him to take his regiment to field. Yet he was perhaps the last to leave the field. Only his dead remained, and Colonel Ritz was not weeping for them....

Now Morning saw it was not all over. Before gaining the ridge swept by Kuroki’s fire, he knew that Mergenthaler was still fighting. It came to him with the earthy rumble of cavalry. To the left, in a crevasse under the crest of the ridge, he saw a knot of horses with empty saddles, and a group of men. Closer to them he crawled, along the sheltered side of the ridge, until in the midst of Russian officers, he saw that splendid bruising brute, who had stamped out of headquarters that morning, draining the heart of Lowenkampf as he went. Mergenthaler of the Cossacks—designed merely to be the eyes and fingers of the fighting force; yet unsupported, unbodied as it were, he still held the ridge.

Kuroki, as yet innocent of the rout, would not otherwise have been checked. His ponderous infantry was not the sort to be stopped by these light harriers of the Russian army. The Flanker was watching for the Hammer, and the Hammer already had been shattered.... Mergenthaler, cursing, handled his cavalry squadrons to their death, lightly and perfectly as coins in his palm. Every moment that he stayed the Japanese, he knew well that he was holding up to the quick scorn of the world the foot-soldiers of Lowenkampf, whom he hated. His head was lifted above the rocks to watch the field. His couriers came and went, slipping up and down through the thicker timber, still farther to the left.... Morning crawled up nearby until he saw the field—and now action, more abandoned than he had ever dared to dream:

An uncultivated valley strewn with rocks and low timber. Three columns of Japanese infantry pouring down from the opposite parallel ridge, all smoky with the hideous force of the reserve—machine-guns, and a mile of rifles stretching around to the right. (It was this wing’s firing that had started the havoc in the grain.)

Three columns of infantry pouring down into the ancient valley, under the gray stirring sky—brown columns, very even and unhasting—and below, the Cossacks.

Morning lived in the past ages. He lay between two rocks watching, having no active sense—but pure receptivity. Time was thrust back.... Three brown dragons crawling down the slopes in the gray day—knights upon horses formed to slay the dragons.

Out of the sheltering rocks and timber they rode—and chose the central dragon quite in the classic way. It turned to meet the knights upon horses—head lifted, neck swollen like the nuchal ribs of the cobra. In the act of striking it was ridden down, but the knights were falling upon the smashed head. The mated dragons had attacked from either side....

It was a fragment, a moving upon the ground,—that company of knights upon horses,—and the Voice of it, all but deadened by the rifles, came up spent and pitiful.

Mergenthaler’s thin, high voice was not hushed. He knew how to detach another outfit from the rocks and timber-thickets, already found by the Japanese on the ridge, already deluged with fire. Out from the betraying shelter, the second charge, a new child of disaster, ran forth to strike Kuroki’s left.... Parts of the film were elided. The cavalrymen fell away by a terrible magic. Again the point thickened and drew back, met the charge; again the welter and the thrilling back-sweep of the Russian fragment.

Morning missed something. His soul was listening for something.... It was comment from Duke Fallows, so long marking time to events.... He laughed. He was glad to be free, yet his whole inner life drew back in loathing from Mergenthaler—as if to rush to his old companion.... And Mergenthaler turned—the brown high-boned cheeks hung with a smile of derision. He was climbing far and high on Lowenkampf’s shame.... He gained the saddle—this hard, huge Egoist, the staff clinging to him, and over the ridge they went to set more traps.

The wide, rocking shoulders of the General sank into the timber—as he trotted with his aides down the death-ridden valley. It may have been the sight of this little party that started a particular machine-gun on the Japanese right.... The sizable bay the chief rode looked like a polo-pony under the mighty frame. Morning did not see him fall: only the plunging bay with an empty saddle; and then when the timber opened a little, the staff carrying the leader up the trail.

It was the mystery which delayed the Japanese, not Mergenthaler. When at last Kuroki’s left wing continued to report no aggressive movement from Bilderling river-ward; and when continued combing in the north raised nothing but bleak hills and grain-valleys hushed between showers, he flooded further columns down the ridge, and slew what he could of the Russian horsemen who tried with absurd heroism to block his way. At two in the afternoon the Flanker fixed his base among the very rocks where Morning had lain—and the next position for him to take was the coal-hills of Yentai. Only the ghosts of the cavalry stood between—and kao liang.

Morning turned back a last time to the fields of millet in the early dusk. He had been waiting for Mergenthaler to die. The General lay in the very go-down where he had outraged Lowenkampf that morning; and now the Japanese were driving the Russians from the position.... Mergenthaler would not die. They carried him to a coal-car, and soldiers pushed it on to Yentai, the station.

The Japanese were closing in. They were already in the northern heights contending with Stakelberg; they were stretched out bluffing Bilderling to the southward. They were locked with Zarubaieff at the southern front of Liaoyang. They were in the grain.... Cold and soulless Morning felt, as one who has failed in a great temptation; as one who has lived to lose, and has not been spared the picture of his own eternal failure.

He looked back a last time at the grain in the closing night. The Japanese were there, brown men, native to the grain. The great shadowed field had whipped Lowenkampf and lost the battle. It lay in the dusk like a woman, trampled, violated, feebly waving. Rain-clouds came with darkness to cover the nakedness and bleeding.

11

DUKE Fallows saw but one face.... John Morning studied a thousand, mastered the heroism of the Cossacks, filled his brain with blood-pictures and the incorrigible mystery of common men. Duke Fallows saw but one face. In the beauty and purity of its inspiration, he read a vile secret out of the past. To the very apocalypse of this secret, he read and understood. The shame of it blackened the heavens for his eyes, but out of its night and torment came a Voice uttering the hope of the human spirit for coming days.

Morning had left. Luban had put on bluster and roaring. Their place in the grain was now broad from trampling; the flight was on in full. It meant something to Fallows. It was not that he wanted the Japanese to win the battle; the doings of the Japanese were of little concern to him. He felt curiously that the Japanese were spiritually estranged from the white man. Russia was different; he was close to the heart of the real Russia whose battle was at home. Russia’s purpose in Asia was black; he was full of scorn for the purpose, but full of love for the troops. Strange gladness was upon him—as the men broke away. Reality at home would come from this disaster. He constructed the world’s battle from it, and sang his song.

One soldier running haltingly for his life looked up to the face of Luban of the roaring voice—and laughed. Luban turned, and perceived that Fallows had not missed the laugh of the soldier. This incident, now closed, was in a way responsible for the next.

... Out of the grain came striding a tall soldier of the ranks. His beard was black, his eyes very blue. In his eyes was a certain fire that kindled the nature of Duke Fallows as it had never been kindled before, not even by the most feminine yielding. The man’s broad shoulders were thrust back; his face clean of cowardice, clean as the grain and as open to the sky. His head was erect and bare; he carried no gun, scorned the pretense of looking for wounded. Had he carried a dinner-pail, the picture would have been as complete—a good man going home from a full-testing day.

In that moment Fallows saw more than from the whole line before.... Here was a conscript. He had been taken from his house, forced across Europe and Asia to this hour. The reverse of his persecutors had set him free. This freedom was the fire in his eyes.... They had torn him from his house; they had driven and brutalized him for months. And now they had come to dreadful disaster. It was such a disaster as a plain man might have prayed for. He had prayed for it in the beginning, but in the long, slow gatherings for battle, in the terrible displays of power, he had lost his faith to pray. Yet the plain man’s God had answered that early prayer. This was the brightness of the burning in the blue eyes.

His persecutors had been shamed and undone. He had seen his companions dissipate, his sergeants run; seen his captains fail to hold. The great force that had tortured him, that had seemed the world in strength, was now broken before his eyes. Its mighty muscles were writhing, their strength running down. The love of God was splendid in the ranker’s heart; the breath of home had come. The turning in the grain—was a turning homeward.

All this Fallows saw. It was illumination to him—the hour of his great reception.

Luban, just insulted by the other infantryman, now faced the big, blithe presence, emerging unhurried from the grain. Luban raised his voice:

“And what are you sneaking back for?”

“I am not sneaking——”

“Rotten soldier stuff—you should be shot down.”

“I am not a soldier—I am a ploughman.”

“You are here to fight——”

“They forced me to come——”

“Forced you to fight for your Fatherland?”

“This is not my Fatherland, but a strange country——”

“You are here for the Fatherland——”

“I have six children in Russia. The Fatherland is not feeding them. My field is not ploughed.”

The talk had crackled; it had required but a few seconds; Luban had done it all for Fallows to see and hear—but Fallows was very far from observing the pose of that weakling. The Ploughman held him heart and soul—as did the infallible and instantly unerring truth of his words. The world’s poor, the world’s degraded, had found its voice.

The man was white with truth, like a priest of Melchizedek.

Luban must have broken altogether. Fallows, listening, watching the Ploughman with his soul, did not turn.... Now the man’s face changed. The lips parted strangely, the eyelids lifting. Whiteness wavered between the eyes of the Ploughman and the eyes of Duke Fallows. Luban’s pistol crashed and the man fell with a sob.

Fallows was kneeling among the soaked roots of the millet, holding the soldier in his arms:

“Living God, to die for you—you, who are so straight and so young.... Hear me—don’t go yet—I must have your name, Brother.... Luban did not know you—he is just a little sick man—he didn’t know you or he wouldn’t have done this.... Tell me your name ... and the place of your babes, and their mother.... Oh, be sure they shall be fed—glad and proud am I to do that easy thing!... You have shown me the Nearer God.... They shall be fed, and they shall hear! The world, cities and nations, all who suffer, shall hear what the Ploughman said—the soul of the Ploughman, who is the hope of the world.... You have spoken for Russia.... And now rest—rest, Big Brother—you have done your work.”

The soldier looked up to him. There had been pain and wrenching, the vision of a desolated house. Now, his eyes rested upon the American. The shadow of death lifted. He saw his brother in the eyes that held him—his brother, and it seemed, the Son of Man smiled there behind the tears.... He smiled back like a weary child. Peace came to him, lustrous from the shadow, for lo! his field was ploughed and children sang in his house.

Fallows had not risen from his knees. He was talking to himself:

“... Out of the grain he came—the soul of the Ploughman. And gently he spoke to us ... and this is the day of the battle. I came to the battle—and I go to carry his message to the poor—to those who labor—to Russia and the America of the future. Luban spoke the thought of the world, but the Ploughman spoke for humanity risen. He spoke for the women, and for the poor.... Bright he came from the grain—bright and unafraid—and those shall hear him, who suffer and are heavy-laden. This is the battle!... And his voice came to me—a great and gracious voice—for tsars and kings and princes to hear—and I am to carry his message....”

Luban laughed feebly at last, and Fallows looked up to him.

“You’ll hear him in your passing, Luban, poor lad. You’ll hear him in your hell. Until you are as simple and as pure as this Ploughman—you shall hear and see all this again. Though you should hang by the neck to-night, Luban,—this picture would go out with you. For this is the hour you killed your Christ.”

12

LOWENKAMPF was the name that meant defeat. Lowenkampf—it was like the rain that night.... “Lowenkampf started out too soon.”... Morning heard it. Fallows heard it. The coughing sentries heard it. The whole dismal swamp of drenched, whipped soldiery heard it. Sleek History had awakened to grasp it; Kuropatkin had washed his hands.... Lowenkampf had started out too soon that morning. The Siberians had only left Yentai Station proper when Lowenkampf set forth from the Coal-heights. Had his supports been in position (very quickly and clearly the world’s war-experts would see this) the rout in the grain would have been checked.

As it was, many of Lowenkampf’s soldiers had run the entire ten miles from the heights to the station, Yentai—after emerging from kao-liang—evading the Siberian supports as they ran, as chaos flies from order. Now in the darkness (with Kuroki bivouacked upon the main trophy of the day, the Coal-heights) the shamed battalions of Lowenkampf re-formed along the main line in the midst of their unused reserves.

