Down Among Men by Will Levington Comfort - HTML preview

 

BOOK II.
 THE HILL-CABIN

1

MORNING sat in the yielding leather of the Boabdil library, quite as if he had passed his youth in the midst of people who talk of doing things. Liaoyang had been written, even the abandoned impediments of retreat covered. It had all come to pass quite according to the early ideas of Noyes and Field. John Morning was Liaoyang in America. His book Liaoyang, magazine and newspaper articles gathered together, was established as important authority in encyclopædic and other reference books. The most captious must grant that living man can do no more than this.

Morning had dined with the president. One after another he had made every magazine of note, and much money. He had done his own story of the journey, which proved more of a comment maker than the battle description; and his article on the deck passages of the Chinese coolies will always be an incentive to foreign missions. New York had waited upon him, had exploited him, given him bewildering payments, and called him everything, even Hugoesque and Tolstoianic. It was very hard for Morning to retain the conviction that there wasn’t ten pages of all this copy that ranked in sheer value with the ten pages of Fallows’ Ploughman. He didn’t for awhile.

Liaoyang was on in full magazine blast in America, while Mukden and Sha River were being fought across the world. At this time Morning spent an hour a day, as war-expert for a particularly incessant daily newspaper of New York. So all people knew what the campaign was about, and what certain generals might do, from past grooves of their wearing in history. Also German gentlemen of military pasts wrote letters disputing the prophecies. Morning had certainly arrived.

The condition or place of arrival was slippery. The peace of Portsmouth had been protocoled.... Liaoyang, deep in the valley of desuetude, was without even the interest of perspective. The name, Liaoyang, made the mind of the world lame.... Even in the heat of arrival, the thing had puzzled him. Money ceased to gladden him after a few mails; did not spare him from the nearest irritation. Plainly he was quite the same John Morning after appearing in the great magazines as before; and the people whom he had interested were mainly of the same sort that had come forward in the Polander bar.

He had been a sick man since the Hun Crossing. When the big New York task was finished, and it was done with something of the same drive of will that characterized the second writing of the main story on board the Sickles, he was again ready to break, body and brain. Running down entirely, he had reached that condition which has an aversion to any task. His productive motors had long lain in the dark, covered from the dust. This was the time he clubbed about. The Boabdil was a favorite, but even here, men drew up their chairs from time to time, day and night, dispatching the waiter for drink and saying:

“Those Japs are pretty good fighters, aren’t they?” or, “What do you consider will become of China in the event of——” or, very cheerily, “Well, Mr. Morning, are you waiting for another war?”

He slept ill; drank a very great deal; the wound in his side had not healed and he had made no great friends. He thought of these four things on this particular mid-day in the Boabdil library.... Nearby was old Conrad with the morning papers, summoning the strength to dine. It was usually late in the afternoon, before he arose to the occasion, but with each stimulant, he informed the nearest fellow-member that he was going to eat something presently. The old man stopped reading to think about it. After much conning, he decided that he had better have just one more touch of this with a dash of that—which he took slowly, listening for comment from within.... After dinner he would smoke himself to sleep and begin preparing for the following morning’s chops. “Eat twice a day, sir—no more—not for years.”

Conrad in his life had done one great thing. In war-time, before the high duty was put on, he had accumulated a vast cellar full of whiskey. That had meant his hour. Riches, a half century of rich dinners, clean collars and deep leather chairs—all from that whiskey sale.... “Picturesque,” they said of Conrad at the Boabdil. “What would the club do without him?”...

Morning watching him now, remembered an old man who used to sit at a certain table in a Sixth avenue bar. The high price of whiskey had reversed conditions in this case, and a changed collar meant funeral or festivity. Forty years ago this old man had bred a colt that became a champion. That was his hour, his answer for living. After all, Morning concluded, having seen Conrad fall asleep one night, the old horseman was less indecent.

Finally Morning thought of the little Englishman at Tongu and the blanket; then of Fallows and Nevin—Fallows saying, “Come on upstairs,” that day of their first meeting at the Imperial, and Nevin saying, “Well, you gave me a night——” .... Morning began to laugh. “Picturesque, what-would-we-do-without Conrad”—sitting five days and nights on the deck passage from the mouth of the Pei-ho to the lowest port of Japan....

He hadn’t thought much of Nevin and Fallows and the Tongu Endicott in the months that followed his arrival from San Francisco, when the work went with a rush. And Betty Berry—there were times when he was half sure she—name, Armory and all—formed but an added dream that Nevin had injected hypodermically the night before.

Morning could think about all these now. The editors had begun to tell what they wanted. He had sent in stuff which did not meet their needs. He was linked to war in their minds. Moreover, plentiful money had brought to the surface again his unfinished passion to gamble, as his present distaste for work had increased the consumption of alcohol.... It was Reverses that reminded him of Fallows and Nevin and the Tongu blanket and the angel he had entertained in the Armory room.

Editors didn’t care for his fiction. “A good war story is all right any time,” they said, but apparently his were not, for five or six trials didn’t take. He had a tendency to remember Fallows when he wrote fiction. The story of the Ploughman came curiously back to mind, when he was turned loose from straight narrative, and he was “balled” between planes.... He thought of a play....

Varce now came into the library and drew up a chair. Varce had one of his stories; Varce edited a magazine that sold several million every two weeks. Long ago, with great effort, and by paying prodigiously, Varce had secured from Morning one of the final tiles of the great Liaoyang mosaic.... Varce was tall, a girl’s dream of poet-knight—black, wavy hair, straight excellent features, a figure lean enough for modern clothes.

“Morning,” he said, “do you know the fighting game?”

“You mean pugilistically?”

“Yes.”

“I used to do fights.”

Varce went on presently:

“A great series of articles is to be written on the boyhood and general atmosphere of the men who have made great ring history—big stuff, you know—well written—from a man who can see the natural phenomena of these bruisers—how they are bred and all that. Now three things go into the fighter—punch, endurance, but, most of all, instinct—the stuff that doesn’t let him ‘lay down’ when the going is rough, and doesn’t keep him from putting the wallop on a groggy opponent. Many a good fighter has missed championship because he was too tender-hearted to knock-out a helpless——”

“Do you like that story of mine you have, Varce?” Morning asked yawning.

“Oh, it’s a good enough story—a bit socialistic—what are you trying to get at?”

“No need of me furnishing diagrams, if the manuscript leaves you that way,” Morning said. “You were just saying about the last touch to a beating—yes, I’ve heard about those three things——”

“Do you want the series?”

“No, I’m doing a play.”

... After Varce had gone, Morning thought it all out again. Varce was living a particularly unmitigated lie. Five years ago he had done some decent verse. He had a touch of the real poetic vision, and he had turned it to trade. He was using it now to catch the crowd. An especially sensational prostitution, this—one that would make the devil scratch his head.... And Varce could do without him. Liaoyang had not made the name of John Morning imperative. Moreover, he himself was living rotten. He wished he had told Varce what he thought of him and his multi-millionaire subscription.... He hadn’t; he had merely spoken of his play. The bridges were not burned behind him. He might be very glad to do a series of “pug” stories for Varce. There were good stories in these fighters—but the good stories, as he saw them, were not what Varce saw in the assignment.

It summed up that he was just beginning over again; that he must beat the game all over again in a different and larger dimension—or else quit.... He ordered a drink.... He could always see himself. That was a Morning faculty, the literary third eye. He saw himself doing a series of the fighters—saw it even to the red of the magazine covers, and the stuff of the announcements.... John Morning, the man who did fifty-mile fronts at Liaoyang, putting all his unparalleled battle color in the action of a 24-foot ring. Then the challenge to the reader: “Can you stand a descriptive force of this calibre? If you can, read the story of the great battle between Ambi Viles and Two-pill Terry in next issue.”... He would have to tell seriously before the battle description, however, how Ambi was a perfect gentleman and the sole support of his mother, an almost human English gentlewoman. It is well to be orthodox.

Somebody spoke of whiskey in the far end of the library, insisting on a certain whiskey, and old Conrad cocked up his ears out of a meaty dream.... Morning closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of a ship beneath, the drive of the cold rain on deck and the heaving of the sea. There was something almost sterile-clean about that deck-passage, compared to this.... Then he remembered again the men he had known, and the woman who came to the Armory room—and the long breath his soul took, with her coming.... Finally he saw himself years hence, as if he had quit the fight now and taken New York and Varce as they meant to use him.... He was sunk in leather, blown up like an inner tube and showing red, stalled in some club library, and forcing the world to remember Liaoyang, bringing down the encyclopædia to show his name, when extra drunk.... No, he would be hanging precariously to some porter job on Sixth avenue, trying to make the worn and tattered edges of his world believe how he had once carried the news from Liaoyang to Koupangtse....

A saddle-horse racked by on the asphalt, and turned into the park. Morning arose. There was stabbing and scalding from the unhealed wound in his side. The pain reminded him of the giants he had once known and of the woman who came to the Armory room. It had always been so; always something about him unsound, something that would not heal. He had accepted eagerly, but ever his giving had been paltry. And he had to be pulled down, out of the shine of fortune, before he remembered how great other men had been to him.

2

THAT night he dreamed that he had passed through death.... He was standing upon a cliff, between the Roaming Country and a valley of living earth. He did not want the spirit region; in his dream he turned his back upon it. He did not want the stars. Illusion or not, he wanted the earth. He looked down upon it through the summer night, down through the tree-tops into a valley that lay in the soft warm dusk. He watched with the passion and longing of a newly-dead mother, who hears her child crying for her, and senses the desolation of her mate.... The breath of earth came up to him through the exhaling leaves—leaves that whispered in the mist. He could have kissed the soil below for sheer love of it. He wanted the cool, damp earth in his hands, and the thick leaf-mould under his feet, and the calm wide listening of the trees.... Stars were near enough, but earth was not. He wanted to be down, down in the drip of the night. He would wait in ardor for the rain of the valley.... Looking down through the tree-tops, he sensed the earth passion, the lovely sadness of it—and desired it, even if he must die again.... There was an ache in the desire—like the ache of thirst that puts all other thoughts away, and turns the dream and the picture to running water.

He awoke, and went to his window in the dark. He saw New York and realized that he was dying for the country. His eyes smarted to tears, when he remembered rides and journeys and walks he had taken over the earth, so thoughtlessly, without knowing their boon and beauty and privilege.... While he was standing there, that which he had conceived as To-morrow, became To-day, and appeared over the rim of the opposite gorge of apartments. The first light of it sank far down into the tarry stuffiness of the pavement, but the dew that fell with the dawn-light was pure as heaven to his nostrils.

That day he crossed the river, and at the end of a car-line beyond Hackensack, walked for a half-hour. It was thus that Morning found his hill. Just a lifted corner of a broad meadow, with a mixed company of fine trees atop. He bought it before dusk. The dairyman’s farmhouse was a quarter-mile distant; the road, a hundred and fifty yards from the crest of the hill, with trees thinly intervening. The south was open to even wider fields; in the far distance to the west across the meadows, the sky was sharpened by a low ribbon of woods and hill-land. In the east was the suspended silence of the Hudson.

“I want a pump and a cabin, and possibly a shed for a horse,” he said, drinking a glass of buttermilk, at the dairyman’s door.

He was directed to Hackensack.

With the falling darkness again upon the hills, he saw that certain crowded, mid-growth trees were better down. The fine thought of building his cabin of them occurred. By the time he reached Hackensack, the house of logs was so dear in thought, that he wanted nothing short of a cabinet-joiner for such a precious task. That night he met Jake Robin, who was sick of nailing at houses in rows, a job that had long since ceased to afford deep breaths to his capacity.

The next day Morning moved to Hackensack, and Jake was at work.... Three thousand he had lost gambling ... he wished he had it now. Much more had been lost, and not so cleanly, in reaching the final Boabdil realization, but he had enough. Presently he was helping Jake, and there was joy in it.

They tapped a spring some thirty feet beneath the humped shoulder of the hill; built a shed for the horse he had not yet found, and then fitted the cabin to the fire-place of concrete and valley stone. One sizeable room it was, that faced the open south from the brow of the hill.

A fine unfolding—this love of Morning’s for wood itself, and woods. Over a half-hundred trees were his own—elm, beech, hickory, oak, ash, and maple—and like a fine clean colony of idealists they stood meditating.... One never knows the quality of wood until one builds his own house. Opening the timbers for the big mortices—each was a fresh and fragrant discovery. Jake and he lingered long, after the cabin was roofed, over the heavy oak flooring, and the finishing of windows and doors and frames. They built some furniture together of hickory, which is a wood a man should handle with reverence, for it is fine in its way as wheat and grapes and honey and wild olives. Hickory answers graciously to the work of the hand, and, like a good dog, flourishes with men.... They built a table and bed-frame and a chest of drawers; and Morning at last went to Hackensack for pots, kettles, and tea things. Jake Robin, like one who has built a ship, was loath to leave without trying the cabin. Morning kept him busy in the clearing, long after he was in the mood to start work on the play. There was a platform to build for the pump; also a certain rustic bench. The shed needed tinkering; an extra cabinet for books was indispensable—and screens.... No one had ever let Jake play before in his life.... Moreover, he was paid for the extra hour required to walk to and from town. All Hack heard about it.

“You’ll need a chicken-coop——”

“No,” said Morning. The look on Jake’s face was like old Amoya’s in Tokyo, when the rickshaw-runner was forbidden to take him to the Yoshuwara.

“I can fit you up a little ice-box near the spring—so’s you’ll pump it full of water, and keep your vittles——”

Morning wanted the stillness for the play, but he couldn’t refuse. Two days more. Then Jake scratched his head.

“You’ll be wantin’ a vine on the cabin,” he ventured. “I know the man who has the little ivies.”

This was irresistible. “Can you see me owning a vine?” asked Morning. Yet there was significance in the idea together with the play.

“And I’ll build a bit of a trainer to start it. By the end of summer——”

“Bring it on, Jake——”

“An’ I’ll fetch a couple of rose vines, and dreen them with broken crockery from the holler——”

The vine prospered and the play; and the roses began to feel for Jake’s trellis. The tool-box was still there.

“You’ll be needin’ fire-wood for the winter. To be sure, you can buy it, but what’s the good, with dead stuff to be knocked down and small trees to be thinned out, and the shed gapin’ open for the saddle-horse you’re not sure of findin’? It’s wood you ought to have in there——”

In fact, it was no small task to break Jake of the hill-habit. Morning grew accustomed to the ax, and the crashing of branches, many of which would have been sacrificed to the strong winds of the Fall. Meanwhile, the shed had come into its own, and there were piles of firewood seasoning in the sun and shade.

He was alone with the nights; sitting there in his doorway when it was fine, studying the far lights of the city.... City lights meant Varce and Conrad, not his great friends. Every hour that he looked, he liked better the wind about the doorway and the open southern fields.

One night he felt his first twinge of sorrow for the big city. Hatred, it had been before. Other men were tortured as he had been, but somehow, the way didn’t get into their dreams and drive them forth, as he had been driven. They were really not to blame for Boabdilling; they sank into the cushions and lost the sense of reality. And then the thousands in the hall-bedrooms and worse, to whom Boabdil was heaven’s farthest pavilion! Morning seemed to have something to say to those thousands, but wasn’t ready yet.

He longed for Fallows, whom he saw more clearly every day—especially since the Ploughman had crept into the play.... He wanted to wait upon the big sick man; to have him here, to prepare food for him, and sit with him in these silences. He wanted Endicott at Tongu, too, and Nevin—oh, yes, Nevin. It was like a prayer that he sent out some nights—for the unearthing of these giants from their hiding—so that he could listen to them, and serve them and make them glad for their giving to him.

A deep summer night. The purple of the north seemed washed and thinned in ether, (nothing else could bring out the heavenly lustre of it), and the black, fragile top-foliage of the woods leaned against it, listening, feminine. Darkness only on the ground; yet he loved it, the heart of the dusk that throbbed there. He loved the earth and the water that mingled in the hollows. He breathed with strange delight the air that brushed the grass and the clover-scent that came to him around the hill.... And this was the momentary passion—that he was going from all this. He loved it as one who was passing beyond. It was like the dream after all. Just as Mother Earth was unfolding, he was called. She was like a woman long lived-with, but unknown, until the sudden revelation of parting.... He touched the stones with his hand.

In the hush, waiting for a katydid to answer, that night, Morning fell asleep.... He had climbed to his cabin, as if it were a room on an upper floor. Before he opened the door, he knew someone was within. Before the light, it was clear that someone was curled up asleep on the foot of his hard bed.... Yes, it was she who had restored his soul, that day at the Armory—and there she lay sleeping.... He did not call her, as he had called Moto-san; there was no thought to waken her, for everything was so pure and lovely about it. He stood there, and watched her gratefully—it seemed a long time—until the katydid answered.

3

AFTER Markheim had kept the play three months—it was now November—Morning crossed to the city to force the decision. The producer was prevailed upon to see him.

“It will be read once more,” said Markheim. “It will go or not. We like it, but we are afraid of it. To-morrow we will know or not.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know. I do not read plays.”

“To-morrow?”

“Yes.”

Markheim bought his opinions, and was attentive to those which cost the most....

Morning drew a napkin the size of a doll’s handkerchief from a pile. A plate of eggs and bacon rung, as if hitting a bull’s-eye upon the white marble before him. He was still wondering what Markheim was afraid of. He didn’t like the feel of it. The Lowenkampf of Duke Fallows’ had crept into the play—Lowenkampf, whose heart was pulled across the world by the mother and child. How they had broken his concentration on the eve of the great battle.

At the time, he had seen the tragic sentimentalist as one caught in a master weakness, but all that was gone. Lowenkampf still moved white in his fancy, while the other generals, even Mergenthaler, had become like the dim mounds in his little woodland.... And what a dramatic thing, to have a woman and a child breaking in upon the poised force of a vast Russian army. It was like Judith going down into the valley-camp of the Assyrians and smiting the neck of Holofernes with his own fauchion. Morning’s mind trailed away in the fascination of Fallows, and in the dimension he had been unable to grasp in those black hours of blood.... So many things were different after this summer alone; yet he had never seemed quite rested, neither in mind nor body.... He had been all but unkillable like the sorrel Eve before that journey from Liaoyang to New York. Now, even after the ease and moral healing of the summer alone, his wound was unhealed....

The telephone-miss in Markheim’s reception-room was very busy when he called the next afternoon.... Something about her reminded him of Mio Amigo. She was a good deal sharper. Was it the brass handle?... To hear her, one would think that she had come in late, and that New York needed scolding, even spanking, which exigencies of time and space deferred for the present. Her words were like the ‘spat, spat, spat,’ of a spanking.... She was like an angry robin, too, at one end of a worm. She bent and pulled, but the worm had a strangle-hold on a stone. It gave, but would not break.... Morning saw the manuscript at this point on her side-table, and the fun of the thing was done.... She looked up, trailed a soft arpeggio on the lower-right of her board, grasped the manuscript firmly, and shoved it to him.

“Mr. Morning to see Mr. Markheim,” he said.

“Mr. Markheim is——”

But the husky voice of the producer just now reached them from within.

“Busy——” she finished with a cough.... New York was at it again. Stuyvesant especially had a devil, and Bryant was the last word.

“... You can’t see Mr. Markheim. This is your message——”

“Oh, it really isn’t. This is just an incident. I hesitate to trouble you, but I must see Mr. Markheim.”

The play was wrapped in the identical paper in which it had been brought.

She must have touched something, for a boy came in—a younger brother, past doubt—but so bewildered, as to have become habitually staring.

“Tell Mr. Markheim, Mr. Morning insists on seeing him.”

The boy seemed on the point of falling to his knees to beg for mercy. Morning’s personal distemper subsided. Here was a drama, too—the great American stage.... One word came out to him from Markheim:

“In-zists!”

“How do you do, Mr. Morning—good afternoon.”

Markheim had his hand in a near drawer, and was smiling with something the same expression that old Conrad used when listening for the dinner notice.

“You see we do not want it—we are afraid,” he began, and becoming suddenly hopeful, since Morning drew forth no bomb, he added, “You have a girl’s idea of war, Mr. Morning—good afternoon.”

He liked his joke on the name. “We were in doubt about the war part—afraid—and so we consulted an expert—one who was on the spot,” he said pleasantly.

Morning’s mind was searching New York; his idea was fateful.

“We are not bermidded to divulge who the expert is, but we did not spare money——”

Morning’s eye was held to the desk over the shoulder of Markheim, to a large square envelope, eminent in blue, upon the corner of which was the name “Reever Kennard.”

