Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

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....