The day had been like a month of fever to Morning, but Duke Fallows was a younger man, and a stranger that night.... Morning tried to work, but he was too close to it all, too tired. It was as if he were trying to tell of a misfortune that had no beginning, and whose every phase was his own heart’s concern. His weariness was like the beginning of death—coldness and pervading ennui. Against his will he was gathered in the glowing currents of Duke Fallows—watching, listening, not pretending even to understand, but borne along. Together they went in to the General’s private room. Lowenkampf looked up, gathered himself with difficulty and smiled. Fallows turned to Morning, asked him to stand by the door, then strode forward and knelt by the General’s knees. It did not seem extraordinary to Morning—so much was insane.

“You were chosen, old friend. It has been a big day for the under-dog——”

“I have lost Liaoyang.”

“That was written.”

“My little boy will hear it in the street. He will hear it in the school. Before he is a man—he will hear it.”

“I shall take him upon my knee. I shall tell him of you in a way that he shall never forget. And his mother—I shall tell her——”

Lowenkampf rubbed his eyes.

“I have business in Russia. This day I heard what must be done. It is almost as if I had gotten to be a man.”

Fallows leaned back laughingly, his arms extended, as if pushing the other’s knees from him.

Some inner wall broke, and the General wept. Morning put his foot against the door. The thought in his heart was: “This is something I cannot write.”...

Morning held the idea coldly now that Fallows was mentally softened from the strain. Other things came up to support it.... He, too, had seen a soldier shot by an officer. It was discipline. At best, it was but one of the thousand pictures. It had happened less because the man was retiring without a wound—thousands were doing that—than because the man answered back, when the officer spoke. He did not hear what the soldier said. This soldier possibly had trans-Baikal children, too. The day and his long illness had crazed Fallows, now at the knees of the man who had lost the battle.

“... I know what you thought this morning—when you saw your men march down into the grain,” Fallows was saying to the General. “You thought of your little boy and his mother. You thought of the babes and wives and mothers—of those soldiers of yours whom you were sending to the front. You didn’t want to send them out. You’re too close to becoming a man for that. You wondered if you would not have to suffer for sending them out so—and if this particular suffering would not have to do with your little boy and his mother——”

“My God, stop, Fallows——”

“You had to think that. You wouldn’t be Lowenkampf if you failed to think that.... I love you for it, old friend. Big things will come from Lowenkampf, and from the conscript who came to me out of the grain with vision and a voice. The battle at home won’t be so hard to win—now that this is lost.”

There was a challenge and heavy steps on the platform—and one low, hurried voice.

Lowenkampf stood up and wiped his eyes.

“The Commander——” he whispered.

A pair of captains towered above him, a grizzled colonel behind; then Morning saw the gray of the short beard, and the dark, dry-burning of unblinking eyes, fixed upon Lowenkampf.... The latter’s shoulders drooped a little, and his eyes lowered deprecatingly for just an instant. Kuropatkin passed in. The soft fullness of his shoulders was like a woman’s. Fleshly and failing, he looked, from behind.... The Americans waited outside with the colonel and captains. The door was shut.

Midnight.... Fallows and Morning had moved in the rain among the different commands. The army at Yentai seemed to be emerging from prolonged anæsthesia to find itself missing in part and strangely disordered. It was afraid to sleep, afraid to think of itself, and denied drink. Fallows had told everywhere the story of the Ploughman; just now he helped himself to a bundle of Morning’s Chinese parchment, and was writing copy in long-hand.

His head was bowed, his eyes expressionless.

“And I alone remain to tell thee!” he muttered at last.

Morning did not answer, but resigned himself to hear more of the Messiah who came out of the grain.

“I told one of Mergenthaler’s aides the story,” Fallows said coldly. “He said it was quite the proper thing to do—to shoot down a man who was leaving the field unwounded. I told Manlewson of the First Siberians, who replied that the Russians would begin to win battles when they murdered all such, as unflinchingly and instantly as the Japanese did, and hospital malingerers as well. I told Bibinoff (who is Luban’s captain), and he said: ‘That’s the first good thing I ever heard about Luban.’ He was pleased and epigrammatic....”

Fallows stood up—his face was in shadow, so far beneath was the odorous lamp.

“Living God—I can’t make them see—I can’t make them see! They’re all enchanted. Or else I’m dead and this is hell.... They talk about Country. They talk about making a man stand in a place of sure death for his Country—in this Twentieth Century—when war has lost its last vestige of meaning to the man in the ranks, and his Country is a thing of rottenness and moral desolation! What is the Country to the man in the ranks? A group of corrupt, inbred undermen who study to sate themselves—to tickle and soften themselves—with the property and blood and slavery of the poor.... A good man, a clean man, is torn from his house to fight, to stand in the fire-pits and die for such monsters. Suddenly the poor man sees!

“... He came forth from the grain with vision—smiling and unafraid. He is not afraid to fight, but he has found himself on the wrong side of the battle. When he fights again it will be for his child, for his house, for his brother, for his woman, for his soul. Blood in plenty has he for such a war.... Think of it, John Morning, the Empire was entrusted to poor little Luban—against this man of vision! He came forth smiling from the grain. ‘I do not belong here, my masters. I was torn away from my woman and children, and I must be home for the winter ploughing. It is a long way—and I must be off. I am a ploughman, not a soldier. I belong to my children and my field. My country does not plough my field—does not feed my children.... What could Luban do but kill him—little agent of Herod? But the starry child lives!...

“And listen, John, to-night—you heard them—we heard these fat-necked, vulture-breasted commanders—vain, envy-poisoned, scandal-mongering commanders, complaining to each other: ‘See, what stuff has been given us to win battles with!... I have told it and they cannot see. They are not even good devils; they are not decent devourers. They have no humor—that is their deadly sin. An adult, half-human murderer, seeing his soldiers leave the field, would cry aloud, ‘Hello, you Innocents—so you have wakened up at last!’ But these cannot see. Their eyes are stuck together. It is their deadly sin—the sin against the Holy Ghost—to lack humor to this extent!”

Morning laughed strangely. “Come on to bed, you old anarchist,” he said, though sleep was far from his own eyes.

“That’s it, John. Anarchy. In the name of Fatherland, Russia murders a hundred thousand workmen out here in Asia. In answer, a few men and women gather together in a Petersburg cellar, saying, ‘We are fools, not heroes. When we fight again it will be for Our Country!’ And they are anarchists—their cause is Terrorism!”

“We’re all shot to pieces to-night, Duke——”

“We are alive, John. Lowenkampf is alive. But he who spoke to me this day, who came forth so blithely to die in my arms (his woman sleeps ill to-night in the midst of her babes), and he is lying out in the rain, his face turned up to the rain. God damn the fat reptile that calls itself Fatherland!... But, I say to you, that we’re come nearly to the end of the prince and pauper business on this planet. The soul of the Ploughman was heard to-day—as long ago they heard the Soul of the Carpenter.... He is lying out there in the millet—his face turned up to the rain. Yet I say to you, John, there’s more life in him this hour than in his Tsar and all the princes of the blood.”

Fallows covered his face with his hands.

“You’re tired and thick to-night, John, but you are one who must see!” he finished passionately. “You must help me tell the story to the cellar gatherings in Petersburg, to the secret meetings in all the centers of misery, wherever a few are gathered together in the name of Brotherhood—in New York, London, Paris, and Berlin.... You must help me to make other men see—help me to tell this thing so that the world will hear it, and with such power that the world will be unable longer to lie to itself.

“I can see it now—how Jesus, the Christ, tried to make men see.... That was His Gethsemane—that He could not make men see. I tell you it is a God’s work—and it came to Jesus, the Christ, at last—‘If they crucify me, perhaps, a few will see!’... I’m going over to Russia, John, to learn how to tell them better.”

13

THE night of the third of September, and John Morning is off for the big adventure. Between the hills, the roads are a-stream.... All day he had watched different phases of the retreat. Fighting back in the city; fighting here and there along the staggering, burdened, cruelly-punished line; a sudden breaking-out of fighting in a dozen places like hidden fires; rain and wounded and seas of mud; the gray intolerable misery of it all; the sick and the dead—Morning was glutted with the colossal derangement. And they called it an orderly retreat.

He was riding the sorrel Eve out of the zone of war. The battle was behind him now, and he breathed the world again. He had something to tell. Liaoyang was in his brain. He was off for the ships that sail. A month—America—the great story.... He felt the manuscript against him. It was in a Chinese belt, with money for the passage home, tight against his body, a hundred thousand words done on Chinese parchment and wrapped in oil-skin. The book of Liaoyang—he had earned it. He had written it against the warping cynicism of Duke Fallows. On the ship he could reshape and renew it all into a master-picture.

It had been easier than he thought to break away from Fallows, his friend. The latter was whelmed in the soul of the Ploughman. A big story, of course, as Fallows saw it—but there were scores of big stories. It would ruin it to let an anarchist tell it. Suppose officers in general did stop to listen to troops sneaking off the field?

Duke had given him a letter, and a story for the Western States. The first was not to be read until he was at sea out from Japan. When Morning spoke of the money he owed, the other had put the thought away. Sometime he would call for it if he needed it; it was a trifle anyway.... It hadn’t been a trifle. It had meant everything.

Morning was glad to breathe himself again. Yet there was an ache in his heart for Duke Fallows, now off for Europe the western way. He, Morning, had not done his part. He hadn’t given as he had taken; had not kept close to Duke Fallows at the last. There was a big score that money could never settle. Soundly glad to be alone, but in the very gladness the picture of Duke Fallows returned—lying on his back, in bunks and berths and beds, staring up at the ceiling, accentuating his own failures to bring out the hopeful and valorous parts of his friend. It was always such a picture to Morning, when Fallows came to mind—staring, dreaming, looking up from his back. It had seemed sometimes as if he were trying to make of his friend all that he had failed to be.... Yet the Duke Fallows of the last twenty-four hours, wild, dithyrambic—had been too much.... Again and again, irked and heavy with his own limitations, Morning’s brain had seized upon the weakness of the other, to condone his own slowness of understanding.... It may have been Eve, and her relation to the Fallows revelation, or it may have been putting hideous militarism behind, that made John Morning think of Women now as he rode, and a little differently from ever before.... Certain laughing sentences of Duke Fallows came back to him presently, with a point he seemed to have missed when they were uttered:

“We have our devils, John. You have ambition; Lowenkampf has drink; Mergenthaler has slaughter.... You will love a woman; you already drink too readily, but Ambition will stand in your house and fight from room to room at the last—and over the premises to the last ditch. He’s a grand devil—is Ambition.... My devil, John? Well, it isn’t the big-jawed male who loves a woman as she dreams to be loved. It’s the man with a touch of women in him—just enough to begin upon her mystery.... When I hear a certain woman’s voice, or see a certain passing figure—something old, very old and wise, stirs within, seems to stir and thrill with eternal life. And, John, it isn’t low—the thought. I’d tell you if it were. It isn’t low. It’s as regal as Mother Nature in a valley, on a long afternoon. It isn’t that I want to hurt her; it isn’t that I want something she has. Rather, I want all she has! I want her mind; I want her soul; I want her full animations. I want to make her yield and give; I want to feel her battle with herself, not to yield and give.... Oh, the flesh is nothing. It is the cheapest thing in the world—but her giving, her yielding—it’s like an ocean tide. It breaks every bond; it laughs at every law. Power seems to rush into a woman when she yields! That’s the conquest of my heart—to feel that power.... All devils are young compared to that in a man’s heart—all but one, and that is the passion to hold spiritual dominion over other men.”

Morning’s mind had fallen into the habit of allowing much for the other’s sayings—of accepting much as mere facility.... Thus he thought as he traveled in the rain, Eve’s swift, springy trot a stimulus to deep thinking; and always there was a bigger and finer John Morning shadowing him, fathoming his smallnesses, wondering at his puny rebellions and vain desires. It was in this fairer John Morning, so tragically unexpressed during the past few months, that the pang lived—the pang of parting from his friend.

Morning was terrific physically. The thing he was now doing was as spectacular a bit of newspaper service as ever correspondent undertook in Asia; and yet, to John Morning the high light of achievement fell upon the manuscript, not upon the action. It had not occurred to him to be afraid. If he could get across the ninety miles to Koupangtse—through the Hun huises, through the Japanese scouting cavalry, across two large and many smaller yellow rivers—and reach the railroad, he would quickly get a ship for Japan from Tientsin or Tongu—and from Japan—home.... He was doing it for himself—passionately and with no sense of splendor.