“I’m sure you did not. He was always a high-priced man,” he said idly.... And so this was the long-delayed answer to his appearance in the World-News to the extent of eighty thousand words. He had heard that Mr. Reever Kennard was back on finance and politics.... Markheim had not followed his mind nor caught the sentence. Morning passed out through the hush. He paused at the door to give the office-boy a present—a goodly present to be divided with the sister, just now occupied with a fresh outbreak of obstreperousness on the part of Gramercy.

Morning had moments of something like the old rage; but the extreme naturalness of the thing, and its touch of humor, helped him over for the next hour or so. Apparently, the opportunity had fallen into the lap of Mr. Reever Kennard; come to him with homing familiarity. The war-expert had spoken, not as one offering his values gratuitously, but as one called and richly paid. Morning reflected that the summer alone on his hill must have subdued him. As a matter of fact, he was doubtful about the play; not because Markheim was afraid; not by any means because Mr. Reever Kennard had spoken, but because it had not come easily, and the three incidents which made the three acts did not stand up in his mind as the exact trinity for the integration of results. But one cannot finally judge his own work.

He wandered straight east from that particular theatre of Markheim’s where the offices were and passed Fourth Avenue. He never went quite that way again, but remembered that there was an iron picket-fence of an old residence to lean against; and at the corner of it, nearer town, the sidewalk sank into a smoky passage where lobsters, chops, and a fowl or two were tossed together in front. It was all but dark. He was averse to taking his present mood across the river. It wasn’t fair to the cabin. Mio Amigo recurred queerly and often to mind....

“Look—there’s Mr. Morning——”

“Sh-sh—oh, Charley—sh-sh!”

Morning was compelled. Could this little shrinking creature, beside whom the under-sized brother now appeared hulking, be the same who had bossed Manhattan to a peak in his presence such a little while ago? She seemed terrified, all pointed for escape, sick from the strain of the street.

“Why, hello!” Morning said.

She pulled her brother on, saying with furious effort of will, “I’m sure we’re much obliged for your present——”

“I had forgotten that,” Morning said.

“We’re going to take in the show,” the boy remarked, drawing back. At large, thus, he was much better to look upon.

“Come on, Charley—we mustn’t detain——”

Morning had an idea, and looked at the sister as he said, “Won’t you have supper with me somewhere? I have nothing——”

Her face was livid—as if all the fears of a lifetime had culminated into the dreadful impendings of this moment. She tried to speak.... Then it came to Morning in a belated way that she thought she was accosted; that she connected his gift with this meeting. He couldn’t let her go now—and yet, it was hard for him to know what to say.

“I mean we three,” he began hastily. “This play being refused rather knocked me out, and I didn’t know what to do with the evening. I don’t live in New York, you know. I thought you and your brother—that we might have supper together——”

He spoke on desperately, trying to stir to life the little magpie sharpness again. It was more to her brother she yielded. New York must have frightened her terribly.... Morning managed to get down to the pair that night. He was clumsy at it, however, for it was a new emprise. Mostly John Morning had been wrapped and sealed in his own ideas. The boy was won with the first tales of war, but the sister remained apart with her terrors. No one had taught her that kindness may be a motive in itself.

And now Morning was coping with what seemed a real idea: What was the quality of the switch-board that harnessed her character? Here she was wild and disordered—like a creature denied her drug. With that mystic rumble of angry New York in her ears—the essential buzz of a million desires passing through her—she was a force, flying and valuable force. Was she lain open to obsession now because she was removed from that slavery? Was that maddening vibration the lost key to her poise?

He tried hard, not daring to be attentive in the least. She would have fled, if he had. He was boyishly kind to her brother. That awed, and was beginning to hold her.

Morning saw clearly that she stood like a stretched wing between her brother’s little soul and the world. She could be brave in sheltering Charley. The boy was really alive. He ate and answered and listened and lived, the show ahead.... In the midst of it, Morning awoke to the fact that he was having a good time; and here was the mystery—with the last two people in New York he would have chosen; a two, his whole life-business had taught him to employ thoughtlessly, as other metropolitan adjuncts—pavements, elevators, messengers. Here was life in all its terror and complication, the same struggles he had known; yet he had always seen himself as a sort of Titan alone in the great destroying elements. The joke was on him.

Charley left them for just a moment. The sister said, as if thinking aloud:

“... And yet, he cries every morning because he has to go to the office. Oh, he wouldn’t go there without me——”

A world of meaning in that. They were sitting in the dark of the Charity Union play-house, with Charley between them. The aims and auspices of the performance were still indefinite to Morning, who had not ceased to grapple with his joke—the seriousness with which he had habitually regarded John Morning, his house, his play, his unhealed wound, his moral debility....

For fifteen minutes a giant had marvelously manhandled his companion. The curtain dropped an instant, and in the place where the giant had performed now stood a ’cello and a chair.... She came on like the wraith of an angel—and sat down and played.... How long she played Morning never knew, but somewhere in it he caught his breath as one who had come back to life.... And then she was gone. The audience was mildly applauding. He turned to the sister leaning on the knees of the boy:

“I know her. She is very dear to me. If you don’t mind, I’ll leave you now. You are safe with Charley—and some time again I’ll come. I thank you very much. I really want to do this again—we three——”

Even though his own joy was bewildering, he saw the sudden happiness of Charley’s sister, who, in spite of all, had been haunted by the dread of the afterward. Now that was gone from her. Relief was in her face. It was all so much better than she had dared to hope. He had wanted nothing—except to be kind—and now he was going. She gave her hand impulsively.... Charley did, too, and was ordered to call a carriage for his sister if he wished; at all events, the means was attended.... Then they saw him making his way forward—putting money into the hands of ushers, and inquiring the way to the stage.... And she was there, playing again.

4

SHE was making the people like her. Her effect was gradual. They had been held by more obvious displays. The instrument seemed very big for her, but the people liked her all the better for this.... He could not be one with the audience, but the old watching literary eye—the third eye—caught the sense of the people’s growing delight. She made them feel that she belonged to them; as if she said:

“I have come back to you. I will do just what you ask. Everything I have is yours——”

It was different and dearer to John Morning than anything he had ever known. The picture came clearly to him as he walked around behind.... This was the hour of her return. She had gone from the hearts of her people long ago to bring back music. It was the beautiful old story of their sacrifice to send her away. How splendidly she had learned; how thrillingly they remembered her beginnings. And she had never forgotten; she would always love and thank them—indeed, she was happier than any now.... Morning was lost for a moment in his story.

She was approaching, but did not see him yet. The house was pleased with her, not noisily, but pleasantly. She turned to bow to the people—and then back toward the wings. She saw him standing there. Her arms went out to him, though she had not quitted the stage.... The gesture was new to the people.... It was different from her coming to him at the Armory.... They were standing together.

“Why don’t you go on again?” a voice said, and with a queer irritation in the tone.

... She was playing again—and with dash and power.

Morning had to shut his eyes now, really to hear; and yet, he could not summon her face to mind when his eyes were shut. He thought with a quick burn of shame that he had once wished her prettier. Sadness followed, for, it seemed to him, their meeting had been broken. She belonged to the people and not to him. They loved her.... She was different. He saw it now. The audience, so pleased and joyous, lifted her in a way perhaps that he could never do.

It was everywhere—the music. It filled the high, brick-walled stage, vibrated in the spiral stairways, moved mysteriously in the upper darkness and immensity. Behind the far wings a man was moving up and down in a sort of enchantment—no, he was memorizing something. A few of the far front rows were visible from where Morning stood, and the forward boxes opposite....

Morning was wandering in a weird land, a hollow land. The woman’s playing was between him and the world of men; half for them, half for him. The Memorizer was but another phantom, wandering with the ghost of a manuscript. Between Morning and the player was only the frail, fluent current of music. This was a suspense of centuries.... Would she go to Them, or return to Him? The tall, dim canvases were fields of emptiness and silence, in which he wandered listening, tortured with tension; and the loft was sunless, moonless, unearthly....

The music ceased. He heard the calling of the other world to her. He was apart in the shadows. Would she go to them, or would she remember him, waiting?... She was coming. He heard her step behind the wings. It was light as a gloved hand upon a table. He was hungry and athirst and breathless. For the first time he saw that her throat and arms were bare.... They were standing together again, but the Other Phantom intercepted.

It was the Memorizing Man. He came forward in an agony of excitement. “You’ll have to prompt me,” he said to Betty Berry, speaking roughly in his tension. “It’s my first time with this new dope. I thought I had it, but I ain’t—and there’s a barrel of it.”

The stage was slightly changed. Morning was thinking how hideous the work of some men. The Phantom was scourged with the fear of one who was to do imperfectly what another had written. The woman had carried a small table and chair to the wings, out of view of the audience and as near as possible to the Memorizer.... Morning found something soft and fragrant in his hands. Betty Berry’s wrap, which she had given to him before going to the table. And now the monologue had begun.... It was to be humorous.

Betty Berry, standing beside the table, raised her eyes from the paper, and beckoned to Morning. His first thought was that he might disturb her prompting, and he hesitated. She looked up again. Then he thought she might want her wrap. He tiptoed forward and put it around her shoulders.

“It wasn’t that,” she whispered, her eyes upon the paper. “I wanted you to keep me company. This is long. Sit down.”

“Won’t you—sit down?” he said from behind, very close to her hair.

She shook her head.... It was peculiar—she standing, and he in the chair. The soft wrap winged out, and her arm beneath slid across his shoulder; the hollow of her left arm against his cheek. He kissed it, and his face burned against its coolness.

She shivered slightly, but did not take her arm away. Now he looked up into her face—her eyelids drawn, her lips compressed, her gaze steadily held to the manuscript. The Phantom was carried on by the alien humor. Laughter was beginning to crackle here and there through the house. Betty Berry followed with her eyes—just the words.

“I was so glad to find you,” Morning whispered.

Her lips moved.

Matters tumbled over each other in his mind to say to her; he was thinking sentences rather than words. He knew that it was not well to talk now, but there seemed so much to say, and so little time. He caught himself promising to give her understanding, and he told her that she seemed everything he wanted to know. His cheek was burning as never before....

The remotest happened. The Phantom faltered in a climax, and covered the difficulty with a trick—awaiting the line from the wings. Betty Berry had become rigid. Her eyes would not see the page.

Morning spoke a sentence in a low, carrying way. He had plucked it from the page painfully near his own eyes. It may be that the Memorizer righted himself, or that the prompted line was what he needed. Anyway, he was going again, and rising to the end....

The two stood together while the house laughed, recalling the performer.

“Thanks. I caught it fine,” the Phantom said hastily. “Not even the front rows knew. I was listening for Miss Berry—and your cue came——”

“It went all right,” said Morning.

The other took the manuscript and passed on, rolling a cigarette.... For just a moment, the two were alone. Into each other’s arms they went, with the superb thoughtlessness of children ... and then they heard steps and voices.... He wondered that Betty Berry could laugh and reply to those who spoke to her.... He wanted to escape with her. Never had he wanted anything so much. He was exhausted, humbled, inspired. To be out in the street with her—it seemed almost too good to be.... She was saying good-night and good-bye. He followed, carrying the ’cello.

5

MORNING remembered that he had thought of her once before as having braids down behind—as if they were boy and girl together, and now it seemed as if they were wandering through some Holland street. He had never been in a Holland street, but the sense of it came to him—as he walked with her, carrying her instrument. His primary instinct was to turn away from the noise of the cars, and where the lights were less glaring. Moreover, now that they were alone, the impulse to say many things had left him.

“We must hurry to the ferry—there is only a few minutes——”

He had known somehow that she was going away—perhaps from something she had said to the others at the theatre.

“You’re not going way back to—to the Armory?”

“No, to Europe just for a few weeks. I sail to-morrow morning from Baltimore. All we have to do is to catch the ferry and train. I have sleeper-tickets—and berth and all——”

“I’ll—I’ll go across on the ferry with you,” he said huskily.

She felt his suffering by her own, and said:

“My old master is there. I am to meet him—I think in Paris—I shall know when I reach London. There is to be just a few private concerts and some lessons further from him. For two years we’ve planned to do this. I go to Baltimore, because it is cheaper to sail from there——”

“And you’ll be back—when?”

“By the first of March—just a few days over three months——”

He was silent for a time, and then asked: “Do you think this is just like a chance meeting to me—as one meets an old friend in New York?”

“No.”

“I was in a whirl when I saw you,” he said desperately. “It was such a pretty thing, too—the way I happened to come to the theatre ... and now you’re going away——”

“Yes—yes—but it’s only a little while——”

“Did you know I was here in New York?”

“I knew you had been. I saw your work——”

“But anywhere my work appears—a letter sent in care of the paper or magazine would find me——”

“We—I mean women—do not write that way——”

“I know—I know.... But I didn’t have anything but the name, ‘Betty Berry’——”

“It seemed that night after I left you at the Armory everyone was talking about John Morning. And to think I supposed you just a soldier. Everywhere, it was what John Morning had done, and what he had endured—and I had spent the afternoon with you. I started to read that story about your journey, but I couldn’t go on. It seemed that I would die before I was half through your sufferings.... I would try to think of the things we said, but they didn’t come back. I couldn’t rest. I was glad you asked me to come again. I could hardly wait for the morning—to go back to the Armory——”

He had no answer. They were in a cross-town car.

“But I think I understand. We won’t say anything of that again....”

“You went back to the Armory that next morning?”

“Yes——”

“Oh, but I wasn’t ready,” he said at last, as if goaded by pain. “I had so much to learn. Why, I had to learn this—how little this means——”

He pointed out of the windows to the city streets.

“You mean New York?”

“Yes——”

“It really seems as if men must learn that, first of all. You have done well to learn so soon.”

“It’s so different now. I must have been half-unconscious that day when you came. You were like an angel. I didn’t know until afterward what it really meant to me.... You remember the men who came—newspaper men? They showed me what I could do in New York—how I could make the magazines and the big markets. I was knocked-out. You must see it—all I wanted to do in coming years—to make what seemed the real literary markets—all was to be done in a few weeks.... It was not until I was on the train that night that I remembered you were a living woman, and had come to me.... Then I didn’t know what to do.... But ever since I have thought of that afternoon, every day....”

They boarded the ferry and moved away from the rest of the people.

“I hate to have you go,” he said. The words were wrung from him. They were such poor and common words, but his every process of thought repeated them. He looked back the years, and found a single afternoon in the midst of passionate waste—the single afternoon in which she came.... She was everything to him. He wanted to go on and on this way, carrying her ’cello. He could ask no more than to have her beside him. He had learned the rest—it was trash and suffering. He wanted to tell her all he knew—not in the tension of this momentary parting—but during days and years, to tell his story and have her sanction upon what was done, and to be done. She was dear; peace was with her.... She would tell him all that was mysterious; together they would be One Who Knew. Together they would work—do the things that counted, and learn faith....

She took the ’cello from him, so that he could carry to the Pullman her large case checked in the Jersey station.... It was very quiet and dark in the coach. All the berths were made up but one, in which they sat down.... They were alone. It was perfect.

“I can’t go back now. I’ll go on with you to Trenton.... I have thought so much of meeting you.... When the men came that day to the Armory they showed me everything that seemed good then—fame and money waiting in New York. It seemed that it couldn’t wait another day—that I must go that night.... When the train started (it was like this in Oakland) I thought of you—of you, back in ’Frisco and coming to the Armory in the morning. It broke me. But I wasn’t right—not normal. I had worked like a madman—wounds and all. I worked like a madman in New York——”

She put her hand on his. Her listening centered him. That was it—as if he had not been whirling true before.... Her hand, her listening, and he was himself—eager to give her all that was real.

“It’s so good to have you here,” she said in a low, satisfied way. “Will you be able to get a train back all right?”

“Yes.” Now he thought of Charley and his sister.

“It was such a good little thing that brought me to you,” he said. “One of the little things that I never thought of before,” he told her hurriedly.

“They are very wonderful—those little things, as you call them.... A person is so safe in doing them——”

“I must tell Duke Fallows about that,” he added. “About that word ‘safe,’ as you just said it.... Did you read his story?”

“About the Ploughman?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, it was wonderful!” Betty Berry said. “He made me see it. It was almost worth a war to make people see that——”

She stopped strangely. He was bending close, watching her.

“Do you know you are a love-woman?”

“You mean something different?” she asked queerly.

“I mean you are everything—don’t you see? You know everything at once that I have to get bruised and tortured to know. And when you are here, I know where I am. It’s different from any kind of resting to be here with you. It’s kind of being made over. And then you are so—tender——”

“You make the tears come, John Morning.”

Now, it was very dark where they were; the real silences began. He knew the most wonderful thing about her—her listening.... Sometimes, she seemed hardly there. Sometimes the love for her and the sweet quality of it all—shut his throat, and he stared away in the dark. It came to him that Betty Berry—left to herself—would be infallible. She might do wrong, through the will of someone else, but her own impulses were unerringly right. There was delicacy, perhaps, from the long summer alone, in this sense that he must not impose his will. She would be unable to refuse anything possible. If ever Betty Berry were forced to refuse anything he asked, they would never be the same together. And so he studied her. Her nature was like something that enfolded. It was like an atmosphere—his own element.

“Betty——”

“Yes.”

“Betty——”

“Yes——-”

And then she laughed and kissed him. He was saying her name in the very hush of contemplation; so real that the name was all....

6

THE Pullman conductor passing through after Trenton gave Morning further passage, and moved on with a smile. A wonderful old darkey was the porter, very huge, past seventy, with a voice purringly kind, and the genial deference of the Old South. Morning was thinking there couldn’t be better hands in which to leave the Betty Berry.... Fifteen minutes at Philadelphia; they hurried out for a cup of coffee. As one of the big station clocks marked the minutes, Morning felt havoc with a new and different force.

“I can’t go back now,” he said.

“You look so tired—the long night journey back——” she faltered.

“Would you like to have me go farther—to Wilmington—to Baltimore?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And you won’t mind staying up?”

Betty Berry covered her eyes.... “I never rested in quite the same way as to-night,” she said. “It has been happy—so happy, unexpected. I shall have nine days at sea to think of it—to play and think of it, moment by moment.”

“I’ll go with you clear through to the ship then.”

The clock ceased its torment.

“Have you plenty of money to get back—and all?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure—because I could loan you some?”

He told her again, but the thought held a comradeship that gripped him. It happened that he was plentifully supplied; though he would have walked back rather than confess otherwise—a peculiar stupidity. The beaming of the old porter made the moment at the steps of the coach so fine, Morning found himself explaining:

“The lady is sailing from Baltimore in the morning. I’ve decided to go clear through to the pier.”

This was an extraordinary thing for him to explain.

They sat in silence until the train moved, and they could forget the snoring.... The coach grew colder, and Betty unpacked a steamer rug which they used for a lap-robe. Even the old darkey went to sleep after Wilmington.

“Letters—” she said at last. “I have been thinking about that.... There’s no way to tell where I am to be. I won’t know until London, where I am to meet my old master. Perhaps then I could tell you—but I daren’t think of letters and risk disappointment.... You must wait until I write you——”

Morning began to count the days, and she knew what was in his mind.

“That’s just it—one gets to lean on letters. One’s letters are never one’s self. I know that extended writing throws one out from the true idea of another. I shall think of to-night during the weeks.... It seems, we forgot the world to-night. There—behind the scenes—how wonderful.... There was no thought about it. I just found myself in your arms——”

“Then I am not to write—until I hear from you?” he asked. It had not occurred to him before that she could have any deeper reason than an uncertain itinerary.

“That will be best.... Don’t you see, writing is your work. It will make you turn your training upon me. Something tells me the peril of that. As to-night dimmed away—you would force the picture.... Trained as you, one writes to what he wishes one to be, not to what one is.... You would make me all over to suit—and when I came, there would be a shock.... And then think if some night—very eager and heart-thumping, I should reach a city—so lonely and hungry for my letter—and it shouldn’t be there.... No, to-night must do for me. I shall go on my way playing and biding my time, until the return steamer. Then some morning, about the first of March, you shall hear that I am back—and that I am waiting for my real letter——”

“And where did you learn all this—about a man writing himself out of the real?” John Morning asked wonderingly.

“If I were to be in one place to receive your letters, I might not have thought of it—yet it is true.... Then, my letters are nothing. Perhaps I am a little afraid to write to you. I think with the ’cello——”

“All that seems very old and wise, beyond my kind of thinking,” he said.

