Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

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....”