Will Levington Comfort

“ I have been much alone, but I spent most of the time serving myself. I have slaved for myself. If Duke Fallows had left me alone, I should have been greedy and ambitious and common. I see you now identified with all the good of the future. You came bringing the good with you to the Armory that day, but I was so clouded with hatred and self-serving, that I really didn’t know it until afterward.... All the dreams of being real and fine, of doing good in work, and with hands and thoughts, of sometime really being a good man who knows no happiness but service for others—that means you—you! ”

“ Morning’s letters were like white-hot fragments from his forge—roughly fashioned, but still seething with force. Helen Quiston felt that there was a splendid singing in that forge; that a man’s voice attuned with God and the world was raised in the morning; that silence drew on as the concentration of the task deepened; that there was singing in the evening again. Aliment for the soul of the music teacher, these letters. She would have fought to obey Betty Berry against the will of the Doctor and nurse had it been necessary. ”

“ She was glad that his mind turned to the actual memory picture of Betty Berry, as he finished:
“I do love the woman that moves about the world, the woman others see—the lips that tremble, the eyes that fill with tears so swiftly over some loveliness, and so rarely over her own sorrow; the instant-enfolding mind, the listening and the vitality—but it seems that I love in a greater way the heart that called to its lover without words—who fared forth to meet her lover and gave her soul.” ”

“ This was John Morning’s splendid summer. He was up often at two or three in the morning. Thoughts and sentences of yesterday, now cleared and improved, thronged his mind, as he made coffee. He learned that a man may write the first half of a book, but be used as a mere slave of the last half. And yet, to be the instrument of a rush of life and ideas, the latter becoming every hour more coherent and effective, was a privilege to make a man sing. And to increase, at the same time, in the realization of the courage and tenderness and faith of a woman who waited ”

“ This was the man whom he had dreamed of murdering, the man who had made him suffer as only the gods should make men suffer. And yet Ferry was like an unpleasant child; and Morning, troubled by greater things, had no hate now, no time nor inclination to hate. The face that had seemed dark and pitiless on the deck in Nagasaki harbor—was only weak and undone—an unpleasant child crying, refusing to be quieted—an annoyance to the house. Such was the devil of the Sickles, the man who had stood between him and America, the man who had tried to make him miss beating the Coptic mails.... ”

“ The Tungsheng ran into Chifu harbor to avoid a storm, and a full day was lost. John Morning had no philosophy then—a hell-minded male full of sickness—not good to view, even through the bars of a cage. But at best to sit five hours, where he sat more than five days and nights, would condemn the mind of any white man or woman to chaos, or else restore it to the fine sanity of Brotherhood.
And then the day when the breeze turned warm and the Islands were green!... Coolies were men that hour, men with eyes that melted to ineffable softness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She shone as never before; fearless, yet with splendid zeal for giving; free to the sky, yet eager to linger low and tenderly where her heart was in harmony; a stranger to all, save one or two in the world, pitilessly hungry to be known, and yet asking so little.... Compared with her, he saw himself as a littered house, wind blowing through broken windows.
... That night, sitting with Duke Fallows before the fire, brooding on his own furious desires, he thought of the other John Morning who had brooded over the story of Liaoyang in so many rooms with the same companion. ”

“ The Doctor looked like a jockey he had once known. It wasn’t that, however, that gave him heart, but the quick, gentle hands.... More and more as he watched the dusty face with its ineffable gravity, he saw bright humanity burning like a forge-fire behind the mask. This brought tears to his own eyes. Nevin, seeing them, became altogether nervous to look at, seemed to have a walnut in his mouth.
And now John Morning felt himself breaking—he was brittle, hard like glass—and his last idea concerned the package of Chinese parchment which they had not brought from the hammock.... ”

“ No one had taught her that kindness may be a motive in itself.
And now Morning was coping with what seemed a real idea: What was the quality of the switch-board that harnessed her character? Here she was wild and disordered—like a creature denied her drug. With that mystic rumble of angry New York in her ears—the essential buzz of a million desires passing through her—she was a force, flying and valuable force. Was she lain open to obsession now because she was removed from that slavery? Was that maddening vibration the lost key to her poise? ”

“ 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. ”

“ A fine unfolding—this love of Morning’s for wood itself, and woods. Over a half-hundred trees were his own—elm, beech, hickory, oak, ash, and maple—and like a fine clean colony of idealists they stood meditating.... One never knows the quality of wood until one builds his own house. Opening the timbers for the big mortices—each was a fresh and fragrant discovery. Jake and he lingered long, after the cabin was roofed, over the heavy oak flooring, and the finishing of windows and doors and frames. ”

