Chapter VI: Book II: The Hill-Cabin (2)

“That will be best.... Don’t you see, writing is your work. It will make you turn your training upon me. Something tells me the peril of that. As to-night dimmed away--you would force the picture.... Trained as you, one writes to what he wishes one to be, not to what one is.... You would make me all over to suit--and when I came, there would be a shock.... And then think if some night--very eager and heart-thumping, I should reach a city--so lonely and hungry for my letter--and it shouldn’t be there.... No, to-night must do for me. I shall go on my way playing and biding my time, until the return steamer. Then some morning, about the first of March, you shall hear that I am back--and that I am waiting for my real letter----”

“And where did you learn all this--about a man writing himself out of the real?” John Morning asked wonderingly.

“If I were to be in one place to receive your letters, I might not have thought of it--yet it is true.... Then, my letters are nothing. Perhaps I am a little afraid to write to you. I think with the ’cello----”

“All that seems very old and wise, beyond my kind of thinking,” he said.

For a long time she was listening. It was like that first afternoon.... What did Betty Berry hear continually? It gave him a conception of what receptivity meant--that quiescence of all that is common, that abatement of the world and the worldly self, that quality purely feminine. It was like a valley receiving the afternoon sunlight. He realized vaguely at first that the mastery of self, necessary for such listening, is the very state of being saints pray for, and practice continually to attain.... Perhaps, he thought, this is the way great powers come--from such listening--the listening of the soul; perhaps such power would come again and again, if only the strength of it were turned into service for men; perhaps it was a kind of prayer.... It was all too vague for him to speak....

She was first to whisper that the dawn had come.

“I love you,” he said.

He saw her eyes with the daylight, as he had not seen them since that first afternoon--gray eyes, very deep. The same strange hush came to him from them. And there was a soft gray lustre with the morning about her traveling-coat; and her brown hair seemed half-transparent against the panes. No one was yet abroad in the coach.

“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.

These influences played merely upon the under-surfaces of an intelligence whose thoughts followed the steamer down the Chesapeake as certainly as the flock of gulls.... It was that quiet time in the morning, after the floors are washed. The day was bright, with just a touch of cold in the air.

... A drink improved him generally. He examined the string of horses again, and talked to the man behind. The man declared it was his law not to drink oftener than once in the half-hour, during the forenoon; he stated that it paid to exert this self-control, as his appetite was better and he was less liable to “slop over” in the afternoon. Morning was then informed that oysters were particularly good just now, and that a man with a weak stomach could live on oysters.... There was just one little flange of an oyster that was indigestible. The man knew this because drink makes one dainty about his eating, and one can tell what agrees with him or otherwise. Furthermore, one could detach the indigestible flange in one’s mouth before swallowing--anyone could with practice. The man glanced frequently at the clock.... Well, he would break over, just once, and make up later. A half hour was sometimes a considerable portage.... They became companionable.

Morning started back for New York at noon. The particular train he caught was one of the best of its kind. The buffet, the quality of service and patronage had a different, an intimate appeal to-day. He sat there until dark--in that sort of intensive thinking which seemed very measured and effective to Morning. His chief trend was a contemplation, of course, of the night before. Aspects appeared that did not obtrude at all with the woman by him. Considering the opportunity, he had kissed her very rarely, as he came to think of it....

His fellow-passengers let him alone. He reflected that he could always get along with the lower orders of men--with sailors, soldiers, bartenders; with the Jakes, Jethros, and Jerries of the world. Duke Fallows had remarked this.... Duke Fallows ... the old Liaoyang adventure came back more clearly than it had for months.... That _was_ a big set of doings. Certainly there was a thrill about those days, when one stopped to think.

At dinner time, approaching the end of the journey, Morning met a pronounced disinclination to stay on the Jersey side. The little cabin on the hill was certainly not for this condition of mind. He had to stop and think that it was only yesterday noon when he left the cabin. A period of time that flies rapidly, appears strangely long when regarded from the moments of its closing. The period of the past thirty hours since he had left the hill was like a sea-voyage. The lights across the river had a surprising attraction. When he realized the old steam of alcohol, his mind glibly explained that it was merely an episode of a sick and overwrought body; that the real John Morning, of altruism and aspiration, was away at sea with the love-woman, much cherished, the very soul of him.

