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Dan England and the Noonday Devil

Page 12

by Myles Connolly


  “This is the enemy the boy returns to battle. Some noonday soon, or some dark of night, he will be shot in the back as, unaware, he paces his cell or walks a prison yard. No soldier’s death will be given him, no firing squad will honor his going. Nor will there be any word of his execution. The enemy, in their satanism, fear a martyr. But a martyr he will be, nonetheless. His name may never be remembered. When the day of the liberation comes, there may be no statue to him, no speeches to his memory. But out of the ground that his blood, and the blood of others, has impregnated will come in time a new freedom and a new growth of Faith. The great Harvester has always chosen fields red with the blood of martyrs for His planting.

  “He returns, then, to what the world would call a futile death. For his death will not make even the fleeting comment of a gesture. But he knows the Divine Paradox—that death can make men free and that the Cross is the everlasting declaration of this.

  “The boy returns to martyrdom. He returns freely, without flinching. He has learned the happiness of being one of the saints.”

  There was a long pause before he continued. “Father Pitka brought him here tonight in the hope his story might inspire me and I would volunteer to return with him—sail that lonely skiff across the Baltic with him to his enslaved country and from there report back through the underground to the free world the terrible story of the struggle between Christ and the antichrist.

  “I turned him down. I did not know his language, I said. But that was not the real truth. The real truth is I am a coward. I prefer to sit here by the fire, fat and secure, comfortable among my friends, and talk and drink wine.” Then he whispered suddenly, pathetically, “Lord save me; Lord save me or I perish.”

  There was silence. Sitting there in the silence I could not persuade myself that the young soldier was as heroic as Dan described him, for Dan seldom failed to discover magnificence beyond the nearest window and colorful heroism in the last person met, whether they were there or not. But there was little doubt that, exaggeration or no exaggeration, the young soldier had affected him as had no other—not in my acquaintanceship with Dan, certainly. His silence testified to that. After a minute or more, Dan got to his feet and, in his slow, lumbering gait, left the room without a word.

  Henry looked after him with troubled eyes. “I’m frightened for him,” he whispered.

  Chapter 13

  Dan’s story was the story of a battle, as I said earlier, the only story worth telling. Now, after the visit of the young soldier, and his dramatic effect on Dan, the battle was, I was sure, joined.

  I purposely stayed away from the house, thinking that he might be sensitive about seeing me again after his somber and startling confession that last night before the fireplace. Then, to my astonishment, one noonday about a week after my visit, he walked into the newspaper office in town, walked in as matter-of-factly as if dropping in thus had been a daily custom for years. He had to buy a wedding present, he said, and he wondered if I would help him. He was very casual.

  I was, as I say, astonished. I knew well how constantly the pattern of his life shifted, and how one night he would talk and act as if a critically important hour in his life had arrived and how a night or two later he would talk and act as if that hour had never been. But how he could come in so matter-of-factly and talk so casually after that last scene before the fireplace only a few days before when he revealed the tortures of his spirit was more than I could quite understand.

  Dan was not very much like the rest of us, and his life was seldom what could be called conventional, and it was, I suppose, foolish to try to judge him by the canons of ordinary conduct. Perhaps such a life, like great art, must always have some enigma to it, large or small, some secret that can never be completely penetrated.

  The wedding present was for Doris. I was surprised at this, for though Doris and Briggs were obviously moving toward matrimony, no mention of it had been made to me and I was now Briggs’s confidant. Dan explained that nothing had been said to him, either, but the mating of two such beautiful souls (as he put it) was inevitable and he wished to be prepared. Later, at lunch, he elaborated on his explanation, telling me that he was finding himself less and less able to write his crime fiction and he was afraid that when the wedding was announced he might not have the money to buy a gift and therefore he was going to make sure it would be on hand.

  He was very offhand in his remark that he was losing his talent for crime fiction but to me it was a remark that was highly significant. This writing of crime fiction was a talent he had developed and a trade he had practiced with success for years. Once it was gone he would be without income unless he returned to newspaper reporting, and his day for that, it seemed to me, had long passed. Not that he had grown too old or too sedentary, even. It was that his temperament had changed. He no longer seemed to see things but rather the meanings of things. That day in town, for example, he looked at people and places with a sort of wonderment. He was like a child on his first picnic. His sense of wonder and his belief in the sublime in life had been developed to an extraordinary degree. And that sense and belief, it seemed to me, had developed further in the short time I had known him. He seemed now to see everybody and everything under the arc of eternity. It was hard to see what future there could be for him in the practical world.

  I suggested that perhaps with his talent for crime fiction gone, he might have more time for writing his tales, the tales he had always wanted to write.

  He nodded slowly, said quietly, “That’s about what I’ve been thinking myself. I’ve decided there’s nothing heroic about me, and a book, for all its deficiencies, might well be the only offering I could ever make for a useless life. I’ve been thinking I might begin with a little tale I call Evening Star. Do you know it?”

