Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

“No, I’m doing a play.”

... After Varce had gone, Morning thought it all out again. Varce was living a particularly unmitigated lie. Five years ago he had done some decent verse. He had a touch of the real poetic vision, and he had turned it to trade. He was using it now to catch the crowd. An especially sensational prostitution, this—one that would make the devil scratch his head.... And Varce could do without him. Liaoyang had not made the name of John Morning imperative. Moreover, he himself was living rotten. He wished he had told Varce what he thought of him and his multi-millionaire subscription.... He hadn’t; he had merely spoken of his play. The bridges were not burned behind him. He might be very glad to do a series of “pug” stories for Varce. There were good stories in these fighters—but the good stories, as he saw them, were not what Varce saw in the assignment.

It summed up that he was just beginning over again; that he must beat the game all over again in a different and larger dimension—or else quit.... He ordered a drink.... He could always see himself. That was a Morning faculty, the literary third eye. He saw himself doing a series of the fighters—saw it even to the red of the magazine covers, and the stuff of the announcements.... John Morning, the man who did fifty-mile fronts at Liaoyang, putting all his unparalleled battle color in the action of a 24-foot ring. Then the challenge to the reader: “Can you stand a descriptive force of this calibre? If you can, read the story of the great battle between Ambi Viles and Two-pill Terry in next issue.”... He would have to tell seriously before the battle description, however, how Ambi was a perfect gentleman and the sole support of his mother, an almost human English gentlewoman. It is well to be orthodox.

Somebody spoke of whiskey in the far end of the library, insisting on a certain whiskey, and old Conrad cocked up his ears out of a meaty dream.... Morning closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of a ship beneath, the drive of the cold rain on deck and the heaving of the sea. There was something almost sterile-clean about that deck-passage, compared to this.... Then he remembered again the men he had known, and the woman who came to the Armory room—and the long breath his soul took, with her coming.... Finally he saw himself years hence, as if he had quit the fight now and taken New York and Varce as they meant to use him.... He was sunk in leather, blown up like an inner tube and showing red, stalled in some club library, and forcing the world to remember Liaoyang, bringing down the encyclopædia to show his name, when extra drunk.... No, he would be hanging precariously to some porter job on Sixth avenue, trying to make the worn and tattered edges of his world believe how he had once carried the news from Liaoyang to Koupangtse....

A saddle-horse racked by on the asphalt, and turned into the park. Morning arose. There was stabbing and scalding from the unhealed wound in his side. The pain reminded him of the giants he had once known and of the woman who came to the Armory room. It had always been so; always something about him unsound, something that would not heal. He had accepted eagerly, but ever his giving had been paltry. And he had to be pulled down, out of the shine of fortune, before he remembered how great other men had been to him.

2

That night he dreamed that he had passed through death.... He was standing upon a cliff, between the Roaming Country and a valley of living earth. He did not want the spirit region; in his dream he turned his back upon it. He did not want the stars. Illusion or not, he wanted the earth. He looked down upon it through the summer night, down through the tree-tops into a valley that lay in the soft warm dusk. He watched with the passion and longing of a newly-dead mother, who hears her child crying for her, and senses the desolation of her mate.... The breath of earth came up to him through the exhaling leaves—leaves that whispered in the mist. He could have kissed the soil below for sheer love of it. He wanted the cool, damp earth in his hands, and the thick leaf-mould under his feet, and the calm wide listening of the trees.... Stars were near enough, but earth was not. He wanted to be down, down in the drip of the night. He would wait in ardor for the rain of the valley.... Looking down through the tree-tops, he sensed the earth passion, the lovely sadness of it—and desired it, even if he must die again.... There was an ache in the desire—like the ache of thirst that puts all other thoughts away, and turns the dream and the picture to running water.

He awoke, and went to his window in the dark. He saw New York and realized that he was dying for the country. His eyes smarted to tears, when he remembered rides and journeys and walks he had taken over the earth, so thoughtlessly, without knowing their boon and beauty and privilege.... While he was standing there, that which he had conceived as To-morrow, became To-day, and appeared over the rim of the opposite gorge of apartments. The first light of it sank far down into the tarry stuffiness of the pavement, but the dew that fell with the dawn-light was pure as heaven to his nostrils.

That day he crossed the river, and at the end of a car-line beyond Hackensack, walked for a half-hour. It was thus that Morning found his hill. Just a lifted corner of a broad meadow, with a mixed company of fine trees atop. He bought it before dusk. The dairyman’s farmhouse was a quarter-mile distant; the road, a hundred and fifty yards from the crest of the hill, with trees thinly intervening. The south was open to even wider fields; in the far distance to the west across the meadows, the sky was sharpened by a low ribbon of woods and hill-land. In the east was the suspended silence of the Hudson.

“I want a pump and a cabin, and possibly a shed for a horse,” he said, drinking a glass of buttermilk, at the dairyman’s door.