Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

  “He suggests naps in the middle of the day, inspires acquaintances to drop in just to say hello, turns ankles, and tears trousers. He sends the toothache that leads to days with the dentist, breaks shoelaces, gives that boil just under the collar, makes us wait in the barbershop, and sees to it that the automobile battery is dead. He promotes corns and bunions and inspires the long telephone talker when lunch is on the table. He makes the leak in the roof, the rug that slides, and the closet door that won’t shut. He snaps the pencil point and the rung of the chair.

  “He writes letters marked ‘personal and important’ advertising yachts for sale, sends a pair of socks in two sizes, and puts the morning paper at the wrong door. He loses pens and wallets, stops watches, sours the cream, hides the dictionary, breaks fingernails, rings the front doorbell, rings the back doorbell, mislays eyeglasses, gives an itch, gives an earache, sticks with a pin, smashes the window, pulls off a button—and so on and on, incessantly and relentlessly disrupting and interrupting, persecuting and torturing through endless infinitesimals. He creates frustration and drives to despair.

  “He provides explanations for our defections and excuses for our sins. He wastes the minutes that waste the hours, the days, the years, until death is on us and nothing is done. He involves life, complicates it, dissipates it. He seeks so to fritter our labors away that we shall achieve nothing deserving of our eternal destiny and accomplish nothing of merit for the salvation of our soul.”

  He was quiet a moment when he finished. Then, suddenly, he got to his feet, rising with a resolution rare in him.

  “I think, perhaps, if you good friends don’t mind, I’ll go upstairs and see if I can’t get my book started.” He turned solemnly to me. “You’re right. I must try to find time to write the things that are close to my heart.”

  He said good night and, erect with determination, left the room.

  I was quite pleased that I had had some effect on him. But my pleasure was short lived. Doris, after Dan had gone, told me in her realistic fashion that I should not be misled by Dan’s resolutions.

  “Dan makes these dramatic decisions once or twice a week,” she explained. “He goes up to his study to work and a half hour later I find him up there sitting back in his armchair sound asleep.”

  This was a blow to my conceit. Nonetheless, that night as I rode home alone on the streetcar (Briggs not having returned from taking Doris home) I could not persuade myself that Dan was merely lazy. I could see on this second visit what I suspected on my first, that he was troubled, at war with himself. Everything about him, his books, his music, his manner of life, and, paradoxically, even his bright talk and his ebullient good spirits tended to be proof of this. There was more, I felt certain, than conversational invention in his fear of the noonday devil.

  Chapter 11

  Two weeks later, Dan telephoned and asked me out to the house for dinner. I was sure then, in spite of Doris’ skepticism, that Dan had begun his book, and he was asking me out to tell me so, and possibly, I thought in my revived conceit, to thank me for the stimulation I had given him.

  I had to go to Springfield on a story and was unable to get to the house for dinner. But Dan was still at the table when I arrived. He insisted I join him and his guests in cheese and wine. He was glowing with talk and wine, and I saw immediately that neither I nor his fear of the noonday devil had had any effect on him. Doris knew him, it was clear, better than I.

  Doris and the usual friends were there—Archer, Barney, Henry, Tim, Briggs, and a new guest, a Frenchman named Pagineau. Pagineau was a grandson of a famous French statesman of the early years of the century—at least, as such Dan introduced him. In France, Pagineau had once been tried for murder and acquitted, and a newspaper friend of Dan’s had sent him to Dan, thinking he might be good material for a crime story. He was good material for a story, it seemed to me when I got to know him, but not the sort of story Dan would want to write, or anyone with anything better to do would care to read.

  The talk had evidently been, as it so often was with Dan, about Christianity. As I entered, Briggs (with an eye on Doris as usual) was questioning Dan on just what he considered the Church to be. Dan spoke of the Church sometimes as if it were an institution, Briggs said, and sometimes as if it were a sort of person or a group of persons. It was a question I had wanted to ask Dan on my last visit when he was speaking of St. Peter’s and the end of time.

  Dan meditated a moment before he spoke. “That’s a large order,” he said, smiling. Then he began, speaking as if the words had long been formulated in his mind.

