Dan England and the Noonday Devil

by Myles Connolly

  This night, the first time I had seen Dan since his talk at the fireplace a week or so before, he seemed, as I have said, to have forgotten the noonday devil and his concern about his own unproductivity. But now, looking back, I realize that much of his talk and wine must have been defensive. Now, I realize that very often his sustained amiability at this time came from a fear of being, as he would say, alone with his soul. The happenings of later that evening gave pathetic evidence of this.

  After the cheese, we all moved into the living room as before. Again, there being a chill in the dark, Henry lighted the fire. Again we all sat in the shadows. Scarcely were we seated when the doorbell rang.

  Doris went to the door and admitted two men. Dan rose quickly to greet them as they entered the living room.

  They were two grave, erect, striking men. The shorter and older of the two was a priest, white-haired, sturdy, with a dark, finely molded face and the carriage of an army colonel. The taller of the two was young, not more, possibly, than twenty-four years of age. He too carried himself with military assurance. His face was also dark and finely molded, with high cheekbones and a narrow but strong, cleanly defined jaw.

  There was an intensity about the two men that was like a subdued light in the shadowy room. Their eyes, particularly, glowed with purpose and quiet fervor. They were not ordinary men on an ordinary visit. That much was immediately clear.

  Dan introduced the priest. He was Father Pitka, a Jesuit who had been Dan’s history professor many years before at Boston College. He was known to Barney and Doris, having been in the past a casual visitor at the house. The college, which was in Newton, was less than a mile’s walk from Dan’s home. The priest introduced the young man with him as Mr. Christobel. Mr. Christobel acknowledged the introduction with a nod, said nothing.

  The priest and the young man wished to speak privately with Dan, and the three went up together to Dan’s study. After they had gone, Archer announced he had to get to work on his book and left. Doris ordered Henry, Tim, and Barney in for kitchen duty, following them in with the air of a drill sergeant. Briggs, out of politeness, hung back with me, but his eyes kept straying toward the kitchen and after a moment he left, saying he would return presently. He did not return and I was left alone before the now smoldering fire. I took the copy of Subercaseaux’ life of St. Francis that I had seen on the window seat on my first visit, and made myself at home before the fire. It is enchanting, this lovely story in water colors of God’s tatterdemalion, and I was soon lost in it.

  I remember the group in the kitchen dispersing—Barney going to bed, Tim going to his room to work on a scientific system for beating roulette, Briggs taking Doris home, and Henry joining me by the fire with his drawing board and sketches (he was already working on the Professor Ambrose story). But I was only vaguely aware of them, back as I was in the thirteenth century with little St. Francis. I watched him, in the exquisite pictures, make merry as a youth with friends and wine. I saw him as a beggar eat crusts of bread from the street. I looked on as he visited St. Peter’s tomb and watched him change clothes with the beggar at the entrance to the Vatican Basilica. I saw him nurse the lepers at Gubbio and preach to the birds. I went to Egypt and Jerusalem with him and was at Greccio when he lifted up the Christ Child from the crib. I had reached Mount Alvernia when Dan returned to the room.

  Dan had seen his guests out and was alone. He entered slowly and stood by the fireplace, staring soberly into the fire. I had not imagined he was capable of so somber a mood. It was a full minute at least before he became aware of Henry and me.

  The Subercaseaux book on my knees was open to the painting of the enrapt Francis on Mount Alvernia as he was lifted from the ground by his vision of a seraph bearing the likeness of Christ on the cross. The page caught Dan’s eye and he stared at it with an almost startled look. I gave the book to him and he sat down with it, his eyes not leaving the picture of Francis and his vision.

  When he spoke, he spoke very quietly. “The world and I love the little man of Assisi because we think of him as a singing man, an ecstatically happy man,” he said. “The Troubadour of God, we like to call him. The most popular books on him and the most popular pictures emphasize his joyousness. Mount Alvernia was his Golgotha, but this we’d rather forget. Nor do we like to remember that he, for all his singing, had his Gethsemani and his passion.

