Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

  It was a strange experience, indeed, and the stranger because he who had affected us so with his fervid recitation of a prayer was a huge, earthy man with a glass of wine in his hand. I doubt if a saint, spare and spiritual, could have affected the group of worldlings half as much. Through my head ran vaguely the words of the poet who saw Jacob’s ladder pitched between heaven and Charing Cross. I was the first to disturb the silence. Like an awed Eckermann or a humble Boswell, I asked Dan where I could find the prayer. I wrote the information down, feeling a little embarrassed as I did so, knowing well I must have appeared academic if not sycophantic to the others. I could see that Archer was looking at me with that cool suspicion of his. But since that first lunch at Luigi’s, I had (as I have said before) been making notes of everything about Dan, of what he said and quoted, and of the tales he told. (Except for the sources of his quotations, I never made notes in front of him.) Dan was a talker, a talker in the great tradition of the Greeks, a follower, in his own less scholarly style, of Dr. Johnson and Oscar Wilde, and he loathed the labor of writing as much as they did. It seemed to me a pity his talk should be completely lost.

  Into the silence I had disturbed, though not dispelled, Dan’s niece, Doris, came. I knew her instantly from the sudden rapt look on Briggs’s face. I would not have recognized her otherwise for she in no way corresponded to his rhapsodic description of her.

  She, without any small talk, proceeded quickly to empty the ash trays on the table. She did this with the deftness and the subdued impatience of a good housekeeper. I could not keep my eyes off her. She was a heavy, not fat but solid girl, of about nineteen with thick legs and a bland but wholesome oblong face. At first, I could not understand what was the tremendous attraction she had for Briggs, an attraction so deep that it caused his dry, unfertile imagination to blossom out into ardent poetry. I remembered especially his words, “Her body is a sorcerer that conjures up the magic of pure beauty wherever she goes.” Never had I heard a description less applicable to a person than this to Doris. Briggs’s fear of me as a possible rival was certainly, as the expression goes, well unfounded.

  But, as I watched the sturdy girl moving efficiently about the table, I slowly began to discover the source of her sorcery. Briggs was of a thin masculinity, with mind far out of proportion to body. Now, here, already even in her girlhood, was a woman—physical, and solidly so, realistic, heavily three dimensional, with no blurred edges, with no trace of idea or idealism on her face. Here was compensation for Briggs—body for mind, sense for sensibility, definition for indefiniteness.

  Doris left to check the kitchen. She had little regard for Henry, Tim, and Barney as housekeepers, and she treated Dan with the affectionate tolerance a daughter might have for an impractical and unimportant father. Now, when I saw Briggs’s eyes following her reverently, I had some understanding of his enslavement.

  Archer took a small, careful sip of his wine and addressed Dan. “Have you started to write the Professor Ambrose story yet?”

  “You like my friend, Professor Ambrose, do you, Justus?” Dan was pleased.

  Archer nodded. “I’d like to know how his story comes out.”

  “I’m still pondering it,” Dan said. “This may well be the first story in my book and I wish it to be as perfect as I can make. It is a true story but I’m not sure of just how to word the finish.” Then, he smiled. “I have it pretty much in my mind, though. Would you like to hear it?”

  All wanted to hear it. He had told most of the story a few evenings before and his guests had been enchanted with it. Now, he was going to tell the last of it.

  Dan settled back in his chair. “That last afternoon, the day after the tragedy,” he began, “all of Professor Ambrose’s friends crowded into his little home waiting for him to return. No one had seen him all the day. Now, in the late afternoon, they sat and waited, fearful of the worst. And some prayed—”

  Doris came back from the kitchen, gesturing for the guests to get out into the kitchen and go to work. But when she realized from the sudden silence that Dan was telling a story, she sat down quietly, unobtrusively to listen.

  Dan went on with the story.

  That night, Dan told only the end of Professor Ambrose’s story but, as subsequently I heard it all, and as the story, like Evening Star, plays an important part in Dan’s own story I might as well give it here, however sketchily.

