Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

  “Nonetheless, Ambrose might, in his wonderful love of life and living, have gone on and put the tragedy behind him had he not, as he stood limply listening, learned the name of the song’s composer.

  “It was Morgan who had written, ‘I Love You But I Like You, Too.’ It was he who had stolen the good Professor’s theme.”

  The song won instant acclaim, and a hundred radio listeners at the college rushed over to Morgan’s quarters to congratulate him. On their way, they passed a dazed, stumbling man they hardly recognized. The Professor went home, locked the doors, and wept. His housekeeper said afterward that he sat up in the dark the night through.

  In the morning, the newspapers carried the story of the young poetry teacher who could turn out a popular song as readily as he could turn out a sonnet, and by noontime he was famous. The fact that he could write neither a song nor a sonnet in no way shaded his glory.

  “I Love You But I Like You, Too” immediately became the hit song on the campus, as elsewhere. Only those few who loved Ambrose and his concerto realized what had happened. They met quietly and went together to Ambrose’s house to try to console him. Ambrose was not home. He had gone out in the morning, the housekeeper said, and had not returned. Now, in the late afternoon of the day after the tragedy, his friends, as Dan told it, “sat and waited, fearful of the worst. And some prayed. They knew that the ruin of his concerto would break his heart. But Morgan’s disloyalty, his treason to all that the Professor believed, they were afraid, would hurt him more.

  “It is bad enough,” Dan said with feeling, “to steal a man’s ideas, to steal the very stuff of his soul. That is not only a sin against a fellow man. It is a grievous sin against the Holy Spirit. But with Ambrose, it was possible there was an even more grievous offense. Had Morgan in stealing his music also taken away the good man’s profound and innocent faith in his fellows?

  “All in the room waited anxiously for Ambrose’s return. Yet all were frightened of that moment when he first would come through the door. Would his wonderful gift be gone? Would he see them as they were—aging, petty, commonplace, with their only distinction being his love of them, their only glory the glory that was in his eyes? Fervidly they wanted him back but fearfully they dreaded his return.

  “The friends sat quietly, watching the little walk that led through a narrow box hedge to the door. Dusk came and still there was no sign of him. Then dark, and the little walk could no longer be seen. Now, the friends waited for the sound of his footsteps.

  “More and more fearfully, as dark came, they dreaded the sound of the footsteps. They began to fidget, to grow apprehensive.

  “Finally, when the dinner hour had passed, the tension became too much for them. Their only thought now was escape. They rose quickly and, almost as one, fled the Professor’s house. They hurried through the dark to the security of their homes as if Ambrose, with judgment now in his eyes, were chasing them.

  “But they had no need to be fearful or to hide. The sound of Ambrose’s footsteps never came. The Professor never returned. No one ever saw or heard of him again.”

  There was a hush around the table as Dan finished.

  “Do not be too hard on my friend Ambrose,” Dan said. “He was more of a sage than a soldier. He was wise and gentle, not audacious. Morgan, in robbing him of his concerto, in stealing the stuff of his soul, had robbed him of his gift, his beautiful innocence. He did not want to return and see the pettiness and ugliness of his friends. Though he lost his innocence, he still held to his ideal. He went away, I am sure, willing to give up all he had in life rather than go back and bear witness against his friends and his faith in them. He did not run away. He left because he wanted them to live in his mind and heart as they were when he had seen them last. He was, in one sense, sacrificing himself for his friends.

  “In time, when his friends came to have an idea of the truth, they were glad he had not returned, glad for his sake, glad for their own. Now they began to feel they were challenged to live up to his image of them. And he, wherever he had gone, to Europe or Eternity, lived more warmly and more gloriously than before in their memory.”

  There was a meditative quiet around the table after Dan had finished the story of Ambrose. Again I had that curious feeling of unreality. It was as hard for me to accept Ambrose’s illusions as it was Ratherskin’s changing over the newspaper’s front page on Christmas Eve or Tim’s destruction of the Match King. They seemed as if they might, in some measure perhaps, be fictions invented for a purpose. It was Ratherskin’s story, as told by Dan, that so dramatically affected Briggs, and it was the story of the Match King that gave Tim’s gray little life definition and vitality. What the purpose of Ambrose’s story could be (if purpose there was), I had no idea.

  Yet, for all my skepticism, as I sat there looking at Dan I could see only a man entirely free of guile and indirection. His honesty, his genuineness were not qualities you detected. They were realities that struck you with an almost physical force. One thing seemed certain: whether or not Dan invented his stories to begin with, he completely believed them at the time he told them.

  It was hard for me after that night to get Dan and his talk and his tales out of my head. Curiously, I had a feeling that all his exuberance hid a pathos of some sort. I remembered especially, and could not forget, the troubled emotion with which he had recited those last lines of the prayer, “O Lord, I beseech Thee, leave me not for a moment, because I know not the value of my soul.”

  Chapter 10

  A week or so later I went out to Dan’s house again. It was after dinner, and Dan and his guests were in the living room. Henry had lighted a fire in the fireplace against the damp. Only one lamp was on in the room, a green-shaded table lamp, and the chief light came from the fire. Dan greeted me, as he did everybody, like a dear friend he had not seen for years.