  “The Church to me is all important things everywhere. It is authority and guidance. It is love and inspiration. It is hope and assurance. It is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is our Lady and St. Joseph. It is St. Peter and Pius XII. It is the bishop and the pastor. It is the catechism and it is our mother leaning over the crib teaching us our evening prayers. It is the cathedral at Chartres and the cross-tipped hut on Ulithi. It is the martyrs in the Colosseum and the martyrs in Uganda, the martyrs at Tyburn and the martyrs at Nagasaki. It is the wrinkled old nun and the eager-eyed postulant. It is the radiant face of the young priest saying his first Mass, and the sleepy boy acolyte with his soiled white sneakers showing under his black cassock.

  “It is the spire glimpsed from a train window and the cruciform miniature of a church seen far below on the earth from an airplane. It is six o’clock Mass with its handful of unknown saints at the communion rail in the gray dark and it is pontifical High Mass with its crowds and glowing grandeur in St. Peter’s. It is the candle-starred procession after evening Benediction in St. Patrick’s and the rosary, the night before the burial, at a stuccoed funeral parlor in Los Angeles. It is El Greco’s soaring Assumption in Toledo and it is the primitive pink and blue angels on a mission altar in Peru. It is the Sistine Choir and it is the May procession of Chinese children singing the Regina Coeli in Peking.

  “It is the Carthusian at prime on Monte Allegro and the Jesuit teaching epistemology in Tokyo. It is the Scheutveld Father fighting sleeping sickness in the Congo and the Redemptorist fighting prejudice in Vermont. It is the Benedictine, the Augustinian, the Passionist, the Dominican, the Franciscan. It is all religious and especially the great unnamed Order of the Parish Priest.

  “It is the Carmelite Sister lighting the tapers for vespers in the drear cold of Iceland and the Sister of Notre Dame de Namur making veils for First Communion in Kwango. It is the Vincentian Sister nursing a Negro Baptist dying of cancer in Alabama and the Maryknoll Sister facing a Communist commissar in Manchuria. It is the White Sister teaching the Arabs carpetmaking in the Sahara and the Good Shepherd Sister in St. Louis giving sanctuary to a derelict child, a home to a lamb who was lost. It is the Little Sister of the Poor salving the sores of a forgotten old man in Marseilles, the Grey Sister serving the destitute in Haiti, the Blessed Sacrament Sister helping a young Negro write poetry in New Orleans. It is the Sister of Charity…. It is all the Sisters everywhere.

  “It is the crippled woman who keeps fresh flowers before our Lady’s altar and the young woman catechist who teaches the barefooted neophytes in the distant hills. It is the girl who gives up her bridge to drive the Sisters to the prisons and the homes of the poor, and it is the woman who goes from door to door begging for help for the orphanage. It is the proud mother of the priest and the heartbroken mother of the criminal. It is all mothers and sisters everywhere who weep and suffer and pray that sons and brothers may keep the Faith.

  “It is the youth climbing the September hill to the seminary, his heart sure of Him calling, and it is the lost priest stumbling, groping, seeking vainly afar the God he can hold in his hands, a stranger among men always and everywhere. It is the bad sermon and the good, the false vocation and the true. It is the tall young man who says the Stations of the Cross every evening and it is the father of ten who wheels the sick to Mass every Sunday morning at the County Hospital.

  “It is
St. Martin and Martin de Porres, St. Augustine and St. Phocas, Gregory the Great and Gregory Thaumaturgus, St. Ambrose and Charles de Foucauld, St. Ignatius and Ignatius the Martyr, St. Thomas More and St. Barnabas. It is St. Teresa and St. Philomena, Joan of Arc and St. Winefride, St. Agnes and St. Mary Euphrasia. It is all the saints, ancient and new, named and unnamed, and all the sinners.

  “It is the stained-glass window with the ragged hole from a boy’s baseball, and the small red sanctuary lamp sputtering in a dark and empty church. It is the bursting out of the Gloria on Holy Saturday and the dim crib at dawn Mass on Christmas. It is the rose vestments on Laetare Sunday and the blue overalls of the priest working with the laborers in a mine in the Ruhr.