For a long time she was listening. It was like that first afternoon.... What did Betty Berry hear continually? It gave him a conception of what receptivity meant—that quiescence of all that is common, that abatement of the world and the worldly self, that quality purely feminine. It was like a valley receiving the afternoon sunlight. He realized vaguely at first that the mastery of self, necessary for such listening, is the very state of being saints pray for, and practice continually to attain.... Perhaps, he thought, this is the way great powers come—from such listening—the listening of the soul; perhaps such power would come again and again, if only the strength of it were turned into service for men; perhaps it was a kind of prayer.... It was all too vague for him to speak....

She was first to whisper that the dawn had come.

“I love you,” he said.

He saw her eyes with the daylight, as he had not seen them since that first afternoon—gray eyes, very deep. The same strange hush came to him from them. And there was a soft gray lustre with the morning about her traveling-coat; and her brown hair seemed half-transparent against the panes. No one was yet abroad in the coach.

“I don’t seem to belong at all—except that I love you,” he whispered.

“Tell me—what that means—oh, please——”

“When I think of what I am, and who I am, and what I have been—and what common things I have done in the stupidity of thinking they were good,” he explained with a rush of words: “when I think of the dozen turnings in my life, when little things said or done by another have kept me from greater shame and nothingness—oh, it doesn’t seem to me that I belong at all to such a night as this! But when I feel myself here, and see you, and how dear you are to me, how you wait for my words, and what happiness this is together—then it comes to me that I don’t belong to those other things, but only to this—that I could never be a part of those old thoughts and ways, if you were always near——”

“And I have waited a long time.... The world has said again and again, ‘He will never come,’ but something deeper of me—something deeper than plays the ’cello, kept waiting on and on. That deeper me seemed to know all the time.”

Talking and listening carried them on. John Morning had the different phases of self segregated in an astonishing way. He spoke of himself as man can only with a woman—making pictures of certain moments, as a writer does. Volumes of emotion, they burned, talking and listening, leaning upon each other’s words and thoughts. They were one, in a very deep sense of joy and replenishment. They touched for moments the plane of unity in which they looked with calm upon the parting, but the woman alone poised herself there. They left the old darkey—a blessing in his voice and smile. Such passages of the days’ journeys were always important to Betty Berry.

Morning fell often from the heights to contemplate the journey’s end and the dividing sea. In spite of his words, in spite of his belief—his giving was not of her quality of giving. His replenishment was less therefore.... They moved about the streets of Baltimore in early morning. The baggage went on to the ship. An hour remained. Sounds and passing people distracted him. The woman was fresher than when he had seen her last night, but Morning was haggard and full of needs.... She was a continual miracle, unlike anything that the world held—different in every word and nestling and intonation. Much of her was the child—yet from this naive sweetness, her mood would change to a womanhood which enfolded and completed him, so that they were as a globe together. In such instants she brought vision to his substance; mind to his brain, intuition to his logic, divination to his reason, affinity to each element—enveloping him as water an island. The touch of her hand was a kiss; and of her kiss itself, passion was but the atmosphere; there was earth below and sky above.... She took him to the state-room where she was to be, “so you will know where I am when you think of me.”... They heard the knock of heels on the deck above....

He could not think. He heard them calling for visitors to go ashore.... He thought once it was too late, and when he was really below on the wharf and she above, and he realized that the wild hope of being taken away with her, (his own will not entering, as the serpent entered Eden,) he could hardly see her for the blur—not of tears, but of his natural rending. Her voice was but one of many good-byes to the shore, yet it came to him out of the tumult of voices and whistles—as a ewe to find her own.

7

MORNING heard some one nearby say that so-and-so had not really sailed, but was just going down the bay.... It was thus he learned that he might have passed the forenoon with Betty Berry on the Chesapeake. In fact, there was no reason for him not taking the voyage.... In a quick rush of thinking, as he stood there on the piers, all his weaknesses paraded before him, each with its particular deformity. The sorry pageant ended with a flourish, and he was left alone with the throb of the unhealed wound in his side.

Betty Berry would not have agreed to let him take the voyage, just for the sake of being with her. He knew this instinctively, but perhaps it might have been managed.... To think he had missed the chance of the forenoon.... The liner was sliding down the passage, already forgotten by the lower city.... Morning found himself looking into the window of a drink-shop. Bottles and cases of wine in their dust and straw-coats were corded in the window, which had an English dimness and look of age. A quiet place; the signs attested that ales were drawn from the wood and that many whiskeys of quality were within. Something of attraction for the spirituous imagination was in the sweet woody breath that reached him when he opened the door. A series of race-horse pictures took his mind from himself to better things.

These influences played merely upon the under-surfaces of an intelligence whose thoughts followed the steamer down the Chesapeake as certainly as the flock of gulls.... It was that quiet time in the morning, after the floors are washed. The day was bright, with just a touch of cold in the air.

... A drink improved him generally. He examined the string of horses again, and talked to the man behind. The man declared it was his law not to drink oftener than once in the half-hour, during the forenoon; he stated that it paid to exert this self-control, as his appetite was better and he was less liable to “slop over” in the afternoon. Morning was then informed that oysters were particularly good just now, and that a man with a weak stomach could live on oysters.... There was just one little flange of an oyster that was indigestible. The man knew this because drink makes one dainty about his eating, and one can tell what agrees with him or otherwise. Furthermore, one could detach the indigestible flange in one’s mouth before swallowing—anyone could with practice. The man glanced frequently at the clock.... Well, he would break over, just once, and make up later. A half hour was sometimes a considerable portage.... They became companionable.

Morning started back for New York at noon. The particular train he caught was one of the best of its kind. The buffet, the quality of service and patronage had a different, an intimate appeal to-day. He sat there until dark—in that sort of intensive thinking which seemed very measured and effective to Morning. His chief trend was a contemplation, of course, of the night before. Aspects appeared that did not obtrude at all with the woman by him. Considering the opportunity, he had kissed her very rarely, as he came to think of it....

His fellow-passengers let him alone. He reflected that he could always get along with the lower orders of men—with sailors, soldiers, bartenders; with the Jakes, Jethros, and Jerries of the world. Duke Fallows had remarked this.... Duke Fallows ... the old Liaoyang adventure came back more clearly than it had for months.... That was a big set of doings. Certainly there was a thrill about those days, when one stopped to think.

At dinner time, approaching the end of the journey, Morning met a pronounced disinclination to stay on the Jersey side. The little cabin on the hill was certainly not for this condition of mind. He had to stop and think that it was only yesterday noon when he left the cabin. A period of time that flies rapidly, appears strangely long when regarded from the moments of its closing. The period of the past thirty hours since he had left the hill was like a sea-voyage. The lights across the river had a surprising attraction. When he realized the old steam of alcohol, his mind glibly explained that it was merely an episode of a sick and overwrought body; that the real John Morning, of altruism and aspiration, was away at sea with the love-woman, much cherished, the very soul of him.

More than a half-year before he had fled to the country, weary to nausea of men in chairs and buffets. The animalism of it had utterly penetrated him at last; the Conrad study was but one of many revelations. He had hated the Boabdil; and hated more the processes of his own mind when alcohol impelled. Only yesterday morning he had hated the whole vanity of New York leisure, with the same freshness that had characterized his first month of cleanliness. Yet he found novelty in the present adventure; the prevailing illusion of which was that he was wrong yesterday rather than now. That night he sought his old haunts. There was a gladness about it.

“One mustn’t be too much alone,” he decided, “especially if he is to write.... I must have got cocky sitting there alone by the cabin-door.... These fellows aren’t so bad....”

Presently he was telling the old story of Liaoyang. That roused him a little and pulled upon mental fibers still lame.... Was he to be identified always with that?... A week later he was telling the story of breaking away from the Russians at Liaoyang and making the journey alone to Koupangtse. This was in a strangely quiet bar on Eighth Avenue, in the Forties. A peculiarity about this particular telling of the story was that he remembered the ferryman on the Hun—the one who had wakened the river-front as he led Eve down to drink—the ferryman who was a leper....

As days passed he went down deeper than ever before. “I must have had this coming——” he would say, and refused to cross the river to rest. There were moments when he felt too unutterably dirty to go to the cabin. One day, he kept saying, “I’m going to see this through.” And on another day he reflected continually (conscious of the cleverness of the thought) that this drink passage was like the journey to Koupangtse.... Then there was the occasion when it broke upon him suddenly that he was being avoided at the Boabdil. He never went back.... One morning he joined some sailors who had breezed in from afar. They brought him memories and parlances; their ways were his ways all that day, whose long drift finally brought them to Franey’s Lobelia, as tough and tight a little bar as you would ask any modern metropolis to furnish. The sailors were down and done-for now, but Morning stood by for the end, enjoying the place and the wide bleakness of it.... A slumming party came in about midnight—young men and women of richness and variety, trying to see bottom by looking straight down—as if one could see through such dirty water.

The city’s dregs about him—a fabric of idiocy and perversion and murder—did not look so fatuous nor wicked to Morning’s eye, as did this perfumed company. They thought they were seeing life, but, deeper than brain, they knew better; their laughter and their voices were off the key, because they were not being true to themselves. Franey’s regulars were glad for the extra drinks, but Morning had a fury. His shame for the party was akin to the shame he had held for Lowenkampf on the eve of battle long ago. He arose, short and flaming, yet conscious even in his rage of the brilliance of his idea.

“You people make me sick,” he said, lurching out. “You’d have to be slumee to see how silly you look——”

They tried to detain him—to laugh at him—but one woman knew better. Her low voice of rebuke to her companions was a far greater rebuke to John Morning at the door.

... Finally he began to wonder how long they would keep on giving him money at the bank. He turned up every day. No matter what he drew it was always gone. Sometimes a holiday tricked him, and he suffered. He watched for Sundays, after he learned.... The banking business was a hard process, because he had to emerge; had to come right up to the window and speak to a clean, white man—who had known him before. It became the sole ascent of Morning’s day—a torturing one. He washed and shaved for it, when possible, and after a time managed frequently to save enough to steady his nerves for the ordeal. Then he had to write his name, and always a blue eye was leveled at him, and he felt the dirt in his throat.... So he drifted for six weeks, and it was winter.

His descent was abrupt and deep. He tried to get back, and found his will treacherous. He was prey at times to abominable fears. His body was unmanageable from illness. There were times when it would have meant death or insanity not to drink. For the first time in his life he encountered an inertia that could not be whipped to the point of reconstructivity. His thoughts cloyed all fine things; his expression made them mawkish and teary; his emotions overflowed on small matters. Betty Berry, around whom all this brooding revolved, hardly reached a plane worthy of interpretation. Morning’s conception of the woman on the afternoon she came to the Armory, or on the night-trip to Baltimore, contrasted with this mental apparition of the sixth week:

“She is a professional musician, making her own way in the world, and taking, as many a man would, the things that please her as she passes. This is not the great thing to her that it is to me. Other men have doubtless interested her suddenly and rousingly, and have gone their way.... Had she been a stranger to a man’s sudden loving she would never have beckoned me to the chair in the wings that night. She would never have come to my arms—as I went to hers——”

Sweat broke from him. The savage and abandoned company of thoughts had ridden down all else, like a troop of raiders, destroying as they went.... The troop was gone; the shouting died away—but he was left more lewd and low than the worst. He had defiled the image of the woman who had given herself so eagerly. He recalled how he had talked of understanding, how he had praised her in his thoughts because she was brave enough to be natural, and to act as a natural woman who has found her own, after years of repression. The other side of the shield was turned to torture him—the sweet, low-leaning, human tenderness of Betty Berry, her patience, her endless and ever-varying bestowals. She had called his the voice of reality, and become silent before it; had proved great enough to remain undestroyed in a man’s world; her faith and spirit arose above centuries of lineage in a man’s world—and she was Betty Berry who knew her lover’s presence, though they were almost strangers to each other, and opened her arms to him....

It was a hell that he vividly reviewed for seven weeks, and with no Virgil to guide. A scene or two from the final day is enough:

... He had come from the bank about one in the afternoon, and had taken a chair in the bar of the Van Antwerp. He was neither limp nor sprawling, but in a condition of queer detachment from exterior influences. He knew that it was daylight; heard voices but no words, and carried himself with the rigid effort of one whose limbs are habitually flippant. Perhaps it was because he was so very generous to the waiter that he was allowed to close his eyes without being molested. In any event, his consciousness betrayed him, and away he went in the darkness of dream: The Ferryman of the Hun was poling away at the stream and he, John Morning, was but one of a company in passage. It was not the Hun river this time; the sorrel Eve was not there. Not alone the Ferryman, but all on board were lepers—he, John Morning in the midst of them, a leper. The old wound was witness to this.... They tried to land at the little towns but natives came forth and drove them away. Down, down stream they went and always natives came forth to warn them as they neared the land.... Even when they drew in to the marshes and the waste-places natives appeared and stoned them away.... And so they went down—to the ocean and the storm and Morning opened his eyes.

Opposite, his back to the marble bar, his elbows braced against the rail, stood Mr. Reever Kennard, watching him, and the look upon the face of the famous correspondent was that of scornful pity—as if there was a truce to an old enmity, no longer worth while.

Still later on that day, over on Second Avenue, Morning almost bumped into a small yellow sign at the elevator entrance to the Metal Workers’ Hall, to the effect that Duke Fallows was to address a gathering there that night.

8

A FLASH of love came to his heart for Duke Fallows at the sight of the name. There was nothing maudlin about this; rather, a decent bit of stamina in the midst of sentimental overflows. It was the actual inside relation, having nothing to do with the old surface irritation.... Morning took care of himself as well as he could during the day. He meant to mix with the crowd at the meeting, but not to make himself known until he was free from vileness. He would keep track of the other’s place and movements in New York. When he was fit—there would be final restoration in the meeting. His heart thumped in anticipation. The yellow poster had turned the corner for him. These first thoughts of the upward trend are interesting:

He meant to cross the river and build a big fire in the cabin. There he would fight it out and cleanse the place meanwhile, in preparation. He pictured the cabin-door open, water on the floor, the fire burning, the smell of soap. He would heat water, wash his blankets, put them out in the sun; polish his kettles with water and sand. Every detail was important, and how strangely his mind welcomed the freshness of these simple thoughts. The glass of the windows would flash in the morning, and the door of oak would gleam with its oil.... Finally he would bring Duke there.

This was the triumph of it all. He would bring the sick man home; tend the fire for him, go to the dairyman’s for milk and eggs. They could call Jake and talk to him—seeing the heart of a simple man.... They would talk and work together ... the sick man looking up at the ceiling, and he, Morning, at the machine as in the old days. Spring would come, the big trees would break their buds and sprinkle the refuse down—and, God, it would be green again—all this rot ended.... So the days would pass quickly until Betty Berry came.... Duke would be glad to hear of her.

... That night Morning went in with the workers to their Hall and sat far back. The meeting had been arranged under socialistic auspices; seven hundred men at least were present. Through the haze of pipe, cigarette, and cigars, Duke Fallows came forth.

And this was no sick man. His knees were strong, and there was a lightness of shoulder that did away with the huddle of old times. His eyes shone bright under the hanging lamp, and his laugh was as far as Asia from scorn. There was brown upon him; his hands, when they fell idle, were curved as if to fit a broad-ax, and “I’m glad to be with you, men,” he said.

“... I have come to tell you a story—my story. Every man has one. I never tell mine twice the same, but some time I shall tell it just right, and then the answer shall come.”

Power augmented in the silence of the smoky hall. The gathering recognized the artist that had come down to them, because he loved the many and belonged with them. They gave him instinctively the rare homage of uncritical attention. Fallows told of Liaoyang—of the whole preparation—of the Russian singing, the generals, the systems by which men were called to service. Always the theme that played through this prelude was the millet of Manchuria. He told of the great grain fields, the feeding troop-horses, the hollows between the hills—how the ancient Chinese city stood in a bend of the river—of the outer fighting, the rains, the mass of men, the Chinese.

This new Duke Fallows hated no man; had no scorn for the Russian chiefs. His ideas of service and humanity concerned Russia rather than Japan—and not the imperialistic Russia, but the real spirit—the toiler, the dreamer, the singer, the home-maker—the Russia that was ready, perhaps as ready as any people in the world, to put away envy, hatred, war; to cease lying to itself, and to grasp the reality that there is something immortal about simplicity of life and service for others. What concerned this Russia, Fallows declared, concerned the very soul of the western world.

He placed the field for the battle in a large way—the silent, watery skies, all-receiving kao-liang, and the moist earth that held the deluges. Morning choked at the picture; the action came back again as Fallows spoke—Lowenkampf himself—the infantry of Lowenkampf slipping down the ledges into the grain—Luban, machine-guns, rout—the little open place in the millet where the Fallows part of the battle was fought.

“... He was a young Russian peasant. If he came into this hall now, we would all know instinctively that he belonged to us. He was fine to look upon that day, coming out of the grain—earnest, glad, his heart turned homeward. His enemy was not Japan, but Imperialism, and defeat was upon it. This defeat meant to him, as it did to hundreds of soldiers in that hour—the beginning of the road home. Luban was burning with the shame of detected cowardice. A common soldier had commented upon it in passing. And now this young Russian peasant met the eyes of Luban, and the two began to speak, and I was there to listen.

“The peasant said that this was not his war; that he had been forced to come; that it meant nothing to him if Russia took Manchuria; but that it meant a very great deal to him—this being away—because his six babies were not being fed by the Fatherland, and his field was not being ploughed.

“It was very simple. You see it all. The Fatherland forced starvation upon a man’s children, while his field remained unploughed. Only a simple man could say it. You must be straight as a child to speak such epics. It is what you men have thought in your hearts.

“Of course, Luban only knew he was an officer and the man was not. Machine-guns were drumming in the distance, and the grain was hot and breathless all about. The forward ranks were terribly broken—the soldiers streaming back past us. Luban, who opened the discussion, was getting the worst of it, and his best reply was murder. He handled the little automatic gun better than the cause of the Fatherland—shot the Ploughman through the breast. I thrust him back to take the falling one in my arms....

“We seemed alone together. There was power upon me. Even in the swiftness and tumult of the passing I made the good man see that I would father his babes, look to the ploughing of his field, and be the son of his mother. His passing made all clear to me. His message was straight from the heart of the world’s suffering poor, from the heavy-laden. He spoke to kings and generals, and to all who have and are blind. There in the havoc of the retreat, dying in my arms—he made it vivid as the smiting sun of Saul—that this hideous disorder of militia was not his Fatherland. He would have fought for the real Fatherland. He was a son in spirit, and a state-builder; he would have fought for that; he was not afraid to die....

“Love for him had come strangely to my heart, men. I said to him—words I cannot remember now—something I had never been able to write, because I had not written for men before, but for some fancied elect. I made him know that he had done well, that his field would bring forth, and that his house would glow red with firelight.... I think my Ploughman felt as I did even before his heart was still—that there is something beyond death in the love of men for one another.... It was wonderful. We forgot the battle. We forgot Luban and the firing. We were one. His spirit was upon me—and the good God gave him peace.

“I tell you quietly, but don’t you see—this that I bring so quietly is the message from the Ploughman who passed—the message of Liaoyang? And this is the sentence of it: Where there is a real Fatherland—there will be Brotherhood.

“The world is so full of pallor and agony and sickness and stealing. First, it is because of the Lubans. The Lubans are sick for power—sick with their desires. Having no self-mastery, they are lost and full of fear. They fear the whip, they fear poverty and denial; theirs is a continual fear of being stripped to the nakedness of what they are—as old Mother Death strips a man. In the terror of all these things they seek to turn the whip upon others, to reinforce their emptiness with exterior possessions. Because their souls are dying, and because they feel the terror of sheer mortality, they seek to kill the virtue in other men. Because they cannot master themselves, they rise in passion to master others. They could not live but for the herds.

“We who labor are the strength of the world. I say to you, men, poverty is the God’s gift to His elect. It is to us who have only ourselves to master—that the dream of Brotherhood can come true. It is alone to us, who have nothing, that these possessions can come, which old Mother Death is powerless to take away. And we who labor and are heavy-laden are making our colossal error to-day. We are the muttering herds. Standing with the many we may not know ourselves. We look upon the cowardice and emptiness of the Lubans and call it Power. We see the ways of the Herd-drivers—and dream of driving others, instead of ourselves. We look upon the Herd-drivers—and turn upon them the same thoughts of envy and hatred and cruelty—which cuts them off from every source of power and leaves them empty and cowardly indeed.

“These are the thoughts of the herds—and yet down in the muscling mass men are not to blame. It takes room for a man to be himself—it takes room for a man to love his neighbor and to master himself. Terrified, whipped, packed, sick with the struggle and the strain of it all—how can men, turning to one another, find brotherhood in the eyes of their fellows. Living the life of the laboring herds in the great cities—why, it would take Gods to love men so!... The world is so full of pallor and agony and sickness and stealing—first, because of the Lubans, and, second, because of the City.... And after Liaoyang, I went straight to the Ploughman’s house—for I had given my word. And now I will tell you what I found on the little hill-farm up in the Schwarenka district among the toes of the Bosk mountains, a still country.”