  I told him I had heard the story from Briggs.

  “Don’t you think it a story with some good things to say?”

  I agreed. But I pointed out that there were so many interplanetary stories around it might be better commercially to start with another of his stories.

  “Commercially?” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t write my own stories commercially. I would rather not write them at all in that case. The only reason I’d ever write my own stories is to see if I couldn’t make people love the things I love and believe the things I believe. I feel deeply they are worth believing and worth loving. Commercially? I could never write these stories commercially.”

  Then, there in the heart of the crazy newspaper office, he looked me directly in the eye, lifted his voice through the din, and asked me as matter-of-factly as if he were asking me the time of the day, “How, if I’m commercial am I going to earn the Beatific Vision?”

  It was fantastic, this huge man standing there in the wild swirl of men and machines dedicated to reporting the facts of the ever shifting Present, and asking about Eternity.

  But I could not smile. His eyes were dark and grave with the importance of his question. I apologized. I did not want to be commercial any more than he did. But there were times when one had to, I said. I thought of his home full of parasites, of his wine and beef, but I did not mention them. All I could do was hope that now when his battle was reaching a critical stage, as apparently it was, he would not get hurt.

  Nobody could worry about him for long, I must admit.

  That day I invited him to Luigi’s for lunch. He refused, saying he was in a hurry.

  “Afraid of the noonday devil?” I asked, trying not to smile. He shot me a quick, serious look. “Yes, I am. I am. How did you know?” Then he remembered and he laughed. “Oh, yes. You were there that night, weren’t you?”

  We went to a lunch counter that was far more elegant than Luigi’s and far more prosaic. It was a place I abhorred but the service was prompt. I expected Dan to take one look at it and run. But no. He hoisted his great hulk on to a stool and leaned over the counter and blinked around at everybody and everything as if he were in his St. Peter’s. The mirrors, the chrome, t
he faces, the starched white waitresses, and the flow of, for him, dainty food kept his eyes hopping and enchanted him. It was the wine at Luigi’s he wished to avoid, I decided later. But at the moment, watching him in his enchantment, I was sure we had done anything but elude the noonday devil.

  The pattern of Dan’s life shifted constantly, as I have said. (I am always entertained when I remember his adventures as a realist.) In high school and college, he had excelled in mathematics and the exact sciences. He was bored then by literature, and the writing of poetry was a chore. Yet, in the days when I knew him, he could hardly add or subtract and one of his chief desires was to have leisure and mood for the reading of poetry and the writing of it.

  But, even used as I was now to expect the unexpected in Dan, I was completely surprised, when I went to his house a week later, to see him before his fire gayer than I had ever seen him. I had expected to find him upstairs in his study busy with his book or, if downstairs, in a solemn or at least serious mood. But there he was, talking more than ever and, it seemed to me, drinking more wine. And the house was more vividly alive than I had seen it and more noisily full of guests.

  Subsequently, the pattern changed again, and there were nights when he was anything but gay and did not touch wine at all. On these nights he was gentle and, in his boyish way, wistful. He diligently served wine to others, making it his own task to see that the glasses were kept filled, appearing to have no interest in it himself. He talked but he made no speeches and told no tales. Always on these nights he left the gaiety early, going upstairs to his study. And on these nights certainly, I said to myself, he was busy with his book.

  On one of these nights, after he had gone upstairs, and all the others had early gone their ways—Briggs with Doris, Archer to his novel, Henry to his drawing, Tim to his roulette, and Barney to his bed—I stayed on, as I frequently did now, in the living room, reading. Summer and autumn had come and gone, and now it was early winter. There had been a light snowfall that afternoon and already the landscape was fitting itself into its pattern of black and white. A chair by Dan’s fire and his books were hard for me to leave, especially for a room in a lodging house in town.

  As I sat there, I heard Dan’s heavy footsteps coming down the stairs and in a moment he came into the living room. He seemed not to be aware of me and went to a window and opened it. The sharp, chill air rushed into the warm room. He stood at the open window, looking out on the white earth like a man contemplating a walk. I knew he never walked when he could avoid it and decided his action was mechanical and aimless. After a moment he closed the window and came over and sat quietly beside me at the fire.

  “Home, home of any sort, is one of God’s most beautiful ideas,” he said, looking far into the fire.

  I realized then that his opening the window and gazing out was the action of a man looking affectionately on the earth he owned and loved.

  “As only he who loses his life can save it,” he went on, musing, speaking as if to himself, “so only he who gives up his home can find it. Some give up home in life but most of us wait until death, and then it may be too late…. It is a hard truth.”

  This night he had not indulged in wine, and he was in his gentle, almost wistful mood. Later, as he talked, he seemed lonely, giving me the feeling that finally, for all his friends and enthusiasms for others, for all his great gregariousness, he was alone.

