Dan England and the Noonday Devil Read online

  “I don’t know any vegetarian joints,” I said as we hung up our overcoats and seated ourselves at a table against the whitewashed cement wall. “I figure you can get a plate of buttered spaghetti here.”

  He studied the crude, handwritten menu. “Do you suppose—?” He looked at me over the top of the menu, his eyes hesitant, troubled, as if he were debating an important step. “—do you suppose it would be all right if I had a chop, a lamb chop?” Then, he added, in explanation, “I’ve been a vegetarian for so many years.”

  “Might do you good,” I replied. “Have you given up Shaw?”

  “Mr. Shaw, the Sunday editor?” There was no slightest flicker of cleverness in his solemn eyes.

  “No. The late George Bernard Shaw, the playwright and vegetarian.”

  He shrugged his slight shrug. “No, I can’t say I’ve given him up—but I’ve been doing a little more thinking of my own lately.”

  Luigi brought me the glass of claret I always had when I lunched there.

  “Wine for you, Signore?” He turned to Briggs.

  “No, thank you.” Briggs shook his head. “Never use it.”

  Luigi shrugged. “I am sorry, Signore,” he murmured and moved on to a customer who was calling for his check.

  Briggs eyed my wine speculatively for a long moment. “Speaking of Shaw, a friend of mine was talking about him the other night,” he said. “You know Shaw’s piece, On Going to Church. Remember where he said, ‘Lager beer and pipes produce routine journalism; wine and gallantry produce brilliant journalism, essays and novels; brandy and cigars produce violently devotional or erotic poetry; morphine produces tragic exaltation…’?”

  I didn’t remember it, but I remarked it was typical of Shaw’s determination to exaggerate anything he didn’t like into an absurdity.

  “I don’t consider it so,” Briggs went on, “but I do think it a very clever and amusing expression of Shaw’s realistic or, perhaps I should say, ascetical attitude toward life and art. But my friend claims Shaw wasn’t realistic or ascetical at all. He says he was a roisterer—drunk with intellectuality—and a voluptuary, shamelessly in love with himself. He had been a mental wanton for so many years his mind finally became incurably licentious. His was simply a profligate mind in an abstemious body.”

  I was astonished at such vigorous words coming out of Briggs’s mouth, even if in quotation, but the only comment I permitted myself was, “Evidently, your friend has very definite opinions.”

  “My friend has very disturbing opinions.” He stared at the wine again, but with eyes now more troubled than speculative. “He says if Shaw had only lost out in his courtship of himself in his youth, and had, in the heartbreak that would inevitably have followed the jilting, turned to wine, he might have written some pretty good poetry. Only poetry endures, he maintains.”

  I studied Briggs, trying to discover what had come over him. But I said merely, “I gather your friend has no use for Shaw.”

  “On the contrary, he likes him. He likes everybody, I think. But he feels sorry for him. He thinks he was a failure; I suppose that’s the best way to put it. He has the idea that if Shaw had become a rollicking good tippler he might have written some poetry that would endure. Like Shakespeare. He says Shakespeare was a very enthusiastic tippler. What do you think of an idea like that?”

  I didn’t know what to think of it, I said. I didn’t quite see how a man could become a better writer because he was a tippler, or a better anything else, for that matter. And as far as Shaw was concerned, I told him he had served a good purpose a half a century ago, whacking the dewy-eyed and purple Late Victorians, but that, in my opinion, his ideas were no longer of any great vigor or importance. They were now merely diverting, and seldom more.

  Then, I asked Briggs, “Is your friend a guzzler—if you don’t mind my asking? Sometimes drinkers go to extremes scoffing at teetotalers, in order to build up a defense for themselves.”

  “Yes, I know. But my friend is not like that. He always has wine after dark but he doesn’t seem to be given too deeply to it. He likes to have a glass in his hand when he talks, the way he likes, or so he says, to have a stick in his hand when he walks.”

  “Sounds like an Old-World gentleman.”

  “Yes—except he doesn’t ever go for walks. In fact, he never walks at all, if he can help it.” He looked pensively up from the table at the snow falling beyond a small window peering out on the sidewalk above. “My friend is a very hard person to evaluate.”