9

“I REMEMBER the soldiers at Liaoyang, the last thing, the many who had grasped at the hope that defeat meant the end of the war. They were learning differently as I left. Hundreds gave up from the great loneliness.... I carried the name of my Ploughman across the brown country, and the northern autumn was trying to hold out against the frosts. Asia is desolate. We who are white men, and who know a bit of the loveliness of life—even though we labor at that which is not our life—we must grant that the Northern Chinese have learned this: To suffer quietly.

“Baikal was crossed at last. On and on by train into the West—until I came to the little village that he had said. For days it had been like following a dream. Sometimes it seemed to me so wonderful—that young man coming out of the millet, and what he said—that I thought it must have come to me in a vision, that I was mad to look for his town and the actual house in the country beyond. Yet they knew his name in the little town, and said that early next morning I could get a wagon to take me to the cabin, which was some versts away.

“I had known so much of cities. For weeks I had been in the noises of the Liaoyang fighting and in trains. Moreover, I had been ill for a long time, too—a crawling, deadly illness. But that night my soul breathed. I ate black bread by candle-light and drank milk. The sharpness of mid-October was in the air. You will laugh when I say it seemed to me, an American, as if I had come home. In the morning early I looked away to the East, from whence I had come, and where the sun was rising. (The ceiling of the little room was so low I had to bend my head.) To the north the mountains were sharp in the morning light and shining like amethyst.... I left the wagon at the first sight of the hut in the distance, and I reached there in the warmth of the morning.

“An old man was sitting in the sun. He asked me to have bread, and said they had some sausage for the coming Sunday. This was mid-week. A child brought good water. Then I heard the cane of the old woman, and saw her hand first, as it thrust the cane out from the door—all brown and palsied, the hand, its veins raised and the knuckles twisted from the weight that bent her fingers against the curve of the stick. The rest was so pure. She had been a tall woman—very thin and bent and white now. When I looked into that face I saw the soul of the Ploughman. I can tell you I wanted to be there. It was very strange.... I can see her now, looking up at me, as the old do from their leaning. It was like the purity and distance of the morning. I trembled, too, before this old wife, for the fact in my mind about her son. I tell you, old mother-birds are wise.

“It was as if my garments smelled of the fighting. She knew whence I had come; she looked into my soul and found the death of her son. Her soul knew it, but not her brain yet. She may have found my love for him, too—the deep bond between us.

“‘Ask the stranger to stay. We will have sausage by the Sunday,’ said the old man. His thought was held by hunger.

“‘Hush, Jan—he comes from our son——’

“‘And where are the children and the young mother?’ I asked.

“‘They are out for faggots in the bush—they will come——’

“I had thought, as I traveled, (the thoughts of the weeks on the road,) to do many things; to give them plentifully of money; to arrange for someone to do the late fall and winter work. I had intended to go on, when sure that everything was at hand to make them comfortable. I tell you, men, it was all too living for that. One could not perform unstudied benefits for the mother of the Ploughman. There was more than money wanted there.

“‘We would like to have you stay with us,’ the mother said, ‘but our poverty is keen, and we have not bread enough now for the winter.... He was taken long before the harvest, and it is long until the grain comes again——’

“‘But if he were here—what would be done, Mother?’

“‘Ah, if he came,’ she said strangely. ‘If he came——’

“The father now spoke:

“‘He would cut wood for our neighbors this winter—when the ploughing was finished. That would provide food—good food. Oh, he would know what to do—our Jan would know——’

“I won’t soon forget that high, wavering voice of the old man—‘Oh, he would know what to do—our Jan is a good son——’ and the shake of his head.

“‘But may I not do some of the things that he would do?’

“I had to say it twice, for I spoke their language poorly. I had understood the son at Liaoyang—but all moments were not like those in which he spoke to me.

“‘And then,’ I added hastily, ‘he sent you some money——’

“I dared not offer much with that pure old face looking at me. The silver and gold that was in my purse I put in her lap.

“‘Oh, it is very much—the good God brought you from him, did he not?’

“‘And we will not need to wait until Sunday for——’

“‘Hush—Jan—no, we will not need to wait.’

“... And then the young mother came. I saw her steps quicken when yet she was far off. The little ones were about her—all carrying something. The older children were laughing a little, but the others were quiet in their haste and effort to keep up.... There was one little boy, but I will tell you afterward of the littlest Jan.... There was a pallor over the brood. Their health was pure, and their blood strong, but that pallor had come. Men, it was hunger already. Here were the fields, and the Fatherland had taken him before the harvest. This thing, the shocking truth of it; that this actually could be; that a country could do such a thing—made me forget everything else for the moment. Then I realized that I must keep the truth from the young mother. Before I spoke at all they told her that I had come from her husband.

“Her lips were white, her breasts wasted. She was lean from hunger, lean from her bearing. Young she was for the six, but much had she labored, and there was a mountain wildness in her eyes. She was stilled, as the old mother had been, by the fear of hearing her man’s death. She dared not ask. She accepted what was said—that I had come from him, that I had brought money, and wished to stay for a little.... She leaned against the door, the smaller children gathering at her knees, the others putting away the wood. Her single skirt hung square, and her arms seemed very long, nearly to her knees; her hands loose and tired. Her hair was yellow; the wind had tossed it. You know how a horse that has been listening, suddenly catches his breath again. The same sound came from her as she started to breathe again.... One of the smaller children laughed, and I looked down. It was the little four-year-old, the third Jan of that house, and he was close to my knees, looking up at me ... and we were all together.

“I loved the world better after that look of the child into my eyes.... I took him on my shoulder. We went to the village together. That night the wagon brought us back; there was much food.... And that was my house. I looked out on the mountains the next day, and for many days to come, and, men—their grand sky-wide simplicity poured into my heart. I took the old horse out, and we ploughed during the few days remaining. There was not much land—but we ploughed it together to the end, when the frost made the upturned clods ring. Then I strawed up the shed for the old horse to pass his winter in warmth, and brought blankets for him. I respected that old horse. Health and good-fellowship had come to me as we worked together. I remember the sharp turning of the early afternoons from yellow to gray and to dark.... Then we went into the bush together in the early winter days. The ax rang, and the snow-bolt was piled high each day with wood. The smell of the wood-smoke in the morning air had a zest for my nostrils I had never known before, and at night the cabin windows were red with fire-light. We were all one together. And I think the spirit of the Ploughman was there in the happiness.

“Sometimes in the night when I would get up to replenish the fire—the mystery of plain goodness would come to me. I would see the children and others all around. Then at the frosty window, shading the fire from my eyes, I looked out upon the snows. I was unable to contain the simple grandeurs that had unfolded to me day by day.... And then I would go back to the blankets where the little boy lay—his hand always fumbling for me as I crept in. The love that I felt for this child was beyond all fear. We could stand together against any fate. And one night it came to me that from much loving of one a man learns to love the many, and that I would really be a man when I learned to love the world with the same patience and passion that I loved the little boy. The Ploughman came along in a dream that night and said it was all quite true.

“And that was the winter.... I wish you could have seen this sick man who had come. I had lain on my back for months, except when some great effort aroused me. I had that coming on, men, which makes a man walk—as a circus bear turns and totters on his back feet. The house, the field, the plough, the horse, woods, winter, and mountains, love for the child, love for all the others—the much that my hands found to do and the heart found to give—these things made me new again. These simple sound and holy things.

“I had been a sick man mentally and morally, too, sick with ego and intellect—a nasty sickness. But one could not look, feeling the joy in which I lived, upon the snows of the foothills, nor afar through the yellow winter noons to the gilded summits of the Bosks; one could not look into the eyes of the children, the last vestige of hunger pallor gone from them; one could not talk of tobacco-and-sausage with the old man by his fireside; nor watch the mysterious great givings of the two mothers—their whole lives giving—pure instruments of giving—passionate givers, they were; givers of life and preservers of life—I say, men, one could not live in this purity and not put away such evil and cruel things.... As the sickness of the blood went from me—so that sickness of mind.... And, I tell you, we were ready as a house could be, when the news came officially that our Ploughman was among the missing from the battle of Liaoyang.

“It was sharper than any winter night. We stood in the cabin and wept together. Then in the hush—the real thought of it all came to one—to whom, do you think?... She was on her knees—the old mother—praying for the other peasant cabins in Russia—the thousands of others from which a son and husband was gone—‘cabins to which the good God has not sent such a friend.’... I tell you, men, all the evil of past days seemed washed from me in that hour.... And that is my home. (The old horse and I opened the fields again in the springtime.)

“After that I went down to Petersburg to tell my story, and to Moscow. I have told it in cellars and stables—in Berlin, in Paris, and London. I am making the great circle—to tell it here—and on, when we are finished, to Chicago, to Denver and San Francisco—and then the long sail homeward, following the first journey to the foothills of the Bosk range. I will go to my old mother there, and to the little boy, who looked up into my eyes—as if we were born to play and talk and sleep together.

“The days of the conscript gangs are over here, men. Such days are numbered, even in Russia. They don’t come to your door in this country and take you away from your work to fight across the world—but the Lubans are here—and the cities are full of horror. It is in the cities where the herds are, where the little Lubans whip, and the bigger Lubans thrive. In the pressure and heaviness of the cities—the thought that comes to the herd is the old hideous conception of the multitude—that the way of the Lubans is the way of life.... It isn’t the way. The way of life has nothing to do with greed, nor with envy, nor with schemes against the bread of other men. It is a way of peace and affiliation—of standing together. And you who have little can go that way; you who labor can go that way—because you are the strength of the world. Don’t resist your enemies, men—leave them. The Master of us all told us that. And when the herds break, and this modern hell of the city is diminished—the Lubans will follow you out—whining and bereft, they will follow you out, as the lepers of Peking follow the caravans to the gates and beyond.... I have told you of my home—the little cabin that came to me from the beginnings of compassion. And there is such a home for every man of you—in the still countries where the voice of God may be heard.”

Morning, desperately ill, rose to leave the hall. In the momentary hush, as he reached the door, the voice of Duke Fallows was raised again, calling his name.

10

“JOHN——” a second time.

Morning turned, his arms lifted despairingly.

“Wait, John, I’ll join you!”

Fallows came down.... The man who gently held the door shut smiled with strange kindness. There was a shining of kindness in men’s faces.... Morning did not feel that he belonged. He was broken and shamed.... The big man was upon him—the long arms tossed about him.

“I’ve been looking and listening for you too long, John, to let you go.”

“... I just wanted to hear you. I’m shot to pieces, Duke; I’ll get a few drinks and wait for you. Then, you’ll see, I’m all out of range of the man you are——”

There was no answer. Morning looked up to find the long bronzed face laughing, the eye gleaming. Fallows turned to the doorman and another, saying:

“Both of you go with him. He needs a drink or two, and one of you come back to show me the way to him—when I’m through here.... This is a great night for us, John.”

The three went down in the elevator.... And so the sick man had not come back—the dithyrambic Duke Fallows was gone for good. The sick man was strong; the impassioned phrase-maker had risen to the simple testimony of service. From scorn and emotion, from judgment and selection, he had risen to the plane of loving kindness.... The air in the street refreshed him a little. Morning found a bar.

“I’ve been drinking,” he said to the men. “Fallows is a king. I was there with him at Liaoyang.... Maybe you saw my story in the World-News.... He stayed in the grain with Luban. I went on to see the cavalry fight.... I came back home to do the story. He went on to Russia on the Ploughman story——”

“Is he a preacher?” said one of the men.

“Yes—but he learned about war and women first.”

“I’ll take a soft drink and go back. You stay here, and I’ll bring him to you,” the same one went on.

The other drank with Morning and agreed that they would not leave until Fallows came.

“And so he learned about war and women first,” he said queerly, when they were alone. “But he has been a laboring man——”

“Yes. You heard him.”

“But before that farm in Russia——”

“Oh, yes; he was a laborer.”

“Well, he certainly got the crowd with him,” the man acknowledged.

“You know why, don’t you?” Morning said impressively.

“No.”

“He’s for the crowd. People feel it.”

“Oh, I knew that.”

There was quiet, and then the face turned to Morning:

“Say, how did you get such a start as this? This kind means weeks——”

“It got away from me before I knew it. I must have got to gambling with myself to see how far I could go.”

“Are you going to quit?”

A mist filled Morning’s mind. The question seemed an infringement. Then it occurred to him how he had fallen to lying to himself.

“He’ll make you quit, but don’t let him stop you too short. You’d be a wreck in a few hours. You see how you needed these two or three drinks?”

... Fallows entered with several of the committee. He had promised to speak to them again.

“It’s what I came for,” he was saying. “So long as I am wanted I’ll stay.... Yes, I’m a socialist.... Yes, I believe in fighting, but when our kind of men stand together, there won’t be anything big enough to give us a fight. When our kind of men look into one another’s eyes and find service instead of covetousness—there’s nothing in the world to stand against us.”

Fallows and Morning were in a steam-room together two hours afterward. Morning was limp and light-headed. He had told of some of the things that had happened since Baltimore—of men he had met—of the slummers—of harrowing nights and waiting for the bank to open.

“You had to have it, John?”

There was something in the way Fallows spoke the word, John, that made Morning weaker and filled his throat. He had to speak loudly for the hissing of the steam.

“Why, if you didn’t get humble and stay humble after such a training—you’d be the poorest human experiment ever undertaken by the Master. But you can’t fail. It isn’t in the cards to fail. You’ve ridden several monsters—Drink, Ambition, Literature—but they won’t get you down. Why, even the sorrel mare didn’t kill you, as I promised aforetime. I saw a lot in that story. You loved her to the last. You left her dead and hunched on an alien road. You’ve loved these others long enough. You’ll leave them dead—even that big fame stuff. I think you’ve ridden that pompous fool to death already. They are all passages on the way to Initiation. Your training for service is a veritable inspiration—and you’ll write to men—down among men. I love that idea—you’ll write the story of Compassion—down among men——”

Fallows’ face came closer through the steam. He scrutinized the wound that wouldn’t heal. “Did you ever hear about Saint Paul’s thorn in the flesh?... ‘And lest I be exalted above measure through the abundance of revelations, there was given me a thorn in the flesh—?’ It all works out. You’ll have to excuse me. The Bible was the only book I had with me up in the Bosk country. I found it all I wanted. I would take it again.... Yes, John, it’s all right with you.”

Morning was telling of that afternoon at the Armory. He passed over quickly the period of worldly achievement in New York to the quiet blessedness he had hit upon, finding the hill and the elms.

“That’s the formula—to get alone and listen——”

“That’s what you preached to-night, wasn’t it?”... Presently he was back to Betty Berry again—finding her at the ’cello—the wonderful ride to Baltimore—which brought him to the drink chapter once more.... He couldn’t see Duke’s face as he spoke of the woman. There was a peculiar need of the other saying something when he had finished. This only was offered:

“We won’t talk about that now, John.... You’d better take another little drink. Your voice is down.... You’ll be through after a day or two, and I’ll stay with you——”

“We’ll go over to the cabin to-morrow,” said Morning.

They were lying cot by cot in the cooling-room, and the talk for a time concerned Lowenkampf, his court-martial and discharge.

“Do you know how I thought of you coming back, Duke?” Morning whispered afterward.

“Tell me.”

“I always thought of you coming back a sick man—staring at the ceiling as you used to—sometimes talking to me, sometimes listening to what I had written. But the main thought was how I would like to take care of you. I was rotten before. I wanted you sick, so I could show you better.”

The huge hand stretched across from cot to cot.

“It was afterward—that all the things you said in Liaoyang came back to me right.... We were lying in ’Frisco waiting for quarantine, and my stuff was finished the second time, before I read your letter to me and the one to Noyes—and the Ploughman story. That was the first time I really saw it right. There was a little doctor with me—Nevin—who got it all from the first reading. At Liaoyang we were down too low among the fighting to get it. That Ploughman story made my big yarn look like a death-mask of the campaign. Betty Berry got it too.... It was the same to-night—why, you got those men, body and soul.”

“I’d like to think so, John; but I’m afraid you’re wrong. It was just a seed to-night. Men need to be cultivated every day in a thousand ways.... Women get things quicker; they can listen better.... The last night before Jesus was taken by the Roman soldiers, he told the Eleven that he could be sure only of them. He knew that of the multitude that heard him—most would sink back. He counted on just the Eleven, and built his church on the weakest, upon the most unstable—counting only on the strength of the weakest link.... The fact is, John, I’m only counting on you. I’ve got to count on you.”

Less than five weeks had elapsed, and yet the worst seemed as far back, in some of Morning’s moments, as the deck-passage out of China. He had suffered abominably. Fallows stood by night and day at first. He brought back a certain quality from the Russian farm that was pure inspiration to the other. They spoke about the Play. Morning was more than ever glad that Markheim had refused it. They sat long by the fire. More happened than modern America would believe off-hand—for John Morning began to learn to listen. Fallows was happy. His presence in the room was like the fire-light. Twice more he went across to the Metal Workers’ Hall, and still the New York group would not let him go. The Socialists brought him their ideas. He was in the heart of threatening upheavals. He reiterated that they must be united in one thing first; they must have faith in one another. They must not answer greed with greed. They must be sure of themselves; they must have a pure voice; they must know first what was wanted, and follow the vision.... Duke Fallows knew that it was all the matter of a leader.... He told them of the men and women in Russia who have put off self. Finally Duke appeared to see that his work was done, and he retired from them.

“It is delicate business,” he said to Morning. “There’s fine stuff in the crowd—then there’s the rest. If I should show common just once—all my work would be spoiled, and even the blessed few would forget the punch of my little story. They think I’ve gone on west.”

Still he didn’t leave the cabin on the hill.

It was only when Morning undertook to touch upon the love story—that Fallows looked away.... Morning tried to comprehend this. Something had happened. The big man who had stared at so many ceilings of Asia, breaking out from time to time in strange utterances all colored with desire; the man who had met his Eve, and talked of being controlled by her even after death—shuddered now at the mention of Betty Berry.... Morning even had a suspicion at last that the other construed a relation between the woman’s influence and the excess of alcohol. These moments dismayed him.

There is a dark spot in every man’s radiance—and this was the Californian’s, Morning concluded. In the transformation which the journey to Russia had effected, his particular weakness seemed hardened into a crust of exceptional austerity. The only women he ever spoke of in the remotest personal fashion belonged to the peasant family of the Ploughman. His audiences were unmixed by his own arrangement. In tearing out his central weakness, a certain madness on the subject had rushed in, a hatred that knew no quarter, and a zeal in denial that only one who has touched the rim of ruin can know.

On the last night of February they talked and read late. The reading was from Saint Paul in the different letters. Fallows seemed impassioned with the figure.

“I understand him,” he said.

“He was afraid of women. Sometimes he seems to hate women,” Morning remarked. Certain lines of Paul’s on the subject had broken the perfection of the message for him.

A strange look came to Fallows. The finger that was turning a page drew in with the others, and the hand that rested upon the book was clenched.... “Paul knew women,” he muttered.

“You think before he took that road to Damascus—he knew women?”

“Yes——”

“Even the Paul who stood by holding the garments of the stoners of Stephen?”

“He was a boy then. He learned afterward, I think.”

“He couldn’t have known the saints among them,” said Morning, who was smiling in his heart.

“Perhaps some saint among them was the one who made him afraid. You know women won’t have men going alone—not even the saints among women.... There may have been one who refused to be dimmed altogether even by that great light.”

“But he went alone——”

“In that way she wouldn’t be the Thorn,” Fallows said slowly. “She would be greater power for him. Yes, Saint Paul went alone. We wouldn’t be reading him to-night—had he turned back to her.”

That hurt. Morning was no longer smiling within. “I didn’t learn women—even as a boy,” he said.

Fallows was unable to speak. He had never loved Morning as at this moment. He was tender enough to catch the strange pathos of it, which the younger man could not feel.

“You’re a natural drunkard, John,” he said presently. “You are by nature ambitious, as it is intimated Cæsar was; but you are naturally a monk, too. I say it with awe.”

