Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

He slept lightly, and was on the verge again and again, almost nightly, in fact, of surprising his own greater activity that does not sleep. He often brought back just the murmur of these larger doings; and on the borderlands he sometimes felt himself in the throb of that larger consciousness which moves about its meditations and voyagings, saying to the body, “Sleep on.” It was this larger consciousness that used him as he used the typewriter, when he was writing at his best and his listening was pure.... He had been held so long to the ruck that he would never forget the parlance of the people—and not fall to writing for visionaries.

... One night he dreamed he went to Betty Berry.... He was ascending the stairs to her. She seemed smaller, frailer. Though he was a step or two down, his eyes met hers equally. She was lovelier than anything he had ever known or conceived in woman. Her smile was so wistful and sweet and compassionate—that the hush and fervor of it seemed everywhere in the world. There was a shyness in her lips and in the turn of her head. Some soft single garment was about her—as if she had come from a fountain in the evening.... And suddenly there was a great tumult within him. He was lost in the battle of two selves—the man who loved and destroyed, and the man who loved and sustained.

The greater love only asked her there—loved her there, exquisite, apart, found in her a theme for infinite contemplation, as she stood smiling.... The other was the love of David, when he looked across the house-tops at Bathsheba, bathing, and made her a widow to mother Solomon. This human love was strong in the dream, for he caught her in his arms, and kissed, and would not let her go, until her voice at last reached his understanding.

“Oh, why did you spoil it all? Oh, why—when I thought it was safe to come?”

He had no words, but her message was not quite ended:

“I should have come to you as before—and not this way—but you seemed so strong and so pure.... It is my fault—all my fault.”

She was Betty Berry—but lovelier than all the earth—the spirit of all his ideals in woman. The marvelous thing about it was that he knew after the dream that this was the Betty Berry that would live in spite of anything that could happen to the Betty Berry in the world. He knew that she waited for him—for the greater lover, John Morning, whose love did not destroy, but sustained.... She who regarded him in “the hush of expectancy” from the distance of a night’s journey, and he who labored here stoutly in the work of the world, were but names and symbols of the real creatures above the illusion of time.... So he came to love death—not with eagerness, but as an ideal consummation. Such a result were impossible had he not faced death as an empty darkness first, and overcome the fear of it.

These many preparations for real life on earth in the flesh he was to put in his book—not his adventures, but the fruits of them—how he had reached to-day, and its decent polarity in service. He had been hurled like a top into the midst of men. After the seething of wild energy and the wobblings, he had risen to a certain singing and aspiring rhythm—the whir of harmony. He told the story in order, day by day. Though it was done with the I’s, there was no self-exploitation. John Morning was merely the test-tube, containing from time to time different compounds of experience. And he did it plainly, plainly, plainly, as is the writer’s business.

As he watched for Jethro, one morning early in June, he perceived a second figure in the old rig. At the box, the stranger got out and followed Jethro’s arm, directed up the hill toward the cabin, disappeared for a moment in the swail-thicket by the fence, and presently began the ascent, bringing Morning’s papers and letters.... The stranger was tall and tanned, wore a wide hat and approached with a slim ease of movement. Morning knew he had seen him before, but could not remember until the voice called:

“Hullo—that you, John Morning?”