  Chapter 9

  Ambrose was a professor of the history and appreciation of music at a small, conservative, old college in New England. Dan had met him when Dan was a newspaper reporter. It was in the days when Stravinski was considered an innovator in music and people were angrily walking out of performances of his Sacré du Printemps. Dan thought it would make a good story to have some venerable oracle fulminate against the innovator.

  Professor Ambrose, a classicist of classicists, seemed perfect for the purpose. He was a tall, thin, stooped man with a droopy mustache, a mild and gracious character out of the Victorian past. His daily speech, it was said, was tuned to Beethoven and Mozart string quartets. Much to Dan’s surprise, and disappointment, however, the Professor had nothing but good to say of Stravinski, maintaining he was essentially a classicist with an art derived from Bach. He played records to illustrate his contention.

  The afternoon of Dan’s visit wore away, and evening came, and with it a supper of Vienna schnitzel and Rhine wine. The Professor, like Dan, drank only wine and this made them friends immediately. The Professor held that distilled beverages hurt the ear, that almost all bad music came out of whisky, gin, or rum, that almost all good music came out of fermented beverages, primarily wine, though he would admit some beer music into the upper categories. Dan was for wine and against distilled liquors for another reason, holding that wine came from a natural process while distilled liquors were produced mechanically and thus were fraught with evil consequences. In any event, Dan and Ambrose, however different their reasons, liked wine and drank it freely. That night when Dan, his head swirling with the intoxication of Mozart string quartets and Rhine wine, left the Professor’s cottage on the outskirts of the campus, he had not found much of a story but he had found a very good friend.

  Ambrose possessed, as Dan described him, one of the most wonderful gifts imaginable. His friends never changed. To him, they were always as when he first met them. To others, they may have grown old, gray, fat, stooped, bald, mean, cowardly, cantankerous—but not to Ambrose. Those he loved were always young, pure, beautiful, and good. Neither time nor meanness nor vice, no matter how in reality they aged and coarsened his friends, could in any way change them in his eyes. This was due (according to Dan) to Ambrose’s faith in them. He believed profoundly in friendship, made shyly emotional little speeches about it on every occasion, and saw in all his acquaintances the loftiest of loyalty and devotion.

  It would be inspiring, Dan said, if he could report that Ambrose’s friends lived up to the picture he had of them. But this, believably enough, was not so. Most of those who went to the Professor’s cottage for his receptions on Sunday afternoons—usually college students and members of the faculty—went to indulge in his kindness. Many came for the tasty cakes and fine sherry he served. Others came to court his good graces and thus achieve high ratings in their studies. And some came to be amused, for Ambrose was the quaint character of the campus.

  Those, as Dan described them, who gathered around Ambrose were, in spite of Ambrose’s love for them, very much like people the world over. They liked the innocent warmth of his kindness. In his presence they could relax and put away the deceits and devices they employed against their fellows in their ordinary life. They enjoyed his graciousness. They liked his remembrance of their birthdays and anniversaries. They took his books and rarely returned them. They borrowed his records and when, which was seldom, they returned them, they were scratched or cracked. They took, in a word, the wine of his kindness and returned him water.

  There were, however, a few who loved him. Very few, Da
n said. They came to his cottage in a sort of reverence, much as religious people would come to the home of a holy man. They enjoyed his little talks on music and his little speeches on friendship, and they were happy sitting with him and listening to his records, of which he had a remarkable collection. But they were most happy when he was playing his own violin concerto.

  Dan was deeply moved when he spoke of Ambrose’s violin concerto. The Professor had worked on the concerto for years and he believed in it as the only real accomplishment of his life. He liked to think of his friends, after he was dead, playing it and listening to it and thus remembering him, and remembering him especially as someone more than a professor of the history and appreciation of music.

  Ambrose had not yet finished the concerto. He was, when Dan knew him, still working on the andante movement. Such of the solo part as was written, he played beautifully and, on occasions, essayed the violin and orchestra sections with an associate, Morgan, simulating the orchestra as best he could on the piano. The theme of his concerto was, strangely enough for the happy Ambrose, death. Not mournful death, not despairing death, but hopeful death, courageous death.

