Morning followed the large, slow knees. It was less that the knees wobbled—rather the frailty of the hangings and pinnings. They did the three high flights and began again, finally drawing up in a broad roof-room that smelled of new harness and overlooking an especially hard-packed part of Tokyo, toward the Ginza. Fallows lit the fire that was ready in the grate and sprawled wearily.
“Where did you study religion, Morning?”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s one way to get it.”
The sound of his own laugh came to Morning’s ears and hurt him. Fallows’ eyes were shut. There was no trace of a smile around the wan mouth.
“You’ll likely be more religious before you’re done. I mean many things by being religious—a man’s inability to lie to himself for one; a passion for the man who’s down—that’s another.... I’ve read your stuff. It’s full of religion——”
Now it seemed to Morning as if he had just entered a fascinating wilderness; apart from this, he saw something about the worn, distressed mouth of Fallows that made him think of himself last night. There was one more effect from this first brush. Something happened in Morning’s mind with that sentence about the inability to lie to one’s self. It was like a shot in the midst of a flock of quails. A pair of birds was down, but the rest of the flock was off and away, like the fragments of an explosive.
“I read some of your stuff about the Filipino woman—‘woman of the river-banks,’ you called her. Another time you looked into a nipa-shack where an old man was dying of beri-beri, and an old woman sat at bay at the door——”
These brought back the pictures to Morning, and the dimension behind the actual light and shade and matter. The healing, too, was that someone had seen his work, and seen from it all that he saw,—the artist’s true aliment, which praise of the many cannot furnish. It gave him heart like an answer to prayer, because he had been very needful.
“You must have come up hard. Did you, boy?” Fallows asked after a moment.