  “It is the shiny, new shoes and shiny, reverent faces of the June bride and groom kneeling before the white-flowered altar at nuptial Mass, and it is the pale, troubled young mother at the baptismal font, her joy mingled with distress as she watches her first-born wail its protest against the sacramental water. It is the long, shadowy, uneven line of penitents waiting outside the confessional in the dusk of a wintry afternoon, each separate and solemnly alone with his sins, and it is the stooped figure of a priest, silhouetted against the headlights of a police car in the darkness of the highway as he says the last prayers over a broken body lying on the pavement beside a shattered automobile.

  “It is the Magnificat and it is grace before meals. It is the worn missal and the chipped statue of St. Anthony, the poor box and the cracked church bell. It is peace and truth and salvation. It is the Door through which I entered into the Faith and the Door through which I shall leave, please God, for eternity.”

  There was a silence after that. Doris was dozing.

  Dan took a sip of his wine, smiled at Doris. “Catholics take their Church for granted,” he explained. “We even take our Lord in the tabernacle for granted. But you mustn’t be too hard on us. All children take their home and their father for granted. We are spoiled children.”

  Pagineau had listened to Dan with a satiric smile. “You are a poet,” he said. “You romanticize too much, my dear friend.”

  Dan thought this a great compliment. “For many years,” he said, “the word Roman was a chilling word, standing for force and tyranny. It took Christianity to make the word stand for love and chivalry. It is good to be romantic.”

  Pagineau was amused. Dan had an extraordinary memory, he said, and people with good memories almost always had bad judgment.

  Dan considered this a most profound and provocative remark. He drank to Pagineau. “I do have bad judgment,” he said. “I’ve always had bad judgment,” he added humbly. “I did not realize it so clearly before.”

  There seemed to me at the moment no doubt about Dan’s bad judgment. Pagineau was a concrete proof of it. Pagineau was extremely tall, being about six feet three inches, and extraordinarily thin, with sallow skin and soft hands with abnormally long fingers. His face, despite its leanness, was gross with dissipation. He was never at home with men unless he was drinking, and he saw to it he was drinking most of the time. He had charm of a sort, a knowledge of people and places, excellent superficial manners, a gift for anecdote, and a flair for turning a sophisticated phrase. He was a parasite of long practice and accomplishment. Even in Dan’s house where parasites excelled, he was outstanding. Archer, the erstwhile pharmacist who was writing the great Christian novel, was, for all his cold and steady avarice, a novice beside Pagineau, who was the top dead beat of my experience.

  He had no money (I suspect he was rushed out of France after the murder trial lest it be discovered he was guilty after all) but he always wore the finest of clothes. Once, seeing him with a complete new wardrobe, including white tie and tails, I asked him where he got the money to pay for it.

  “My clothes came from New York,” he said, as if this were an answer to my query. “I had them flown over by the airplane.”

  True enough, as I learned later, he had had the clothes flown over from New York. It was his technique to give, when possible, his swindles size, color, and excitement, the theory being, the larger and more important the swindle the less it is suspected. His theory was, in my observation, well founded. But he had not answered my question.

  When I asked again where he got the money, he looked at me in indignation. “I do not pay for the clothes,” he declared loftily. “I will not pay for the clothes.”

  When I remarked that in America it was customary to pay your bills he grew even more indignant. “It is against my ethics,” he retorted, looking down on me with a hurt look in his jaundiced eyes. “I do not pay for the clothes.”

  He explained his ethics. He traded, he said, only in establishments that allowed credit. In order to allow credit, an establishment had to charge more to cover the risk. Now, he maintained, if all customers paid their bills, the establishments that allowed credit and charged more to cover the risk, would be making money dishonestly. This dishonesty his ethics was decisively against. Therefore he did not pay.

  “I am the reesk!” he announced defiantly.

  I tell this here only to give an idea of Pagineau’s character. He had an arrogance about him that was more than that of the continental sophisticate looking down on what he considered the American boor. It was, I often thought, the arrogance that goes with pure evil.

