“Tell him——”
When Morning stopped telling Noyes and Field what to tell Nevin for him, it was time to go for the ferry. The Polander slipped out of Morning’s mind like a dream—smoke, voices, glasses, indecent praise. Noyes reached across the bar for a package. That last seemed quite as important as anything.
They left him at the ferry—these men of the Western States—servants of his action and his friends.... And somewhere in the city was little Nevin, who had done his work and who had not come for his pay; somewhere in the city, but apart from voices and adulation—the man who had forgotten himself in telling the story of how the news was brought in.... It was all desperately unfinished. It hurt him every moment.
In the Pullman berth he opened the package Noyes had given him; the porter brought a glass. Afterward, he lay in the darkness. It was very still when he had become accustomed to the wheels. The going always had soothed him. In the still train and the peace of the road, he heard at last that ringing again at the new door of his life, and opened to Betty Berry, who had promised to come.
BOOK II.
THE HILL-CABIN
1
Morning sat in the yielding leather of the Boabdil library, quite as if he had passed his youth in the midst of people who talk of doing things. Liaoyang had been written, even the abandoned impediments of retreat covered. It had all come to pass quite according to the early ideas of Noyes and Field. John Morning was Liaoyang in America. His book Liaoyang, magazine and newspaper articles gathered together, was established as important authority in encyclopædic and other reference books. The most captious must grant that living man can do no more than this.
Morning had dined with the president. One after another he had made every magazine of note, and much money. He had done his own story of the journey, which proved more of a comment maker than the battle description; and his article on the deck passages of the Chinese coolies will always be an incentive to foreign missions. New York had waited upon him, had exploited him, given him bewildering payments, and called him everything, even Hugoesque and Tolstoianic. It was very hard for Morning to retain the conviction that there wasn’t ten pages of all this copy that ranked in sheer value with the ten pages of Fallows’ Ploughman. He didn’t for awhile.
Liaoyang was on in full magazine blast in America, while Mukden and Sha River were being fought across the world. At this time Morning spent an hour a day, as war-expert for a particularly incessant daily newspaper of New York. So all people knew what the campaign was about, and what certain generals might do, from past grooves of their wearing in history. Also German gentlemen of military pasts wrote letters disputing the prophecies. Morning had certainly arrived.
The condition or place of arrival was slippery. The peace of Portsmouth had been protocoled.... Liaoyang, deep in the valley of desuetude, was without even the interest of perspective. The name, Liaoyang, made the mind of the world lame.... Even in the heat of arrival, the thing had puzzled him. Money ceased to gladden him after a few mails; did not spare him from the nearest irritation. Plainly he was quite the same John Morning after appearing in the great magazines as before; and the people whom he had interested were mainly of the same sort that had come forward in the Polander bar.