“You are wrong,” Morning said with strength. “When this woman came into the room at the Armory that first day—it was as if she brought with her the better part of myself——”

“You said that same before. You were sick. You were torn by exhaustion and by that letter of mine about Reever Kennard. It was the peace and mystery a woman always brings to a sick man.... Your woman is your genius, John. Any rival will stifle and defame it. It’s the woman in a man that makes him a prophet or a great artist. Your ego is masculine; your soul is feminine. When you learn to keep the ego out of the brain, and use the soul, you will become an instrument, more or less perfect, for eternal utterances. When you achieve the union of the man and woman in you—that will be your illumination. You will have emerged into the larger consciousness. You are not so far as you think from that high noon-light. If you should take a woman in the human way, you will not achieve in this life the higher marriage, of which the union of two is but a symbol. That would be turning back, with the spiritual glory in your eyes—back to the shadow of flesh.”

“How do you know that?” Morning asked coldly.

“Because of the invisible restraints that have kept you from women so far.... I believe you are prepared to tell men something about the devils of drink and ambition—having met them?”

“It is possible.”

“I speak with the same authority.”

Morning did not accept this authority, but was long disturbed after the light was out.... Her ship had been six days at sea.

They opened the door wide to the first morning of March. Snow was upon the hill, but there was a promise in the air, even in the sharpness of it. The wind came in, searched among the papers of the table, disordered the draughts of the chimney, filling the room with a faint flavor of wood-smoke, that perfect incense. They stood there, testing the day, and each was thinking of the things of the night before. Fallows said:

“John, you didn’t build this cabin with the idea of a woman coming?”

“No; it was built before I found her the second time. It was my escape from Boabdil.... But I thought of her coming, many times afterward—just as I thought of you coming back to stare at the rafters——”

Fallows looked down intently at him for a moment, and said:

“John, you’ve got about all your equipment now. You can’t stand much more tearing down. My road is not for you. You were given balance against that. Don’t venture into what is alien ground for you. You will get back your health. Even the wound will heal. Then will come to you those gracious ideals of singleness, plainness of house and fare, of purity and solitude and the integration of the greater dimension of force.... You are through looking—you must listen now. The blessedness you told me of this last summer was but a breath of what you will get....

“You are a natural monk. If you were in a monastery, the laws restraining you would be gross and material, compared with those bonds which nature has put upon you. The cowl, the cell, and the solitude are but symbols again of the inner monasticism a few rare souls have known. You need no exterior bonds, vows, nor threatenings—no walls, no brandishing threats of damnation. But, if you should betray the invisible restraints that have held you for so many years, the sin would be far deadlier than breaking any vows made to a church or to an order. Vows are for half-men, John; vows are but the crutches of an unfinished integrity.”

11

ON the morning of the Third, at ten, her call came to him. Shortly after twelve he was across the river and far uptown in the hallway of an apartment-house. Even as he spoke her name, his was called from the head [Pg 176]of the stairs. He always remembered the intonation.... A fire was burning in the grate. The ’cello was there. She left the hall-door of the room open, but they heard voices, and it was draughty.... She went to close it and returned to Morning, who was still standing.

“What is the matter? You are not well,” she said.... It was hard for him to realize that this was only the third time he had seen her. He was trying to adjust her in the other meetings with this—the angel who had come helping to the Armory; the concert Betty Berry, her nature flung wide to expression, bringing her gift with love to her people. The Armory was one; but the Betty Berry of the concert-night was many: she who had come forth from the stage to his arms (and that was the kiss of all time); the listening Betty Berry in the dimness of the Pullman car; holding fast to his hand as a child might, while they watched the dawn of morning together; the Betty Berry who had led him to her berth on the ship—that kiss and this....

The room had disordered him at the first moment. It was so particularly a New York apartment room. But the ’cello helped it; the grate-fire was good, and after she had shut the door—there was something eternal about the sweetness of that—it was quite the place for them to be.

He was animate with emotions—and yet they were defined, sharp, of their own natures, no soft overflow of sentiment, each with a fineness of its own, like breaths of forest and sea and meadow lands. These were great things which came to him; but they were not passions.... He saw her with fear, too. Simply being here, had the impressiveness of a miracle. It was less that he did not deserve to be with her, than that the world he knew was hardly the place for such blessedness. He was listening to her, in gladness and humility:

“... I asked myself again and again after you were gone, ‘Is it a dream?’ ... I moved about the decks waiting for the night, as one in a deep dream.... You were gone so quickly after that voice. Oh, I was all right. I was full of you. It would have seemed sacrilege to ask for you again.... Yet I seemed to expect you with every knock or step or bell. They asked me to play on shipboard, and I could hardly believe you were not among those who listened.... That first night at sea, the moon was under a hazy mass. I don’t know why I speak of it, but I remember how I stood watching it—perhaps hours—and out of it all I only realized at last that my hands were so small for the things I wanted to do for you, and for everybody.”

That was the quality of her—as if between every sentence, hours of exterior influences had intervened.... He began to realize that Betty Berry never explained. All that afternoon, in different ways, his comprehension augmented on how fine a thing this is. She was glad always to abide by what she said or did. Even on that night, when she came from her playing to the wings where he stood, came to his arms, while the people praised her—she never made light of that acceptance. Many would have diminished it, by saying that they were not accountable in the excitement and enthusiasm of a sympathetic audience. It was so to-day when the door was closed. It seemed to Morning as if human adults should be as fine as this—above all guile and fear.

He was in a risen world that afternoon. Often he wished he could make the world see her as he did. But that was the literary habit, and a tribute to her. Certainly it was not for the writing. He was clay beside her, but happy to be clay.... She did not know it, he thought, but she was free.

That was his thought of the day. Betty Berry was free. The door of the cage was open for her. She did not have to stay, but she did stay for love of the weaker-winged.

“Will all our meetings be so different and lovely?” she asked in the early dusk. “Please tell me about yourself very long ago—the little boy, before he went away.”

It was queer for her to ask that. He had expected her to inquire at once about the three months since their parting in Baltimore. He had determined to tell if she asked, but it was hard even to think of his descents, with her sitting by the fire so near. Such things seemed to have nothing to do with him now—especially when he was with her. They were like old and vile garments cast off; and without relation to him, unless he went back and put them on again. Little matters like Charley and his sister had a relation, for they were without taint. His thoughts to-day were thoughts of doing well for men, as in fine moments with Duke Fallows—of going out with her into the world to help—of writing and giving, of laughing and lifting.... It was surprising how he remembered the very long ago days—the silent, solid, steadily-resisting little chap. Many things came back, and with a clearness that he had not known for years. The very palms of her hands were upturned in her listening; it seemed as if the valves of her heart must be open.

“I can see him—the dear little boy——”

He laughed at her tenderness.... They went out late to dinner; and by the time he had walked back to the house it was necessary for him to leave, if he caught the last car to Hackensack. Duke Fallows would be expecting him at the cabin....

It came to him suddenly, and with a new force, on the ferry, that he had once wished she were pretty. He suffered for it again. He could never recall her face exactly. She came to him in countless ways—with poise for his restlessness, with faith and stamina that made all his former endurings common—but never in fixed feature. It was the same with her sayings. He remembered the spirit and the lustre of them, but never the words.... She was a saint moving unobserved about the world, playing—adrift on the world, and so pure.

He realized also that he had spoken of Betty Berry for the last time to Duke Fallows. There was no doubt in his mind now that Fallows had replaced his old weakness with what might be called, in kindness—fanaticism.... The thought was unspeakable that Betty Berry could spoil his work in the world—he, John Morning, a living hatch of scars from his errors ... and so arrogant and imperious he had been in evil-doing! This trend made him think of her first words to-day: “You are not well.” It was true that he had been astonished often of late by a series of physical disturbances, so much so that he had begun to ask himself, in his detached fashion, what would come next. He could not accept Fallows’ promise that he would get altogether right in health again. He was certainly not so good as he had been. These things made him ashamed.

Now that he was away from her, the sense obtained that he had not been square in withholding the facts of the wastrel period. It didn’t seem quite the same now, as when she was sitting opposite. He would have to tell her some time, and of that certain mental treachery to her, and of the wound, too.... He saw the light of the hill cabin. A touch of the old irritation of Liaoyang had recurred of late. Morning could master it better now. Still so many things that Fallows had said in Asia had come true. Climbing up the hill, he laughed uneasily at the idea of his being temperamentally a monk.... He had not strayed much among women; he had been too busy. Now he had met his own. He would go to her to-morrow. His love for her was the one right thing in the world. Fallows nor the world could alter that....

The resistance which these thoughts had built in his mind was all smoothed away by the spontaneous affection of the greeting. They sat down together before the fire, but neither spoke of the woman who had come between.

12

ON the way to Betty Berry the second day, Morning could not quite hold the altitude of yesterday. There was much of the boy left in the manner of his love for her. The woman that the world saw, and which he saw with physical eyes, was only one of her mysteries. The important thing was that he saw her really, and as she was not seen by another.... They had been together an hour when this was said:

“There comes a time—a certain day—when a little girl realizes what beauty is, and something of what it means in the world. That day came to me and it was hard. I fought it out all at once. I was not exactly sure what I wanted, but I knew that beauty could never help me in any way. I learned to play better when I realized this fully. I have said to myself a million times, ‘Expect nothing. No one will love you. You must do without that,’ I believed it firmly.... So you see when I went back to the Armory that next morning I had something to fall back upon.... I would not have thought about it except you made me forget—that afternoon. Why, I forget it now when you come; but when you go, I force myself to remember——”

“Why do you do that?”

She was looking into the fire. The day was stormy, and they were glad to be kept in.

“Why do you do that?” he repeated.

“Because I can’t feel quite at rest about our being together always. It seems too wonderful. You must understand—it’s only because it is so dear a thing——”

She had spoken hastily, seeing the fear and rebellion in his eyes.

“Betty Berry.... We’re not afraid of being poor. Why not go out and get married to-day—now?”

Her hand went out to him.

“That wouldn’t be fine in us,” she said intensely. “I would feel that we couldn’t be trusted—if we did anything like that.... Oh, that would never keep us together—that is not the great thing. And to-day—what a gray day and bleak. We shall know if that day comes. It will be one such as the butterfly chooses for her emerging. It must not be planned. Such a day comes of itself.... Why, it would be like seizing something precious from another’s hand—before it is offered——”

“And you think you are not beautiful?” he said.

“Yes.”

He tried to tell her how she seemed to him when they were apart—how differently and perfectly the phases of her came.

“It makes me silent,” he went on. “I try to tell just where it is. And sometimes when I am away—I wonder what is so changed and cleansed and buoyant in my heart—and then I know it is you—sustaining.”

“It doesn’t seem to belong to me—what you say,” she answered. “I don’t dare to think of it as mine.... Please don’t think of me as above other women. I am not apart nor above. I am just Betty Berry, who comes and goes and plays—dull in so many ways—as yet, a little afraid to be happy. When you tempt me as now to be happy—it seems I must go and find someone very miserable and do something perfect for him.... But, it is true, I fear nothing so much as that you should believe me more than I am.”

A little afterward she was saying in her queer, unjointed way, as if she spoke only here and there a sentence from the thoughts running swiftly through her mind:

“... And once, (it was only a few weeks after the Armory, and I was playing eastward) I heard your name mentioned among some musicians. They had been talking about your war, and they had seen the great story.... I couldn’t tell them that I know you?... It was known you were in New York, and one of the musicians spoke of an early Broadway engagement—of starting for New York that very night. It was the most common thing to say—but I went to my room and cried. Going to New York—where you were. Can you understand—that it didn’t seem right for him, just to take a train like that? And I had to go eastward so slowly. For a while after that, traveling out there, I couldn’t hold you so clearly; but as we neared New York—whether I wished it or not—I began to feel you again, to expect you at every turning. Sometimes as I played—it was uncanny, the sense that came to me, that you were in the audience, and that we were working together.... And then you came.”

Her picture changed now. Morning grew restless. It was almost as if there were a suggestion from Duke Fallows in her sentences:

“I thought of you always as alone.... You have gone so many ways alone. Perhaps the thought came from your work. I never could read the places where you suffered so—but I mean from the tone and theme of it. You were down among the terrors and miseries—but always alone.... You will go back to them—alone, but carrying calmness and cheer. You will be different.... It’s hard for me to say, but if we should clutch at something for ourselves—greedily because we want something now—and you should not be able to do your work so well because of me—I think—I think I should never cease to suffer.”

A dozen things to say had risen with hostility in his mind to check this faltering expression, the purport of which he knew so well in its every aspect. He hated the thought of others seeing his future and not considering him. He hated the fear that came to him. There had been fruits to all that Fallows had said before. He had plucked them afterward. And now Betty Berry was one with Fallows in this hideous and solitary conception of him. And there she sat, lovely and actual—the very essence of all the good that he might do. He was so tired of what she meant; and it was all so huge and unbreakable, that he grew calm before he spoke, from the very inexorability of it.

“There is no place for me to go—that you could not go with me. Every one seems to see great service for me, but I see it with you. Surely we could go together to people who suffer.... I have been much alone, but I spent most of the time serving myself. I have slaved for myself. If Duke Fallows had left me alone, I should have been greedy and ambitious and common. I see you now identified with all the good of the future. You came bringing the good with you to the Armory that day, but I was so clouded with hatred and self-serving, that I really didn’t know it until afterward.... All the dreams of being real and fine, of doing good in work, and with hands and thoughts, of sometime really being a good man who knows no happiness but service for others—that means you—you! You must come with me. We will be good together. We will serve together. Everybody will be better for us. We will do it because we love so much—and can’t help it——”

“Oh, don’t say any more—please—please! It is too much for me. Go away—won’t you?”

She had risen and clung to him, her face imploring.

“Do you really want me to go away?” he said.

“Yes—I have prayed for one to come saying such things—of two going forth to help—prayed without faith.... I cannot bear another word to be said to-day.... I want to sit here and live with it——”

He was bewildered. He bent to kiss her brow—but refrained.... Her face shone; her eyes were filled with tears.... He was in the street trying to recall what he had said.

13

HE did not cross the river, but wandered about the city.... She had starved her heart always, put away the idea of a lover, and sought to carry out her dreams of service alone. Then he had come. In the midst of mental tossing and disorder to-day, he had stumbled upon an expression of her highest idea of earth-life: for man and woman to serve together—God loving the world through their everyday lives.... And she had been unable to bear him longer near her. It was the same with her heart, as with one who has starved the body, and must begin with morsels.

He was in the hotel writing-room—filling pages to her. He did not mean to send the pages. It was to pass the time until evening. He lacked even the beginnings of strength to stay away from her until to-morrow. He would have telephoned, but she had not given him the number, or the name of the woman who kept the house. The writing held his thoughts from the momentarily recurring impulse to go back. The city was just a vibration. Moments of the writing brought her magically near. In spite of her prayer for him not to, his whole nature idealized her now. His mind was swept again and again with gusts of her attraction. Thoughts of hers came to him almost stinging with reality ... and to see her again—to see her again. Once in the intensity of his outpouring, he halted as if she had called—as if she had called to him to come up to her out of the hollows and the vagueness of light.

It was nightfall. He gave way suddenly—to that double-crossing of temptation which forces upon the tempted one the conviction that what he desires is the right thing.... He would be a fool not to go. She would expect him.... He arose and set out for her house.

But as he neared the corner something within felt itself betrayed.

“And so I cannot be content with her happiness,” he thought. “I cannot be content with the little mysteries that make her the one Betty Berry. I am not brave enough to be happy alone—as she is. I must have the woman....”

He was hot with the shame of it. He saw her bountifulness; her capacity to wait. Clearly he saw that all these complications and conflicts of his own mind were not indications of a large nature, but the failures of one unfinished. She did not torture herself with thoughts; she obeyed a heart unerringly true and real. She shone as never before; fearless, yet with splendid zeal for giving; free to the sky, yet eager to linger low and tenderly where her heart was in harmony; a stranger to all, save one or two in the world, pitilessly hungry to be known, and yet asking so little.... Compared with her, he saw himself as a littered house, wind blowing through broken windows.

... That night, sitting with Duke Fallows before the fire, brooding on his own furious desires, he thought of the other John Morning who had brooded over the story of Liaoyang in so many rooms with the same companion. All that former brooding had only forced the world to a show-down. He knew, forever, how pitifully little the world can give.... A cabin on the hill and a name that meant a call in the next war....

The face of the other cooled and stilled him. Duke was troubled; Duke, who wasn’t afraid of kings or armies or anything that the world might do; who didn’t seem even afraid now of the old Eve violence, whoever she was—was afraid to speak of Betty Berry to his best friend.... Morning wondered at this. Had Duke given up—or was he afraid of mixing things more if he expressed himself? The fire-lit face was tense. One after another of the man’s splendid moments and performances ran through Morning’s mind—the enveloping compassion—in Tokyo, Liaoyang, in the grain, in the ploughed lands—the Lowenkampf friend, the friend of the peasant house, the friend of men in Metal Workers’ Hall, his own friend in a score of places and ways—the man’s consummate art in friendliness....

“Duke, there’s a lot to think about in just plain living, isn’t there?”

The other started. “Hello,” he said. “I didn’t think you were in my world.”

Betty Berry was waiting at the stairs the next morning.

“Did you get my letter?” she whispered, when the door had swung to.

“No.... Mailed last night?”

“Yes.”

“I left the cabin two hours before the mail. It’s rural delivery, you know. Jethro reaches my box late in the forenoon——”

“I wrote it about dark, but didn’t mail it until later. I thought you would come——”

He told her how he had written, how he had come to her house, and turned away. They were very happy.

“To think that you came so far. I couldn’t sit still, I was so expectant at that very time.... But it was good for us——”

“I understood after a while.”

“Of course, you understood.... I was—oh, so happy yesterday. Yet, aren’t we strange? Before it was night, I wanted you to come back.... I didn’t go out last night. I couldn’t practice. To-night, there are some friends whom I must see——”

Morning, in a troubled way, reckoned the hours until evening.... She was here and there about the room. The place already reflected her. She had never been so blithe before.... It was an hour afterward that he picked up a little tuning-fork from the dresser, and twanged it with his nail. She started and turned to him, her thumb pressed against her lips—her whole attitude that of a frightened child.

“I wonder if I could tell you?” she said hesitatingly. “It would make many things clear. You told me about little boy—you. It was my father’s——”

He waited without speaking.

“... He used to lead the singing in a city church,” she said. “Always he carried the tuning-fork. He would twang it upon a cup or a piece of wood, and put it to his ear—taking the tone. He had a soft tenor voice. There was never another just like it, and always he was humming.... I remember his lips moving through the long sermons, as he conned the hymn-book, one song after another, tapping his fork upon a signet ring. How I remember the tiny twanging, the light hum of an insect that came from him, from song to song, his finger keeping time, his lips pursed over the words.

“He never heard the preacher. There was no organ allowed, but he led the hymns. He loved it. He held the time and tone for the people—but never sang a hymn twice the same, bringing in the strangest variations, but always true, his face flaming with pleasure.

“For years and years we lived alone. As a little girl, I was lifted to the stool to play his accompaniments. As a young woman, I supported him, giving music lessons. The neighbors thought him an invalid.... All his viciousness was secret from the world, but common property between us from my babyhood. I pitied him and covered him, fed him when he might have fed himself, waited upon him when he might have helped me. He would hold my mind with little devilish things and thoughts—as natural to him as the tuning-fork.... He would despoil the little stock of food while I was away, and nail the windows down. My whole life, I marveled at the ingenuity of his lies. He was so little and helpless. I never expected to be treated as a decent creature, from those who had heard his tales. They looked askance at me.

“For years, he told me that he was dying, and I sat with him in the nights, or played or read aloud. If any one came, he lay white and peaceful, with a look of martyrdom.... And then at the last, I fell asleep beside him. It was late, but the lamp was burning. I felt him touch me before morning—the little old white thing, his lips pursed. The tuning-fork dropped with a twang to the floor. I could not believe I was free—but cried and cried. At the funeral, when the church people spoke of ‘our pain-racked and martyred brother’——”

She did not finish.

Morning left her side. “I never thought of a little girl that way,” he said, standing apart. “Why, you have given me the spirit of her, Betty. It is what you have passed through that has made you perfect.... And I was fighting for myself, and for silly things all the time——”

But he had not expressed what was really in his mind—of the beauty and tenderness of unknown women everywhere, in whose hearts the sufferings of others find arable ground. Surely, these women are the grace of the world. His mother must have been weathered by such perfect refinements, otherwise he would not have been able to appreciate it in Betty Berry. It was all too dreamy to put into words yet, but he felt it very important in his life—this that had come to him from Betty’s story, and from Betty standing there—woman’s power, her bounty, her mystic valor, all from the unconscious high behavior of a child.

She had given him something that the Ploughman gave Duke Fallows. He wanted to make the child live in the world’s thoughts, as Duke was making the Ploughman live.