Fallows had been so sure of his friend’s physical courage, that he made no point of it, in the expression of attachment.... He had called it vision at first, this thing that had drawn him to John Morning—a touch of the poet, a touch of the feminine—others might have called it. No matter the name, he had seen it, as all artists of the expression of the inner life recognize it in one another; and Fallows knew well that where the courage of the soldier ends, the courage of the visionary begins.

Morning was a trifle peculiar, however. Unless it sank utterly, he stuck to a ship, until the horizon revealed another sail.

He had come up through the dark. The world had grounded him deeply in illusion. Most brilliant of promises—even Fallows had not seen him that first day in too bright a dawn—but he learned hard. And his had been close fighting—such desperate fighting that one does not hear voices, and one is too deep in the ruck to see the open distance.... Much as he had been alone—the world had invariably shattered his silences. Always he had worked—worked, worked furiously, angrily, for himself.... He was taught so. The world had caught him as a child in his brief, pitiful tenderness. The world was his Eli. As from sleep, he had heard Reality calling. He had risen to answer, but the false Eli had spoken—an Eli that did not teach him truly to listen, nor to say, when he heard the Voice another time—“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.”

14

THE Taitse, of large and ancient establishment, runs westward from Liaoyang for twenty-five miles, and in a well-earned bed, portions of which are worn in the rock. Morning rode along the north bank, thus avoiding altogether a crossing of the Taitse, since his journey continued westward from the point where the river took its southward bend. From thence it paralleled the Hun in a race to join the Liao. The main stem of the latter was beyond the Hun, and these two arteries of Asia broke Morning’s trail. Fording streams of such magnitude was out of the question, and there was a strong chance of an encounter with the Hun huises at the ferries....

Rain, and the sorrel’s round hoofs sucked sharply in the clay. She had no shoes to lose in these drawing vacuums. The scent of her came up warm and good to the horse-lover. Alone on a road, she had always been manageable, hating crowds and noise—soldiers, Chinese, and accoutrements. Perhaps, this was merely a biding of time. Eve had a fine sense of keeping a strange road. This was not usual, although a horse travels a familiar road in the darkness better than a man. These two worked well together.

By map the distance from Liaoyang to Koupangtse was seventy miles. Morning counted upon ninety, at least. The Manchurian roads are old and odd as the Oriental mind.... He passed the southward bend of the big river, and at daybreak reached Chiensen, ten miles beyond, on the Hun.

Chiensen, unavoidable on account of the ferry, was a danger-point. Japanese cavalry, it was reported, frequently lit there, and the Hun huises (Chinese river-pirates and thieves in general, whom Alexieff designated well as “the scourge of Manchuria”) were at base in this village.... In the gray he found junks, a flat tow and landing.

You never know what Chinese John is going to do. If you have but little ground of language between you, he will take his own way, on the pretext of misunderstanding. Morning’s idea was to get across quickly, without arousing the river-front. He awoke the ferryman, placing three silver taels in his hand. (He carried silver, enough native currency to get him to Japan, his passport, and the two large envelopes Duke Fallows had given him, in the hip-pockets of his riding breeches.) The ferryman had no thought of making the first crossing without tea. Morning labored with him, and with seeming effect for a moment, but the other fell suddenly from grace and aroused his family. He was not delicate about it. Morning resigned himself to the delay, and was firmly persuading Eve to be moderate, as she drank from the river’s edge, when Chinese John suddenly aroused the river population. Standing well out on the tow-flat, he trumpeted at some comrade of the night before, apparently no less than a hundred yards up the river. There were sleepy answers from many junks within range of the voice. It was the one hateful thing to John Morning—yet to rough it with the ferryman for his point of view would be the only thing worse.

The landing was rickety; its jointure with the tow-boat imperfect. The American took off his coat, tossed it over the sorrel’s head, tying the sleeves under her throat. She stiffened in rebellion, but as the darkness was as yet little broken by the day, she decided to accept the situation. Morning felt her growing reluctance, however, as she traversed the creaking, springy boards. The crevasse between the landing and the craft was bridged; and the latter, grounded on the shore-side, did not give. The mare stood in the center of the tow, sweating and tense.

Numerous Chinese were now abroad—eager, even insistent, to help. Their voices stirred the mare to her old red-eyed insanity. Morning could hold himself no longer. Once or twice before in his life this hard, bright light had come to his brain. Though the exterior light was imperfect, the ferryman saw the fingers close upon the butt of the gun, and something of the American’s look. He dropped his tea, sprang to the junk and pulled up the bamboo-sail. This was used to hold the tow against the current.

Two natives in the flat-boat stood ready with poles. And now the ferryman spoke in a surprised and disappointed way as he toiled in front. He seemed ready to burst into tears; and the two nearer Morning grunted in majors and minors, according to temperament. The American considered that it might all be innocent, although the voices were many from the town-front. Poling began; the tow drew off from the landing. Clear from the grounding of the shore, the craft sank windily to its balance in the stream.

This was too much for Eve. Her devil was in the empty saddle. She leaped up pawing. The two Chinese at the poles dived over side abruptly. Water splashed Eve’s flanks, and she veered about on her hind feet—blinded and striking the air in front. The wobble of the tow now finished her frenzy—and back she went into the stream. The saddle saved her spine from a gash on the edge of the tow. Morning had this thought when Eve arose; that he need fear no treachery from the Chinese; and this as she fell—a queer, cool, laughing thought—that after such a fall she would never walk like a man again.

He had been forced to drop the bridle, but caught it luckily with one of the poles as she came up struggling. He beckoned the ferryman forward, and Eve, swimming and fighting, was towed across. To Morning it was like one of his adventures back in the days of the race-horse shipping.

Eve struck the opposite bank—half-strangled from her struggle and the blind. The day had come. The nameless little town on this side of the Hun was out to meet him. Had he brought a Korean tiger by a string, however, he could not have enjoyed more space—as the mare climbed from the stream. He talked to her and unbound her eyes. Red and deeply baleful they were. She shook her head and parted her jaws. The circle of natives widened. Morning straightened the saddle and patted Eve’s neck softly, talking modestly of her exploit.... Natives were now hailing from mid-stream, so he leaped into the sticky saddle and guided the mare out to the main road leading to Tawan on the Liao.... Queerly enough, just at this instant, he remembered the hands and the lips of the ferryman—a leper.

Ten miles on the map—he could count thirteen by the road—and then the Liao crossing.... The mare pounded on until they came to a wild hollow, rock-strewn, among deserted hills. Morning drew up, cooled his mount and fed the soaked grain strapped to the saddle since the night before. Eve was not too cross to eat—nor too tired. She lifted her head often and drew in the air with the sound of a bubble-pipe.... Just now Morning noted a wrinkle in his saddle blanket. Hot with dread, he loosed the girth.

He looked around in terror lest anyone see his own shame and fear. He had put the saddle on in the dark, but passed his hand between her back and the cloth. Long ago a trainer had whipped him for a bad bit of saddling; even at the time he had felt the whipping deserved. He lifted the saddle. A pink scalded mouth the size of a twenty-five-cent piece was there.... God, if he could only be whipped now. She was sensitive as satin; it was only a little wrinkle of the rain-soaked blanket.... His voice whimpered as he spoke to her.

Only a horseman could have suffered so. He washed the rub, packed soft lint from a Russian first-aid bandage about to ease the pressure; and then, since the rain had stopped again, he rubbed her dry and walked at her head for hours, despairing at last of the town named Tawan. The Liao was visible before the village itself. Morning shook with fatigue. He had to gain the saddle for the possible need of swift action, but the wound beneath never left his mind. It uncentered his self-confidence—a force badly needed now.

And this was the Liao—the last big river, roughly half-way. The end of the war-zone, it was, too, but the bright point of peril from Hun huises.... Morning saw the thin masts of the river junks over the bowl of the hill, their tribute flags flying.... To pass was the day’s work, to make the ferry with Eve. There was too much misery and contrition in his heart for him to handle her roughly. The blind could not be used again. She would connect that with the back-fall into the Hun. The town was full of voices.

15

CHINESE were gathering. Morning went about his business as if all were well, but nothing was good to him about the increase of these hard, quick-handed men. They were almost like Japanese. With the tail of his eye, he saw shirt signals across the river. The main junk fleet was opposite. Trouble—he knew it. The hard, bright light was in his brain.

In the gathering of the natives, Eve was roused afresh. His only way was to try her without the blind. If she showed fight, he meant to mount quickly and ride back through the crowd for one of the lower-town crossings.

Without looking back, he led the way to the landing, holding just the weight of the bridle-rein. His arm gave with her every hesitation. To his amazement she consented to try. The tow-craft was larger here—enough for a bullock-pair and cart—and better fitted to the landing. Step by step she went with him to her place.

Now Morning saw that in using the blind the first time he had done her another injury. She would not have gone back into the Hun but for that. She awed him. Something Fallows had said recurred—about her being unconquerable, different every day. Also Fallows had said, “She will kill you at the last....”

He drove back the Chinese, all but two pole-men, that would have gathered on the tow. This was quietly done, but his inflexibility was felt. Many signals were sent across, as the tow receded from the shore, and numbers increased on the opposite bank.

Eve, breathing audibly, swung forward and back with the craft, as it gave to the river. The towing junk, as in the Hun, held the other against the current; the rest was poling and paddling.... The junk itself slipped out of the way as the tow was warped toward the landing. Other junks were stealing in.... Morning already had paid. He felt the girth of the saddle, fingered the bridle, tightened his belt. A warm, gray day, but he was spent and gaunt and cold. Eve was hushed—mulling her bit softly, trembling with hatred for the Chinese.

The road ascended from the river, through a narrow gorge with rocky walls. The river-men were woven across the way. While the tow was yet fifteen feet from the landing, Morning gained the saddle. The ferry-man gestured frantically that this had never been done before; that a man’s beast properly should be led across. Morning laughed, tightened his knees, and at an early instant loosened the bridle-rein, for the mare to jump. The heavy tow shot back as she cleared the fissure of stream.

Morning was now caught in the blur of events. The Chinese did not give way for the mare, as she trotted across the boards to the rocky shore. Up she went striking. Again he had not known Eve. The back-dive into the Hun had not cured her. She would walk like a man and pitch back into Hell—and do it again.... Someone knifed her from the side and she toppled.

The fall was swift and terrible, for the trail sloped behind. Morning’s instinct was truer than his brain, but there was no choice of way to jump. He could not push the mare from him completely to avoid the cliff. He was half-stunned against the wall, and not clear from the struggle of her fall. The brain is never able to report this instant afterward, even though consciousness is not lost. He was struck, trampled; he felt the cold of the rock against his breast, and the burn of a knife.

The Chinese struck at him as he rose. The mare was up, facing him, but dragging him upward, as a dog with a bone. His left hand found the pistol. He cleared the Chinese from him, emptying the chambers.... Eve let him come to her. He must have gained the saddle as she swung around in the narrow gorge to begin her run. The wind rushed coldly across his breast and abdomen. His shirt had been cut and pulled free. It was covered with blood. He tried to hold the mare, but either his strength was gone or she was past feeling the bit. It was her hour. All Morning could do was to keep the road.

He was all but knocked out. He had mounted as a fighter gets up under the count—and fights on without exactly knowing. The mare was running head down. He tried his strength again. The reins were rigid; she had the bit and meant to end the game.... He loved her wild heart; mourned for her; called her name; told her of wrongs he had done. Again and again, the light went from him; sometimes he drooped forward to her thin, short mane, and clung there, but the heat of her made him ill. They came into hills, passed tiny villages. It was all strange and terrible—a hurtling from high heaven.... Eve was like a furnace....

And now she was weaving on the road—running drunkenly, unless his eyes betrayed.... The rushing wind was cold upon his breast. His coat was gone; his shirt had been cut. He tried to pull the blood-soaked ends together. At this moment the blow fell.

These Chinese had been quick-handed, and they knew where to search for a man’s goods. He was coldly sane in an instant, for the rending of his whole nature; then came the quick zeal for death—the intolerableness of living an instant. The wallet—the big story—some hundreds of tales in paper! It was the passing of these from next his body that had left him cold.... Fury must have come to his arms. The mare lifted her head under his sudden attack.