  “After this vision of the seraph was gone—” Dan nodded at the picture “—Francis saw that he had wounds on his hands and feet and in his side. Not joy and jubilance, not song but the stigmata were his best rewards. His ecstasies were bought with suffering. It is strange how determined I am to avoid the full realization of that truth. It’s cowardice, I suppose.”

  Dan gave the book back to me. I closed it and put it back on the window seat. I was going to quote Stevenson to Dan, that no man is as much of a coward as he thinks he is, but I had a feeling he would not have heard me and I kept my peace.

  Chapter 12

  Dan sat in silence a long time staring into the fire. Now, he seemed like a stranger, a man I had not seen before. Henry, concerned at his mood, stopped sketching.

  Dan raised the wine bottle to pour himself wine, changed his mind, put the bottle down.

  “Do you remember,” be turned to me, “those last words in Leon Bloy’s The Woman Who Was Poor?” I said I did not know Leon Bloy’s work. “I think you’d like the book,” he went on. “It is in praise of poverty, real poverty, the wretched poverty of the streets, as a way to God. And the woman who was poor says at the end, ‘There is only one unhappiness and that is—not to be one of the saints.’”

  He returned to the fire. When, finally, he spoke again, it was with a solemnity that was so alien to him as to be disturbing. Henry, I could see, was deeply troubled, the more so because of the love he had for him.

  He spoke meditatively, slowly. It was the first time up to then I had heard him speak in real seriousness of himself. His theme, if his rather fitful talk can be said to have had a theme, was the worthlessness of his life. He had that evening, in an instant, seen himself as a wastrel, “good for nothing in time or in eternity,” to use his own words. He had always followed his own inclinations, had never done anything to thwart himself, and such religion as he had was merely another indulgence for him. (This is, of course, his description of himself, not mine certainly.) His Faith, he said, was very much incense and candlelight, Christmas Eve and our Lady (and her compassion in which he declared he had always found succor) and Easter Sunday morning. He had taken the sweet and left the bitter. (Again I am merely giving his opinion of himself.) He had always considered himself a sort of pet of Providence—“one of God’s weaknesses” was the phrase he used—and he lived in complete assurance of having all this world and heaven too.

  “That is one of the most serious temptations of the Faith,” he explained. “For the Faith can make life so adventurous and beautiful, it is hard to see the Cross looking down on us from the Hill. It is so easy to become a Christian hedonist, and it seems so reasonable to do so. It is the temptation I have never resisted.”

  Now, he went on, he was realizing how superficial his life had been. He had accomplished nothing, nothing in terms of his immortality. He was at last beginning to understand the one great unhappiness Leon Bloy had mentioned—that of not being one of the saints.

  I tried to point out to him that, so far as I knew it, his Me had been anything but worthless. I commented on his kindness and generosity, rare in an acquisitive world. In his way, I said, he was what I would consider a saint.

  He would not listen. “Self-indulgence, every bit of it,” he said. “I indulge in charity as I do in wine.”

  “Why not consider charity the highest form of self-indulgence?” I suggested. But he waved my suggestion away as having no pertinency to the problem.

  Once, he went on, he had considered the idea of becoming a priest. But the more serious he became with the idea, the more frightened of it he grew. No one was good eno
ugh to be a priest, he told himself.

  “That was my way out. I simply lacked the courage that goes with the high calling,” he said quietly. “I am a coward, I’ve always been a coward.”

  Henry sharply resented this. He had never known anyone who lived so bravely as Dan did, he said, taking no thought for the morrow, depending on nobody, living his life clearly and cleanly as he saw it.

  “Selfishness, Henry,” Dan replied. “Complete selfishness. I live improvidently because that seems to me to be the happiest manner of living. I live independently because my ego is uncomfortable before even the idea of a superior. My whole existence is very much like a bad play. It projects nothing. It has neither development nor climax.”

  He pondered a while. “If I had married and had had children, I would have some justification for the gift of life. But again I was afraid.