More than a half-year before he had fled to the country, weary to nausea of men in chairs and buffets. The animalism of it had utterly penetrated him at last; the Conrad study was but one of many revelations. He had hated the _Boabdil_; and hated more the processes of his own mind when alcohol impelled. Only yesterday morning he had hated the whole vanity of New York leisure, with the same freshness that had characterized his first month of cleanliness. Yet he found novelty in the present adventure; the prevailing illusion of which was that he was wrong yesterday rather than now. That night he sought his old haunts. There was a gladness about it.

“One mustn’t be too much alone,” he decided, “especially if he is to write.... I must have got cocky sitting there alone by the cabin-door.... These fellows aren’t so bad....”

Presently he was telling the old story of Liaoyang. That roused him a little and pulled upon mental fibers still lame.... Was he to be identified always with that?... A week later he was telling the story of breaking away from the Russians at Liaoyang and making the journey alone to Koupangtse. This was in a strangely quiet bar on Eighth Avenue, in the Forties. A peculiarity about this particular telling of the story was that he remembered the ferryman on the Hun--the one who had wakened the river-front as he led Eve down to drink--the ferryman who was a leper....

As days passed he went down deeper than ever before. “I must have had this coming----” he would say, and refused to cross the river to rest. There were moments when he felt too unutterably dirty to go to the cabin. One day, he kept saying, “I’m going to see this through.” And on another day he reflected continually (conscious of the cleverness of the thought) that this drink passage was like the journey to Koupangtse.... Then there was the occasion when it broke upon him suddenly that he was being avoided at the _Boabdil_. He never went back.... One morning he joined some sailors who had breezed in from afar. They brought him memories and parlances; their ways were his ways all that day, whose long drift finally brought them to Franey’s _Lobelia_, as tough and tight a little bar as you would ask any modern metropolis to furnish. The sailors were down and done-for now, but Morning stood by for the end, enjoying the place and the wide bleakness of it.... A slumming party came in about midnight--young men and women of richness and variety, trying to see bottom by looking straight down--as if one could see through such dirty water.

The city’s dregs about him--a fabric of idiocy and perversion and murder--did not look so fatuous nor wicked to Morning’s eye, as did this perfumed company. They thought they were seeing life, but, deeper than brain, they knew better; their laughter and their voices were off the key, because they were not being true to themselves. Franey’s regulars were glad for the extra drinks, but Morning had a fury. His shame for the party was akin to the shame he had held for Lowenkampf on the eve of battle long ago. He arose, short and flaming, yet conscious even in his rage of the brilliance of his idea.

“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.

8

A FLASH of love came to his heart for Duke Fallows at the sight of the name. There was nothing maudlin about this; rather, a decent bit of stamina in the midst of sentimental overflows. It was the actual inside relation, having nothing to do with the old surface irritation.... Morning took care of himself as well as he could during the day. He meant to mix with the crowd at the meeting, but not to make himself known until he was free from vileness. He would keep track of the other’s place and movements in New York. When he was fit--there would be final restoration in the meeting. His heart thumped in anticipation. The yellow poster had turned the corner for him. These first thoughts of the upward trend are interesting:

He meant to cross the river and build a big fire in the cabin. There he would fight it out and cleanse the place meanwhile, in preparation. He pictured the cabin-door open, water on the floor, the fire burning, the smell of soap. He would heat water, wash his blankets, put them out in the sun; polish his kettles with water and sand. Every detail was important, and how strangely his mind welcomed the freshness of these simple thoughts. The glass of the windows would flash in the morning, and the door of oak would gleam with its oil.... Finally he would bring Duke there.

