Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

The bath-boy, wet from steam, with only a loin-cloth about him, followed Morning to his room. The American was not allowed to bathe alone; would not have been allowed to undress himself, had he not insisted upon the privilege. He sat in a tub, three walls of which were wood and the fourth of iron. Against the outside of the latter, burned a furious fire of charcoal. For the benefits of this bath, he was begged to make no haste and to occupy his mind with matters of the higher life. A moment or two before the water reached a boiling-point, Morning was allowed to escape. Exceeding pressure of business was occasionally accepted as precluding the chance of a bath for one day, but to miss two days in succession, without proving that he had bathed elsewhere, meant a loss of respect, and a start of household whispering.

He was sick to get back to work, turned to it for restoration and forgetfulness, as a man to a drug. Moreover, there was need, for he was on space. Two or three papers in the Mid-west used what he could write, though he had no holding contracts, and had left Chicago with such haste to catch a steamer, that there had been no chance to make an arrangement, whereby these papers might have used the same story simultaneously. And then, there had been a delay of nearly a day in Vancouver. This time in Chicago would have been enough for the establishment of a central office and an agent on percentage, who could have enlarged his market without limit, and cut down his work to one letter a day. Instead, he did the same story now, from three different angles. It had been this way before. With war in the air, Morning was unable to breathe at home. Off he went, without a return ticket—tourist cars and dingy second-class steamer passage—but with a strange confidence in his power to write irresistibly. It was like a mark—this faith of his in the ability to appeal.

All his life he had lived second-class. To-night he wondered if it would always be so; if there was not something in the face of John Morning, something that others saw at once, which placed him instantly among culls and seconds in the mysterious adjustments of the world. They had made him feel so at the Imperial, before this episode. Men who didn’t write ten lines a day were there on big incomes; and others, little older than he, with only two or three fingers of his ability, on a safe salary and flexible expense account.

The day was brought back to him again and again. The cut of Corydon Tait had crippled him. He felt it now crawling swiftly along the nerves of his limbs until it reached his brain, and remaining there coldly like undigested matter in a sick body. He felt his face queerly. There was neither fat nor flabbiness upon it. He could feel the bone. His fingers brushed his mouth, and a sort of burn came to him. It was the finest thing about John Morning. There was a bit of poetry about it, a touch of tenderness, finer than strength. Passion was in the mouth, intensity without intentness, not a trace of the boarish, nor bovine. It is true you often see the ruin of such a mouth in quiet places where those of drugs and drinks are served; but you see as well the finished picture upon the faces of those men lit with world’s service, who have heard the voice of the human spirit, and are loved by the race, because they have forgotten how to love themselves.

Morning knew it only as his weakness. It was the symbol to-night of his failure.... Those at the Imperial had seen it; they had dared to deny him because of it. The greatest among the war-men were thin-lipped and sinewy-jawed—the soldier face.... He knew much about war; none had campaigned more joyously than he. In the midst of peril, courage seemed altogether obvious and easy; his fearlessness was too natural for him to be surprised at it, though it surprised others....

The typewriter buzzed on. Wearily he caught up the trend, but the drive was gone, although there was hardly a lull in the registering of the keys for two-thirds of a page. Always before, this sort of hackwork had been done with a dream of the field ahead. His forces fused. He had been denied a column. His hand brushed across his face and John Morning was ashamed—ashamed of his poverty, of his work, of his own nature, which made a tragedy of the cut of Corydon Tait; ashamed of the heat in his veins from the stimulants he had drunk; ashamed because he had not instantly demanded his rights at the Imperial; ashamed of the mess of a man he was, a fool of his volition and vitality, commonness stamped on his every feature.

Morning’s affinity for alcohol was peculiar. He worked with it successfully. So resilient was his health that he was usually fresh in the morning. Often he had finished a long evening of work on pretty good terms with himself, the later pages of copy coming in a cloud of speed.... The copy-producing seemed to use up the whipping spirit, rather than himself; at least, he treasured this illusion. The first bottles of rice-beer lasted the longest.... He recalled now that the maid-servants had twice heated sake for him at supper; as for the rice-beer he had been more than ever thirsty to-night. He glanced into the corner where the bottles were and a sense of uncleanness came over him—as if his body were flowing with the slow spirit, like a sea-marsh at high tide.

... He heard the shafts of a rickshaw grate upon the gravel outside. Amoya had come; it was midnight. He opened the papered lattice. The runner was bowing by his cart, holding his broad hat with both hands. Morning covered his machine, put fresh charcoal in the brazier, caught up his hat and overcoat, and shuffled down the stairway, holding his slippers on with his toes. The door-boy gave him his shoes and opened the way to the street. Morning greeted Amoya with a pat on the shoulder, and climbed into the cart.

“Yoshuwara?” the runner asked.

“No, you shameless ruffian!”