It was these things—common, beautiful, passed-by things, that revealed to Morning, as he began to be ready—the white flood of spirit that drives the world, that is pressing always against hearts that are pure.

He went nearer to her.

“Everything I think is love for you, Betty,” he said.

The air was light about her, and delicate as from woodlands.

14

THE horse and phaeton—both very old—of the rural-carrier could be seen from the hill-cabin. Duke Fallows walked down to the fence to say “Hello” to Jethro whom he admired. He returned bearing very thoughtfully a letter addressed to John Morning. It was from across the river; the name, street, and number of the sender were written upon the envelope.... Fallows sat down before the fire again, staring at the letter. He thought of the woman who had written this, (just the few little things that Morning had said) and then he thought of the gaunt peasant woman in Russia, the mate of the Ploughman, and of the mother of the Ploughman. He thought of the little boy, Jan—the one little boy of the six, that had his heart, and whom he longed for.

He thought of this little boy on one hand—and the world on the other.

Then he thought of Morning again, and of the woman.

He loved the world; he loved the little boy. Sometimes it seemed to him when he was very happy—that he loved the world and the little boy with almost the same compassion—the weakness, fineness, and innocence of the races of men seeming almost like the child’s.

He thought of John Morning differently. He had loved him at first, because he was down and fighting grimly. He thought of him of late as an instrument, upon which might be played a message of mercy and power to all who suffered—to the world and to the little boy alike.

And now Fallows was afraid for the instrument. Many things had maimed it, but this is the way of men; and these maimings had left their revelations from the depths. Such may measure into the equipment of a big man, destined to meet the many face to face. Fallows saw this instrument in danger of being taken over by a woman—to be played upon by colorful and earthly seductions. No man could grant more readily than he, that such interpretations are good for most men; that the highest harmony of the average man is the expression of love for his one woman and his children. But to John Morning, Fallows believed such felicity would close for life the great work which he had visioned from the beginning.

He did not want lyrical singing from John Morning, he wanted prophetic thunderings.

He wanted this maimed young man to rise up from the dregs and tell his story and the large meaning of it. He wanted him to burn with a white light before the world. He wanted the Koupangtse courage to drive into the hearts of men; a pure reformative spirit to leap forth from the capaciousness where ambition had been; he wanted John Morning to ignite alone. He believed the cabin in which he now sat was built blindly from the boy’s standpoint, but intelligently from the spirit of the boy, to become the place of ignition. He believed this of Morning’s to be a celibate spirit that could be finally maimed only by a woman. He believed that Morning was perfecting a marvelous instrument, one that would alter all society for the better, if he gave his heart to the world.

Fallows even asked himself if he did not have his own desperate pursuits among women in too close consideration.... It would be easy to withdraw. So often he had faltered before the harder way, and found afterward that the easy one was evil.... He left it this way: If he could gain audience with Betty Berry alone this evening he would speak; if Morning were with her, he would find an excuse for joining them and quickly depart. Last night Morning had returned to the cabin early; the night before by the last car. It was less than an even chance.... Fallows crossed the river, thinking, if the woman were common it would be easy. The way it turned out left no doubt as to what he must do. Approaching the number, on the street named on the corner of the envelope, he passed John Morning, head down in contemplation. He was admitted to the house. Betty Berry appeared, led him to a small upper parlor, and excused herself for a moment.

Fallows sat back and closed his eyes. He was suffering. All his fancied hostility was gone. He saw a woman very real, and to him magical; he saw that this was bloody business.... She came back, the full terror of him in her eyes. She did not need to be so sensitive to know that he had not come as a cup-bearer.... He was saying to himself, “I will not struggle with her....”

“Have I time to tell my story?”

“I was going out.... John Morning just went away because I was to meet old friends. But, if this is so very important, of course——”

“It is about him.”

“I think you must tell your story.”

Fallows talked of Morning’s work, of what he had first seen from Luzon, and of the man he found in Tokyo. He spoke of the days and nights in Liaoyang, as he had watched Morning at his work.

“He’s at his best at the type-writer. When the work is really coming right for him, he seems to be used by a larger, finer force than he shows at other times.... It is good to talk to you, Miss Berry. You are a real listener. You seem to know what I am to say next——”

“Go on,” she said.

“When a man with a developed power of expression stops writing what the world is saying, and learns to listen to that larger, finer force within him—indeed, when he has a natural genius for such listening, and cultivates a better receptivity, always a finer and more sensitive surface for its messages—such a man becomes in time the medium between man and the energy that drives the world——”

“Yes——”

“Some call this energy that drives the world the Holy Spirit, and some call it the Absolute. I call it love of God. A few powerful men of every race are prepared to express it. These individuals come up like the others through the dark, often through viler darkness. They suffer as others cannot dream of suffering. They are put in terrible places—each of which leaves its impress upon the instrument—the mind. You have read part of John Morning’s story. Perhaps he has told you other parts. His mind is furrowed and transcribed with terrible miseries.

“Until recently his capacity was stretched by the furious passion of ambition. It seemed in Asia as if he couldn’t die, unexpressed; as if the world couldn’t kill him. You saw him at the Armory just after he had passed through thirty days hard enough to slay six men. Ambition held him up—and hate and all the powers of the ego.

“This is what I want to tell you: ‘When the love of God fills that furious capacity which ambition has made ready; when the love of God floods over the broadened surfaces of his mind, furrowed and sensitized by suffering, filling the matrix which the dreadful experiences have marked so deeply—John Morning will be a wonderful instrument of interpretation between God and his race.’

“I can make my story very short for you, Miss Berry. Your listening makes it clearer than ever to me. I see what men mean when they say they can write to women. Yes, I see it.... John Morning has made ready his cup. It will be filled with the water of life—to be carried to men. But John Morning must feel first the torture of the thirst of men.

“Every misery he has known has brought him nearer to this realization; days here among the dregs of the city; days of hideous light and shadow; days on the China Sea, sitting with coolies crowded so they could not move; days afield, and the perils; days alone in his little cabin on the hill; sickness, failures, hatreds from men, the answering hatred of his fleshly heart—all these have knit him with men and brought him understanding.

“He has been down among men. Suffering has graven his mind with the mysteries of the fallen. You must have understanding to have compassion. In John Morning, the love of God will pass through human deeps to men. Deep calls to deep. He will meet the lowest face to face. He will bring to the deepest down man the only authority such a man can recognize—that of having been there in the body. And the thrill of rising will be told. Those who listen and read will know that he has been there, and see that he is risen. He will tell how the water of life came to him—and flooded over him, and healed his miseries and his pains. The splendid shining authority of it will rise from his face and from his book.

“And men won’t be the same after reading and listening; (nor women who receive more quickly and passionately)—women won’t be the same. Women will see that those who suffer most are the real elect of this world. It’s wonderful to make women listen, Miss Berry, for their children bring back the story.

“It isn’t that John Morning must turn to love God. I don’t mean that. He must love men. He must receive the love of God—and give it to men. To be able to listen and to receive with a trained instrument of expression, and then to turn the message to the service of men—that’s a World-Man’s work. John Morning will do it—if he loves humanity enough. He’s the only living man I know who has a chance. He will achieve almost perfect instrumentation. He will express what men need most to know in terms of art and action. The love of God must have man to manifest it, and that’s John Morning’s work—if he loves humanity enough to make her his bride.”

Fallows was conscious now of really seeing her. She had not risen, but seemed nearer—as if the chair, in which she slowly rocked, had crept nearer as he talked. Her palms resting upon her knees were turned upward toward him:

“And you think John Morning is nearly ready for that crown of Compassion?”

“Yes——”

“You think he will receive the Compassion—and give it to men in terms of art and action?”

“Yes——”

“You think if he loves me—if he turns his love to me, as he is doing—he cannot receive that greater love which he must give men?”

“Yes——”

“And you think it would be a good woman’s part to turn him from her?”

“Yes——”

“And you came to tell me this?”

“Yes.”

“I think it is true——”

“Oh, listen—listen——” he cried, rising and bending over her—“a good woman’s part—it would be that! It would be something more—something greater than even he could ever do.... What a vision you have given me!”

She stood before him, her face half-turned to the window. Yet she seemed everywhere in the room—her presence filling it. He could not speak again. He turned to go. Her words reached him as he neared the door.

“Oh, if I only had my little baby—to take away!”

15

FALLOWS stood forward on the ferry that night and considered the whole New York episode. He had done his work. He had told the Ploughman story five times. It was just the sowing. He might possibly come back for the harvest.... He had another story to tell now. Could he ever tell it without breaking?... He had tortured his brain to make things clear for Morning and for men. He realized that a man who implants a complete concept in another intelligence and prevents it from withering until roots are formed and fruitage is assured, performs a miracle, no less; because, if the soil were ready, the concept would come of itself. He had driven his brain by every torment to make words perform this miracle on a large scale.

And this little listening creature he had just left—she had taken his idea, finished it for him, and involved it in action. To her it was the Cross. She had carried it to Golgotha, and sunk upon it with outstretched palms.... There was an excellence about Betty Berry that amazed him, in that it was in the world.... He had not called such women to him, because such women were not the answer to his desires. He realized with shame that a man only knows the women who answer in part the desires of his life. Those who had come to him were fitted to the plane of sensation upon which he had lived so many years. He had condemned all women because, in the weariness of the flesh, he had suddenly risen to perceive the falsity of his affinities of the flesh. “What boys we are!” he whispered, “in war and women and work—what boys!”

Betty Berry had taught him a lesson, quite as enormous to his nature as the Ploughman’s. A man who thinks of women only in sensuousness encounters but half-women. He had learned it late, but well, that a man in this world may rise to heights far above his fellows in understanding, but that groups of women are waiting on all the higher slopes of consciousness for their sons and brothers and lovers to come up. They pass their time weaving laurel-leaves for the brows of delayed valiants....

Duke thought of the men he had seen afield, the gravity with which these men did their great fighting business, the world talking about them. Then he thought of the little visionary in her room accepting her tragedy....

Even now, in the hush and back-swing of the pendulum, it seemed very true what he had said. She had seen it. It is dangerous business to venture to change the current of other lives; no one knew it better than Fallows. But he considered Morning. Morning, as it were, had been left on his door-step. Morning would be alone now—alone to listen and receive his powers.... Fallows looked up from the black water to the far-apart pickets of the wintry night. He was going home.

The cabin was lit. Fallows climbed the hill wearily. There was a certain sharpness as of treachery from his night’s work, but to that larger region of mind, open to selfishness and the passion to serve men, peace had come. He was going home, first to San Francisco—then to the Bosks and the little boy.

Morning arose quickly at the sound of the step on the hard ground, and opened the door wide. He had been reading her letter, which Fallows had left upon the table. The letter had been like an added hour with her. It was full of shy joy, full of their perfect accord, remote from the world—its road and stone-piles and evasions.... Fallows saw that he looked white and wasted. The red of the firelight did not mislead his eye. Its glow was not Morning’s and did not blend with the pallor.

“I’m going on to-morrow, John,” he said.

“’Frisco?”

“Yes—and then——”

“You’ll come back here?”

“No, I’ll keep on into the west to my cabin——”

“It would be nearer this way. I planned to see you after ’Frisco.”

“I’ll come back,” Fallows’ thought repeated, “for the harvest.”

“And so you are going to make the big circle again?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t finished this first one, until you reach Noyes and your desk in the Western States.”

“The next journey won’t take so long.”

“You’ve been the good angel to me again, Duke. It’s quite a wonder, how you turn up in disaster of mine.... I wonder if I shall ever come to you—but you won’t get down. You wouldn’t even stay ill.”

“You won’t get down again, John, at least, in none of the ways you know about——”

Both men seemed spent beyond words.... Morning saw in the other’s departure the last bit of resistance lifted from his heart’s quest. Betty Berry had come between them. Morning’s conviction had never faltered on the point that Fallows was structurally weak on this one matter.... And so he was going. All that was illustrious in their friendship returned. They needed few words, but sat late before turning in. The cabin cooled and freshened. Each had the thought, before finally falling asleep, that they were at sea again.... And in the morning the thing that lived from their parting was this, from Duke Fallows:

“Whatever you do, John—don’t forget your own—the deepest down man. He is yours—go after him—get him!”

... She was at the top of the stairs when he called the next morning; and he was only half-way up when he saw that she had on her hat and coat and gloves. The day was bitter like the others. He had thought of her fire, and the quiet of her presence. He meant to tell her all about Duke Fallows and the going. It was his thought—that she might find in this (not through words, but through his sense of release from Duke’s antagonism) a certain quickening toward their actual life together. He wanted to talk of bringing her to the cabin—at least, for her to come for a day.

“You will go with me to get the tickets and things. I must start west at once.”

It was quite dark in the upper hallway. Morning reached out and turned her by the elbow, back toward the door of her room. There in the light, he looked into her face. She was calm, her eyes bright. Whatever the night had brought—if weakness it was mastered, if exaltation it was controlled. But she was holding very hard. There was a tightness about her mouth that terrified him. It was not as it had been with them; he was not one with her.

“You mean that you are going away—for some time?”

“Yes.... Oh, you must not mind. We are road people. We have been wonderfully happy. You must not look so tragic——”

It wasn’t like her at all. “We are not road people,” he thought.... “You must not look so tragic,”—that was just like a thing road people might say.

He sat down. The weakness of his limbs held his mind. It seemed to him, if he could forget his body, words might come. At first the thought of her going away was intolerable, but that had dwindled. It was the change in her—the something that had happened—the flippancy of her words.... He looked up suddenly. It seemed as if her arms had been stretched toward him, her face ineffably tender. So quickly it had happened that he could not be sure. He wanted this very thing so much that his mind might have formed the illusion. He let it pass. He did not want her to say it was not so.

Words of her letter came back to him. Neither the letter nor yesterday had anything to do with this day.... “You are drawing closer all the time. I have been so happy to-day that I had to write. You must know that I sent you away because I could not bear more happiness....”

Where was it? What had happened? He was fevered. Something was destroying him.... Betty Berry did not suffer for herself—it was with pity for him. The mother in her was tortured. It was her own life—this love of his for her—the only child she would ever have. She had loved its awakenings, its diffidences, the faltering steps of its expression. The man was not hers, but his love for her was her very own.... She had not thought of its death, when Fallows talked the night before. She had thought of her giving up for his sake, but not of the anguish and the slaying of his love for her. And this was taking place now.

“You will let me write to you?” he said, still thinking of the letter.

“Oh, yes.”

“And you will write to me?”

She remembered now what she had written.... The fullness of her heart had gone into that. She could not write like that again. Yet he was asking for her letters, as a child might ask for a drink.... She could not refuse. It wasn’t in nature to see his face, and refuse.... Surely if she remained apart it was all any one could ask.

“Yes, I will write sometimes.”

He stood in the center of the room, his head bowed slightly, his eyes upon the wall. He was ill, bewildered, his mind turning here and there only to find fresh distress.... Suddenly he remembered that he had not told her of his drinking.... That must be it. Some one else had told her, and she was hurt and broken.

“I meant always to tell you,” he said. “Only it really did not seem to signify by the time you came back. And when I was with you—oh, I seemed very far from that. I don’t understand it now——”

She did not know what he meant; did not care, could not ask. It was something he clutched—in the disintegration.... He looked less death-like in his thinking of it.

“It doesn’t greatly matter,” she said. “I have to go west.... Won’t you come with me to get the tickets?”

“I can’t go out into the street yet. If there is anything more I have done—won’t you let me know?”

Suddenly he realized her side, that he was detaining her; that it wasn’t easy for her to speak. It was not his way to impose his will upon anyone; his natural shyness now arose, and he fingered his hat.

“Dear John Morning—you haven’t done anything. You have made me happy. I must go away to my work—and you, to yours.... It is hard for me, but I see it as the way. I have promised to write——”

The words came forth like birds escaping—thin, evasive, vain words. That which she had seen so clearly the night before, (and which she seemed utterly to have lost the meaning of) was a lock upon every real utterance now. She had not counted upon this tragedy of her mother instinct—this slaying of the perfect thing in him, which she had loved to life.

He arose, and sat down; he swallowed, started to speak, but could not. He was like a boy—this man who had seen so much, just a bewildered boy, his suffering too deep for words—the sweetest part of him to her, dying before her eyes. And the dream of their service together, their hand-in-hand going out to the world, their poverty and purity and compassion together—these were lost jewels.... It was all madness, the world—all madness and devilishness. Beauty and virtue and loving kindness were gone, the world turned insane.... The thought came to tell him she was insane; a better lie still, that she was not a pure woman. She started to speak, but his eyes came up to her.... She tried it again, but his eyes came up to her. He fingered his hat boyishly. The mother in her breast could not.

Their dreadful night. The winter darkness was coming on swiftly. Her train was leaving.

“But you said you were not going to work for the present. You have been working so hard all winter——”

He had said it all before.

“Yes—but there is much for me to do—days of study and practice—and thinking. You will understand.... Everything will come clear and you will understand. You see, to-day—this isn’t a day for words with us.... One must have one’s own secret place. You must say of me, ‘She suddenly remembered something—and had to go away.’...”

“‘She suddenly remembered something and had to hurry away,’” he repeated, trying to smile. “But she will write to me. I will work—work—and when you let me, I will come to you——”

“Yes——”

He had to leave.... He kissed her again. There was something like death about it.

“If we were only dead,” she said, “and were going away together——”

... A man stepped up to him, regarded him intently. Morning realized that he must get alone. He had been shaking his head wearily, and unseeingly—standing in the main corridor of the station in Jersey—shaking his head.... It was full night outside. He forgot that he did not have to recross the river—and was on the ferry back to New York before he remembered....

He gained the hill to his cabin long afterward. That reminded him that Duke Fallows had gone, too—and that very morning.

It seemed farther back in his life than Liaoyang.

16

BETTY BERRY’S journey was ten hours west by the limited trains—straight to the heart of her one tried friend, Helen Quiston, a city music teacher. Her first thought, and the one buoy, was that she would be able to tell everything.... She could not make Helen Quiston feel the pressure that his Guardian Spirit (she always thought of Duke Fallows so) invoked in that half-hour of his call, but with a day or a night she could make her friend know what had happened, and [Pg 203]something of the extent of force which had led to her sacrifice. Helen would tell her if she were mad. All through that night she prayed that her friend would call her mad—would force her to see that the thing she had done was viciously insane.

She was engulfed. For the first time, her spirit failed to right itself in any way. She was more dependent upon Helen Quiston than she had conceived possible, since the little girl had fought out the different cruel presentations of the days, during the early life with her father.

Throughout the night en route she thought of the letter she had promised to write to John Morning. The day with him had brought the letter from a vague promise to an immediate duty upon her reaching the studio.... She was to write first, and at once. Already she was making trials in her mind, but none would do. He would penetrate every affectation. The wonder and dreadfulness of it—was that she must not tell the truth, for he would be upon her, furiously human, disavowing all separateness from the race, as one with a message must be; disavowing the last vestige of the dream of compassion which his Guardian Spirit had pictured.... She knew his love for her. She had seen it suffer. Would Helen Quiston show her that she must bring it back—that the Guardian Spirit was evil? There was a fixture about it, a whispering of the negative deep within.

She could not write of the memories. Not the least linger of perfume from that night at the theatre must touch her communication. Yet it was the arch of all. As she knew her soul and his, they had been as pure as children that night—even before a word was spoken. It had been so natural—such a rest and joy.... She had learned well to put love away, before he came. From the few who approached, she had laughed and withdrawn. The world had daubed them. In her heart toward other men, she was as a consecrated nun. And this was like her Lord who had come.... She had made her way in the world among men. She knew them, worked among them, pitied them. Her father had been as weak, as evil, as passionate, as pitiable. In the beginning she had learned the world through him—all its bitter, brutal lessons. As she knew the ’cello and its literature, she knew the world and the cheap artifices it would call arts.... She had even put away judgments; she had covered her eyes; accustomed her ears to patterings; made her essential happiness of little things; she had labored truly, and lived on, wondering why. And he had come at last with understanding. She had seen in Morning potentially all that a woman loves, and cannot be. He had made her mind and heart fruitful and flourishing again. Then his Guardian Spirit had appeared and spoken. As of old there had been talk of a serpent. As of old the serpent was of woman.

Helen Quiston was just leaving for a forenoon’s work away from the studio. She sat down for a moment holding the other in her arms; then she made tea and toast, and hastened off to return as quickly as possible.... For a long time Betty Berry stood by the piano. The day was gray and cold, but the studio was softly shining. All the woods of it were dark, approximately the black of the grand piano; floors and walls and picture frames were dark, but the openings were broad, and naked trees stirred outside the back windows.... She did not look the illness that was upon her. She was a veteran in suffering.... She forgot to breathe, until the need of air suddenly caught and shook her throat. It was often so when the hidden beauty of certain music unfolded to her for the first time.

