Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

He held it fast.

It had given him money, fame, and New York for a day—the opinion from Kennard that killed the first writing of Compassion—the mood to see Charley and his sister at the switch-board, which brought him to Betty Berry again.... Out of these had come all that was real and true of this hour. It had given him the slums and the leper conflict—Nevin’s cure and the fasting—the real Ploughman—the better Compassion—the cabin in which he sat, his place of Initiation. It had given him the triumph over death—the illumination of love and labor—the listening life of the soul, and the vision of its superb immortality.

He held it fast and looked hard at the little friend. The brass handle sent up a smell of verdi-gris from his hot hand.

3

This was John Morning’s splendid summer. He was up often at two or three in the morning. Thoughts and sentences of yesterday, now cleared and improved, thronged his mind, as he made coffee. He learned that a man may write the first half of a book, but be used as a mere slave of the last half. And yet, to be the instrument of a rush of life and ideas, the latter becoming every hour more coherent and effective, was a privilege to make a man sing. And to increase, at the same time, in the realization of the courage and tenderness and faith of a woman who waited; to feel the power of her in the work; to work for her; to put his love for her in the work, all the strength of her attraction—this was living the life of depth and fullness.

Times when he looked out of the doorway, and the elms were shaping against the flowery purple of daybreak, and the robin beginning thirstily—his eyes smarted with tears at the beauty of it all, the privilege of work, and the absolute rightness of the whole creation, in which a man can’t possibly lose, after he has heard his real self speak. He loved life and death in such moments, and knew there was a Betty Berry in the waiting studio, and another over the Crossing. (Had he not glimpsed her in his dream at the top of the stairway?)

So his book prospered, enfolding the common man. It had something for every man who had not come so far as he. He was of them, in every understanding among them, different only in that it was his business to write by the way. His old failures furnished the studies of distintegrating forces. Personally, he was detached from them, as his writing showed, except for an intellectual familiarity—as detached as from the worn clothing he had left here and there around the world. One by one, the constructive and destructive principles of the average man were shown divided against each other in the arena of mind—and how the friends and loves had come to the balance. Nevin was in the fabric, the little Englishman at Tongu, Fallows and the Woman—not in name, (there was no name but John Morning’s), but they were all there, lifting and laughing and drawing, as friends and loves do in the life of a man. Again and again he cried out that the peace and sweet reason of things he had found was of their bringing—that without them he would have been lost again and again by the way.

... The Summer days passed magically. Markheim was beginning to talk rehearsals. He had found the right man to play the Ploughman.... Late-September. The letters from Betty Berry were rarer, thinner. They troubled him.... One morning he watched Jethro’s rig approach—a golden morning, and the cattle were feeding down in the meadow. He had seen the picture a thousand times—the cattle on the slope—yet it was never so real to him, nor had he hungered for the face of Betty Berry as now.... Jethro stopped at his box, and he hurried down. There was a letter from her—and one from Russia, too. The first did not free his mind from sorrow—though the effort was plain to do this very thing.... The letter from Fallows filled the day:

“... I knew, John, if I sat down to write, it would set free all my longing to go back to you. So I have put it off from week to week.... From the Western States I followed our old trail to Tokyo, then via Peking, to Shanhaikwan, Koupangtse, Liaoyang.... I stopped there, and went around by the coal-fields, where the millet had been planted all over again. I talked over the battle with the Japanese. They are just as interested as ever in what the other man knows. Though the big battle seemed like another life to me, it was their immediate yesterday. They would do it all over again. The Ploughman seemed to walk with me; the rest was boyish babble.... I found Lowenkampf—white and quiet—but the woman loves him, if Russia does not. The little boy is a man-soul. That’s the story—except that he sent his love to you. The three are off to South America, and all is well.... Up in the Bosk hills, I followed the Summer. The old man is gone. He had his sausages at the last....

“I was needed, but the little farm was all right. The neighbor had done his part. There was enough for all.... How simple, one little vanity of a man such as I am, and this family has enough and to spare; food and firelight, good-will, their hope of heaven brought down to comprehension again—all for so little, John. If men only knew the joy of it—how it lasts and augments, how it sustains the man who does it—to weave a mesh of happiness for the poor. The fact is, he has to watch very carefully, or he’ll get caught in the mesh himself.