Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

“You people make me sick,” he said, lurching out. “You’d have to be slumee to see how silly you look——”

They tried to detain him—to laugh at him—but one woman knew better. Her low voice of rebuke to her companions was a far greater rebuke to John Morning at the door.

... Finally he began to wonder how long they would keep on giving him money at the bank. He turned up every day. No matter what he drew it was always gone. Sometimes a holiday tricked him, and he suffered. He watched for Sundays, after he learned.... The banking business was a hard process, because he had to emerge; had to come right up to the window and speak to a clean, white man—who had known him before. It became the sole ascent of Morning’s day—a torturing one. He washed and shaved for it, when possible, and after a time managed frequently to save enough to steady his nerves for the ordeal. Then he had to write his name, and always a blue eye was leveled at him, and he felt the dirt in his throat.... So he drifted for six weeks, and it was winter.

His descent was abrupt and deep. He tried to get back, and found his will treacherous. He was prey at times to abominable fears. His body was unmanageable from illness. There were times when it would have meant death or insanity not to drink. For the first time in his life he encountered an inertia that could not be whipped to the point of reconstructivity. His thoughts cloyed all fine things; his expression made them mawkish and teary; his emotions overflowed on small matters. Betty Berry, around whom all this brooding revolved, hardly reached a plane worthy of interpretation. Morning’s conception of the woman on the afternoon she came to the Armory, or on the night-trip to Baltimore, contrasted with this mental apparition of the sixth week:

“She is a professional musician, making her own way in the world, and taking, as many a man would, the things that please her as she passes. This is not the great thing to her that it is to me. Other men have doubtless interested her suddenly and rousingly, and have gone their way.... Had she been a stranger to a man’s sudden loving she would never have beckoned me to the chair in the wings that night. She would never have come to my arms—as I went to hers——”

Sweat broke from him. The savage and abandoned company of thoughts had ridden down all else, like a troop of raiders, destroying as they went.... The troop was gone; the shouting died away—but he was left more lewd and low than the worst. He had defiled the image of the woman who had given herself so eagerly. He recalled how he had talked of understanding, how he had praised her in his thoughts because she was brave enough to be natural, and to act as a natural woman who has found her own, after years of repression. The other side of the shield was turned to torture him—the sweet, low-leaning, human tenderness of Betty Berry, her patience, her endless and ever-varying bestowals. She had called his the voice of reality, and become silent before it; had proved great enough to remain undestroyed in a man’s world; her faith and spirit arose above centuries of lineage in a man’s world—and she was Betty Berry who knew her lover’s presence, though they were almost strangers to each other, and opened her arms to him....

It was a hell that he vividly reviewed for seven weeks, and with no Virgil to guide. A scene or two from the final day is enough:

... He had come from the bank about one in the afternoon, and had taken a chair in the bar of the Van Antwerp. He was neither limp nor sprawling, but in a condition of queer detachment from exterior influences. He knew that it was daylight; heard voices but no words, and carried himself with the rigid effort of one whose limbs are habitually flippant. Perhaps it was because he was so very generous to the waiter that he was allowed to close his eyes without being molested. In any event, his consciousness betrayed him, and away he went in the darkness of dream: The Ferryman of the Hun was poling away at the stream and he, John Morning, was but one of a company in passage. It was not the Hun river this time; the sorrel Eve was not there. Not alone the Ferryman, but all on board were lepers—he, John Morning in the midst of them, a leper. The old wound was witness to this.... They tried to land at the little towns but natives came forth and drove them away. Down, down stream they went and always natives came forth to warn them as they neared the land.... Even when they drew in to the marshes and the waste-places natives appeared and stoned them away.... And so they went down—to the ocean and the storm and Morning opened his eyes.

Opposite, his back to the marble bar, his elbows braced against the rail, stood Mr. Reever Kennard, watching him, and the look upon the face of the famous correspondent was that of scornful pity—as if there was a truce to an old enmity, no longer worth while.

Still later on that day, over on Second Avenue, Morning almost bumped into a small yellow sign at the elevator entrance to the Metal Workers’ Hall, to the effect that Duke Fallows was to address a gathering there that night.