She went to the rear windows, gradually realizing that it would soon be spring-time. There was a swift, tangible hurt in this that brought tears. There had been no tears for the inner desolation.... “Poor dear John Morning,” she whispered.

The reproduction of a wonderful painting of the meeting of Beatrice and Dante held her eye for a long time.... The blight was upon her as she tried a last time to write. It spread over her hand and the table, the room, the day. There was a hurt for him in everything she wanted to say. She was hot and ill—her back, her brain, her eyes, from trying. She could not hurt him any more. He had done nothing but give her healing and visions. His Guardian had done nothing but tell the truth, which she had seen at the time. This agony of hers had existed. It was like everything else in the world.

She wrote at last of their service in the world. They needed, she said, the strong air of solitude to think out the perfect way. It was very hard for her, who had fared so long on dreams and denials and loneliness. He must remember that. “Great things come to those who love at a distance,” she wrote bravely. Tears started when she saw the sentence standing so dauntlessly upon the page of her torture.... It would make them kinder, make their ideals live—and how young they were!... She said that she was afraid to be so happy as he had made her in certain moments. Often she found herself staring at the picture of Beatrice and Dante.

The thought that broke in upon this brave writing was that she was denied the thrill of great doing, as it had come to her while Fallows had spoken.... It would have lived on, had she gone that night, without seeing Morning again. Moreover, her way was different from that which she had pictured, as his Guardian talked. She did not see then that her action made a kind of lie of all her giving up to that hour; and that there could be no united sacrifice. It was pure, voiceless sacrifice for her—and blind murdering for him....

From the choke of this, her mind would turn to the song of triumph her spirit had sung as his Guardian told the story.... She had seemed to live in a vast eternal life, as she listened; and this which she was asked to do—was just to attend a temporary flesh sickness. She had the strange blessedness that comes with the conviction that immortality is here and now, as those few men and women of the world have known in their highest moments.

She could get back nothing of that exaltation. It would never come again. The spirit it had played upon was broken.... She had been rushing away on her thoughts. It was afternoon, the letter unfinished, the ’cello staring at her from the corner. It had stood by her in all her sorrows of the years, but was empty as a fugue now—endless variations upon the one theme of misery.... Happiness does not come back to the little things—after one has once known the breath of life.... She closed the narrow way of the letter, which she had filled with words—no past nor future, only the darkness that had come in to mingle with the dark hangings of the room of her friend.... She kissed the pages and sent them back the way she had come in the night.

The qualities that had brought her the friend, Helen Quiston, and which had made the friendship so real, were the qualities of Betty Berry. She had come to the last woman to be told of her madness, or to find admonition toward breaking down the thing she had begun.... They had talked for hours that night.

“I know it is lovely, dear Betty. Why, you look lovelier this instant than I ever dreamed you could be. Loving a man seems to do that to a woman—but the privilege of the greater thing! Oh, you are privileged. That’s the way of the great love. I should like sometime to know that Guardian. How did mere man grasp the beauty and mystery of service like that?... Stay with me. I will serve you, hands and feet. It is enough for me to touch the garment’s hem.... You are already gone from us, dearest. You have loved a man. You do love a man. He is worthy. You have not found him wanting. What matters getting him—when you have found your faith? Think of us—think of the gray sisterhood you once belonged to—nuns of the world—who go about their work helping, and who say softly to each other as they pass, ‘No, I have not been able to find him yet.’”

17

MORNING awoke in the gray of the winter morning. The place was cold and impure. He had fallen asleep without the accustomed blasts of hill-sweeping wind from window to window. He had not started the fire the night before; had merely dropped upon his cot, dazed with suffering and not knowing his weariness. He was reminded of places he had awakened in other times when he could not remember how he got to bed. Beyond the chairs and table lay the open fire-place, the ashes hooded in white.

The blackness of yesterday returned, but with a hot resentment against himself that he had not known before. He had followed Betty Berry about for hours, and had not penetrated the hollow darkness with a single ray of intelligence. This dreadful business was his, yet he had been stricken; had scarcely found his speech. There was no doubt of Betty Berry now, though a dozen evasions of hers during the day returned. She was doing something hard, but something she thought best to do. The real truth, however, was rightly his property.... To-day she would write. To-morrow her letter would come. If it did not contain some reality upon which he might stand through the present desolation, he would go to her.... Yes, he would go to her.

His side was hurting. He was used to that; it had no new relation now. Everything was flat and wretched. Distaste for himself and this nest in which he had lain, was but another of the miserable adjuncts of the morning. He stood forth shivering from the cot; struck a match and held it to some waste paper. Kindling was ready in the fire-place, but the paper flared out and fell to ashes, as he watched his left hand. He went to the window and examined his hand closer. The nails were broken and dry; there were whitish spots on the joints. He had seen something of this before, but his physical reactions had been so various and peculiar, in the past six weeks, that he had refused to be disturbed.

Just now his mind was clamoring with memories. He had the sense that as soon as an opening was forced in his mind, a torrent would rush in. He felt his heart striking hard and with rapidity. The floor heaved windily, or was it the lightness of his limbs? He went about the things to do with strange zeal, as if to keep his brain from a contemplation so hideous that it could not be borne.

He lit another paper, placed kindling upon it, poked the charred stubs of wood free from the thick covering of white, and brought fresh fuel. Then, as the fire kindled, he opened the door and windows, and swept and swept.... But it encroached upon him.... The open wound was no longer a mystery.... His dream of the river and the boat that was not allowed to land; his dream of the cliff, and looking down into the life of earth through the tree-tops ... the ferry-man of the Hun ... and now yesterday with its two relations to the old cause.

His whole nature was prepared for the revelation; yet it seemed to require years in coming. Like the loss of the manuscript in the Liao ravine, it was done before he knew.

“Of course, they had to rush away, when they found out,” he mumbled. “Of course, they couldn’t stay. Of course, they couldn’t be the ones to tell me.”

It might have been anywhere in China; the ferryman on the Hun ... during the deck-passage.... It did not greatly matter. Some contact of the Orient had started the slow virus on its long course in his veins. He knew that it required from three to five years to reach the stage of revealing itself as now. He saw it as the source of his various recent indispositions, and realized that he could not remain in his cabin indefinitely. It would be well for a while. Neither Duke Fallows nor Betty Berry would tell. He could keep his secret, and then—to die in some island quarantine? None of that. This was his life. He was master of it. He should die when he pleased, and where.

... Yes, she had her gloves on, when he came. She had not removed them all day, not even at the very last.... How strange and frightened she had been—how pitiful and hard for her! She could not have told him. She had loved him—and had suddenly learned.... She had seen that he did not know.... It must have come to her in the night—after the last day of happiness. Perhaps the processes of its coming to her were like his. He was sorry for Betty Berry.

And he could not see her again; he could not see her again. He passed the rest of the day with this repetition.... His life was over. That’s what it amounted to. Of course, he would not let them segregate him. His cabin would do for a while, until the secret threatened to reveal itself, and then he would finish the business.... The two great issues leaned on each other: The discovery of his mortal taint took the stress from the tragedy of yesterday; and that he could not see Betty Berry again kept madness away from the abominable death.... The worst of it all was that the love-mating was ended. This brought him to the end of the first day, when he began to think of the Play.

The literary instinct, of almost equal disorder with dramatic instinct, and which he had come to despise during the past year, returned with the easy conformity of an undesirable acquaintance—that reportorial sentence-making faculty, strong as death, and as uncentering to the soul of man. Morning saw himself searching libraries for data on leprosy, being caught by officials—the subject of nation-wide newspaper articles and magazine specials, the pathos of his case variously appearing—Liaoyang recalled—his own story—Reever Kennard relating afresh the story of the stealing of Mio Amigo. What a back-wash from days of commonness! The ego and the public eye—two Dromios—equal in monkey-mindedness and rapacity.

Morning was too shattered to cope with this ancient dissipation at first.

After the warring and onrushing of different faculties, a sort of coma fell upon the evil part, and the ways of the woman came back to him. He sat by his fire that night, the wound in his side forgotten, the essence of Asia’s foulness in his veins, forgotten—and meditated upon the sweetness of Betty Berry. He approached her image with a good humility. He saw her with something of the child upon her—as if he had suddenly become full of years. “How beautiful she was!” he would whisper; and then he would smile sadly at the poor blind boy he had been, not to see her beautiful at first.... To think, only three days before, she had sent him away, because she could not endure, except alone, the visitation of happiness that came to her. People of such inner strength must have their secret times and places, for their strength comes to them alone. To think that he had not understood this at once.... He had been eloquent and did not know it.

“Hell,” he said, “that’s the only way one can say the right thing—when he doesn’t plan it.”

... If his illness had been any common thing she would not have been frightened away. He was sure of this. It took Asia’s horror—to frighten her away. He saw her now, how she must have fought with it. He shuddered for her suffering on that day.... That day—why it was only the day before yesterday.... He never realized before how the illusion, Time, is only measurable by man’s feeling.... He was a little surprised at Duke Fallows. He himself wouldn’t have been driven off, if Duke had suddenly uncovered a leprous condition. He had been driven off by Duke’s ideas, but no fear of contagion could do it. Yet Duke was the bravest man he had ever known—in such deep and astonishing ways courageous. Yet he had been brought up soft. He wasn’t naturally a man-mingler. It had been too much for him. It was a staggerer—this. Fallows was a Prince anyway. Every man to his own fear.... This was the second morning.

Old Jethro, the rural delivery carrier, drove by that morning without stopping. She could not have mailed her letter until last night—another day to wait for it. Morning tried to put away the misery. Women never think of mail-closing times. They put a letter in the box and consider it delivered.... He puzzled on, regarding the action of Duke Fallows, in the light of what he would have done. No understanding came.

All thoughts returned in the course of the hours, his mind milling over and over again the different phases, but each day had its especial theme. The first was that he would not see Betty Berry again; that Duke Fallows had been frightened away, the second; and on the third morning, before dawn, he began to reckon with physical death, as if this day’s topic had been assigned to him.

Sister Death—she had been in the shadows before. Occasionally he had shivered afterward, when he thought of some close brush with her. She was all right, only he had thought of her as an alien before. It really wasn’t so—a blood sister now.... He recalled scenes in the walled cities of China.... She had certainly put over a tough one on him.... It would be in this room. He wouldn’t wait until his appearance was a revelation.... He would do the play. Something that he could take, would free him from the present inertia, so he could work for a while, a few hours a day. When the play was done—the Sister would come at his bidding.... He had always thought of her as feminine. A line from somewhere seemed to seize upon her very image—this time not sister, but——

Dark mother, always gliding near, with soft feet——

He faced her out on that third morning. Physically there was but a tremor about the coming. Not the suffering, but a certain touch and shake of the heart, heaved him a little—the tough little pump stopped, its fine incentive and its life business broken.... But that was only the rattle of the door-knob of death.

It was all right. He wasn’t afraid. The devil, Ambition, was pretty well strangled. There must be something that lasts, in his late-found sense of the utter unimportance of anything the world can give—the world which appreciates only the boyish part of a real man’s work. So he would take out with him a reality of the emptiness of the voice of the crowd. Then the unclean desire for drink was finished—none of that would cling to him; moreover, no fighting passion to live on would hold him down to the body of things.... But he would pass the door with the love of Betty Berry—strong, young, imperious, almost untried.... Would that come back with him? Does a matter of such dimension die? Does one come back at all?...

Probably in this room....

Then he thought of the play that must be done in this room; and curiously with it, identifying itself with the play and the re-forming part of it, was the favorite word of Duke Fallows’—Compassion. What a title for the play! Duke’s word and Duke’s idea.... All this brought him to the thought of Service, as he had pictured it for Betty Berry—a life together doing things for men—loving each other so much that there were volumes to spare for the world—down among men—to the deepest down man.

His throat tightened suddenly. He arose. A sob came from him.... His control broke all at once.... How a little run of thoughts could tear down a man’s will! It wasn’t fear at all—but the same depiction running in his mind that had so affected Betty Berry when she begged to be alone....

“The deepest down man—the deepest down man.... It is I, Duke!... Surely you must have meant me all the time!”

But it passed quickly, properly whipped and put away with other matters—all but a certain relating together of the strange trinity, Death, Service, and Betty Berry—which he did not venture to play with, for fear of relapse.... He had been eating nothing. He must go to Hackensack. The little glass showed him a haggard and unshaven John Morning, but there was nothing of the uncleanness about the face in reflection.... He heard the “giddap” of Jethro far on the road. The old rig was coming.... It stopped at his box. He hurried down the hill.

18

TWO letters; one from Duke Fallows. Morning opened this on the way up the slope. He was afraid of the other. He wanted to be in the cabin with the door shut—when that other was opened.... Fallows was joyous and tender—just a few lines written on the way west: “... I won’t be long in ’Frisco. I know that already. The Western States does very well without me.... Soon on the long road to Asia and Russia. I must look up Lowenkampf again before going home. He was good to us, wasn’t he, John?... And you, this old heart thrills for you. You are coming on. I don’t know anything more you need. I say you are coming on. You’ll do the Play and the Book.... John, you ought to write the book of the world’s heart.... And then you will get so full of the passion to serve men that writing won’t be enough. You will have to go down among them again—and labor and lift among men. Things have formed about you for this.... We are friends.... I am coming back for the harvest.”

The sun had come out. Morning was standing in the doorway as he finished. The lemon-colored light fell upon the paper.... It wasn’t like Duke to write in this vein—after running away. He repeated aloud a sentence to this effect. Then he went in, shut the door, and, almost suffocating from the tension, read the letter of Betty Berry.

It was just such a letter as would have sent him to her, before his realization of the illness.... He saw her torture to be kind, and yet not to lift his hopes. It was different from Fallows’, in that it fitted exactly to what he now knew about himself. And he had to believe from the pages that she loved him. There was an eternal equality to that.... The air seemed full of service. Two letters from his finest human relations, each stirring him to service. He did not see this just now with the touch of bitterness that might have flavored it all another time.... What was there about him that made them think of him so? If they only knew how meager and tainted so much of his thinking was. Some men can never make the world see how little they are.

He wrote to Betty Berry. Calm came to him, and much the best moments that he had known in the three days. He was apt to be a bit lyrical as a letter-lover—he whose words were so faltering face to face with the woman. Thoughts of the play came to his writing. He was really in touch with himself again. He would never lose that. He would work every day. When a man’s work comes well—he can face anything.... The play was begun the fourth day, and, on the fifth, another letter from Betty Berry. This was almost all about his work. She had seized upon this subject, and her letters lifted his inspiration. She could share his work. There was real union in that....

He was forgetting his devil for an hour at a time. There were moments of actual peace and well-being. He did not suffer more than the pain he had been accustomed to so long. And then, a real spring day breathed over the hill.

That morning, without any heat of producing, and without any elation from a fresh letter from the woman, he found that in his mind to say aloud:

“I’m ready for what comes.”

By a really dramatic coincidence, within ten minutes after this fruitage of fine spirit, John Morning found an old unopened envelope from Nevin, the little doctor of the Sickles. He had recalled some data on Liaoyang while inspecting the morning—something that might prove valuable for the play, in the old wallet he had carried afield. Looking for this in the moulded leather, he found the letter Nevin had left in the Armory, before departing—just a little before Betty Berry came that day.... Nevin had not come back. But Noyes and Field had come.

Morning remembered that Nevin had spoken that morning of finding something for the wound that would not heal.... The remedy was Chinese. The Doctor knew of its existence, but had procured the name with great difficulty in the Chinese quarter.... Morning was to fast ten days while taking the treatment.

He went about it with a laugh. The message had renewed his deep affection for Nevin. It had come forth from the hidden place where Nevin now toiled, (secretly trying, doubtless, to cover every appearance of his humanity).... He remembered how Nevin had studied the wound that refused to heal. The last thing had been his report on that. When there was nothing more to be offered but felicities—he had vanished.

Morning did not leap into any expectancy that he was to be healed, but thoughts of Nevin gave him another desire after the play and the book—to trace the great-hearted little man before the end. Nevin would be found somewhere out among the excessive desolations. If it may be understood, the idea of mortal sickness remained in Morning’s mind at this time, mainly as a barrier between him and Betty Berry.

Nevin’s drug was procured in New York. Hackensack failed utterly in this.... On the third day, Morning suffered keenly for the need of food. A paragraph from Betty Berry on the subject of the fasting at this time completely astonished him; indeed, shook the basic conviction as to the meaning of her departure:

“... I have often thought you did not seem so well after I returned from Europe, as you were when we parted. But the ten days will do for you, something that makes whatever might happen in the body seem so little and unavailing.... Don’t you see, you are doing what every one, destined to be a world-teacher, has done?... What amazes me continually, is that you seem to be brought, one by one, to these things by exterior processes, rather than through any will of your own.... The Hebrew prophets were all called upon to do this in order to listen better. Recall, too, the coming forth from the Wilderness of the Baptist, and the forty days in the wilderness of the Master Himself. Why, it is part of the formula! You will do more than improve the physical health; you will hear your message more clearly.... I sit and think—in the very hush of expectancy for you.”

As the evidences came, so they vanished. She could not have fled from him in the fear of leprosy and written in this way; nor could Duke Fallows, who was first of all unafraid of fleshly things. The conviction of his taint, and of its incurableness, daily weakened. Before the ten days passed, the last vestige of the horror was cleaned away. Illusion—and yet the mental battle through which he had passed, and which, through three terrible days, had shaken him body and soul, was just as real in the graving of its experience upon the fabric of his being as was the journey to Koupangtse, done hand and foot and horse. He perceived that man, farther advanced in the complications of self-consciousness, covers ground in three days and masters a lesson that would require a life to learn in the dimness and leisure of simple consciousness.

There was no way of missing this added fact: He, John Morning, was not designed to lean. He had been whipped and spurred through another dark hollow in the valley of the shadow, to show him again, and finally, that he was not intended for leaning upon others, yet must have an instant appreciation of the suffering of others. He had been forced to fight his own way to a certain poise, through what was to him, at the time, actual abandonment in distress, by the woman and the friend he loved. Moreover, he had accepted death; resignation to death in its most horrible form had been driven into his soul—an important life lesson, which whole races of men have died to learn.

He was seeing very clearly.... He bathed continually both in water and sunlight, lying in the open doorway as the Spring took root on his hill and below. Often he mused away the hours, with Betty Berry’s letters in his hand—too weak almost to stir at last, but filled with ease and well-being, such as he had never known. Water from the Spring was all he needed, and the activity of mind was pure and unerring, as if he were lifted above the enveloping mists of the senses, through which he had formerly regarded life.

Everything now was large and clear. Life was like a coast of splendid altitude, from which he viewed the mighty distances of gilded and cloud-shadowed sea, birds sailing vast-pinioned and pure, the breakers sounding a part of the majestic harmony of granite and sea and sky; the sun God-like, and the stars vast and pure like the birds.

When he actually looked with his eyes, it was as if he had come back, a man, to some haunt of childhood. The little hill was just as lovely, a human delight in the unbudded elms, a soft and childish familiarity in the new greens of the sun-slope grass. The yellow primrose was first to come, for yellow answers the thinnest, farthest sunlight. The little cabin was like a cocoon. He was but half-out. Soon the stronger sunlight would set him free—then to the wings.... One afternoon he stared across to the haze of the great city. His eyes smarted with the thought of the Charleys and the sisters, of the Boabdils and the slums.... Then, at last, he thought of Betty Berry waiting and thinking of him ... “in the very hush of expectancy.” The world was very dear and wonderful, and his love for her was in it all.

It was the ninth day that the bandage slipped from him, as clean as when he put it on the day before, and when he opened the door of the cabin he heard the first robin.... There was a sweeping finality in the way it had come from Nevin, and the quality of the man lived in Morning’s appreciation. His friends were always gone before he knew how fine they were.

He was slow to realize that the days of earth-life were plentiful for him, in the usual course. A man is never the same after he has accepted death.... And it had all come in order.... He could look into her eyes and say, “Betty Berry, whatever you want, is right for me, but I think it would be best for you to tell me everything. We are strong—and if we are not to be one together, we should talk it over and understand perfectly.”...

How strange he had missed this straight way. There had been so much illusion before. His body was utterly weak, but his mind saw more clearly and powerfully than ever.