This was the triumph of it all. He would bring the sick man home; tend the fire for him, go to the dairyman’s for milk and eggs. They could call Jake and talk to him--seeing the heart of a simple man.... They would talk and work together ... the sick man looking up at the ceiling, and he, Morning, at the machine as in the old days. Spring would come, the big trees would break their buds and sprinkle the refuse down--and, God, it would be green again--all this rot ended.... So the days would pass quickly until Betty Berry came.... Duke would be glad to hear of her.

... That night Morning went in with the workers to their Hall and sat far back. The meeting had been arranged under socialistic auspices; seven hundred men at least were present. Through the haze of pipe, cigarette, and cigars, Duke Fallows came forth.

And this was no sick man. His knees were strong, and there was a lightness of shoulder that did away with the huddle of old times. His eyes shone bright under the hanging lamp, and his laugh was as far as Asia from scorn. There was brown upon him; his hands, when they fell idle, were curved as if to fit a broad-ax, and “I’m glad to be with you, men,” he said.

“... I have come to tell you a story--my story. Every man has one. I never tell mine twice the same, but some time I shall tell it just right, and then the answer shall come.”

Power augmented in the silence of the smoky hall. The gathering recognized the artist that had come down to them, because he loved the many and belonged with them. They gave him instinctively the rare homage of uncritical attention. Fallows told of Liaoyang--of the whole preparation--of the Russian singing, the generals, the systems by which men were called to service. Always the theme that played through this prelude was the millet of Manchuria. He told of the great grain fields, the feeding troop-horses, the hollows between the hills--how the ancient Chinese city stood in a bend of the river--of the outer fighting, the rains, the mass of men, the Chinese.

This new Duke Fallows hated no man; had no scorn for the Russian chiefs. His ideas of service and humanity concerned Russia rather than Japan--and not the imperialistic Russia, but the real spirit--the toiler, the dreamer, the singer, the home-maker--the Russia that was ready, perhaps as ready as any people in the world, to put away envy, hatred, war; to cease lying to itself, and to grasp the reality that there is something immortal about simplicity of life and service for others. What concerned this Russia, Fallows declared, concerned the very soul of the western world.

He placed the field for the battle in a large way--the silent, watery skies, all-receiving _kao-liang_, and the moist earth that held the deluges. Morning choked at the picture; the action came back again as Fallows spoke--Lowenkampf himself--the infantry of Lowenkampf slipping down the ledges into the grain--Luban, machine-guns, rout--the little open place in the millet where the Fallows part of the battle was fought.

“... He was a young Russian peasant. If he came into this hall now, we would all know instinctively that he belonged to us. He was fine to look upon that day, coming out of the grain--earnest, glad, his heart turned homeward. His enemy was not Japan, but Imperialism, and defeat was upon it. This defeat meant to him, as it did to hundreds of soldiers in that hour--the beginning of the road home. Luban was burning with the shame of detected cowardice. A common soldier had commented upon it in passing. And now this young Russian peasant met the eyes of Luban, and the two began to speak, and I was there to listen.

“The peasant said that this was not his war; that he had been forced to come; that it meant nothing to him if Russia took Manchuria; but that it meant a very great deal to him--this being away--because his six babies were not being fed by the Fatherland, and his field was not being ploughed.

“It was very simple. You see it all. The Fatherland forced starvation upon a man’s children, while his field remained unploughed. Only a simple man could say it. You must be straight as a child to speak such epics. It is what you men have thought in your hearts.

“Of course, Luban only knew he was an officer and the man was not. Machine-guns were drumming in the distance, and the grain was hot and breathless all about. The forward ranks were terribly broken--the soldiers streaming back past us. Luban, who opened the discussion, was getting the worst of it, and his best reply was murder. He handled the little automatic gun better than the cause of the Fatherland--shot the _Ploughman_ through the breast. I thrust him back to take the falling one in my arms....