Yes, he could manage her now. The bloody mouth and the blind-mad head came up to him—her front legs giving like a colt’s. Down they went together. Morning took his fall limply, with something of supremely organized indifference, and turned in the mud to the mare.

She was dead. The gray of pearl was in her eyes where red life had been.... No, she raised herself forward, seemed to be searching for him, her muzzle sickly relaxed. She could not stir behind. Holding there for a second—John Morning forgot the big story.

Eve fell again. He crawled to her—tried to lift her head. It was heavy as a sheet-anchor to his arms.... Her heart had broken. She had died on her feet—the last rising was but a galvanism.... He looked up into the gray sky where the clouds stirred sleepily. He wanted to ask something from something there.... He could not think of what he wanted.... Oh, yes, his book of Liaoyang.

And now his eye roved over the mare.... Her hind legs were sheeted with fresh blood and clotted with dry.... Desperately he craned about to see further. Entrails were protruding from a knife wound. The inner tissues were not cut, but the opened gash had let them sag horribly. She had run from Tawan with that wound.... He had worn her to the quick in night; blinded her for the Hun crossing, when she would have done nobly with eyes uncovered.... He had not been able to keep her from killing herself.... John Morning, the horseman.... He had left a gaping wound in the spirit of Duke Fallows.... All that he had done was failure and loss; all that he had planned so passionately, so brutally, indeed, that the needs and the offerings of others had not reached his heart, because of the iron self-purpose weighed there.

Luban, Lowenkampf, Mergenthaler, even the Commander-in-chief, looked strangely in through the darkened windows of his mind. The moral suffocation of the grain-fields surged over him again.... He caught a glimpse of that last moment in the ravine, but not the taking of the wallet.... Was it just a dream that a native leaped forward to grasp his stirrup, and that he leaned down to fire? He seemed to recall the altered brow.

The pictures came too fast. The sky did not change. The something did not answer.... Eve was lying in the mud. She looked darker and huddled. He kissed her face, and as he gained his feet, the thought came queerly that he might be dead, as she was. He held the thought of action to his limbs and made them move.

When he could think more clearly, he scorned the pain and protest of his limbs. He would not be less than Eve. If he were not dead, he would die straight up, and on the road to Koupangtse.

16

THIRTY-SIX hours after Morning left Eve, an English correspondent at Shanhaikwan added the following to a long descriptive letter made up of refugee tales, and the edges and hearsay of the war-zone:

Night of Sept. 5.... An American whose name by passport is John Morning reached here to-night on the Chinese Eastern, having left Koupangtse this morning. According to his story, he was with the Russians, now in retreat from Liaoyang, on the night of Sept. 3, only forty-eight hours from this writing.

Morning was in an unconscious condition upon arrival. His passage had been fourth-class for the journey, and he was packed among the coolies and refugees on an open flat-car so crowded that all but the desperately fatigued had room only to stand. This white man had fallen to the floor of the car, among the bare feet of the surging Oriental crowd, beneath their foul garments.

... He was lifted forth from the car by the Chinese—a spectacle abjectly human, covered with filth; moreover, his body was incredibly bruised, his left puttee legging torn by a deep knife-wound that began at the knee, and traversed a distance of eight inches downward—the whole was gummed and black with blood; another knife-wound in his side was in an angry condition, and his clothing was stiffened from flow of it.

A few taels in paper and silver were found upon him; the passport, an unopened letter addressed to himself; also a manuscript addressed to a San Francisco paper, and to be delivered by John Morning. The natives reported that he had reached Koupangtse an hour before the arrival of the Chinese Eastern; had employed a native to buy him fourth-class passage, paying the native also to help him aboard. He had collapsed, however, until actually among the Chinese on the flat-car. He had tasted neither food nor drink during the long day’s journey, nor in Koupangtse during the wait. The natives affirm that he crawled part of the distance up to the railway station; and that there were no English or Americans there.

Upon reaching here, Morning was revived with stimulants, his wounds bathed and dressed, fresh clothing provided. His extraordinary vitality and courage indicate that he will overcome the shocks and exhaustion of a journey hardly paralleled anywhere, if his story be true. He asserts that he must be on his way to Tientsin to-morrow morning—but that, of course, is impossible.... He is not in condition to answer questions, although undoubtedly much is in his dazed and stricken brain for which the world is at this moment waiting.

In his half-delirium, Morning seems occupied with the loss of a certain sorrel mare. He also reports the loss of his complete story of the battle, the preliminary fighting, the generals in character sketch, the terrain and all, covering a period of four months up to the moment of General Zarubaieff’s withdrawal from the city proper. This manuscript, said to contain over a hundred thousand words done on Chinese parchment, was in a wallet with the writer’s money, and was cut from him in the struggle on the bank of the Liao, when the wounds were received. His assailants were doubtless Hun huises.

Whatever can be said about the irrational parts of his story, the young man appears to know the story of the battle from the Russian standpoint. He brings the peculiar point of view that it was the millet that defeated the Russians, although the superiority of the Japanese in morale, markmanship, fluidity, is well known, etc.

... Morning lay in a decent room at the Rest House in Shanhaikwan. There seemed an ivory finger in his brain pointing to the sea—to Japan, to the States. So long as he was walking, riding, entrained, all was well enough, and the rest was mere body that had to obey—but when he stopped, the ivory finger grew hot or icy by turns; and as now, he watched in agony for the day and the departure of the train for Tientsin.

He would require help. Below the waist he was excruciating wreckage that for the present would not answer his will.... They were good to him here. The Chinese coolies had been good to him on the open car.... Lowenkampf, Fallows, good to him—so his thoughts ran—the sorrel Eve was his own heart’s mate. He loved her running, dying, striking. She had run until her heart broke. He could not do less. She had run until she was past pain—he must do that—and go on after that.... Was it still in his brain—the great story? Would it clear and write itself—the great story?

That was the question. All was well if he could get Liaoyang out in words. He would do it all over again on the ship. Every day the ship would be carrying him closer to the States. He was still on schedule. He would reach America on the first possible ship after the battle of Liaoyang—possibly, ahead of mails. On the voyage he would re-do the book—twenty days—five thousand words a day. He might do it better. It might come up clean out of the journey, the battle itself and the pictures strengthened, brightened, impregnated with fresh power.... Three weeks—every moment sailing to the States—the first and fastest ship!... The driving devil in his brain would be at rest. The big story would clear, as he began to write. The days of labor at first would change to days of pure instrumentation. He would drive at first—then the task would drive him.... But he must not miss a possible day to Japan—to Nagasaki.... He had not money for the passage to America. At this very moment he could not get out of bed—but these two were mere pups compared to the wolves he had met....

They found him on the floor drawing on his clothes in the morning—an hour before the train. His wounds were bleeding, but he laughed at that.

“You see, I’ve got to make it. You’ve been very kind. I’ll heal on the way—not here. I’ve got the big story. I’ve got to keep moving to think it out. I can’t think here. I’ll get on—thank you.”

And he was on. That night his train stopped for ten minutes at Tongu, the town near the Taku Forts, at the mouth of the Pei-ho.... All day he had considered the chance of getting ship here, without going on to Tientsin, seventy miles up-river. The larger ships lightered their traffic from Tongu; he might catch a steamer sailing to-night for Japan, or at least for Chifu.... It was getting dark.

The face that looked through the barred window at the Englishman in charge of the station at Tongu unsettled the latter’s evening and many evenings afterward.

“Is there a ship from the river-mouth to-night?”

Morning repeated his question, and perceived that the agent had dropped his eyes to the two hands holding the ticket-shelf. Morning’s nails were tight in the wood; he would wobble if he let go.

“Yes, there’s the little Tungsheng. She goes off to-night——”

“For Japan?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t carry passengers—that is—unless the Captain gives up his quarters, and he has already done that this trip.”

“Deck passengers——”

“Sure, all carry coolies out of here—best freight we have.”

“Do you sell the tickets?”

“Who’s going?”

“My servant.... I won’t go on to Tientsin if I can get—get him on to-night——”

“The launch and lighter are supposed to be down shortly from Tientsin—that’s all I can say. It’s blowing a bit. She may not clear.”

“She’ll clear if any does?”

“Yes, Himmelhock has taken her out of here worse than this. You’d better decide—I’ve got to go out now. The train’s leaving.”

Seventy miles up the river, he thought,—the wrong way if he stuck to the train. Every mile that ivory finger would torture him. His brain now seemed holding back an avalanche. If he chose falsely, he would tumble down the blackness with the rocks and glaciers.... This Englishman looked a gamester—he might help. Perhaps he wasn’t a corpse.

“I’ll stay,” he said, and the story and all his purpose wobbled and grew black.... He mustn’t forget. He mustn’t fall.... So he stood there holding fast to the ticket-shelf, which he could not feel—held and held, and the train clattered, grew silent, and it was dark.

“Where’s your servant?”

Morning’s lips moved.

“Where is your servant?”

“I am my servant.”

“I can’t give a white man deck passage. It’s not only against the rules—but against reason.”

Morning groped for his arm. “Take me into the light,” he said.

The man obeyed.

“What day is this?”

“Night of September six.”

“I left Liaoyang the night of the third. I rode a good horse to death—along the Taitse, over the Hun and the Liao. I rode through the Hun huises twice. I was all cut up and beaten—the horse went over backward in the Hun, and in the gut on the bank of the Liao.... I was in Liaoyang for the battle. I was there four months waiting for the battle. They took my story—hundred thousand words—the Hun huises did, in the fight on the Liao bank. The horse killed herself running with me ... but I’ve got it all in my head—the story. I’ll get to the States with it before any mail—before any other man. It’s all in my head—the whole Russian-end. I can write it again on the ship to the States in three weeks.... I’ve got to get off to-night. You’re the one to help me.... See these——”

Morning opened his shirt and then started to undo his legging.

“For God’s sake—don’t.... But you’ll die on the deck——”

“No, the only way to kill me would be to wall me up—so I couldn’t keep moving.”

“I’ll go down to the river with you in a few minutes.”

And then he had John Morning sobbing on his shoulder.

17

THE Englishman at Tongu was a small, sallow man, with the face of one who is used to getting the worst of it. Tongu, as a post, was no exception from an outsider’s point of view. Morning saw this face in [Pg 76]odd lights during the days that followed. It came to the chamber of images—and always he wanted to break down, and his hands went out for the shoulder.... He remembered a pitching junk in the windy blackness at the mouth of the Pei-ho. (He had seen the low mud-flats of the Taku forts from here in another service.)... The Tungsheng looked little—not much bigger than the junk, and she was wooden. There was chill and a slap of rain in the blackness.

“Hul-lo, who is dere?” The slow, juicy voice came from the door of the pilot-house.

“Endicott. I’ve got a deck passenger——”

“Huh—dere dick as meggots alretty——”

“This is a kitchen coolie of mine—he must go. Send someone down to make a place and take his transportation——”

The grumbling that followed was a matter of habit rather than of effectiveness. Morning seemed to see the lower lip from which the voice came, a thick and loppy member.... The mate came down, stepping from shoulder to back, across the complaining natives. They were three deep on the deck. He kicked clear a hole in the lee of the cabin.... Morning sank in, and Endicott bent to whisper:

“Put the grub-basket between your knees and don’t take your hands off it.... Put the blanket over it. It’s a thick, good blanket. I could give you a better passage, but they wouldn’t take you—honest, they wouldn’t. If they see you’re white, tell old Himmelhock you’re Endicott’s house-coolie. He can’t do anything now.... If you live, write and send the big story to Endicott at Tongu.”

Morning was sinking to sleep. He felt the warmth of the blanket, a thick, rough blanket Endicott had donated. Its warmth was like the man’s heart.... Morning’s hands went out. A coolie growled at him.... There was no worry now. It was the night of the sixth, and he was sailing. He could do no more; the ivory finger in his brain neither froze nor burned.... The pitching did not rouse him—nor the men of sewers and fields—sick where they sat—woven, matted together, trusting to the animal heat of the mass to keep from dying of exposure. John Morning lay in the midst of them—John Morning whose body would not die.