  “Today, fatherhood is an heroic calling. The father of olden times was in many ways an idyllic character, living serenely in the bosom of his family, planning and saving for the future. But today he lives in turmoil and toils in vain. If he is industrious, if he is competent, he does not work for his family and the future but for the lazy and incompetent everywhere. No longer has his home the peace of the old homestead. His children ride in engines of death and destruction, and the jangling of the telephone in the depth of the night may mean tragedy in the air or on the highway. Diseases of the mind, born of the madness and artificiality of the modern environment, derange and sometimes destroy those he loves.

  “More menacing is the increased threat against faith and morals endlessly made by an increasingly arrogant and unbelieving world. More dangerous by far are the soul’s diseases (with skepticism and apathy predominating), present always like a plague. Life outside of the monastic walls is perilous, fiercely competitive, often brutal. The dedicated father today is a hero, and if you ask why he faces his burdens so bravely, I can answer only because in him is the stuff of saints. Not for him is the consolation of applause. The mother is praised in song and extolled in story. But the father walks the common way without bugles, without drums, with no flags flying. He, truly, has given hostages to fortune.

  “Those holy men and women who have given up the world are glorious children of God, but if there were no harassed, slaving poor fathers, there would be none of those glorious children, if for no other reason than they would never have been born. Peace of mind and peace of soul are lovely possessions but they are not for the dedicated father. The particular saint in him demands that he go out and meet the challenge of the day, that he be concerned not with his own serenity and well-being but with those in his care, that he venture forth into the world and there, thick in the masses of men, seek the opportunity to love his neighbor and to love his enemy, so that, in advance and not in retreat, in battle and not in seclusion, he may prove himself worthy of Him who has shared with him the divine power of creation.

  “The priest may offer his Mass and the nun her sacrifices, and the contemplatives may send up their unceasing assault of prayer and mortification—all may cry out for succor, may plead to stay the hand of Eternal Justice—but it is the father, that undistinguished, yawning man you see in the early morning leaving home for the shop, the office, the factory, the mine—that tired, troubled person you see returning home at night, often with a smile that is false and a cheerfulness without foundation—it is he who is the first warrior and the first guardian of the Faith. For he is the captain of the home, the citadel on which the Christian civilization is built. There is no order or organization to record his heroism or promote his beatification. He is the common, oftentimes inglorious beast of burden, his greatest distinction being the resemblance he bears to the ass that carried Christ.”

  Dan’s gaze sought the fire and the emotion that had come into his last words died away. Again he was somber, meditative. “No. I’m a coward,” he went on after a moment. “The high heroism of dedicated fatherhood frightened me as did the nobility of the priesthood. Console myself as I may by saying I had no calling, I am still a coward. All that I have done I have done to please myself !”

  He paused and gazed into the fire. “Only in martyrdom can I even hope for salvation,” he said.

  Henry and I glanced at each other. This did not sound like Dan England. The prophet of living had become the apostle of death. I could see Henry was alarmed.

  “Yes,” Dan went on, “martyrdom is the only good ending for the undedicated life. Then, that life, no matter how futile, no matter how selfish, is given supreme purpose. Martyrdom gives to one who has been cowardly in his faith, the most courageous and most sublime act of faith possible to man. To him who has faltered in his dream, it gives the clearest and most emphatic assertion of the truth of the dream.

  “The coward, in martyrdom, walks right through the darkness of death directly into the vision of God. It is the only hope for people like me, the only possible glorification of a petty and self-indulgent life. How else can anyone like me ever hope for the Beatific Vision?” He looked at Henry and then at me. He must have seen on our faces that his mood and his thought had startled me and disturbed Henry. He could not possibly have expected an answer. Neither Henry nor I could accept his problem as he stated it, and, even if we had been able to accept it, we certainly could have offered no solution.