“We seemed alone together. There was power upon me. Even in the swiftness and tumult of the passing I made the good man see that I would father his babes, look to the ploughing of his field, and be the son of his mother. His passing made all clear to me. His message was straight from the heart of the world’s suffering poor, from the heavy-laden. He spoke to kings and generals, and to all who have and are blind. There in the havoc of the retreat, dying in my arms--he made it vivid as the smiting sun of Saul--that this hideous disorder of militia was not his Fatherland. He would have fought for the real Fatherland. He was a son in spirit, and a state-builder; he would have fought for that; he was not afraid to die....

“Love for him had come strangely to my heart, men. I said to him--words I cannot remember now--something I had never been able to write, because I had not written for men before, but for some fancied elect. I made him know that he had done well, that his field would bring forth, and that his house would glow red with firelight.... I think my Ploughman felt as I did even before his heart was still--that there is something beyond death in the love of men for one another.... It was wonderful. We forgot the battle. We forgot Luban and the firing. We were one. His spirit was upon me--and the good God gave him peace.

“I tell you quietly, but don’t you see--this that I bring so quietly is the message from the Ploughman who passed--the message of Liaoyang? And this is the sentence of it: Where there is a real Fatherland--there will be Brotherhood.

“The world is so full of pallor and agony and sickness and stealing. First, it is because of the Lubans. The Lubans are sick for power--sick with their desires. Having no self-mastery, they are lost and full of fear. They fear the whip, they fear poverty and denial; theirs is a continual fear of being stripped to the nakedness of what they are--as old Mother Death strips a man. In the terror of all these things they seek to turn the whip upon others, to reinforce their emptiness with exterior possessions. Because their souls are dying, and because they feel the terror of sheer mortality, they seek to kill the virtue in other men. Because they cannot master themselves, they rise in passion to master others. They could not live but for the herds.

“We who labor are the strength of the world. I say to you, men, poverty is the God’s gift to His elect. It is to us who have only ourselves to master--that the dream of Brotherhood can come true. It is alone to us, who have nothing, that these possessions can come, which old Mother Death is powerless to take away. And we who labor and are heavy-laden are making our colossal error to-day. We are the muttering herds. Standing with the many we may not know ourselves. We look upon the cowardice and emptiness of the Lubans and call it Power. We see the ways of the Herd-drivers--and dream of driving others, instead of ourselves. We look upon the Herd-drivers--and turn upon them the same thoughts of envy and hatred and cruelty--which cuts them off from every source of power and leaves them empty and cowardly indeed.

“These are the thoughts of the herds--and yet down in the muscling mass men are not to blame. It takes room for a man to be himself--it takes room for a man to love his neighbor and to master himself. Terrified, whipped, packed, sick with the struggle and the strain of it all--how can men, turning to one another, find brotherhood in the eyes of their fellows. Living the life of the laboring herds in the great cities--why, it would take Gods to love men so!... The world is so full of pallor and agony and sickness and stealing--first, because of the Lubans, and, second, because of the City.... And after Liaoyang, I went straight to the Ploughman’s house--for I had given my word. And now I will tell you what I found on the little hill-farm up in the Schwarenka district among the toes of the Bosk mountains, a still country.”

9

“I REMEMBER the soldiers at Liaoyang, the last thing, the many who had grasped at the hope that defeat meant the end of the war. They were learning differently as I left. Hundreds gave up from the great loneliness.... I carried the name of my Ploughman across the brown country, and the northern autumn was trying to hold out against the frosts. Asia is desolate. We who are white men, and who know a bit of the loveliness of life--even though we labor at that which is not our life--we must grant that the Northern Chinese have learned this: To suffer quietly.

“Baikal was crossed at last. On and on by train into the West--until I came to the little village that he had said. For days it had been like following a dream. Sometimes it seemed to me so wonderful--that young man coming out of the millet, and what he said--that I thought it must have come to me in a vision, that I was mad to look for his town and the actual house in the country beyond. Yet they knew his name in the little town, and said that early next morning I could get a wagon to take me to the cabin, which was some _versts_ away.