  But to Dan, Pagineau was only a shade short of heroic. He saw him as a martyr at the murder trial and now as an exile in a strange and insensitive land. He saw him especially as a son of the country of the cathedrals and, as he put it, a child of the family of Faith. Dan liked to tell, when he introduced Pagineau, how wisely he had been educated. It was his grandfather who had been the young Pagineau’s teacher. He would take him to the Louvre, say, and once they had entered he would command the boy to close his eyes. He would then lead him with closed eyes to a Rembrandt, if that were to be the lesson of the visit, and command the boy to open his eyes and look only at the Rembrandt. Then he would explain Rembrandt to the boy, tell him the painter’s life story and his approach to his art, and point out how both were revealed in the painting before him. The lesson over, he would command the boy to close his eyes again and lead him out of the museum as they had entered.

  “One picture at a time!” Dan was almost rhapsodic. “Not a maze and a conglomeration! One thought at a time! What simplicity! What genius! No wonder, Marcel, you are a man of so many accomplishments!”

  Pagineau, deep in the California wine (which he took every occasion to disparage), nodded his head in agreement with Dan’s opinion of him.

  Although it seemed to me that Pagineau always drank far more than he properly should and showed the effects of it quickly and too often repulsively, Dan was forever extolling his handling of wine.

  “You drink graciously, Marcel,” he would say. “That is because you come from a land where wine has its proper place on the table. You grow up with wine and you grow old with it. Never can it be said of you as Chesterton said of the teetotaler and the drunkard: ‘They both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.’”

  That night some woman called in her car for Pagineau and he went off with her. On the way out, he stopped at the door for a moment, standing tall in the fine clothes he considered it unethical to pay for, and said a tipsy good night. “As we say in France—” he bowed to Dan “—one is not poor who has a friend.”

  Barney, his cloudy eyes sullen in his battered face, muttered, “Whatta fakeroo!”

  But Dan did not hear Barney. He considered this exit of Pagineau’s delightful, wise in Old-World wisdom, graceful with Old-World charm.

  I have written of Pagineau only to show the extent of Dan’s innocence or, perhaps I should say, of his charity. As he had no part in Dan’s essential story, I can finish with him in a few words here. He became one of Dan’s most constant guests. After a while, it began to seem as if he were changing, as if he were in some strange way being transformed to resemble Dan’s opinion of him. It began to see
m indeed as if a miracle were taking place, that Dan was finally affecting the quality of his life.

  One night, oratorical with wine, he made a speech in praise of nobility—noblesse oblige was his theme—and ended up by declaring he was going back to fight for France. Dramatically, and much to Doris’ consternation, he flung his wine glass into the fireplace, smashing it to pieces, and strode from the room and the house. He never returned.

  Dan was tremendously moved. “Tonight,” he said after Pagineau was gone, “we have been witnesses to true heroism. A spirit has asserted itself ! A warrior has gone off to the wars!”

  When Doris pointed out that France was not at war at the time, Dan said France was always at war with materialism, and it was against this ancient enemy that Pagineau had gone to fight.

  It so happened that Pagineau’s conversion and the martial spirit it inspired lasted only until he got to New York. Months later he was in the newspapers. Life was kind if it kept the papers from Dan’s eyes, and I think it did.

  Pagineau, it appeared, found himself a wealthy mistress in New York. One afternoon, needing money, Pagineau drove a truck up to his mistress’ apartment while she was at the hairdresser’s, informed the superintendent of the building that they were moving, and loaded all of the woman’s furniture and possessions, including jewelry, silver, and furs, into the truck and drove off with them.

  That evening the woman, frantic in her despoiled apartment, received a package by special messenger from Pagineau. In it was a stack of pawn tickets from various pawn brokers throughout the city. Pagineau had borrowed a fortune of money on the woman’s furniture and possessions. With the package was this note: “Dearest—You see I did not steal. I am not a thief. With these tickets you may recover all of your beautiful things. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Love, always. Marcel.”

  The last I heard of Pagineau he was seriously hurt in a brawl over a bar bill in a Mexican border saloon. He had refused to pay the bill, I’m sure, standing by his ethics to the last. So much for Pagineau.