  The idea of the concerto was inspired by a paragraph that Mozart wrote to his father. (Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven were Ambrose’s Trinity.) “As death is, strictly speaking, the true end and aim of our lives,” the young Mozart wrote, “I have for the last two years made myself so well acquainted with this true, best friend of mankind, that his image no longer terrifies, but calms and consoles me. I never lie down to rest without thinking that, young as I am, before the dawn of another day I may be no more; and yet nobody who knows me would call me morose and discontented. For this blessing I thank my Creator every day, and wish from my heart I could share it with all my fellow men.”

  Dan considered Ambrose’s selection of Mozart’s thought as his main theme typical of the humble but sensitively wise professor.

  “Mozart, in the thirty-five years he lived, did all he could to share with his fellows his disdain of the earthly terrors of death,” Dan declared. “His music is the happiest of all music in the history of man. Living, he sang gaily, beautifully. Dying, he sought feverishly to finish the Requiem he was writing, knowing well it was his own.

  “What faith! In death, he was buried without family, without friends, without music, even, during a blinding snowstorm in a pauper’s grave. And this,” Dan said, “I consider the greatest defiance of all. The immortal Mozart buried in the coldest, the most brutal circumstances of mortality. This friendly soul leaves without friends, this lovely soul without loveliness, this singing soul without song. And he whose name shall last as long as the human spirit endures is buried in a grave without a name. What a defiance!”

  This, in any event, is the way Dan put it, and Ambrose, he said, wanted in his concerto to tell again of Mozart’s faith and defiance.

  “His main theme was inspiring,” Dan said. “It sang of courage and gaiety against the moving solemnity of a requiem. It had, for all its undercurrent solemnity, the morning brightness of Mozart and I am quite sure the Master would not have been altogether unappreciative of the beauty of the humble professor’s work.”

  Ambrose’s few friends could be most quickly identified by their affection for his concerto. Each and every one of them swore by it, proclaiming it, as Dan did, a masterpiece. But the others took it, and particularly Ambrose’s playing of it, as a price to be paid for good cakes and wine and a pleasant place to visit. But to Ambrose all were alike, all who showed him any attention were his friends. He was, Dan said, very much like the saint who was always overwhelmed with gratitude if anyone greeted him, even in passing on the street.

  “There were, as I say, those few, those very few who loved him but the rest looked upon him as a gullible poor soul, always ripe for plucking,” Dan said. “But what matter did it make? To Ambrose, they were all the dearest of friends. And to him, in the wonderful gift God gave him, they never changed, they never grew a day older or a whit less perfect. You see,” Dan explained, “that was because he had perfect faith in them. Their selfishness, their greed could not penetrate that faith. What of it if they took his books, his records, his wine, his kindness? He did not care. If he meditated on their deficiencies—which was most unlikely—he was sure to dismiss them as an inconsequential price to pay for such loyal and devoted friendship.”

  Dan was, however, from his first meeting with Ambrose, deeply concerned as to what would happen to him should one day that faith of his be shaken. Suppose in some way, Dan used to ponder, the innocent, sensitive Ambrose suddenly saw, even briefly, into the iniquity of those around him. Suppose he had a glimpse of their selfishness and their secret disdain of him, would his illusion of their perfection go? And would he then see them as they were—aging, balding, graying, mean, cowardly, cantankerous? Would he see his friends, not as wonderful people set apart, but callous and coarse and petty like the rest of us?

  Still, Dan could not bring himself to believe that Ambrose, in his childlike innocence and his smiling blind faith, would ever discover falsity among his friends. What could they ever do, he asked himself, that would betray them? They laughed at him, used him openly for their own purposes, even stole from him. It was said that when Ambrose first came to the college, an associate had run off with his wife and he had forgiven them both. What more could be done to him?