The days and nights rushed together....

Sometimes he wondered if he were not back at the shipping—in some stock-car with the horses—but horses were so clean compared to this.... When he could think, he put clean lint to his wounds. He scorned pain, for he was on his way; and much was merciful coma.

There was rain, deluges; and though the air rose heavy as amber afterward, the freshness at the time was salvation. He learned as it is probable no other American ever learned, what it means to live in the muck of men. All one at the beginning and at the ending, it is marvelous how men separate their lives in the interval—how little they know of one another, and how easily foolish noses turn up. Here was a man alive—dreaming of the baths he had missed, of Japanese Inn baths most of all.

“Who am I?” he asked.... “John Morning,” would whip back to him from somewhere. “And who in hell is John Morning to revolt at the sufferings of other men?”

He had seen the coolies in the steerage of many ships—even these massed deck passages of the Yellow and China Seas and the Coasting trade. He had looked at them before as one looks into a cage of animals. Now he was one of those who looked out, one of the slumees. Once he asked, “Is this the bottom of the human drain, and if not—must I sink to it?”

The Chinese did steal his food that first night, but fed him occasionally from their own stock. Finding him white, they fouled him, but kept him warm.... The Tungsheng ran into Chifu harbor to avoid a storm, and a full day was lost. John Morning had no philosophy then—a hell-minded male full of sickness—not good to view, even through the bars of a cage. But at best to sit five hours, where he sat more than five days and nights, would condemn the mind of any white man or woman to chaos, or else restore it to the fine sanity of Brotherhood.

And then the day when the breeze turned warm and the Islands were green!... Coolies were men that hour, men with eyes that melted to ineffable softness. It was like Jesus coming toward them on the sea—the green hills of Japan. Their hearts broke with emotion; they wept and loved one another—this mass all molten and integrated into one. It was like the Savior coming to meet them through the warm bright air. He would make them clean; their eyes would follow Him always....

Morning was not the only one who had to be carried ashore at Shimoneseki, after the quarantine officer had finished with the herd. His passport saved him. “I had to come. It was the first ship out of Tongu. Deck passage was the only way they would take me,” was the simple story. He was fevered, but strangely subdued that day. Himmelhock was at the door of the pilot-house, when Morning looked up from the shore a last time, and his native sailors, bare to the thigh, were sluicing the decks.

The bath was heaven. He was able to walk afterward. The officials burned his clothing, but made it possible for him to buy a few light things. The wound in his leg was healing; the bruises fading away. The wound in his side did not heal; it was angry as a feline mouth.

He had bandages, but no stockings; clean canvas clothing, but no underwear.... He found that he had to wait before answering when anyone spoke; and then he was not quite sure if he had answered, and would try again—until they stopped him. Somewhere long ago there was a parrot whose eyes were rimmed—with red-brown, and of stony opaqueness. He couldn’t recall where the parrot was, but it had something to do with him when he was little, almost beyond memory. His eyes now felt just as the parrot’s had looked.

It was a night run back to Nagasaki by rail—his thought was of ships, ships, ships. He could stand off from the world and see the ships—all the lines of tossing, steaming ships. Then he would go down to the deck of one—and below and aft where Asiatics were crowded together. To the darkest and thickest place among them he would go, and there lie and rest until the finger in his brain roused him. Then he would find that the train had stopped. It was the halt that awakened him.

There were two ships, all but ready to clear for the States, lying in the harbor of Nagasaki that morning. The first was the liner Coptic, but she had to go north first, a day at Kobe, and two days at Yokohama, before taking the long southeastern slide to Honolulu. She was faster than the American transport, Sickles (with a light load of sick and insane from the Islands), but the latter was clearing for Honolulu at sundown and would reach San Francisco at least one day earlier than the liner. Moreover, the Coptic would have recent mails; the Sickles would beat the mails.

Money was waiting for him at Tokyo, less than an hour’s journey from Yokohama; he would have good care and a comfortable passage home on the old liner, but his brain burned at the thought. Four days north—not homeward.... The Sickles was clipper-built—she was white and clean-lined, lying out in the harbor, in the midst of black collier babies. She was off for Home to-night. He had traveled home once before on a transport. He was American and she—the flag was there, run together a bit in the vivid light, but the flag was there! And to-night he would be at sea—pulling himself together for the big story, alone with the big story—the ship never stopping—unless they stopped in ocean to drop the dead....

The actual cost of the transport passage is very little, merely a computation for food and berth; the difficulty is to obtain the permit. As it was, he had not enough money, barely enough to get up to Yokohama, second class on the Coptic; and yet, this hardly entered. It was like a home city, this American ship, to one who had been in the alien heart of the Chinese country so long. He would know someone, and a telegram from ’Frisco would bring money to him. He had a mighty reliance from the big story.

The U. S. quartermaster at Nagasaki was a tired old man. He advised Morning to cable to Manila for permission. Morning did not say that he lacked money for this, but repeated his wish to go. The old man thought a minute and then referred him to Ferry, the Sickles quartermaster. He had been doing this for thirty years, referring others to others so that all matters merely struck and glanced from him. Thus he kept an open mind. Morning wanted something to take from this office to Ferry of the Sickles. The resistance he encountered heated him. The smell of the deck-passage was in his nostrils; it seemed in his veins, and made him afraid that others caught the taint. The old quartermaster did not help him. Morning could hear his own voice, but could not hold in mind what he said.... The officer did not seem to be interested in Liaoyang. This disturbed him. It made him ask if he had not gone mad after all—if he could be wrong on this main trend, that he had something the world wanted.

He took a sampan at the harbor-front and went aboard the transport. Ferry, the Sickles quartermaster, was a tall, lean man with a shut smile that drooped. The face was a pinched and diminished Mergenthaler, and brought out the clouds and the manias of Morning’s mind.

Were all quartermasters the same? What had become of men? Had the world lost interest in monster heroisms? Ferry did not help him—on the contrary, stood looking down with the insolence of superior inches. Morning found himself telling about the sorrel mare. That would not do. He returned to the main fact that he had the big story and must get across the Pacific with it.

“I can’t take you——”

Morning heard it, but couldn’t believe. He tried to tell about the Hun huises and the loss of the manuscript, the walk to Koupangtse——

“Really—it’s no affair of mine. I can’t take you on.... The Coptic is sailing——”

And just now Mr. Reever Kennard appeared on the deck. The summer had added portliness. He was in flannels—a spectacle for children and animals.... The insignificance of all about was quickened when Mr. Reever Kennard appeared. The decks were less white, sailors, soldiers more enlisted. John Morning became an integer of the Tungsheng’s deck-passage again, and the lining of his nostrils retained the reek of it.

“How do you do, Mr. Kennard?” he said. His back was different. He felt a leniency there, very new or very ancient, as he turned to Ferry, adding: “This gentleman knows me. We parted in Tokyo this Spring, when I went over with the Russians. I met him long ago in the Philippine service. He will tell you——”

Ferry’s face grew suddenly saturnine, his eyes held in the glance of the famous correspondent’s.

“You’ll please count it closed—I can’t take you.”

Morning now turned to Kennard, who was sealing with his tongue a little flap of cigar-wrapper which may have prevented the perfect draught. Morning bowed and moved aft, where the dust of the coaling was thick, and the scores of natives, women and men, who handled the baskets, were a distraction which kept the reality from stifling him. Presently he went ashore and it was noon.... He could not understand Kennard; could not believe in an American doing what Ferry had done, to a man who had the big story of Liaoyang. It was some hideous mistake; he had not been able to make himself understood.

The Sickles launch was leaving the pier at two. Morning was there and took a seat. He was holding himself—the avalanche again—and rehearsing in his mind what he should say to Ferry. His brain was afire; the wound in his side had scalded him so long that his voice had a whimper in it. He had not eaten—the thought was repulsive—but he had bought drink in the thought of clearing his brain and deadening his hurt....

His brain was clearer on the launch, but the gin fumed out of him as he approached the upper deck, where Ferry’s quarters were.

The Quartermaster saw him, but was speaking to an infantry captain. Morning waited by the rail. Many times he thought—if he could only begin to speak now. Yet he feared in his heart when Ferry turned to him, he would fail. It was something little and testy in the man—something so different from what he had known in the great strains of Liaoyang—except for Luban. Yes, Ferry was like Luban, when Luban was in the presence of a fancied inferior.... They talked on—Morning thought of murder at last. A peculiar wiry strength gathered about the idea of murder in its connection with Ferry’s dark, mean face. He felt all the old strength in his hands, and more from days of pain—days of holding one’s self—will, body, brain.

“Well——” Ferry had turned to him suddenly.

Morning’s thoughts winged away with a swarm of details of the crime.... “I could tell you something of the Story—I could show you how they cut me on the Liao—the Hun huises——”

“If you come to this deck again—I’ll send you ashore in irons.”

At four that afternoon Morning saw the Coptic draw up her chains and slide out of the harbor, with the swift ease of a river-ferry.... He could not count himself whipped on the Sickles—and this is the real beginning of John Morning. He was Fate-driven. The man who did not have the courage to ask his rights in Tokyo—to inquire the reason of his disbarment, was not through with the American transport Sickles. A full day ahead of the mails in San Francisco—and he was waiting for the dusk. The fight had been brought to him. He was dull to the idea of being whipped.

Three enlisted men were drinking in the little apothecary shop which Morning had used for the day’s headquarters. They belonged to the Sickles. They had been taking just one more drink for many minutes. He told them he was sailing on the transport and joined them in a sampan to the ship when it was dark. The harbor was still as a dream; the dark blending with the water.... They touched the bellying white plates of the ship. Morning seemed to come up from infinite depths.... The men were very drunk; they had ordered rapidly toward the end; the effect caught up as swiftly now. They helped each other officiously. Morning put on the fallen hat of one who had become unconscious.... The watch was of them, a corporal, who was no trouble-maker. He blustered profusely and hurried them below.... Morning was bewildered. He had spoken no word, but helped the others carry the body, a wobbly deputation, down among the hammocks.... He heard the voices of those maimed in mind.... He placed his end of the soldier’s body down, left his companions, and made his way forward, to where the hammocks were farther apart. Early years had given him a sort of enlisted man’s consciousness of things; and he knew now not to take another’s place. He chose one from a pile of hammocks and slung it forward, close to the bulk-head of the bedlam, and well out of the lights.... He lay across his only baggage, a package containing a thousand sheets of Chinese parchment. He lay rigid, trying to remember if out-going ships took a pilot out of Nagasaki.

He heard the anchor-chain. He was very close to it. The voices of the sun-struck and vino-maddened men from the Islands were deadened by the hideous grating of the links in the socket.... It was not too late for him to be put ashore even now; since it was war-time. Of course there would be a pilot, for the harbor was mined.... He drew the canvas about his ears, but the voices of the brain-dead men reached him.... Cats, pirates, and river-reptiles terrified them; one man was still lost in a jungle set with bolo-traps; the emptiness of others was filled by strange abominations glad of the flesh again.

18

HE had been listening to Duke Fallows for a long time—Duke’s voice blended with war and storm and a woman’s laugh.... Then he reverted to the idea of murdering Ferry. Finally someone said:

“He’s a new one from Nagasaki. He’s got the fevers——”

And then:

“Who in hell is he?”

They began to ask questions. Morning answered nothing. Day had come. He heard the throb of the engines, felt the swell of the sea, but the strength of yesterday’s concentration was still upon him. It had built a wall around him, holding the life of his mind there; as a life of low desires imprisons the spirit to its own vile region after death.... He did not speak, but looked from face to face for Ferry.

They ceased to expect an answer from him.... A young doctor appeared. His eyes rolled queerly; his cheek folded over his mouth, as if he were beyond words from drink, and tremendously pleased with his prowess. They called him Nevin. He prepared himself profoundly for speech. Morning now realized the nimbleness of Nevin’s hands, unwinding the filthy bandages. Presently, the Doctor straightened up, passed his hand over his brow, tongued the other cheek, and after a sweating suspense ordered:

“Take him to the hospital.”

A white room.... The Doctor came again. They took his clothing and bathed him.... He heard and smelled the sea through an open port ... glad, but utterly weary ... waiting for Ferry.

