6
Second class, that night, on the Pacific liner Manchuria, forward among the rough wooden bunks, eating from tin-plates.... It had been Morning’s suggestion. Fallows had accepted it laughingly, but as a good omen.
“Two can travel cheaply as one,” he said. “I’m quite as comfortable as usual.”
Morning realized that his friend was not comfortable at best. He was too well himself, too ambitious, quite to realize the other’s illness. Morning found a quality of understanding that he had expected vaguely to find sometime from some girl, but he could not return the gift in kind, nor right sympathy for the big man’s weakness. Fallow’s didn’t appear to expect it.
They left the Manchuria at Nagasaki, after the Inland Sea passage, found a small ship for Tientsin direct; also a leftover winter storm on the Yellow Sea. Morning, at work, typewriter on his knees, looked up one night as they neared the mouth of the Pei-ho. An oil-lamp swung above them smokily; the tired ship still creaked and wallowed in the gale. Fallows has been regarding him thoughtfully from time to time.
“You keep bolstering me up, Duke, and I don’t seem to help you any,” Morning said. “Night and day, I worry you with the drum of this machine—when you’re too sick to work; and here you are traveling like a tramp for me. I’m used to it, but it makes you worse. You staked me and made possible a bit of real work this campaign—why won’t you let me do some stuff for you?”
“Don’t you worry about what I’ve done—that’s particularly my affair. Call it a gamble. Perhaps I chose you as a man chooses his place to build a house....”
Morning wondered at times if the other was not half dead with longing for a woman.... In the fifteen years which separated the two men in age lay all the difference between a soldier and an artist. Morning had to grant finally that the Californian had no abiding interest in the war they were out to cover; and this was so foreign that the rift could not be bridged entirely.
“War—why, I love the thought!” Fallows exclaimed. “The fight’s the thing—but this isn’t it. This is just a big butchery of the blind. The Japanese aren’t sweet in this passion. We won’t see the real Russia out here in Asia. Real Russia is against all this looting and lusting. Real Russia is at home singing, writing, giving itself to be hanged. Real Russia is glad to die for a dream. This soldier Russia isn’t ready to die. Just a stir in the old torpor of decadence—this Russia we’re going to. You’ll see it—its stench rising.... I want the other war. I want to live to fight in the other war, when the under-dog of this world—the under-dog of Russia and England and America, runs no more, cowers no more—but stops, turns to fight to the death. I want the barricades, the children fired with the spirit, women coming down to the ruck, the girls from the factories, harlots from the slums. The women won’t stay at home in the war I mean—and you and I, John, must be there,—to die every morning——”
Yet Fallows didn’t write this. He lay on his back dreaming about it. Always the women came into his thoughts. Morning held hard to the game at hand.... Lying on his back—thus the Californian became identified in his mind. And strange berths they found, none stranger than the one at last in the unspeakable Chinese hotel at New Chwang. Morning remembered the date—4/4/’04—for he put it down in the black notebook, after smashing a centipede on the wall with it. They were awakened the next morning by the passing of a brigade of Russian infantry in full song. Each looking for “good-morning” in the eyes of the other, found that and tears.