  But, in the dreadful event of Ambrose seeing his friends as they were—petty and callous and coarse—what would become of him? Would his heart break and he die of his sorrow? Would his mind break and he go mad with his disillusionment?

  One day the answer came.

  Morgan, the associate who filled in on the piano when Ambrose played his concerto, supplied that answer. Morgan was a man of many gifts, all of them minor. He taught a course in modern poetry, being qualified for it, I suppose, by the fact he had written some incomprehensible verse for poetry magazines. The verse had brought him minor distinction.

  Dan knew little of his verse but, as Morgan wrote in recent days when incomprehensibility in literature and art was a mark of genius (more of a mark of genius than long-windedness, more even than a complete lack of a sense of humor), it is not clear why he did not achieve major distinction. For writing to be important in those days, it had only to be long, humorless, heavy with purpose, and, without obviously affronting the reader, as obscure as possible. The poems of the leading religious poet of the day were, except for their titles, almost completely unintelligible; a bad play by a bad short-story writer, incoherent with double talk, had won all kinds of awards; and the most acclaimed book of the time was a stream-of-consciousness farrago of prate and prattle normally of interest to no one except a psychiatrist. Why Morgan’s incomprehensible poetry had not won him more prominence I do not know. It did, however, recommend him for the lectureship at the college.

  Morgan had led a twisted life, beginning as a piano player in cafes, then shifting to an unsuccessful career as a writer of advertising copy, going from that to librettos for musical comedies, and, after failure at that and a subsequent spell as a film salesman, turning to short stories and verse. Only the verse had ever seen light.

  Ambrose considered him the first of his friends. “What a divine union,” he would exclaim, “a musician and a poet! Another Browning, perhaps. Another Wagner, even!”

  Morgan took full advantage of Ambrose’s generosity and friendship, and he did it callously. He had a theory that the Professor lived in some sort of nebulous world and did not, he said, “realize what went on around him,” and therefore there was no special reason for considering his feelings. He explained the Professor’s forgiveness of his wife’s traitorship by saying that he had not really realized what had happened. He remarked once that the Professor would be dead a long time before he realized it. This rather obscure remark, Dan said, was often quoted in amusement by the Professor’s parasites. When Dan commented to him on the Professor’s extraordinary generosity, Morgan waved the comment aside. “
Ambrose enjoys being generous,” he said. “He likes giving things away. It gives him a feeling of bigness.”

  How much truth there was in this opinion I do not know, but Morgan’s cold theory that the Professor had no realization of what was going on around him and had therefore no feelings that could be hurt was, as it dramatically turned out, thoroughly false.

  One Sunday evening, Ambrose was taking a leisurely walk in the dusk, his head humming with harmonies for the last movement of his concerto which he was about to finish, when out of the open window of a fraternity house along his walk came the sound of an orchestra on a national radio broadcast.

  The music, an introduction to a song, caught Ambrose’s ear. The music troubled him. He had heard it before but the intricate orchestration of the prelude blurred the line of the music and for a moment he could not identify it. He stopped to listen. Then, the announcer’s voice came in over the music, saying the singer of the evening was about to introduce a new song titled, “I Love You But I Like You, Too.”

  Ambrose smiled, nodded. He liked the title. Immediately, the singer began the song. Ambrose, listening, grew limp. His face turned white.

  The melody of the song was the main theme of his concerto. The theme that was to tell heroically and happily of Mozart’s faith and his defiance of death had been made the tune of a tawdry ballad.

  “No one ever stole from Chopin or Tchaikovsky with more zest and thoroughness,” Dan said. “The theme lent itself to thievery, being simple and melodious and requiring hardly any adapting. Ambrose, the instant he recognized the music, tragically realized that his life’s dream had been destroyed. It was bad enough to steal a melody from an established classic,” Dan pointed out, “but at least the classic still survived. In Ambrose’s case, however, should his concerto be played, it would appear that he had stolen the theme from a popular song. Thus, the concerto would be greeted as cheap and its composer reprehensible.