  “What do you think of his opinion of Shaw?” I asked after a moment.

  He pondered again, still watching the snow. “I suppose my friend means that if a fanatical rigorist like Shaw had lost himself, for a time anyway, in complete disorder and abandon, it might have brought on some sort of upheaval, and out of the upheaval might have come good. Whether that is so or not, I do not know.” He looked down again at the wine. “But I do know one thing. I’m going through quite an upheaval myself.”

  Luigi came to the table for the order.

  Briggs drew himself up in sudden resolution. “I’ll have the lamb chop,” he said.

  The lamb chop that day signalized Briggs’s venture into a new life. I could see he considered himself little less than audacious in his decision. From then on, we lunched together quite frequently.

  The change in him continued. He put on weight, for example; had put on quite quickly, indeed, four or five pounds. On his skeleton skull and figure any increase of weight, no matter how slight, was definitely noticeable. At Luigi’s, one noonday, over our plates of pot roast, I commented on it.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ve been sleeping better since I’ve been eating meat. I no longer lie awake at night and toss with the ache of futility.”

  “How about the ache of disinterestedness—that gone, too?” I asked as soberly as I could. I tried never to betray my amusement at his idiosyncrasies. This was not too difficult, for Briggs had no suspicion that he was in any way idiosyncratic, and had no idea he was amusing.

  “Yes,” he answered gravely, as he carefully carved himself a piece of pot roast, “my disinterestedness seems to have disappeared, too. They are closely related, futility and disinterestedness, one coming from the other, though which comes first I have never been able to determine. They left me together.”

  “And how do you figure eating meat cured you?”

  “I am not quite sure.” He meditated my question, chewing on a mouthful of the roast. “My friend says meat gives heat to the cold light of the intellect, and adds intuition and insight to the processes of thought, thus helping to wisdom and understanding. Red meat, plenty of it, he maintains, supplies color and emotion.”

  It was hard for me to keep a straight face. “I’d like to meet this friend of yours sometime, if it could be arranged.”

  “He’d like to meet you, I’m sure,” he said.

  “Why don’t you ask him in for lunch sometime? Who is he?”

  “Dan England. He’s a writer. Used to be a newspaperman.”

  “I’ve seen his stuff. He certainly doesn’t sound like what I’ve seen.”

  “No. No, he doesn’t,” Briggs said. “He’s a sort of living paradox.”

  But Briggs made no effort to have me meet his friend. He was still, I could see, distrustful of his feelings. Feeling of any sort was obviously a new experience for him, and it was clear he was troubled and sometimes wary about his transformation. But the transformation continued. As the weeks moved out of winter toward spring, Briggs began to show signs of human warmth, and, on one occasion, he permitted himself a moment of what, for him, might be considered humor. That was when I suggested that, if he continued under the ripening influence of his friend, he might soon lose the detachment that he felt recommended him so perfectly for the job of Religious editor.

  He smiled a small smile. “That’s true,” he said. “Only the other day I found myself looking with distaste on a little piece on the Mohammedans.” But then he added soberly,
“I printed the piece, however. I am determined not to lose my objectivity.”

  But it was quite clear he was losing what he called his objectivity. His main subject of conversation continued to be himself but it was now a more human, more social self. Dan England, whom he quoted constantly, was, I became more and more persuaded, responsible for the transformation. Briggs had first become acquainted with him right after Christmas, and it was after Christmas that Briggs first began to show signs of change.

  It was, curiously enough, Shaw who brought Briggs and Dan England together. Dan had in his possession a post card written and signed by Shaw (given Dan by a guest, a play producer, in appreciation of some six months’ room and board) and Briggs, learning of it and eager for the autograph, had called on Dan at his home in Newton, a short distance out of Boston. It proved, from Briggs’s account, to be quite an evening.

  The night Briggs called was the night of the feast of Little Christmas (so he learned from Dan later), the twelfth day after Big Christmas, and Dan was vigorously celebrating the arrival of the Three Kings. The house was crowded, the wine flowed freely, and there were much noise and music and singing. Dan met Briggs at the door. They had talked several times on the telephone about the autograph and thus were not altogether strangers.