“I had known so much of cities. For weeks I had been in the noises of the Liaoyang fighting and in trains. Moreover, I had been ill for a long time, too--a crawling, deadly illness. But that night my soul breathed. I ate black bread by candle-light and drank milk. The sharpness of mid-October was in the air. You will laugh when I say it seemed to me, an American, as if I had come home. In the morning early I looked away to the East, from whence I had come, and where the sun was rising. (The ceiling of the little room was so low I had to bend my head.) To the north the mountains were sharp in the morning light and shining like amethyst.... I left the wagon at the first sight of the hut in the distance, and I reached there in the warmth of the morning.

“An old man was sitting in the sun. He asked me to have bread, and said they had some sausage for the coming Sunday. This was mid-week. A child brought good water. Then I heard the cane of the old woman, and saw her hand first, as it thrust the cane out from the door--all brown and palsied, the hand, its veins raised and the knuckles twisted from the weight that bent her fingers against the curve of the stick. The rest was so pure. She had been a tall woman--very thin and bent and white now. When I looked into that face I saw the soul of the Ploughman. I can tell you I wanted to be there. It was very strange.... I can see her now, looking up at me, as the old do from their leaning. It was like the purity and distance of the morning. I trembled, too, before this old wife, for the fact in my mind about her son. I tell you, old mother-birds are wise.

“It was as if my garments smelled of the fighting. She knew whence I had come; she looked into my soul and found the death of her son. Her soul knew it, but not her brain yet. She may have found my love for him, too--the deep bond between us.

“‘Ask the stranger to stay. We will have sausage by the Sunday,’ said the old man. His thought was held by hunger.

“‘Hush, Jan--he comes from our son----’

“‘And where are the children and the young mother?’ I asked.

“‘They are out for faggots in the bush--they will come----’

“I had thought, as I traveled, (the thoughts of the weeks on the road,) to do many things; to give them plentifully of money; to arrange for someone to do the late fall and winter work. I had intended to go on, when sure that everything was at hand to make them comfortable. I tell you, men, it was all too living for that. One could not perform unstudied benefits for the mother of the Ploughman. There was more than money wanted there.

“‘We would like to have you stay with us,’ the mother said, ‘but our poverty is keen, and we have not bread enough now for the winter.... He was taken long before the harvest, and it is long until the grain comes again----’

“‘But if he were here--what would be done, Mother?’

“‘Ah, if he came,’ she said strangely. ‘If he came----’

“The father now spoke:

“‘He would cut wood for our neighbors this winter--when the ploughing was finished. That would provide food--good food. Oh, he would know what to do--our Jan would know----’

“I won’t soon forget that high, wavering voice of the old man--‘Oh, he would know what to do--our Jan is a good son----’ and the shake of his head.

“‘But may I not do some of the things that he would do?’

“I had to say it twice, for I spoke their language poorly. I had understood the son at Liaoyang--but all moments were not like those in which he spoke to me.

“‘And then,’ I added hastily, ‘he sent you some money----’

“I dared not offer much with that pure old face looking at me. The silver and gold that was in my purse I put in her lap.

“‘Oh, it is very much--the good God brought you from him, did he not?’

“‘And we will not need to wait until Sunday for----’

“‘Hush--Jan--no, we will not need to wait.’

“... And then the young mother came. I saw her steps quicken when yet she was far off. The little ones were about her--all carrying something. The older children were laughing a little, but the others were quiet in their haste and effort to keep up.... There was one little boy, but I will tell you afterward of the littlest Jan.... There was a pallor over the brood. Their health was pure, and their blood strong, but that pallor had come. Men, it was hunger already. Here were the fields, and the Fatherland had taken him before the harvest. This thing, the shocking truth of it; that this actually could be; that a country could do such a thing--made me forget everything else for the moment. Then I realized that I must keep the truth from the young mother. Before I spoke at all they told her that I had come from her husband.