The Play was conceived as a whole that ninth day. The sun came warmly in, while he wrote at length of the work, as he finally saw it.... On the tenth day he drank a little milk and slept in his chair by the doorway.... There was one difficult run that the robin went over a hundred and fifty times, at least.

19

BETTY BERRY watched the progress of the fasting with a mothering intensity. She saw that which had been lyrical and impassioned give way to the workman, the deeper-seeing artist. He was not less [Pg 220]human; his humanity was broadened. From one of his pages, she read how he had looked across at the higher lights of New York one clear March night. His mind had been suddenly startled by a swift picture of the fighting fool he had been, and of the millions there, beating themselves and each other to death for vain things.... She saw his Play come on in the days that followed the fasting. There was freshness in his voice. She did not know that he had accepted death, but she saw that he was beginning to accept her will in their separation.

And this is what she had tried to bring about, but her heart was breaking. Dully she wondered if her whole life were not breaking. The something implacable which she had always felt in being a woman, held her like a matrix of iron now. Her life story had been a classic of suffering, yet she had never suffered before.

A letter from him, (frequently twice a day, they came) and it was her instant impulse to answer, almost as if he had spoken. And when she wrote—all the woman’s life of her had to be cut from it—cut again and again—until was left only what another might say.... She was forced to learn the terrible process of elimination which only the greater artists realize, and which they learn only through years of travail—that selection of the naked absolute, according to their vision, all the senses chiseled away. His work, his health, especially the clear-seeing that came from purifying of the body, the detachment of his thoughts from physical emotions—of these, which were clear to her as the impulses of instinct—she allowed herself to write. But the woman’s heart of flesh, which had fasted so long for love, so often found its way to her pages, and forced them to be done again.... Certain of his paragraphs dismayed her, as:

“Does it astonish you,” he asked, almost joyously, “when I say there is something about Betty Berry beyond question—such a luxurious sense of truth?... I feel your silences and your listenings between every sentence. It is not what you say, though in words you seem to know what I am to-day, and what I shall be to-morrow—but all about the words, are you—those perfect hesitations, the things which I seemed to know at first, but could not express. They were much too fine for a medium of expression which knew only wars, horses, and the reporting of words and deeds of men.... Why, the best thing in my heart is its trust for you, Betty Berry. Looking back upon our hours together, I can see now that all the misunderstandings were mine and all the truth yours. When it seems to me that we should be together, and the memories come piling back—those perfect hours—I say, because of this trust, ‘Though it is not as I would have it, her way is better. And I know I shall come to see it, because she cannot be wrong.’”

So she could not hide her heart from him, even though she put down what seemed to her unworthiness and evasion, and decided through actual brain-process what was best to say. A new conduct of life was not carrying Betty Berry up into the coolness beyond the senses. Fasting would never bring that to her. Fasting of the body was so simple compared to the fasting of the heart which had been her whole life. Nor could she ever rise long from the sense of the serpent in woman which she had realized from the words of his Guardian—not a serpent to the usual man, but to the man who was destined to love the many instead of one.... She loved him as a woman loves—the boy, the lover, the man of him—the kisses, the whispers, the arms of strength, the rapture of nearness....

He must have been close to the spirit of that night at the theatre, when this was written:

“The letter to-day, with the plaintive note in it, has brought you even closer. I never think of you as one who can be tried seriously; always as one finished, with infinite patience, and no regard at all for the encompassing common. Of course, I know differently, know that you must suffer, you who are so keenly and exquisitely animate—but you have an un-American poise.... You played amazingly. I loved that at once. There was a gleam about it. Betty Berry’s gleaming. I faced you from the wings that night. I wanted to come up behind you. You were all music.... But I love even better the instrument of emotions you have become. That must be what music is for—to sensitize one’s life, to make it more and more responsive....”

Then in a different vein:

“... The long forenoons, wherein we grow.... Yes, I knew you were a tree-lover; that the sound of running water was dear to you ... and the things you dream of ... work and play and forest scents and the wind in the branches.... Sometimes it seems to me—is it a saying of lovers?—that we should be boy and girl together.... Why, I’ve only just now learned to be a boy. There was so much of crudity and desire and anguish-to-do-greatly-at-any-cost—until just a little ago. But I’ve never had a boyhood that could have known you. I wasn’t ready for such loveliness in the beginning.... I’ve wanted terribly to go to you, but that is put away for the time.”

These lines wrung her heart. “Oh, no,” she cried, “you have not learned how to become a boy. There was never a time you were not ready—until now! You are becoming a man—and the little girl—oh, she is a little girl in her heart....”

Everything his Guardian had promised was coming to be. He was changing into a man. That would take him from her at the last—even letters, this torrent of his thoughts of life and work. She saw the first process of it—as the Play grasped him finally—the old tragedy of a man turning from a woman to his work....

She built the play from the flying sparks.... He was thronged with illusions of production. How badly he had done it before, he said, and how perfect had proved the necessity to wait, and to do it a second time.... Even the most unimaginative audience must build the great battle picture from the headquarters scene; then the trampled arena of the Ploughman, deep in the hollow of that valley, and his coming forth through the millet....

“... It’s so simple,” he wrote in fierce haste. “You see, I remember how hard it was for me to grasp that first night, when Fallows brought in the story to the Russian headquarters.... I have remembered that. I have made it so that I could see it then. And I was woven in and fibred over with coarseness, from months of life in Liaoyang and from the day’s hideous brutality. I have measured my slowness and written to quicken such slowness as that. The mystery is, it is not spoiled by such clearness. It is better—it never lets you alone. It won’t let you lie to yourself. You can’t be the same after reading it.... And it goes after the deepest down man.... Every line is involved in action.

“The third act—sometime we’ll see it together—how the main character leaves the field and goes out in search of the Ploughman’s hut, across Asia and Europe; how he reaches there—the old father and mother, the six children, the one little boy, who has the particular answer for the man’s lonely love—the mother of the six, common, silent, angular, her skirt hanging square, as Duke put it—but she is big enough for every one to get into her heart. You will see the fear of her man’s death, which the stranger’s presence brings to her, though he leaves it to Russia to inform the family. You will see the beautiful mystery of compassion that he brings, too. That’s the whole shine of the piece. And it came from the ministry of pain.

... “I’m not praising my Play—it isn’t. It’s Duke’s almost every word of it—every thought, the work of Duke’s disciple. I have merely felt it all and made it clear—clear. You see it all. Many thousands must see, and see what the name means. It’s the most wonderful word in the world to me, Compassion.”

Then came the break for a day, and the flash that his work on the Play was finished. “The cabin will be harder for me now. The new work is only a dream so far—and this goes to Markheim to-day.... It is very queer that I should go back to Markheim, but somehow I want to pick up that failure. There are other reasons.... I shall tell him that he can have five days. I’m just getting ready to go across the River.... My health was almost never better. I’m not tired. The work has seemed to replenish me, as your letters do. But that last letter—yesterday’s—it seems to come from behind a screen, where other voices were—the loved tones troubled and crowded out by others. It left me restless and more than ever longing to see you. It is as if there were centuries all unintelligible, to be made clear only by being with you. The world and the other voices drown yours——”

She felt the instinct of centuries to hold out her arms to him—arms of the woman, after man’s task in the world—home at evening with the prize of the hunt and battle. The world for the day, the woman for the night—that is man’s way. She seemed to know it now from past eternity. And for woman—day and night the man of her thoughts.... She was afraid of her every written word now. Her heart answered every thrill of his; the murmuring and wrestling resistance of his against the miles, was hers ten-fold.... The days of the fasting had not been like this, nor the two weeks that followed in which he had completed the play.... April had come. She was ill. Her music was neglected altogether. Her friend, Helen Quiston, never faltered in her conception of the beauty and the mystery of the separation. With all her will, Helen sustained her against the relinquishing of the lofty ideal of sacrifice, and tried to distract her impassioned turning to the east.... She would hold to the death; Betty Berry knew this.

“It’s harder now that the play is done,” Betty repeated. “He can’t be driven instantly to work again. I can’t lie to him. He doesn’t fight me—he thinks I’m right—that’s the unspeakable part of it. There is nothing for me to write about except his work....”

And Helen Quiston found her, a half-hour afterward, staring out of the window, exactly as she had left—her hands in her lap exactly the same.... Betty Berry was thinking unutterable things, having to do with adorable meetings in the theatre-wings—of wonderful night journeys, all night talking—of waiting in a little room, and at the head of the stairs. There was an invariable coming back to the first kiss in the wings of the theatre.

“We were real—we were true to each other that night—true as little children. We needed no words,” this was her secret story.... “Oh, I waited so long for him ... and we could have gone out together and served in a little way. But they would not let us alone.”

He had been across to New York.... The second morning after the play was finished, she received a letter with a rather indescribable ending. He told her of fears and strangeness, of intolerable longing for something to happen that would bring them together.... The rest is here:

“I’m a bit excited by the thought that just came to me. And another, but I won’t tell you yet, for fear.... I don’t quite understand myself. I seem afraid. I think I would ask more of myself than I would of another man just now. There seem all about me invisible restraints. Something deep within recognizes the greatness and finality of your meaning to me.... It is true, you do not leave the strength to me. Did you ever—? No, I won’t ask that.... This letter isn’t kind to you—unsettling, strange, full of an intensity to see and be with you....”

Moments afterwards, as she was standing at the piano—the letter trailing from her hand—the telephone in the inner room startled her like a human cry.

20

IT was Morning. She did not remember his words nor her answers—only that she had told him he might come up-town to her. He had dropped the receiver then, as if it burned him.

So, it was a matter of minutes. Nothing was ready. Least of all, was she ready. She could hardly stand. She had forgotten at first, and it had required courage, of late, to look in the mirror. She would have given up, before what she saw now, but a robin was singing in the foliage by the rear windows. She went out to open the studio door into the hall, then retired to the inner room again.... “He can heal you, and bring back the music,” her heart whispered, but her mind cowered before herself, and this mate of herself, Helen Quiston, and before his Guardian.... She heard his step on the stair ... called to him to wait in the studio. He was pacing to and fro.

Morning felt the light resistance in her arms. His kiss fell upon her cheek. He held her at arm’s length, looking into her face.

She laughed, repeating that she was not ill.... She was always thinner in summer, she said. In her withholding, there was destructiveness for the zeal he had brought; and that which she set herself resolutely to impart—the sense of their separateness—found its lodgment in his nature. It would always be there now, she thought; it would augment, like ice about a spring in early winter, until the frost sealed the running altogether. The lover was stayed, though his mind would not yet believe.

“Is it really possible,” he said, sitting before her restlessly, “that I am here in your house, and that I can stay, and talk with you, and see you and hear you play? I have thought about it so much that it’s hard to realize.”

“It is quite what a lover would say,” she thought.... She had to watch her words. Her heart went out to him, but her mind remembered the work to do.... Self-consciousness, and a weighing of words—how horrible between them!

“And what made you come? I had just read your letter, when the telephone rang——”

“I shouldn’t have sent that letter,” he answered. “I must have sent it because of the things I thought, and didn’t write.... The night before, I had come home to the cabin—after Markheim and the city. It was dreadful—with the work gone. Yesterday was too much for me—the Spring day—alone—not ready to begin again—you here.... I got to thinking about you so fast—and the shame of it, for us to be apart—that I couldn’t endure it.... I thought of going to you in a month—in a week; and then when the letter was mailed, I thought of it being with you this morning.... A thousand things poured into my mind. It seemed finally as if everything was wrong between us; as if I had already remained too long from you. It was like fighting devils.... And then I tried to beat the letter to you, but it got here by an earlier train this morning.”

He was like a child to her, telling about something that had frightened him.

Their silences were strained. His eyes had a sleepless look. Betty saw it working upon him—the repulsion that had gone from her. She wished she might go to his arms and die. It suddenly came over her—the uselessness of it all—the uselessness of being a woman, of waiting, of final comprehension—all for this rending.... Yet she saw what would happen if she followed her heart. He would take her. There would be a radiant season, for the lover within him was not less because his work was for other men. But there was also within him (his Guardian had made her believe it) her rival, a solitary stranger come to the world for service, who would not delay long to show him how he had betrayed his real work, how he had caged his greater self, his splendid pinions useless.... Morning would hear the world calling for work he could not do.

“There seem all about me invisible restraints.”

This from the letter of the morning—alone remained with her. It expressed it all. The sentence uprose in her mind. It was more dominant to her than if a father had forbade his coming, or even if by his coming another was violated.

All the forbiddings that Society can bring against desire are but symbols compared to the invisible restraints of a full man’s nature. Men who are held by symbols, ruled by exterior voices and fears, are not finished enough to be a law unto themselves.... It wasn’t the terror of these thoughts, but tenderness in answer to his hurried tumble of explanation regarding his coming, that had filled Betty’s eyes. He caught the sparkle of a tear in profile, and came to her.

“It’s like creating—visibly, without hands, but with thoughts—creating a masterpiece—to see the tears come like that——”

He drew a chair to the bench where she sat, her back to the piano. Helen Quiston was away, as usual, for the forenoon.

“It is creating—another world,” she answered steadily.

He stared at her. She saw again that sleepless look.

“You’ve been a whole month on a lofty ridge—just think of it—fasting and pure expression of self—spiritual self-revelation——”

It seemed to him there was a suggestion in what she said for the new book.

“And now you are down in the meadows again,” she finished.

“The earth-sweet meadows—with you.”

He could not know what the words meant to her; that there was no quarter in them for her. She did not belong to his ascents.

“Somehow I always think of you as belonging best to the evenings, the hushed earth, the sweetness of the rest-time. You make me remember what to do, and how to do it well. Why, just now you made me see clearly for a second what I must do next. You make me love people better—when I am close to you.”

She was not to be carried away by these givings which would have made many a woman content.

“Remember, I have had your letters every day. You are very dear to me up there. You have been down in the meadows—and in the caverns—much. You are not ready to return—even for the evenings. You stand now for austere purity—for plain, ancient, mother’s knee ideals. You must not delude yourself. A man must be apart in order to see. You did not begin really to live—until you drew apart.”

He felt her stripping his heart. His face lifted in agony, and his eyes caught the picture on the wall of the meeting of Beatrice and Dante. The Florentine woman seemed not to touch the earth; the poet was awed, mystic in the fusion of their united powers. It was fateful that Morning saw the picture at this instant.

“Look,” he said, “what the world has from the meeting of that man and woman—an immortal poem!”

“But Beatrice passed on——”

“She became identified with his greater power, Betty. She was one with it——”

“By passing on!”

He arose and lifted her to her feet, and his arms did not relinquish her.

“And you mean that you would pass on?... You must not. You must not. We would both be broken and bewildered. I love you. I have come to you. I want to be near—and work with you. I know you all, and shall love you always. I have come to you, and I must stay—or you must come with me——”

Her resistance was broken for the moment. An icy burden fell from her. She clung to him, and tears helped her.

They were together again in the studio that afternoon. Betty Berry was making tea, her strength renewed. Helen Quiston had come and gone. Morning had been away for an hour.

“Strange man,” she said, “let us reason together.... You are working now for men. That is right, but when you are full of power, when you come really into the finished man you are to be, and all these hard years have healed beyond the last ache—you will work for women. Does it sound strange from me, that the inspiration of the world to-day is with the women? Why, it seems to me that men are caught in the very science of cruelty. And then, the women of to-day represent the men of the future. When one of the preparers of the way brings his gospel to women, he kindles the inspiration of the next generation. But this fire can only come from the solitary heights—never from the earth-sweet meadows——”

He shook his head.

“The men who have done the most beautiful verses and stories about children—have had no children of their own. A man cannot be the father of his country and the father of a house. The man who must do the greatest work for women must hunger for the vision of Woman, and not be yoked with one.... It is so clear. It is always so.”

“All that you say makes me love you more, Betty——”

“Don’t, dear. Don’t make it harder for me.... It is not I that thrills you. It is my speaking of your work that fills your heart with gladness—the things you feel to do——”

“They are from you——”

“Don’t say that. It is not true.”

“But I never saw so clearly——”

“Then go away with the vision. Oh, John Morning, you cannot listen to yourself—with a woman in the room!”

He lifted his shoulders, drawing her face to his. “I was going to say, you are my wings,” he whispered. “But that is not it. You are my fountain. I would come to you and drink——”

“But not remain——”

“I love your thoughts, Betty, your eyes and lips——”

“Because you are athirst——”

“I shall always be athirst!”

“That is not nature.”

He shuddered.

“Do men, however athirst—remain at the oases? Men of strength—would they not long to go? Would they not remember the far cities and the long, blinding ways of the sun?”

“But you could go with me—” he exclaimed.

“That is not nature!”

He was the weaker. “But you have gone alone to the far cities, and the long, blinding ways of the sun——”

“Yes, alone. But with you—a time would come when I could not. We are man and woman. There would be little children. I would stay—and you could not leave them.... Oh, they are not for you, dear. They would weaken your courage. You would love them. At the end of the day, you would want them, and the mother again.... The far cities would not hear you; the long, blinding ways of the sun would know you no more——”

“Betty,” he whispered passionately, “how wonderfully sweet that would be!”

“Yes ... to the mother ... but you—I can see it in your eyes. You would remember Nineveh, that great city....”

Darkness was about them.

“Betty Berry—you would rather I wouldn’t take the train to you again—not even when it seems I cannot stay longer away?”

She did not answer.

“Betty——”

“Yes....”

She left him and crossed to the far window.

“Would you not have me come to you again—at all?”

She could not hold the sentence, and her answer. The room was terrible. It seemed filled with presences that suffocated her—that cared nothing for her. All day they had inspired her to speak and answer—and now they wanted her death. She moved to the ’cello. Her hands fluttered along the strings—old, familiar ways—but making hardly a sound.... If she did not soon speak, he would come to her. She would fail again—the touch of him, and she would fail.

“Betty, is there never to be—the fountain at evening?”

“You know—you know—” she cried out. Words stuck after that. She had not a thought to drive them.

He arose.

“Don’t,” she implored. “Don’t come to me! I cannot bear it.”

... It was his final rebellion.

“I am not a preparer of the way. I have not a message. I am sick of the thought. I am just a man—and I love you!”

At last she made her stand, and on a different position. “I could not love you—if that were true.”

She heard him speak, but not the words. She heard the crackling and whirring of flames. He did not cross the room.... She had risen, her arms groping toward him. She felt him approach, and the flames were farther.... She must not speak of flames.

“You will go away soon—won’t you?” she whispered, as he took her.

“Yes, to-night——”

“Yes—to-night,” she repeated.

She was lying upon the couch in the studio, and his chair was beside her.

“No, don’t light anything—no light!... It is just an hour.... I could not think of food until you go. But you may bring me a drink of water. On the way to the train, you can have your supper.... I will play—play in the dark, and think of you—as you go——”

She talked evenly, a pause between sentences. There was a tensity in the formation of words, for the whirring and crackling distracted, dismayed her. Her heart was breaking. This she knew. When it was finished, he would be free.... The flames were louder and nearer, as he left for the drink of water. She called to him to light a match, if he wished, in the other room.... He was in her room. She knew each step, just where. He was there. It was as if he were finally materialized from her thoughts in the night, her dreaming and writing to him. His hand touched her dresser. She heard the running water ... and then it was all red and rending and breathless, until she felt the water to her lips. Always, as he came near, the flames receded.

And out of all the chaos, the figure of the craftsman had returned to him. The world had revealed itself to him as never before in the passage of time. She had given him her very spirit that day, and the strength of all her volition from the month of brooding upon the conception of his Guardian. Literally on that day the new Book was conceived, as many a man’s valorous work has begun to be, in a woman’s house—her blood and spirit, its bounty.

“This is a holy place to me, this room,” he said, the agonies of silence broken. “I can feel the white floods of spirit that drive the world.”

She did not need to answer. She held fast to herself, lest something betray her. Darkness was salvation. All that his Guardian had asked was in her work. John Morning told it off, sentence by sentence. It took her life, but he must not know. She thought she would die immediately after he was gone—but, strangely, now the suffering was abated.... She was helping.... Was not that the meaning of life—to give, to help, to love?... Someone had said so.

He lifted her, carried her in his arms, talked and praised her.

“There’s something deathlessly bright about you, Betty Berry!” he whispered. “I am going—but we are one! Don’t you feel it? You are loving the world from my heart!”

To the door, but not to the light, she walked with him.... Up the stairs he strode a last time to take her in his arms.

“We are one—a world-loving one—remember that!”

She did not know why, but as he kissed her—she thought of the pitcher broken at the fountain.

It was all strange light and singing flame.... She was lost in the hall. She laughed strangely.... She must play him on his way.... Someone helped her through the raining light—until she could feel the strings.