“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.