  I was tempted here before the fire to suspect Dan, as I had on our first meeting, of dramatizing himself. This emotional change in him this night had an unreal and almost shocking suddenness about it. And this explanation of his inner soul, and his public confession before me, a stranger, was dramatic almost in the theatrical sense of the word. My old suspicion had, as I say, returned. Later when I had a longer perspective on his life and saw him whole, so to speak, I realized that for him to think and feel was practically for him to talk. His fabulousness was in his talk, as I wrote in the beginning. He never did anything one could record. Even as a writer he wrote nothing other than his few verses, his single piece of prose, and his bread-and-butter fiction. True were his words when he said in levity, as he often did, that talk was his vocation and in talk did he toil.

  Once this was understood, it was difficult to suspect him again. If, as I have remarked, he seemed on occasions to talk for effect, as, for example, when he assured the penniless Tim that he was a genius in finance, that also was sincere with him. In his talk, however much he might deny it, he practiced charity and goodness. In his talk he influenced others. In his talk he designed and built. In his talk, briefly, he lived what, to use his words, I would call a dedicated life.

  But I did not understand this clearly then, so I was unable to answer when he asked how other than in martyrdom was he to earn the Beatific Vision. Had I understood, I could have answered him that it might be he would earn his reward through his talk and the good it had done. He would have disdained the answer as superficial, might even have resented it as sacrilegious; but nonetheless I would have given it. The gift he had was certainly not ordinary and certainly not futile, and so far as the dedication he spoke of was concerned, it seemed to me that that gift was primarily dedicated to the purpose his Jesuits had well taught him—the Greater Glory of God.

  In any event, he did not expect an answer and I gave none. His gaze went back to the fire and he was silent again.

  “Tonight I met a saint.” He was matter-of-fact now when he spoke again. “You saw him, that young man who was here tonight with Father Pitka. His name is not Christobel. He is a soldier of an enslaved nation behind the Iron Curtain—its name I am not permitted to tell—a member of the heroic underground that fought the German invader and now fights the Russian invader. He came secretly out from behind the Iron Curtain, sailing a small skiff across the Baltic, to seek aid and friends. Tomorrow he returns without aid and without friends. And he returns to die.

  “Yesterday he learned that the enemy, having discovered his going, had announced he had deserted his cause. He had fled his comrades for his own security, the enemy had declared, and he w
ould not return. Tomorrow, therefore, he must go back. This, he is well aware, is the purpose of the enemy’s announcement. They know him. They know he will not let his comrades believe he has fled and failed them. They know he will now return. They await him. Still he must return. He returns therefore only to die.

  “I listened to this boy’s story tonight as Father Pitka translated it. The struggle in his homeland he does not see as a struggle between capitalism and communism, nor a struggle between peoples. He sees it as a struggle, personal and even private, deep in men’s hearts and homes for the survival of the spirit. His is not the story the newspapers tell. It is not political, not economic. It is more profound, more fateful. I cannot tell you how deeply it moved me.

  “He is a fool to return to die, it might be said. That he is a fool, the world will certainly say. Time, it might be urged, will erase tyranny as it has always in the past. Possibly. But this boy does not see the battle as merely a battle against tyranny. If he did, he might well stay here in freedom and security. No. For him, the war is the war between light and darkness, between civilization and barbarism, brought at last after nineteen hundred years to an open, clearly defined and tragically critical battlefield.

  “On economic issues, on the issues of oligarchies of wealth, of unjust distributions of land, of the value of labor, of the evil of destitution, on all such issues he is as realistic as any communist. More realistic, indeed, for he supplements justice with charity.

  “For him the battle is not a battle between two economic systems. For him, it is a battle against an enemy more powerful, more menacing than all the heresies and apostasies of Christian history rolled into one. This is the enemy that corrupts the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, that holds brutality to be a virtue, cruelty an excellence, and sin a practice of sanctity. This is the enemy that teaches: Thou shalt kill, thou shalt lie, thou shalt hate, thou shalt steal, thou shalt blaspheme, thou shalt dishonor. This is the enemy that preaches you shall value only your body, you shall seek only what raiment you will wear and what goes into your belly. This is the enemy that is an affront even to paganism, for paganism had its natural virtues and ideals. This is the enemy that would destroy Socrates and Lao-tse as well as Moses and Paul. This is the enemy who opposes not only the divine precepts but the divine in man.