“My God—not only cut, but trampled——” a voice said.

Morning felt if he were alone with Nevin he could have said something.... The Doctor looked like a jockey he had once known. It wasn’t that, however, that gave him heart, but the quick, gentle hands.... More and more as he watched the dusty face with its ineffable gravity, he saw bright humanity burning like a forge-fire behind the mask. This brought tears to his own eyes. Nevin, seeing them, became altogether nervous to look at, seemed to have a walnut in his mouth.

And now John Morning felt himself breaking—he was brittle, hard like glass—and his last idea concerned the package of Chinese parchment which they had not brought from the hammock.... Six days afterward he asked for it.

For a short while each day, during the interval, he just touched the main idea and sank back to sleep. He suffered very little. The after-effects of his journey from Liaoyang tried to murder him in various ways, but relaxation, nourishment, good air and care worked as a sort of continuous anæsthesia. On this sixth day the Doctor appeared to ignore his question about the package of paper, but leaned forward, glanced to the right and left, as if to communicate a plan to scuttle the ship, and said:

“You’re one more little man. You’ve had a new one each day—pneumonia, sclerosis, brain-fever.... My hospital report on your case will drive the Major-Surgeon into permanent retirement.... What did you say was the matter to-day—Chinese parchment?”

“I’ve got so much to do, Doctor?... What day is this?”

“Morning of the nineteenth.”

The color swept into Morning’s face, terror into his eyes.

“I didn’t think it was so bad as that—I can’t lay up any more—twelve days left.... Two weeks and two days since I rode out of Liaoyang——”

“I’ll have to let ’em put you in the forward hutch—if you begin to talk Liaoyang, now that your fever’s down. There wasn’t any Americans in that fighting——”

“I’m not a soldier——”

Nevin wrung his hands. A thought recurred to Morning.

“There was a couple of letters in my clothes—one addressed to a paper in ’Frisco, and one to me.”

The other was curious enough to send an orderly to search.

“Have him bring the package of paper, too,” Morning said. When all was brought in good order, he added: “This letter to me I’ll read later. The larger package is Duke Fallows’ first hurried story of the battle of Liaoyang. I won’t read that either, because I’ve got to do one of my own. I did one, you know—ten times as long as this—but the Hun huises got it on the Liao-crossing, from Tawan—that’s where I got cut up. Morning of the fourth, it was.... The sorrel mare did fifteen miles with her guts sticking out, and I walked thirty to Koupangtse, with these wounds and smashed from a couple of falls—before the morning of the fifth.... You can look at Duke Fallows’ story, Doctor, and I’ll take a little doze——”

Fallows’ battle was done clearly as a football game, and as briskly, to the withdrawal of the Russian lines upon the inner positions of the city and the flanking movement of Kuroki. A dramatic pause then to survey the Russian force on the eve of disaster, from which the reader drew the big moral sickness. After that Lowenkampf, the millet and the Ploughman. In quite a remarkable way Fallows turned the reader now from the mass to the individual. In a little trampled place in the grain the battle was lost by the Russians and won by Japan.... The Doctor was interrupted several times, but no force was missed. It was a new voice to him. He wondered if Fallows would make the world hear it. It seemed to compel a reckoning.

The Fallows story laughed all the way. One did not have to look twice at a sentence to understand, yet two readings did not wear it out, nor would it leave one alone. All the time the Doctor read, matters he had heard in delirium from the lips of John Morning came back.

Nevin remembered the tears on the first morning, the choke in his own throat; the first sight of the wounds, the queer, extra zeal he had put into this case. Finally he could hardly wait to learn the rest—chiefly how John Morning had happened to be lying in the darkest end of the hammock-hole, over against the insane compartment.... Yet he did not wake up his patient. When Morning finally opened his eyes, it was time for nourishment. Nevin brought a glass of extra wine before inquiring. “First, tell me—has Ferry seen me?”

“Captain Ferry, the quartermaster?”

“Yes.”

“I’d rather think not. He’s about occasionally—but his truck with the sick men is mostly transportation and nourishment——”

“The second time I came to ask him to take me across that afternoon—the second time,” Morning said slowly, “he told me that if I appeared on his deck again he’d send me ashore in irons. You see the Sickles is to beat the Coptic in. I had to come. Why, the mails couldn’t beat me through from Liaoyang.... I finally got aboard with some soldiers—but I would have leeched to the anchor.... And, say, I think I knew you that morning. It seemed as if I could let go when I felt your hands——”

The two were quiet. The Doctor looked obliquely at an open port with one eye shut, as if he were not sure of the count....

Accompanying the manuscript was a letter to Noyes, editor of Western States, which chiefly concerned John Morning. Many brave things were said.... Nevin, deeply stirred with the whole business, saw the Ploughman coming forth from the millet—saw the Ploughman going home. That little drama so dear to Fallows’ heart was greater than Liaoyang. Nevin saw that such things are deathless.... Deathless—that’s the word. They look little at the time in the midst of thunder and carnage; but the thunder dies away and the rains come and clean the stains—and the spirit of it all lives in one deed or in one sentence. A woman nurses the sick at Scutari, and the Crimean war is known for the angel of its battlefield, by the many who do not know who fought, nor what for.... Nevin felt the big forces throbbing in the world—the work of the world. It had come to him distantly before. It had pulled him out of the comfort and ease of his home town to serve the sick at sea and in the Islands.

The mystery of service. He had never dared tell anyone. His voice broke so easily. He had covered the weakness in leers and impediments, so the world would not see. He had talked of his rights and his wages, the dusty-faced little man. Mystery of Service—and men were ashamed when it touched them.

But Fallows, laughing and so powerful, this boy’s man-friend, wasn’t afraid. Was the boy afraid? What had driven him? Did the boy know what had driven him? What, in God’s name, had driven this human engine that would not stop—that threw off poisons and readjusted itself against the individual and collective organizations of death?

Nevin was shaken by the whole story—it girded, girdled him.... Let Ferry come. Ferry was one of those bleak despoilers of human effort, whose presence consumed the reality in another. What was Ferry anyway and Ferry’s sort—a spoiled child or an ancient decadent principle? Was it merely a child-soul with a universe ahead, or was he very old and very ill—incorrigible self-love on its road back to nothing?... But the Ploughman lived, Fallows lived, the boy Morning lived—their work was marching on.

The Doctor did not speak, because his voice would break. He went about his work instead—swift magnetic hands.... At least, he could stand between Morning and the quartermaster—if there were need.

When he came back Morning was at work, a hard bright look of tension about him, and a line of white under the strange young beard....

“I think I can get it going now. I think it is beginning to come again,” he said in a hushed tone. The Doctor arranged the pillows better, sharpened an extra pencil and went out.

“I may have to do those first pages again,” he said an hour later. “It’s hard to get out of the hospital—you know, what I mean—a man’s bath is so important to one lying-up that it shuts out a battle-line. What a fool a sick man is. But I’ll get it——”

He fell asleep in the dusk before the candles came. The Doctor found him cool, his breathing normal.... The next day Morning worked until Nevin remonstrated.

“You’ll die, if you go on——”

“I’ll die, if I don’t,” said Morning. The Doctor knew in his heart that it was true. Still they compromised. That night, as Morning dropped down into an abyss of exhaustion, he mumbled the whole story of Eve—the sorrel mare. “She rose to her feet—white death in her eyes,” he finished....

Nothing attracts the eye on ship-board like a man at work. All idle ones are caught in the current and come to pay their devoirs to the man mastered by a strong task.... The Doctor had Morning taken to an extra berth in his own state-room. The door had a spring lock, for many medicines and stores were there. Ferry was not likely to happen in the Doctor’s quarters. The latter even doubted if he would recognize Morning. He came and went, as the task drove on. Once Morning stopped to tell him about the deck passage on the Tungsheng, and another time about his brush with the Hun huises in the ravine across the river from Tawan.... The Doctor saw that Morning had made a wonderful instrument of himself; he studied how the passion of an artist works on the body of man. The other found that so long as he ate regularly and fell asleep without a struggle—he was allowed to go on.

The Sickles was swinging down into the warmth. The sick man had a bad day, lying in the harbor at Honolulu.

“It isn’t the work, Doctor—it’s the ship’s stopping,” Morning said, squirming in the berth. “It makes my head hot. I see steamy and all that. I had it when the Tungsheng lay up for a day in Chifu on account of the blow.... I had it that day in Nagasski when Ferry wouldn’t take me on. I’ll be all right to-night.... Give me a little touch of that gin and lime juice——”

“Just lime juice when heads get hot.... You’re a clever little drunkard. I’ve been wondering how far you’d go.... Yes, we’ll clear to-night.... Ferry’s ashore. Come out and see the black boys dive for pennies.”

“There’s something doing with this knife-wound—it doesn’t heal,” the Doctor said, mid-way between the Islands and the Farallonnes. “The leg’s all right. Organs and all the little organs seem to thrive on work. That is, they’re no worse. The leg heals—but this one—you seem to have established a permanent drain——”

“Fifty pages yesterday—two hundred words a page,” Morning muttered.

“Yes—and the day before—and to-morrow—and the night we left Honolulu.... If a man worked that way for money, he’d be as dead as Ferry inside of a month.... Have you read your friend Fallows’ story yet?”

“No, I don’t dare—a sick man isn’t all himself. And this story is me. It’s got to be me. It’s better in places than the other, the one I lost.... I haven’t read Duke’s letter to me yet. He’s strong medicine. He keeps coming back to me, as it is. I want to get off alone when the work is done and think. You can’t see him all, when he’s in a room with you.... He was like you, in being a friend to me.... Yet, I seem to know you better. You’ve helped me so. I’m pretty happy the way the story is coming——”

“See how long you can go without a drink to-day.”

“It starts me off, you see. It doesn’t seem to touch me—just steams right off with the work——”

“That’s rotten sophistry. I’m watching you——”

Nevin had never seen a body so driven by will. Morning appeared no worse; certainly he was no better; his brain was in absolute abeyance; his will crashed through clouds of enervation and irresolution. There were times when Nevin believed Morning would collapse, when he was finished with Liaoyang, but he was not so sure now. He was sure, however, that he must not interfere except in extremity.... This was part of the big work. Somehow he trusted in Duke Fallows—who had allowed the boy to write the detailed battle-end, and gone back to Europe to feed the babes of the Ploughman. That last made him want to doctor the whole world....

Morning had done the story and re-written the lead. The Sickles would enter the Gate at daylight.

“There’s seventy-five or eighty thousand words of it. It’s good—unless I’m crazy. It’s good, unless this is all a dream. God, I’m thirsty.”

With the work done for the day, however, he asked for lime juice and water. His temperature was less than two points above normal; nothing had broken; yet the voyage had not replenished Morning’s body. He could hardly stand.

“To-night I’ll read the Fallows’ stuff—and the letters.... Doctor, can you get me ashore early?”

“Think a minute—you don’t know what you ask——”

“Quarantine——”

Nevin nodded. “There’s extra attention to a ship like this—they’ll have to see that running wound of yours for instance——”

“Not if you don’t report it——”

The Doctor’s lower jaw reached down, and to the right, finding the walnut. “You wouldn’t even read Duke Fallows’ story before you wrote yours. A man can’t lie in his own work——”

“You’ve been so good,” Morning said huskily. “I begin to expect miracles——”

“You can get messages—telegrams, letters—ashore.... And then it may only take a couple of hours. There isn’t any contagion here that I know of.”

Morning first read Fallows’ letter to Noyes, editor Western States. It told of the story accompanying—but more of the bearer. Laughing, loving-hearted, eloquent—Fallows was all through it, and fine gifts of the man’s thinking. There was suggestion to Noyes to use Morning’s story and get it across simultaneously in New York. “The boy has never yet, so far as I can see, found time to arrange a decent payment for his work. Please observe that unless some one, equally as capable, gets into Port Arthur, Morning’s story will be the biggest feature of the war in a newspaper way. I’m going on to Europe on the Ploughman story. Let Morning do the big battle—I’ll begin to crackle later.”

And then Morning read the story.... His voice trailed up finally from the shadows of lower berth. “It’s good,” he said to the Doctor after midnight.