  All sat with Dan before the fire and there was much small talk, gentle and unsustained. Dan had his wine beside him but now he sipped it slowly, meditatively staring into the fire.

  Dan, in answer to a question by Briggs (who was being very Catholic and being so, I suspected, to improve his cause with Doris) was speculating on where the center of Christendom would be at the end of time. Would Rome some day be a buried ruin like Nineveh or Carthage, and would a new St. Peter’s rise in some new city on some distant Mongolian plain? Had the West irrevocably failed and would the new glory rise in the alien and enigmatic Orient? Dan seemed to believe that this would happen. Doris objected, saying it was impossible that this should ever be. Wasn’t Rome the Eternal City? To which Dan replied, “One of the marks of the truth of the Church is that the impossible usually happens.”

  Dan’s devotion to his Church rather surprised me. I had an idea that he, being so independent and almost so irresponsible a spirit, would have been in opposition to organization and authority. When I commented on it, he laughed and said, “Don’t be misled by my rhapsodies. I’m a very bad Catholic.”

  How bad a Catholic Dan was—or how good—is his business, his and his God’s, certainly not mine. I did learn from remarks of Doris’ that he went to daily morning Mass, usually protesting, much in the manner of Chesterton, that only the power of Holy Mother Church could get him out of bed at so early an hour. When once I remarked that it was difficult for me to picture him being so methodically devout, he looked at me with blinking incredulous eyes.

  “There’s nothing methodical about going to daily Mass,” he said. “Each morning holds a fresh and unique experience—a drama more solemn than death, more inspiring than birth—it is a drama of death and birth, really—the one great drama since time began.

  “We are all at heart ritualists, whether we know it or not, and participating in the ritual of the stupendous sacrifice, we shed our false and gaudy artificialities and swim in deep, primal seas—plunge into coldly refreshing reality, and become, in an invigorating sense, our primitive selves again. Morning Mass is a morning song as well as a morning sacrifice and good for t
he soul. It is a time of detachment and offers the perfect hour not only for prayer but for orientation. We are all racing toward eternity and it is then, in that morning hour, we can take time out, so to speak, to have a slow, quiet look at our distorted selves and our crazy world—and see both in placidly proper perspective. A great simplification takes place, and lucidly, even radiantly, we see the things that matter—and see, too, that the things that matter can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

  “Morning Mass is a matchlessly healthy and practical way of starting the day. So soon as the news gets about, I expect all the psychiatrists will be prescribing morning Mass for their patients whatever their belief or lack of it.”

  The talk continued about the Church. Dan, it appeared, was much entertained by those who considered the Church to be totalitarian.

  “You’d think, to hear some good people talk,” he said, “the Church has some sort of secret Swiss Guard like a slave state’s secret police to seize me in the dead of night if I should deny her authority. The truth is I am the police, the judge and the jury—I am the jailer and the firing squad.

  “If I gave up going to church and apostatized, no one I know of would be the least concerned except my lovely Doris here. The bishop, who never heard of me, would certainly not chase after me in great perturbation. And if I took up a life of crime, about the only interest in me would come from the police. The truth is, alas, I’m free to go to hell any way I wish. My salvation is my own personal problem. The Church is about as totalitarian as my own dear mother was. It might have been better for me if both of them had had a little of the totalitarian in them.”

  He sipped his wine. “And so far as the Pope and the hierarchy being a gang of political schemers plotting like a bureau of internationalists to take over the countries of the world—!” He laughed again. “In recent centuries, the guardians of the Church have, with few exceptions, been politically so innocent that the Church’s survival can be explained only in terms of her divinity. And this I hold is good. Far better political failure and spiritual progress than the other way around, as happens with nationalist churches whose desire for security commits them to the devious practices of politics and hence to compromise, and dooms them thus to eventual extinction.

  “But the shepherds of the Church are always and in every way suspect, as the First Shepherd was always and in every way suspect. Whatever is done or said, even if it is only the warning of the threat divorce is to the home and hence to the nation, is misconstrued as being against the freedom of man and even against the welfare of the country. He who insists on the rules of the game becomes by strange reasoning the enemy of liberty. But so it must be, I suppose. The absolute is always suspect.

  “The late, good Cardinal Suhard of Paris—bless his soul—encouraged priests to don working clothes and go out into the factories and mines and hovels of France and work and live with the workingman. This was seen by some as a novel and crafty political maneuver. How naive! The followers of Marx and Engel had been busy thus for seventy-five years, having learned their lesson from the Christians of many centuries before.

  “The Communist Manifesto had been at work almost fifty years before Leo XIII came out with his Rerum Novarum. As political schemers, the popes and the hierarchs are most often children. And perhaps that’s as it should be for otherwise they might well not enter—nor lead others—into the Kingdom of Heaven.

  “Once, one of these invectives against old Mother Church so put me in a dither that I could not write a letter. I wrote some verse instead.” He smiled, took a little wine. “It is always good when you are in a dither to write verse.”