  “Come right in!” Dan gaily greeted Briggs. “We’ll consider you one of the Kings!”

  Briggs’s job as Religious editor did not, as Dan assumed, prepare him for an understanding of his greeting. Briggs, instead, immediately decided that Dan was insane. Months later he learned, Briggs told me, that Dan enjoyed throwing Scripture and the saints at pagans and unbelievers, not so much to disconcert them as to advance his belief that Scripture and the saints should be a natural part of the common small talk and banter of each and every day.

  That night, the combination of Holy Scripture and wine, and the exuberance abounding in the house were almost too much for the cool, ascetical, and agnostic Briggs. He wanted to turn and flee but his nearness to the fulfillment of his desire for the autograph overcame his distress, and, urged by Dan’s friendly and persuasive arm, he moved on into the thick of the tumult.

  Dan treated Briggs with special enthusiasm, saying, as he introduced him to his guests, how fitting it was that a Religious editor should visit him on this holy day. Later, when the tumult had quieted, and Dan alone was talking, the others all listening, he held forth on the aptness and significance of the old newspaper shop phrase, “Religious Editor,” as opposed to titles more formally in use such as “Religion Editor” and “Church Editor,” neither of which Dan could endure. He was certain, he said, that Briggs was a deeply religious man, and thus ideally cast as the Religious editor. He could see Briggs, he said, yearning to announce the great events of religious history, such as the coming of the Three Kings, in great bold jubilant headlines, heralding the splendor and importance of these events, but he could also see, he said, the valiant Briggs opposed and frustrated by the ignorance and pride of the Irreligious editors.

  Briggs tried to protest against Dan’s idealization of him, but Dan was too deep in his eloquence and too sure of his judgment of Briggs to listen. Silencing Briggs with an upraised hand, he told a story of a managing editor he had once known. The editor, Ratherskin, was a man of extraordinary erudition. His knowledge made him proud, Dan declared, and his pride made him an agnostic. He did not believe in God or religion. Indeed, Dan said, he did not believe in anything—mankind, government, matrimony—in anything except himself.

  Then, one evening, as Dan put it, Ratherskin met a saint, was soon converted, and became a profoundly religious man.

  “That was pretty fast for an agnostic.” I could not help being skeptical. “How did your friend say it happened?”

  Briggs was not too sure just how the conversion took place. “I had little interest—and no belief—in religious experience at the time Dan told the story. I do remember he said the saint was an ordinary laboring man who came to work as a porter in the hotel where Ratherskin lived. Speech was difficult for him, Dan declared, and he had little or no brains.

  “‘But he had sanctity.’ That’s how Dan put it. ‘Sanctity so bright and pure it was hard to look him in the eyes.’

  “Ratherskin, who classified everything according to knowledge, was unable to classify sanctity. It mystified him, disturbed him. The mere presence of the porter would strike him as dramatic, even revolutionary. One night when the porter said a quiet ‘Good night and God bless you’ to him, Ratherskin suddenly had a vision. Suddenly, he saw beyond himself, beyond appearances, beyond the skies.” (Briggs was using Dan’s words.) “He saw the human spirit. Immediately he felt humble, and as immediately he lost belief in himself. He was soon converted.”

  Briggs explained that Dan talked long on the life of Ratherskin after his conversion. He talked of the beginning of humor and the beginning of fear, and of how the less important he considered himself, the more important he became, and of experiences of that sort, which seemed quite understandable when Dan told them, but afterward did not make much sense to him. It was not long, however, before all this and much more became understandable to Briggs, as will appear presently. At this time, remember, he had only met Dan.

  Briggs went on with Ratherskin’s story, as Dan told it. It seems the more religious Ratherskin grew, the less competent an editor he became. He began to feel that the news or the day was not as important as he once believed it. Finally, he began to consider the news of the day of no importance at all. Then, late one Christmas Eve, after the paper had gone to press, he sought escape from the festive boisterousness of the night in the shadowy quiet of a church. He stopped before the Christmas stable and noticed that the image of the Child had already been placed in the straw of the manger.