“It’s dam’ good. It’s better than mine.... He was alive with it—I mean with the Ploughman. It’s the way he did it. He tried to get it across before we separated. He told me from every angle—told Lowenkampf—told them all at the station at Yentai. None of us could see.... He was crazed about it—that we couldn’t see. We were all choked with blood and death that night. He said Kuropatkin and the others would see that the Ploughman was right—if they had a sense of humor. Such density to humor, he called the sin against the Holy Ghost——”

After they had talked many minutes, Morning broke the seal to his own letter and learned why he had been barred from the earlier Japanese armies.

19

THE fineness of Fallows, of Nevin, of Endicott, the station-agent at Tongu, the risen humanity of the Ploughman—Morning’s soul to sense these men was empty within him. All that he knew was blood and blow and force and mass and hate. He lay panting and possessed. As he had plotted in delirium how to kill Ferry, dwelling upon the process and the death; so Reever Kennard came in now for a hatred as perfect and destructive. The letter had called up something of the same force which had driven John Morning from Liaoyang, over or through every barrier to the present hour in which the Sickles lay off the entrance of the Golden Gate waiting for dawn, thirty-six hours ahead of the Coptic.

His work was diminished in his own mind; the value of his story was lost, the zest to market it, the sense of the world’s waiting. He was a thief in the eyes of men. A man cannot steal. They believed him a thief.... He thought of moving about the halls of the Imperial that day—of his thoughts as he had watched from the window in the billiard-room while the picture was taken. He had been tranced in terror.... Had he but known, he would have made a hell in that house. He saw Reever Kennard again on the deck of the Sickles—his turning to Kennard for help—unparalleled shame.... The thing he desired with such terrible zeal now was enacted in his brain. That hour on the deck of the Sickles was repeated, but this time he knew what Kennard had done. He called him to the lie in imagination. The jowl was heavy with scorn and the small slow eyes were bright with fear—yet they took nothing back and Morning moved closer and closer demanding, until the devil broke from him, and his knotted hand sank into the soft center of the man. He watched the writhing of that clean flanneled liar, watched him arise. The hand sank once more ... the vile play romping through his mind again and again—hideous fighting of a man brought up among stable and race-track and freight-route ruffians—the fighting that feels no pain and only a knockout can stop....

“Wow—it’s hot as hell in here,” came from Nevin in the upper bunk.

A little before dawn, utterly ravaged by the poison of his thinking, Morning was struck by the big idea. He turned on the light, steadied himself to paper and pencil and wrote to Noyes of the Western States:

Inclosed find (I) Duke Fallows’ first story of Liaoyang; (II) his letter to you, containing among other things information concerning the bearer; (III) the first ten thousand words of my eighty-thousand-word story of the battle fought a month ago to an hour—including sketches of Kuropatkin, and others, covering exactly terrain, the entire position, strategy, and finally the cause of the Russian disaster, with word-picture of the retreat, done on the day when it was at its height. The writer left the field and made the journey to Koupangtse alone, nearly one hundred miles to the railroad. This is the only American eye-witness story besides Fallows’. The mails of the second-hand reports will not reach here before the arrival of the Coptic.... I will sell this story to the Western States on condition that it appear in the World-News, New York, simultaneously—the story to be run in not less than seven installments, beginning by telegraph to-morrow. I insist on the World-News, but have no objection to the general syndicating of the story by the Western States, my price for the American newspaper rights being $1,800 and transportation to New York.

“In God’s name, are you doing another book?” Nevin demanded, letting himself down from the berth. “What’s the matter—you’re on fire?”

Morning was counting off the large first installment of his manuscript. He placed it upon the table, with the Fallows’ story and the two letters to Noyes.... Then he put an empty water-pitcher on it, restoring the balance of his story to its place under his pillow.

“Listen” he said, clutching Nevin’s arm, “here’s the whole thing—if I’m sick to-morrow. Give it to the reporter from the Western States—make him see it is life-blood. Make him rush with it to Noyes. It’s the whole business.... He’ll get it—before the quarantine is lifted, if you—oh, if you can! It’s all there.... You do this for me?”

“And where will you be all this time——”

“Oh, Nevin—Nevin—for God’s sake put me to sleep! I’m full of burning and devils! Fill up that needle business and put me to sleep!... I can’t wait to get across in the New York World-News. That’s Reever Kennard’s own paper.”

20

THE voices sounded far and muted—voices one might hear when swimming under water. It was easier for him to stay down than rise and answer. He seemed carried in the strong flow of a river, and preserved a consciousness, very vague, that it meant death to go down with the stream. At last, opening his eyes, he saw the city over the pier-sheds.

The rest of the manuscript was still under the pillow, but the water-pitcher rested upon the bare wood of the table. It was after twelve. His deadly fury had burned itself out. The thought of the World-News taking the story, steadied his weakness. It was much harder to dress than usual, however. He had no shore clothes, but Nevin would see to that for him. With a glad thrill, he realized that the Sickles had passed the quarantine, or she wouldn’t be in the slip. His mind turned to Nevin again, and when he was thinking about this deep-rooted habit the voyage had inculcated, the Doctor himself entered.

“Well, you gave me a night.”

“You’ll have some rest now.”

“I’ve brought some clothes for you to go ashore with.... The Western States got your story two hours ago. Ferry has gone ashore.”

“Did the reporter take it here—or from across the harbor in quarantine?”

“He was waiting with others—for us to be turned loose. I gave him the stuff as we were putting about. He didn’t come aboard, I saw his launch reach landing. I told him to put the stuff into the hands of Noyes and to hurry back. All of which he did——”

“Why to hurry back?”

The little man’s mouth gave way to strange twistings, and he answered grudgingly, “Well, I had a story to give him.”

Morning took a room at the Armory, refusing a loan from the Doctor. “I’ll have it shortly—plenty, I think. I’ll lie up there until I hear from Noyes. I may hurry East——”

The process was not clear exactly, but the old story of Mio Amigo had given him a terror of borrowing. The Armory was nearby. It was clean and cheap. This little decision of choosing the Armory, a result of Mio Amigo, too, is the most important so far.... The Doctor went with him. The two were hushed and sick with things to say. Nevin felt he was losing the throb of great service; that he could not hold it all after this power-house of a man went his way. It was not only Morning, but Morning was attached to the large, quiet doings and seeings of the stranger named Duke Fallows.

Morning loved the Doctor. Nevin did not tower; Nevin was instantly in his comprehension. Their throats tightened.... Nevin saw him to the light little room, and said as he was leaving:

“I’ve been all over Chinatown, looking up a formula for that wound that won’t heal. It’s this—full directions inclosed. You’ll have to get settled before you try it out.”

He disappeared saying he would be back. Morning put the envelope in a wallet, which he had carried afield.... It was not yet two in the afternoon. There was a timorous rap at the door. Morning’s head dropped over drowsily. The door opened just a little and a voice said:

“Is there a sick American soldier in here?”

It was low and timorous like the tapping, but there was a laugh in it, and something that drove the wildness out of his heart.

“Yes,” he said.

“And may I come in?”

“Yes.”

She was slight and young and pale. She passed between the window and his eyes. Her brown hair seemed half-transparent. The day was bright, but not yellow; its soft gray luster was exactly the woman’s tone. There was a curious unreality about the whole figure. The light in her eyes was like the light in the window; gray eyes and very deep. So quietly, she came, and the day was quiet, the house—a queer hush everywhere.

“There are a few of us who meet the transports—and call on the sick soldiers. We talk to them—write letters or telegrams. Sometimes they are very glad. All we want is to help. I haven’t tried many times before——”

Someone had told him once of a woman in London, who met the human drift in from the far tides of chance—and made their passing or their healing dear as heaven. He had always kept the picture. He scarcely heard all that this young woman was saying.

She was not beautiful, not even pretty. You would see her last in a room full of women. Under her eyes—he could not tell just where—there was a line or shadow of strange charm; and where the corner of her eye-lids folded into the temple a delicate perfection lived; her frail back had a line of beauty—again, he could not describe this. The straightness of the figure was that of lightness, of aspiration.... Sometimes she seemed just a girl. Her underlip pursed a little; it was not red.... She seemed waiting with the lightness of a thistle—waiting and listening in the lull before a wind.

“My name is Betty Berry.”

“Mine is John Morning.”

She told him that she was a musician, and that San Francisco was her home, although she was much away. He saw her with something that Duke Fallows had given him. The hush deepened with the thought. Had he taken from that tired breast a certain age and clear-eyedness and judgment of the ways of love-women? There might have been reality in this; certainly there was reality in his not having seen a white girl in many months. He was changed; his work done for the moment; he was very tired and hungry for something she brought.... “Betty Berry.”

He was changed. This Western world was new to him. He seemed old to the East—old, much-traveled, and very weary; here was faith and tenderness and reality. Duke Fallows’ city—Duke had strangely intrenched himself here; and this wraith of an angel who came to him ministering!... Malice and ambition—reprisal and murder were gone. What a dirty little man he had been—how rotten with self, how furious and unspeakable. Why had he not seen it? Why had he rejected Duke Fallows with his brain and accepted him with his soul? The soul—what queer place in a man is this? Duke Fallows, Lowenkampf—were in and out, and Nevin, even the Ploughman now; and this little gray hushed spirit of a girl had come straight to his soul. Why could one not always feel these Presences? Would such destroying and malignant hatred return as that for Reever Kennard last night? Was it because he had been so passionate for self—that until now, (when he was resting and she came), decency, delight, nor vision had been able to break through the deadly self-turned currents?... This was like his finer self coming into the room.

“How did you know that boys coming home—need to see you?” he asked. He had to be very careful and arrange what he meant to say briskly and short. Most of his thoughts would not do at all to speak.

“Women know. So many boys come home—like those on the Sickles whom one is not allowed to see. I have watched them going out, too. They don’t know why they go. They don’t expect to find a new country, and yet it seems as if they must go and look. And many come home so numbed with loneliness that they have forgotten what they need.”

“Then women know what boys—men are?”

She smiled, and seemed listening—her lips pursed, her eyes like a cloudy dawn, turned from him slightly. What did she hear continually that did not come to him?

“I mean the men,” he added, “whom the world calls its bravest—the gaunt explorers and fighters—do women know what boys they are?”

“I don’t know those whom the world calls its bravest.”

“I think I needed to have you come,” he said, “but I didn’t know it.”

The hush was in the room again. Morning felt like a little boy—and as if she were a child with braids behind. They felt wonderful things, but could only talk sillinesses.... There was something different about her every time he looked. It seemed if she were gone; he could not summon her face to mind. He did not understand it then.

It had grown quite a little darker before they noticed. The far rumble of thunder finally made them see a storm gathering.

“You won’t go until it’s over?”

“It might be better for me to go now—before it begins.”

“Do you live far?”

“Yes.”

“Then stay—please.”

She drew her chair closer. They tried to tell each other of what they had been, but this didn’t prosper. The peculiar thing was that their history seemed to begin from now—all was far and unimportant but this. Morning, moreover, did not mean to spoil the primary idea in her mind of his being an American soldier; though all his recent history impinged upon the one fact that he wasn’t.... He tried to hold her face in his mind with shut eyes, but it was a forced and unfair picture when mentally dragged there.... The thunder increased and the rain.

“Once when I was little,” she said, “I was alone in the house when a storm came, and I was so frightened that day—that I never could be since, in just the same way.”

Perfect revelation. Something in him wished she were pretty. She was such a shy and shadowy creature. He called to mind the girls he had known—coarse and tawdry lot, poor things. Betty Berry was all that they were not; yet some of them were prettier. He could see their faces quite distinctly, and this startled him, because shutting his eyes from full gaze at this girl, he could not see her twice the same.... The weather cleared. They were together in silence for moments at a time. She became more and more like a wraith when the natural dusk thickened.

“Was it hard for you to knock and speak—that first moment?”

“Yes.”

“Do—do any of the soldiers ever misunderstand?”

“No——”

“That’s fine of them,” he granted.

“They couldn’t when one has no thought, only to be kind to them——”

“You think they see that at once?”

“They must.”

“A man doesn’t know all about soldiers simply because he ‘soldiers’ with them,” Morning said.