  He went on and recited what he had written. He evidently liked reciting verse as he liked reciting toasts, giving timbre, as he did, with his vibrant voice to every word and phrase.

  The towering beauty of my Love

  I had not known before;

  If you will hate her quite so much

  Then I will love her more.

  I knew her fair, I knew her sweet,

  But not so sweet and fair

  That she should drive you blind with rage

  And wild with such despair.

  I looked on her with common eyes,

  As on a common face,

  And looking so did not discern

  Her glory nor her grace.

  But that was ere you made me see

  How fair she is and great;

  I had not known of half my love

  Until I knew your hate!

  Childlike, he beamed around at all of us as if he expected applause. It was because he had written so little he considered worth the trouble that, I imagine, he looked upon his verses with such pride.

  Dan, I found out subsequently, had written verse other than that he had recited and other than his toasts. Not much, and not all good. There was a rather long Christmas poem that he wrote for Doris when she was a little girl. And there was a similarly rather long poem titled “Ode to Writing Men.” The somber and almost cynical quality of this poem surprised and puzzled me when first I read it, though it does not do so now. It might perhaps prove of diversion to some readers and I shall give it here. If the reader does not care for poems that run more than a dozen lines or so (I am one who does not) he can skip it without compunction.

  Ode to Writing Men

  (After reading various journals, books and magazines, religious and secular, during the Christmas season.)

  ’Tis joy on earth again,

  Gentlemen.

  So, safe within your lofty wall

  Of noun and verb and particle

  Of verse and editorial

  And article,

  Be merry.

  See each Whimsy has its space,

  See each Fancy hangs with grace,

  See each Rhyme is pinned in place,

  And be merry.

  (That distant whirring

  Is the World stirring.

  That rumbling beat

  Is the tramp of feet.)

  Yes, be merry.

  Pass the cup and pass the wine

  (The wine of vanity is mellow)

  And hail the day and hail the vine

  For Christ’s a rare, good fellow.

  Ah, be merry.

  Carol, song, and toast compose,

  And, of course, some sterling prose;

  (Dear Christ, You are the least

  Guest at Your feast)

  And so be merry

  Till day breaks….

  Yes, till day breaks

  Over the world’s massed, hollow faces,

  Over the white, fanatic faces,

  Over the filthy, blood-stained places,

  Till day breaks….

  Pass them a verse, gentlemen,

  As you pass the wine,

  (The wine of vanity is sweet)

  And throw them a line,

  Gentlemen,

  A well-turned line.

  ’Tis joy on earth again.

  Be merry!

  Toast the rich and toast the fair,

  Toast the amiable everywhere,

  Safe within your lofty wall

  Of noun and verb and particle,

  Of verse and editorial,

  And article.

  (The tramp of feet becomes a thunder

  Beyond the wassail door,

  And suffering that cried for succor

  May cry no more,

  But take its plunder….

  Poor, starless brood,

  Starved of Christ

  And starved of food,

  May take its plunder

  And cry no more!)

  Be merry, gentlemen.

  ’Tis joy on earth again.

  There were also several short poems of merit, the most vivid of which is this quatrain, called “Semite.”

  I scrubbed his hulk of spit and mud

  (Poor Jew left battered in the street)

  I scrubbed him clean—and yet the blood

  Kept trickling from h
is hands and feet.

  There was still another poem, I discovered later, that, while not of too high quality, did offer to a certain degree an insight into the Dan that was hidden beneath his wine and talk and amiability. This poem he called “Morning Prayer” and I shall give it in its proper place in the story.

  These few verses, and one small prose piece which I shall also give in its proper place are the only really personal writings of Dan’s ever to see paper, so far as I know.

  That night, after he had recited his verse, I remarked it was too bad he did not find more time for writing the things that were close to his heart.

  “I wish I could,” he said almost wistfully, “and each day I plan for the morrow to be the day I begin, but always there is some obstacle and the day goes and another dawns and I still have not begun. The world, the flesh, and the devil seem to be in constant conspiracy against me.”

  Now, as Dan spoke, Archer, the pharmacist turned novelist, rose abruptly and left us, saying it was time for him to get upstairs and to work. Dan watched him go with admiration.

  “The Lord surely has Justus under His wings,” he said, quoting the Ninetieth Psalm. “He is afraid neither of the business that walks about in the darkness nor the noonday devil.”

  The business that walks about in the darkness did not bother Dan too much. But the noonday devil persecuted him tirelessly.

  “He is the daylight devil, the worst of all the fiends,” Dan declared. “Wine cannot drive him away as it can the demons of darkness for wine cannot exorcise in the sunlight. It has been said that Satan’s best trick is to prove he does not exist. I do not think so. I think his best trick is to assure us he is a gentleman. And his next best trick is to persuade us he is unimportant, is just passing by. That is the noonday devil.

  “The smiling gentleman devil I can resist. Urbanity has never been persuasive with me. But the noonday fiend is primitive. He distracts, disrupts, takes away purpose and patience and time. He works through incidentals and accidentals. He seeks to involve us in trivia, to trip us up with inconsequential detail, so that we will be unable to do a day’s work worthy of our soul.