“Her lips were white, her breasts wasted. She was lean from hunger, lean from her bearing. Young she was for the six, but much had she labored, and there was a mountain wildness in her eyes. She was stilled, as the old mother had been, by the fear of hearing her man’s death. She dared not ask. She accepted what was said--that I had come from him, that I had brought money, and wished to stay for a little.... She leaned against the door, the smaller children gathering at her knees, the others putting away the wood. Her single skirt hung square, and her arms seemed very long, nearly to her knees; her hands loose and tired. Her hair was yellow; the wind had tossed it. You know how a horse that has been listening, suddenly catches his breath again. The same sound came from her as she started to breathe again.... One of the smaller children laughed, and I looked down. It was the little four-year-old, the third Jan of that house, and he was close to my knees, looking up at me ... and we were all together.

“I loved the world better after that look of the child into my eyes.... I took him on my shoulder. We went to the village together. That night the wagon brought us back; there was much food.... And that was my house. I looked out on the mountains the next day, and for many days to come, and, men--their grand sky-wide simplicity poured into my heart. I took the old horse out, and we ploughed during the few days remaining. There was not much land--but we ploughed it together to the end, when the frost made the upturned clods ring. Then I strawed up the shed for the old horse to pass his winter in warmth, and brought blankets for him. I respected that old horse. Health and good-fellowship had come to me as we worked together. I remember the sharp turning of the early afternoons from yellow to gray and to dark.... Then we went into the bush together in the early winter days. The ax rang, and the snow-bolt was piled high each day with wood. The smell of the wood-smoke in the morning air had a zest for my nostrils I had never known before, and at night the cabin windows were red with fire-light. We were all one together. And I think the spirit of the Ploughman was there in the happiness.

“Sometimes in the night when I would get up to replenish the fire--the mystery of plain goodness would come to me. I would see the children and others all around. Then at the frosty window, shading the fire from my eyes, I looked out upon the snows. I was unable to contain the simple grandeurs that had unfolded to me day by day.... And then I would go back to the blankets where the little boy lay--his hand always fumbling for me as I crept in. The love that I felt for this child was beyond all fear. We could stand together against any fate. And one night it came to me that from much loving of one a man learns to love the many, and that I would really be a man when I learned to love the world with the same patience and passion that I loved the little boy. The Ploughman came along in a dream that night and said it was all quite true.

“And that was the winter.... I wish you could have seen this sick man who had come. I had lain on my back for months, except when some great effort aroused me. I had that coming on, men, which makes a man walk--as a circus bear turns and totters on his back feet. The house, the field, the plough, the horse, woods, winter, and mountains, love for the child, love for all the others--the much that my hands found to do and the heart found to give--these things made me new again. These simple sound and holy things.

“I had been a sick man mentally and morally, too, sick with ego and intellect--a nasty sickness. But one could not look, feeling the joy in which I lived, upon the snows of the foothills, nor afar through the yellow winter noons to the gilded summits of the Bosks; one could not look into the eyes of the children, the last vestige of hunger pallor gone from them; one could not talk of tobacco-and-sausage with the old man by his fireside; nor watch the mysterious great givings of the two mothers--their whole lives giving--pure instruments of giving--passionate givers, they were; givers of life and preservers of life--I say, men, one could not live in this purity and not put away such evil and cruel things.... As the sickness of the blood went from me--so that sickness of mind.... And, I tell you, we were ready as a house could be, when the news came officially that our Ploughman was among the missing from the battle of Liaoyang.

“It was sharper than any winter night. We stood in the cabin and wept together. Then in the hush--the real thought of it all came to one--to whom, do you think?... She was on her knees--_the old mother_--praying for the other peasant cabins in Russia--the thousands of others from which a son and husband was gone--‘cabins to which the good God has not sent such a friend.’... I tell you, men, all the evil of past days seemed washed from me in that hour.... And that is my home. (The old horse and I opened the fields again in the springtime.)

“After that I went down to Petersburg to tell my story, and to Moscow. I have told it in cellars and stables--in Berlin, in Paris, and London. I am making the great circle--to tell it here--and on, when we are finished, to Chicago, to Denver and San Francisco--and then the long sail homeward, following the first journey to the foothills of the Bosk range. I will go to my old mother there, and to the little boy, who looked up into my eyes--as if we were born to play and talk and sleep together.