  “As Dan put it, ‘There and then, he suddenly discovered real news!’” Briggs went on. “‘He hurried back to the newspaper office, and ordered the presses stopped immediately. The next morning, Christmas morning, the paper had a new front page. The usual news of crime and of war, the accounts of Christmas Eve festivities and the last-minute shopping rush—and even the usual bland Christmas poem by the staff poet—all had been discarded and the page carried only the story of Christ’s birth, word for word, as St. Luke had written it. Across the top of the page was the single boldly exultant headline:

  GOD BECOMES MAN!

  ‘Of course, immediately the owners saw the paper,’ Dan declared, ‘the Luke story was killed and the first front page restored, but not before the paper had run into two editions and caused a profound disturbance in the town. Ratherskin was fired on Christmas day. He is now a Jesuit lay Brother.’”

  Thus Briggs finished his account of his first meeting with Dan England. I was skeptical of the truth of the Ratherskin story but Briggs apparently wasn’t, so I made no comment on it.

  “Did you get the Shaw autograph?” I asked.

  “He gave it to me for nothing,” Briggs nodded, “Unfortunately, it was badly stained with wine.”

  I could not altogether believe that Briggs, despite his new qualities, his growing loquacity, his gain in weight, his defection from vegetarianism—and despite the fact that Dan England was obviously an extraordinarily persuasive personality—had been converted to Dan England’s ideas. Ratherskin’s conversion, if the story were true, was the conversion of a man on in years. But Briggs was young, intolerant, and, in his own mind, omniscient.

  It was not until several weeks before Easter that I became persuaded that more had happened to Briggs than I believed.

  We had gone to Luigi’s for lunch. On the walk down Washington Street, Briggs had not said a word. As he had become almost loquacious in the preceding weeks, his silence puzzled me.

  Yet he was, for him, physically buoyant, walking very much on his toes, his head back, his eyes seeking out the blue and white flowers of the Spring sky unfolding above the high dismal walls of the buildings. When we reached the open square before Faneuil Hall, and came almost suddenly on the
market stalls spilling the colorful new fruits and vegetables out into the vivid sunlight of the sidewalks, he stopped abruptly and I expected him to break out into words. But he still said nothing.

  Even when we were seated in the restaurant, he continued to maintain his silence, ignoring the menu and staring out the little window that, above us, opened almost surreptitiously on the sunshine and shadow of the sidewalk busy with an endlessly moving pattern of feet and legs.

  Luigi brought my wine, and then moved on to more impatient customers.

  Suddenly Briggs came out of his silence and called back to Luigi:

  “Luigi! Please!”

  Luigi returned to the table. There was a second’s quiet as Briggs carefully chose the proper words for his momentous announcement.

  “Luigi,” he said with a trace of a quaver in his voice, “I think—if you don’t mind—I think I will have a glass of wine today.”

  Luigi immediately bowed his pleasure. “Ah, Signore, I am so happy you are well again!”

  Briggs faced me, clearly pleased that this new and, to him, great decision was behind him. His once gray face was glowing dully, but still glowing. I could see now there was more than spring in his eyes.

  “I am in love,” he announced, drawing himself up as if announcing some unusual accomplishment.

  “You?”

  He nodded. “Since last night, about eight twenty. Since eight twenty-two, to be exact. It was at my friend’s house. I was coming down the stairs from his study when she entered the front door. We met at the foot of the stairs. She spoke to me but I could not speak back.” He looked straight at me but did not see me. “She is like no one else who ever lived—a delicately embodied spirit, with an aura of dark radiance. Her eyes are a melody for the poetry of her voice, and her body is a sorcerer that conjures up the magic of pure beauty wherever she goes.” He finally got me in focus. “I know this may sound exaggerated to you. I know you will say it is the rhapsody of a young man in love. But—” he leaned forward and spoke vehemently to emphasize his complete belief in his words “—but I promise you I am not exaggerating at all! All I say of this girl is absolutely true. No one like her ever lived!”