Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

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.