“The days of the conscript gangs are over here, men. Such days are numbered, even in Russia. They don’t come to your door in this country and take you away from your work to fight across the world--but the Lubans are here--and the cities are full of horror. It is in the cities where the herds are, where the little Lubans whip, and the bigger Lubans thrive. In the pressure and heaviness of the cities--the thought that comes to the herd is the old hideous conception of the multitude--that the way of the Lubans is the way of life.... It isn’t the way. The way of life has nothing to do with greed, nor with envy, nor with schemes against the bread of other men. It is a way of peace and affiliation--of standing together. And you who have little can go that way; you who labor can go that way--because you are the strength of the world. Don’t resist your enemies, men--leave them. The Master of us all told us that. And when the herds break, and this modern hell of the city is diminished--the Lubans will follow you out--whining and bereft, they will follow you out, as the lepers of Peking follow the caravans to the gates and beyond.... I have told you of my home--the little cabin that came to me from the beginnings of compassion. And there is such a home for every man of you--in the still countries where the voice of God may be heard.”

Morning, desperately ill, rose to leave the hall. In the momentary hush, as he reached the door, the voice of Duke Fallows was raised again, calling his name.

10

“JOHN----” a second time.

Morning turned, his arms lifted despairingly.

“Wait, John, I’ll join you!”

Fallows came down.... The man who gently held the door shut smiled with strange kindness. There was a shining of kindness in men’s faces.... Morning did not feel that he belonged. He was broken and shamed.... The big man was upon him--the long arms tossed about him.

“I’ve been looking and listening for you too long, John, to let you go.”

“... I just wanted to hear you. I’m shot to pieces, Duke; I’ll get a few drinks and wait for you. Then, you’ll see, I’m all out of range of the man you are----”

There was no answer. Morning looked up to find the long bronzed face laughing, the eye gleaming. Fallows turned to the doorman and another, saying:

“Both of you go with him. He needs a drink or two, and one of you come back to show me the way to him--when I’m through here.... This is a great night for us, John.”

The three went down in the elevator.... And so the sick man had not come back--the dithyrambic Duke Fallows was gone for good. The sick man was strong; the impassioned phrase-maker had risen to the simple testimony of service. From scorn and emotion, from judgment and selection, he had risen to the plane of loving kindness.... The air in the street refreshed him a little. Morning found a bar.

“I’ve been drinking,” he said to the men. “Fallows is a king. I was there with him at Liaoyang.... Maybe you saw my story in the _World-News_.... He stayed in the grain with Luban. I went on to see the cavalry fight.... I came back home to do the story. He went on to Russia on the _Ploughman_ story----”

“Is he a preacher?” said one of the men.

“Yes--but he learned about war and women first.”

“I’ll take a soft drink and go back. You stay here, and I’ll bring him to you,” the same one went on.

The other drank with Morning and agreed that they would not leave until Fallows came.

“And so he learned about war and women first,” he said queerly, when they were alone. “But he has been a laboring man----”

“Yes. You heard him.”

“But before that farm in Russia----”

“Oh, yes; he was a laborer.”

“Well, he certainly got the crowd with him,” the man acknowledged.

“You know why, don’t you?” Morning said impressively.

“No.”

“He’s _for_ the crowd. People feel it.”

“Oh, I knew that.”

There was quiet, and then the face turned to Morning:

“Say, how did you get such a start as this? This kind means weeks----”

“It got away from me before I knew it. I must have got to gambling with myself to see how far I could go.”

“Are you going to quit?”

A mist filled Morning’s mind. The question seemed an infringement. Then it occurred to him how he had fallen to lying to himself.

“He’ll make you quit, but don’t let him stop you too short. You’d be a wreck in a few hours. You see how you needed these two or three drinks?”

... Fallows entered with several of the committee. He had promised to speak to them again.