“ Times when he looked out of the doorway, and the elms were shaping against the flowery purple of daybreak, and the robin beginning thirstily—his eyes smarted with tears at the beauty of it all, the privilege of work, and the absolute rightness of the whole creation, in which a man can’t possibly lose, after he has heard his real self speak. He loved life and death in such moments, and knew there was a Betty Berry in the waiting studio, and another over the Crossing. ”

“ Men began to think of food and drink. The heights of Yentai, which they had left in bitter hatred so shortly ago, was now like hills of rest on the long road home. More and more the resistance of men shrunk in the evil magic of this pressure of grain and sky and holding earth—a curious, implacable unworldliness it was, that made the flesh cry out.
“They should have cut this grain,” Luban said for the third time.
Fallows had said it first. Anyone should have seen the ruin of this advance, unless the end of the millet were reached before the beginning of battle. ”

“ Helen Quiston had long loved the woman. She knew much that the Doctor did not. It was she who read the letters which in certain moments of the day Betty hastily penned. It was as if for a moment in a long gray day, a ray of watery sunlight broke through the cloud-banks. In the momentary shining of her mind, Betty would write to Morning. Many of the letters were impossible. Certain of these letters would have brought the lover by the first train. ”

“ The fineness of Fallows, of Nevin, of Endicott, the station-agent at Tongu, the risen humanity of the Ploughman—Morning’s soul to sense these men was empty within him. All that he knew was blood and blow and force and mass and hate. He lay panting and possessed. As he had plotted in delirium how to kill Ferry, dwelling upon the process and the death; so Reever Kennard came in now for a hatred as perfect and destructive. ”

“ He became sceptical of all work that came from brain, in the sense of having its origin in something he had actually learned. He remembered how Fallows had spoken of this long ago; (he had not listened truly enough to understand then) ; how a man’s brain is at his best when used purely to receive—as a little finer instrument than the typewriter.
Except for certain moments on the borderland of sleep, Betty Berry was closest to him during his work. His every page was for her eye—a beloved revelation of his flesh and mind and spirit. ”

“ Morning sat in the yielding leather of the Boabdil library, quite as if he had passed his youth in the midst of people who talk of doing things. Liaoyang had been written, even the abandoned impediments of retreat covered. It had all come to pass quite according to the early ideas of Noyes and Field. John Morning was Liaoyang in America. His book Liaoyang, magazine and newspaper articles gathered together, was established as important authority in encyclopædic and other reference books. The most captious must grant that living man can do no more than this. ”

“ Betty Berry had taught him a lesson, quite as enormous to his nature as the Ploughman’s. A man who thinks of women only in sensuousness encounters but half-women. He had learned it late, but well, that a man in this world may rise to heights far above his fellows in understanding, but that groups of women are waiting on all the higher slopes of consciousness for their sons and brothers and lovers to come up. ”

“ God, how generous women are with their treasures! They are devils because of their great-heartedness. So swift, so eager, so delicate in their giving. They look up at you, and you are lost. My life has been gathering a bouquet—and some flowers fade in your hand.... I hated it, but they looked up so wistfully—and it seemed as if I were rending in a vacuum.... Always the moment of illusion—that this one is the last, that here is completion, that peace will come with this fragrance; always their giving is different and very beautiful—and always the man is deeper in hell for their bestowal.... ”

“ Lowenkampf has drink; Mergenthaler has slaughter.... You will love a woman; you already drink too readily, but Ambition will stand in your house and fight from room to room at the last—and over the premises to the last ditch. He’s a grand devil—is Ambition.... My devil, John? Well, it isn’t the big-jawed male who loves a woman as she dreams to be loved. It’s the man with a touch of women in him—just enough to begin upon her mystery.... When I hear a certain woman’s voice, or see a certain passing figure—something old, very old and wise, stirs within, seems to stir and thrill with eternal life. ”

“ Morning did not realize the change that had come over him until he recalled the shame and rebellion that had risen in his mind when Markheim had said this before.... Something had come to him from Duke Fallows, or from Betty Berry, or from the hill silences. He was a new creature.... Must one be detached somewhat from the world in order to use it? This was his sense at the moment: that he could compel the mind before him, reinforced as it was by distaste for everything decent, and manifesting the opinions of other men, including Reever Kennard’s. ”

“ An uncultivated valley strewn with rocks and low timber. Three columns of Japanese infantry pouring down from the opposite parallel ridge, all smoky with the hideous force of the reserve—machine-guns, and a mile of rifles stretching around to the right. (It was this wing’s firing that had started the havoc in the grain.)
Three columns of infantry pouring down into the ancient valley, under the gray stirring sky—brown columns, very even and unhasting—and below, the Cossacks.
Morning lived in the past ages. He lay between two rocks watching, having no active sense—but pure receptivity. ”