Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

“I don’t seem to belong at all—except that I love you,” he whispered.

“Tell me—what that means—oh, please——”

“When I think of what I am, and who I am, and what I have been—and what common things I have done in the stupidity of thinking they were good,” he explained with a rush of words: “when I think of the dozen turnings in my life, when little things said or done by another have kept me from greater shame and nothingness—oh, it doesn’t seem to me that I belong at all to such a night as this! But when I feel myself here, and see you, and how dear you are to me, how you wait for my words, and what happiness this is together—then it comes to me that I don’t belong to those other things, but only to this—that I could never be a part of those old thoughts and ways, if you were always near——”

“And I have waited a long time.... The world has said again and again, ‘He will never come,’ but something deeper of me—something deeper than plays the ’cello, kept waiting on and on. That deeper me seemed to know all the time.”

Talking and listening carried them on. John Morning had the different phases of self segregated in an astonishing way. He spoke of himself as man can only with a woman—making pictures of certain moments, as a writer does. Volumes of emotion, they burned, talking and listening, leaning upon each other’s words and thoughts. They were one, in a very deep sense of joy and replenishment. They touched for moments the plane of unity in which they looked with calm upon the parting, but the woman alone poised herself there. They left the old darkey—a blessing in his voice and smile. Such passages of the days’ journeys were always important to Betty Berry.

Morning fell often from the heights to contemplate the journey’s end and the dividing sea. In spite of his words, in spite of his belief—his giving was not of her quality of giving. His replenishment was less therefore.... They moved about the streets of Baltimore in early morning. The baggage went on to the ship. An hour remained. Sounds and passing people distracted him. The woman was fresher than when he had seen her last night, but Morning was haggard and full of needs.... She was a continual miracle, unlike anything that the world held—different in every word and nestling and intonation. Much of her was the child—yet from this naive sweetness, her mood would change to a womanhood which enfolded and completed him, so that they were as a globe together. In such instants she brought vision to his substance; mind to his brain, intuition to his logic, divination to his reason, affinity to each element—enveloping him as water an island. The touch of her hand was a kiss; and of her kiss itself, passion was but the atmosphere; there was earth below and sky above.... She took him to the state-room where she was to be, “so you will know where I am when you think of me.”... They heard the knock of heels on the deck above....

He could not think. He heard them calling for visitors to go ashore.... He thought once it was too late, and when he was really below on the wharf and she above, and he realized that the wild hope of being taken away with her, (his own will not entering, as the serpent entered Eden,) he could hardly see her for the blur—not of tears, but of his natural rending. Her voice was but one of many good-byes to the shore, yet it came to him out of the tumult of voices and whistles—as a ewe to find her own.

7

Morning heard some one nearby say that so-and-so had not really sailed, but was just going down the bay.... It was thus he learned that he might have passed the forenoon with Betty Berry on the Chesapeake. In fact, there was no reason for him not taking the voyage.... In a quick rush of thinking, as he stood there on the piers, all his weaknesses paraded before him, each with its particular deformity. The sorry pageant ended with a flourish, and he was left alone with the throb of the unhealed wound in his side.

Betty Berry would not have agreed to let him take the voyage, just for the sake of being with her. He knew this instinctively, but perhaps it might have been managed.... To think he had missed the chance of the forenoon.... The liner was sliding down the passage, already forgotten by the lower city.... Morning found himself looking into the window of a drink-shop. Bottles and cases of wine in their dust and straw-coats were corded in the window, which had an English dimness and look of age. A quiet place; the signs attested that ales were drawn from the wood and that many whiskeys of quality were within. Something of attraction for the spirituous imagination was in the sweet woody breath that reached him when he opened the door. A series of race-horse pictures took his mind from himself to better things.