Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

Then in a different vein:

“... The long forenoons, wherein we grow.... Yes, I knew you were a tree-lover; that the sound of running water was dear to you ... and the things you dream of ... work and play and forest scents and the wind in the branches.... Sometimes it seems to me—is it a saying of lovers?—that we should be boy and girl together.... Why, I’ve only just now learned to be a boy. There was so much of crudity and desire and anguish-to-do-greatly-at-any-cost—until just a little ago. But I’ve never had a boyhood that could have known you. I wasn’t ready for such loveliness in the beginning.... I’ve wanted terribly to go to you, but that is put away for the time.”

These lines wrung her heart. “Oh, no,” she cried, “you have not learned how to become a boy. There was never a time you were not ready—until now! You are becoming a man—and the little girl—oh, she is a little girl in her heart....”

Everything his Guardian had promised was coming to be. He was changing into a man. That would take him from her at the last—even letters, this torrent of his thoughts of life and work. She saw the first process of it—as the Play grasped him finally—the old tragedy of a man turning from a woman to his work....

She built the play from the flying sparks.... He was thronged with illusions of production. How badly he had done it before, he said, and how perfect had proved the necessity to wait, and to do it a second time.... Even the most unimaginative audience must build the great battle picture from the headquarters scene; then the trampled arena of the Ploughman, deep in the hollow of that valley, and his coming forth through the millet....

“... It’s so simple,” he wrote in fierce haste. “You see, I remember how hard it was for me to grasp that first night, when Fallows brought in the story to the Russian headquarters.... I have remembered that. I have made it so that I could see it then. And I was woven in and fibred over with coarseness, from months of life in Liaoyang and from the day’s hideous brutality. I have measured my slowness and written to quicken such slowness as that. The mystery is, it is not spoiled by such clearness. It is better—it never lets you alone. It won’t let you lie to yourself. You can’t be the same after reading it.... And it goes after the deepest down man.... Every line is involved in action.

“The third act—sometime we’ll see it together—how the main character leaves the field and goes out in search of the Ploughman’s hut, across Asia and Europe; how he reaches there—the old father and mother, the six children, the one little boy, who has the particular answer for the man’s lonely love—the mother of the six, common, silent, angular, her skirt hanging square, as Duke put it—but she is big enough for every one to get into her heart. You will see the fear of her man’s death, which the stranger’s presence brings to her, though he leaves it to Russia to inform the family. You will see the beautiful mystery of compassion that he brings, too. That’s the whole shine of the piece. And it came from the ministry of pain.

... “I’m not praising my Play—it isn’t. It’s Duke’s almost every word of it—every thought, the work of Duke’s disciple. I have merely felt it all and made it clear—clear. You see it all. Many thousands must see, and see what the name means. It’s the most wonderful word in the world to me, Compassion.”

Then came the break for a day, and the flash that his work on the Play was finished. “The cabin will be harder for me now. The new work is only a dream so far—and this goes to Markheim to-day.... It is very queer that I should go back to Markheim, but somehow I want to pick up that failure. There are other reasons.... I shall tell him that he can have five days. I’m just getting ready to go across the River.... My health was almost never better. I’m not tired. The work has seemed to replenish me, as your letters do. But that last letter—yesterday’s—it seems to come from behind a screen, where other voices were—the loved tones troubled and crowded out by others. It left me restless and more than ever longing to see you. It is as if there were centuries all unintelligible, to be made clear only by being with you. The world and the other voices drown yours——”

She felt the instinct of centuries to hold out her arms to him—arms of the woman, after man’s task in the world—home at evening with the prize of the hunt and battle. The world for the day, the woman for the night—that is man’s way. She seemed to know it now from past eternity. And for woman—day and night the man of her thoughts.... She was afraid of her every written word now. Her heart answered every thrill of his; the murmuring and wrestling resistance of his against the miles, was hers ten-fold.... The days of the fasting had not been like this, nor the two weeks that followed in which he had completed the play.... April had come. She was ill. Her music was neglected altogether. Her friend, Helen Quiston, never faltered in her conception of the beauty and the mystery of the separation. With all her will, Helen sustained her against the relinquishing of the lofty ideal of sacrifice, and tried to distract her impassioned turning to the east.... She would hold to the death; Betty Berry knew this.