“It’s what I came for,” he was saying. “So long as I am wanted I’ll stay.... Yes, I’m a socialist.... Yes, I believe in fighting, but when our kind of men stand together, there won’t be anything big enough to give us a fight. When our kind of men look into one another’s eyes and find service instead of covetousness--there’s nothing in the world to stand against us.”

Fallows and Morning were in a steam-room together two hours afterward. Morning was limp and light-headed. He had told of some of the things that had happened since Baltimore--of men he had met--of the slummers--of harrowing nights and waiting for the bank to open.

“You had to have it, John?”

There was something in the way Fallows spoke the word, _John_, that made Morning weaker and filled his throat. He had to speak loudly for the hissing of the steam.

“Why, if you didn’t get humble and stay humble after such a training--you’d be the poorest human experiment ever undertaken by the Master. But you can’t fail. It isn’t in the cards to fail. You’ve ridden several monsters--Drink, Ambition, Literature--but they won’t get you down. Why, even the sorrel mare didn’t kill you, as I promised aforetime. I saw a lot in that story. You loved her to the last. You left her dead and hunched on an alien road. You’ve loved these others long enough. You’ll leave them dead--even that big fame stuff. I think you’ve ridden that pompous fool to death already. They are all passages on the way to Initiation. Your training for service is a veritable inspiration--and you’ll write to men--down among men. I love that idea--you’ll write the story of Compassion--down among men----”

Fallows’ face came closer through the steam. He scrutinized the wound that wouldn’t heal. “Did you ever hear about Saint Paul’s thorn in the flesh?... ‘And lest I be exalted above measure through the abundance of revelations, there was given me a thorn in the flesh--?’ It all works out. You’ll have to excuse me. The Bible was the only book I had with me up in the Bosk country. I found it all I wanted. I would take it again.... Yes, John, it’s all right with you.”

Morning was telling of that afternoon at the Armory. He passed over quickly the period of worldly achievement in New York to the quiet blessedness he had hit upon, finding the hill and the elms.

“That’s the formula--to get alone and listen----”

“That’s what you preached to-night, wasn’t it?”... Presently he was back to Betty Berry again--finding her at the ’cello--the wonderful ride to Baltimore--which brought him to the drink chapter once more.... He couldn’t see Duke’s face as he spoke of the woman. There was a peculiar need of the other saying something when he had finished. This only was offered:

“We won’t talk about that now, John.... You’d better take another little drink. Your voice is down.... You’ll be through after a day or two, and I’ll stay with you----”

“We’ll go over to the cabin to-morrow,” said Morning.

They were lying cot by cot in the cooling-room, and the talk for a time concerned Lowenkampf, his court-martial and discharge.

“Do you know how I thought of you coming back, Duke?” Morning whispered afterward.

“Tell me.”

“I always thought of you coming back a sick man--staring at the ceiling as you used to--sometimes talking to me, sometimes listening to what I had written. But the main thought was how I would like to take care of you. I was rotten before. I wanted you sick, so I could show you better.”

The huge hand stretched across from cot to cot.

“It was afterward--that all the things you said in Liaoyang came back to me right.... We were lying in ’Frisco waiting for quarantine, and my stuff was finished the second time, before I read your letter to me and the one to Noyes--and the Ploughman story. That was the first time I really saw it right. There was a little doctor with me--Nevin--who got it all from the first reading. At Liaoyang we were down too low among the fighting to get it. That Ploughman story made my big yarn look like a death-mask of the campaign. Betty Berry got it too.... It was the same to-night--why, you got those men, body and soul.”

“I’d like to think so, John; but I’m afraid you’re wrong. It was just a seed to-night. Men need to be cultivated every day in a thousand ways.... Women get things quicker; they can listen better.... The last night before Jesus was taken by the Roman soldiers, he told the Eleven that he could be sure only of them. He knew that of the multitude that heard him--most would sink back. He counted on just the Eleven, and built his church on the weakest, upon the most unstable--counting only on the strength of the weakest link.... The fact is, John, I’m only counting on you. I’ve got to count on you.”

* * * * *