  He talked of the past, the distant past with a nostalgia found usually in the old and the dying. He talked without any trace of his usual grandiloquence. He told of the poverty of his boyhood, poverty so bitter, so extreme, it was difficult for me to visualize it. On one occasion in winter, the family did not have the two pennies to purchase the cake of yeast with which to make bread. His mother had one penny, a lucky penny that had come with the gift of a little purse many years before. The penny had never been lucky but his mother had held to it, for that penny was a part of the much worn purse which had been for so long the family bank and to give it up would have been the confession of bankruptcy and final failure. But this day the penny had to go. Dan took it and holding fiercely to it, begged another penny on the wintry streets. He bought the yeast and they had their bread.

  He told of a poverty so complete that there were winters when the family could not afford to buy coal and the only fuel for the kitchen stove was newspaper, newspaper taken from a hundred trash cans in the neighborhood. These the family, huddled around the stove, rolled tightly into little balls for longer burning and fed to the stove. It was hard for me to associate such poverty with Dan. He seemed so rich in life and so generous of himself and all he had. I was of the idea that such poverty would breed fear and frugality.

  When I said this, Dan shook his head slowly. “Such poverty teaches you, if you want to read its lesson, how little you really need, how little really matters.”

  Dan spoke of his poverty without bitterness. For him it was a great school of wisdom. It was difficult after that training, he said, ever to become the cynic whom Wilde described as “the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

  And his poverty, Dan pointed out, was never destitution. Eventually always, there were food and warmth and shelter. And this poverty was sanctified, he said, by the wonderful faith of his father and mother. His home was a sanctuary as well as a shelter. All in the family knew, even in their darkest moments, they possessed what no riches in the world could ever buy. It was a happy family as Dan described it.

  There was a pathos in Dan’s looking wishfully back on some things most of us would have been glad to have forgotten. Dan’s father was, I gathered, an invalid and on Dan, when he was little more than twelve, fell the job of supporting the family and educating himself as well. His mother was a humble, simple woman, a true saint, he said, and he spoke of her with reverence. I remember especially an instance he gave of her simplicity. In Lent she would not look in a mirror, for that was vanity. After a single glance in the glass on Ash Wednesday morning to note well the significance of the ashes on her forehead, she would not look again until Easter Sunday morning, and that was not to admire a new hat, Dan said, for a new hat she never had, but to see the new happiness on her own face. For Easter to her was truly the day the Lord had made and she was glad to rejoice therein.

  “My mother had brave dreams for all of her family,” he said, “and especially for me. She gave her life for those dreams. I’m afraid I failed her.”

  One thing was made clear to me in this nostalgia of his, this seeking deeply into the past. He was still in his heart, despite his flurries of gaiety and his hope in his book, the man he had judged and found wanting. He was the condemned man without present or future, seeing purpose and joy only in his boyhood and days long gone.

  The single prose piece he wrote I shall give here. It furnishes a better insight into Dan than anything I can write, and especially into his conversation that night of the first snowfall. It was written, I imagine, as a sort of personal and private memorial to his mother. It tells, sketchily, of two Christmas Eves, one when he was a boy at home, and one when he was a young man and homeless. He had scrawled across the top of it the rather inept title, “Where?” This I am sure was temporary and would have been changed if he had ever got around to writing his book.

  Chapter 14

  There would be tea brewing on the stove in the kitchen. The coals would show red with thin blue flames where one of the stove covers had been tilted. Then, there would be a candle, perhaps two, for there could only be candles on Christmas Eve. They would be burned down pretty low now, it being after eleven o’clock when he would reach home. About ten minutes past eleven, he always reached home. His stamping the snow off his shoes on the steps outside would be the signal for the handful of tea to be dropped into the pot. There would be candles in the next room, too, the dining room they called it. And then beyond that, another candle or two. Always candles on Christmas Eve. Not many candles. A few candles, but good candles special for the vigil. They wo
uld spear the dark with steady yellow flames, and make long, rich shadows on the walls and on the pictures on the walls. The ceiling would be lighted without shadows.

  There were never shadows like these Christmas Eve candle shadows. They gave mystery to the house, and a soft strangeness that you never found on any other night.

  The Boy would throw his hat and coat on the chair by the kitchen stove. Then, he would go on through the dining room, as they called it, into the other room. She would meet him, as she got up from the floor where she would be setting out the presents before the tiny crib. Her knees would be stiff, he knew, and her poor body tired, but she would get up with her white face happy in spite of its whiteness, and her always bright eyes brighter, and she would turn to him for a glance of appreciative pleasure. He knew she would look for that, though she had made the house clean, had washed and mended the old lace curtains, had scrubbed the floors—hadn’t he noticed the kitchen floor, white with the grain showing?—had swept and dusted not so much for his pleasure this night, but because God was coming. But she would look to see if he were happy. He would scowl. It was defensive, or perverse. But he would scowl, and while he scowled he would notice how white her hair showed on the side that caught the light of the candles.

  “My poor boy is tired,” she would say.

  Then he could hold the scowl no longer. He would say:

 

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