“And then——”

“Yes——”

“They look at me and it’s very plain that I come just to be good to them.... They think of me in the same way as a Salvation Army lassie or a missionary——”

“Now, that’s queer,” said he. “It didn’t occur to me at all. It would never come to me to ask you to leave a tract.”

“And I didn’t feel like a missionary, either.... Now it’s all cleared again. I must go.”

There was a pang.... Where was Nevin? Why had Noyes or someone from the Western States not come to him? Coming back to these things pained.... A boy in the halls called the afternoon papers in a modified voice.

“Will you get me the papers—especially the Western States?”

She hurried to call the boy. He saw the huge picture of Duke Fallows on the sheet toward him, as she re-entered.

“This is what I want,” he said hoarsely, taking the Western States....

“John Morning,” she whispered.

In inch letters across the top—there it was:

JOHN MORNING BRINGS IN THE FIRST FALLOWS STORY.

Full Day Ahead of Coptic Mails.... Morning Leaves Fallows on the Field Beyond Liaoyang, Night of September 3rd.... Two Americans Alone See Great Battle.... The Incomparable Fallows’ Story Printed in Full in the Western States To-day.... John Morning’s Detail Picture—a Book in Itself—Begins in the Western States To-morrow—Biggest Newspaper Feature of the Year’s Campaign.... Read To-day How John Morning Brought in the News—a Story of Unparalleled Daring and Superhuman Endurance....

Such was the head and the big-print captions. Morning’s riding forth from Liaoyang on the night of the third—the sorrel mare—the Hun Crossing—the Liao Crossing and the fight with the river-bandits—the runaway of the sorrel and her broken heart—his journey dazed and delirious, covered with wounds, thirty miles to Koupangtse—Tongu—the battle to get aboard the Sickles, first, second, and third attempts—redoing the great story on shipboard—all this in form of an interview and printed as a local story, ran ahead of the Duke Fallows article.

A great moment, and John Morning, forgetting all else, even forgetting the girl who glanced at him with awed and troubled eyes, held hard for a moment to the one realization: Noyes would not have printed, “Begins in the Western States to-morrow,” had he not arranged for publication in Reever Kennard’s World-News....

Her chair was farther away. She waited for him—as one expecting to be called. He turned; their eyes met full.

“You are not an American soldier——”

“I am an American. I have had a hard time, almost as hard as any soldier could——”

“I wouldn’t have come—the whole city will serve you——”

“That’s why I didn’t speak. No soldier could have gotten more good.”

Her eyes turned downward. The room was almost dark. A knock at the door.

“I must go——”

He held out his hand. “Won’t you come again?”

“It doesn’t seem——”

He would not let her hand go. “Oh, won’t you come again?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

Betty Berry opened the door for Noyes and another, and she passed out.

21

NOYES said lightly:

“The young lady doesn’t need to go on our account——”

“But she’s gone,” Morning muttered. The walls gave him back the words.

“If it’s any interest to you, Morning, I’ve followed directions in your letter,” the editor said presently.

“The World-News——”

“That’s what I waited for—before coming here. They’re using Field’s local story to-morrow morning. It’s on the wire to them now. This is Field.”

“I had the pleasure of bringing in your manuscript from the Sickles rather early this morning,” said the latter. “Also I did the story that Doctor Nevin told me.”

“I wish he would come,” said Morning.

“Nevin?”

“Yes.”

“He’s on his toes where you are concerned,” said Field.

“He has done much for me——”

“Friend Fallows is rather strong for you, too, I should say,” Noyes offered.

He was a pale, soft, middle-aged man who gave the impression of being more forceful than he looked.

“I owe everything to him,” said Morning.

“By the way, Morning, what were you mad at, when you wrote that letter of directions to me? I followed it carefully as you said—price—World-News—everything. We’ll have a lot of other papers beside the World-News—but that letter made me hot under the collar every time I glanced at it——”

“I was just about to break. I was very sick of words. Every sentence was like drawing a rusty chain in one ear and out the other.”

“Of course you know you’ve got the world by the tail on this Russian end—this Liaoyang story,” Noyes observed.

“I’ve written the story. The big part of the copy is here for you.”

“You’re not going to quit now. Are you down and out physically?”

“No.”

“Why, Morning,” Field broke in, “you ought to make ten thousand dollars in the next thirty days. You’ve got a big feature for every magazine in America—and then the book.”

“The chance doesn’t come but once in a life time—and then only to God’s chosen few, who work like hell,” said Noyes, and he sat back to review this particularly finished remark.

“What would you do?” Morning asked.

“I’d start for New York to-night. Field’s story about you—the one we run to-night at the head of Fallows’ story—will start the game. A couple of installments of your big yarn will have appeared in the World-News when you reach New York. If it ends as good as it begins, you’ll have the big town groggy within a week. You’ll receive the magazine editors in your hotel, contract to furnish so much—and talk off same to expert typists. That’s the way things are done. You’ve got the goods. New York serves a man like that. It’s nothing to me, but I know the game—even if I never cornered a Liaoyang story. Fallows said you have done more work for less money than any man in America. He’s one of our owners——”

So Noyes rambled on; Field breaking in with fresh and timely zest. Morning had not looked beyond the main story. He saw separate articles now in every phase. It would work out.... Four days of rest—looking out of the car-window. He would land in New York once and for all—land hard—do it all at once. Then he would rest.... He was seething again.... With this advantage he could break into the markets that would stand aloof from his ordinary product for years. All day his devil had slept, and now was awake for rough play in the dusk. His dreams organized—the big markets—breaking out of the newspapers into the famous publications! He had the stuff. It would be as Noyes said. He would have thought of it for another man.

“How soon can I start?” he said.

“Four or five hours.”

“I’m obliged to you.... Fallows seems still with me,” he said strangely.... “I must see Nevin——”

There was a ringing in his brain at some unused door, but he did not answer. He was driven again. Harrowing the idea of waiting a single day ... in these modern hours when world-events are so swiftly forgotten.

Everything was settled. Morning was taken from place to place in a cab. Noyes not only was conscientious about seeing to every detail for Friend Fallows—but he made it very clear that he was not accustomed to spend his evenings down-town. From time to time, he dropped hints of what he would be doing at home at this hour. Down-town nights were all put away for him, he declared.

The balance of the manuscript was locked in the safe at the Western States to be set up to-morrow, and proofs sent out. The second and possibly third installments of the story would go to the World-News by telegraph, the rest follow by mail.

“To-morrow morning, out in the mountains, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that New York is reading Field’s story which we ran to-day. Is that stuff the Doctor gave us, right, Morning?”

“Huh?”

“Did you dream about that sorrel mare—entrails out—walking like a man—white death in her eyes?” Noyes pursued.

“God, I wonder if I did? Did I dream that I did the big story twice?——”

He was in pain; there was lameness in his mind at being driven again. He wished Noyes would go home.... Messengers were back and forth to the Sickles trying to get Nevin. Transportation to New York was the newspaper’s affair; when it was handed him, something went from Morning that he could not get again. There was much to drink. Noyes had put all this from him so long that he found the novelty humorous—and yet, what a bore it was after all! Field was a steaming geyser of enthusiasms. Both talked. Others talked. Morning was sick with words. He had not had words drummed into his brain in so long. He half-realized that his impatience for all these things was disgust at himself, but all his past years, and their one-pointed aim held him now. This was his great chance.... He wanted Nevin.

These city men gave him everything, and disappointed him. Had he been forced to battle with them for markets; had he been forced to accept the simple column rate, he could not have seen them as now. Because they had become his servants, he touched their weakness. And what giants he had known—Fallows and Nevin—and Endicott, the little Englishman at Tongu.... You must answer a man’s need when that need is desperate—to make a heart-hold. A man makes his friends before his world capitulates.

He was waiting in the bar of the Polander.... Nevin had not been found. Morning was clothed, expensed; his order upon New York for the price of the story would not be touched until he reached there. He had won already; he had the world by the tail.... Nevin did not come. There was no bite in the drink for Morning. He was in pain; others made a night of it. He struggled in the pits of self, that sleepless, never-forgetting self. There was a calling, a calling deep within, but the outer noise spoiled the meaning. Men drank with single aim; they drank like Russian officers—to get drunk. They were drunk; all was rich and free. Noyes knew many whom he saw every day, and many whom he had seen long ago. He called them forward to meet Morning, who had brought in the story.... Morning who knew Duke Fallows—Morning who had the big story of the year, beginning to-morrow.... And always when they passed, Noyes remarked that the down-town stuff was silly as the devil. White and clerical, his oaths were effective. He drank hard and well as men go. Field drank well—his impulses becoming more gusty, but not evil.... Once Morning would have called this a night of triumph. Every one looked at him—talked respectfully—whispered, pointed.... Twenty minutes left—the crowd grew denser in the Polander bar. There was a voice in the arch to the hotel. Ferry entered in the midst of men. He was talking high, his eyes dancing madly.

“Why, the son of ... threw me—that’s all. He’s done with the Sickles.... Who? Why, Nevin, the squint-eyed son of a.... He threw me.... I thought this Morning was some drunken remittance man wanting passage. Reever Kennard said he was a thief.... Nevin might have come to me.... Why, Morning didn’t even pay his commutation for rations——”

“I would have mailed it to you, Ferry—except for this meeting,” said Morning, his voice raised a little to carry.

An important moment to him, and one of the strangest of his life. This was the man whom he had dreamed of murdering, the man who had made him suffer as only the gods should make men suffer. And yet Ferry was like an unpleasant child; and Morning, troubled by greater things, had no hate now, no time nor inclination to hate. The face that had seemed dark and pitiless on the deck in Nagasaki harbor—was only weak and undone—an unpleasant child crying, refusing to be quieted—an annoyance to the house. Such was the devil of the Sickles, the man who had stood between him and America, the man who had tried to make him miss beating the Coptic mails.... They faced each other, the quartermaster, wincing and shrunken.

“I had to get across, Ferry. I was too sick to make you see. Kennard always says that. He seems to know that best—but it isn’t true.... I was bad to look at. You see, I had come a long way. I was off my head and eyes——”

“I didn’t know,” Ferry blurted, “and now Nevin has thrown me. I wasn’t supposed to take civilians——”

“I know it—only I had to get across.... I don’t know what I’d have done but for Nevin. He was mother and father on the voyage. I can give you the commutation now——”

“You were a stowaway——”

“That’s what made it delicate to pay for the passage——”

Ferry was broken-nerved. He suggested buying a drink, as a child who has learned a fancied trick of men.

And Morning drank. Noyes glanced at Field, who had suddenly become pale and anxious with a story-idea. He was at work—drink-clouds shoved back and all the exterior enthusiasm—fresh as after a night’s rest. He was on a new story.

Ferry went away and Morning looked at the clock. Only five minutes of his life had been used in this important transaction. Nevin had not come—Nevin who had lost his berth, thrown over his own work for him.... There would be no more Nevin on the Sickles. Would he come East?

“Oh, I say, Field—drop the Ferry end of the story,” Morning said.

“Sure,” said Field glibly.

“Nothing to it,” said Noyes.

Morning was too tired to go further, though he felt their lie.

“But, Nevin,” he said to Noyes.

“I’ll have him found to-morrow. That’s the big local thing to-morrow.”

“Tell him——”

When Morning stopped telling Noyes and Field what to tell Nevin for him, it was time to go for the ferry. The Polander slipped out of Morning’s mind like a dream—smoke, voices, glasses, indecent praise. Noyes reached across the bar for a package. That last seemed quite as important as anything.

They left him at the ferry—these men of the Western States—servants of his action and his friends.... And somewhere in the city was little Nevin, who had done his work and who had not come for his pay; somewhere in the city, but apart from voices and adulation—the man who had forgotten himself in telling the story of how the news was brought in.... It was all desperately unfinished. It hurt him every moment.

In the Pullman berth he opened the package Noyes had given him; the porter brought a glass. Afterward, he lay in the darkness. It was very still when he had become accustomed to the wheels. The going always had soothed him. In the still train and the peace of the road, he heard at last that ringing again at the new door of his life, and opened to Betty Berry, who had promised to come.