Dan England and the Noonday Devil Read online

  “I am sure you are right,” I, though dazed, managed to say. His poetry and passion had astonished me so I could find no other words to say.

  Luigi returned and served the plain red wine with a flourish that would have flattered a fine sherry or an ancient Burgundy. “It will make the heart sing, Signore,” Luigi said, bowing himself away from the table.

  Briggs took up the glass of wine, looked deeply into it. He had come far and fast, from vegetarianism and the ache of futility, to wine and the raptures of love, moving the whole extraordinary distance in less than six months.

  “I suppose my ordering wine puzzles you.” He spoke, still staring into the wine. “But I’m sure you remember what Euripides said, ‘Where there is no wine, there is no love.’”

  “Your friend, your Mr. England, quoted that, I imagine.”

  He looked at me in surprise. “What made you say that?”

  “It didn’t sound like you.”

  “Well,” he gravely took a sip of the wine, “not like my old self, perhaps, but I’m going to sound more and more like my new self from now on.”

  He obviously did not relish the wine but he determinedly kept sipping it. I lifted my glass in toast. “To your beautiful lady!”

  He shook his head ruefully. “She’s not my lady. I doubt if she even remembers me.” Then, in one bold motion, he drained his glass. “But I’m going to make her my lady. I have risen to a high resolve.” He became rhetorical again, weaving scraps of poetry into his speech, as the wine took effect. “I shall worship her by years of noble deeds until I win her. A moth to the star, perhaps, but a soaring moth! My heart is set!”

  The transformation seemed to grow under my eyes. Now, the cold disciple of the metaphysical Shaw had become the impassioned son of Don Quixote.

  “Is the lady your friend’s daughter?” I asked when I was sufficiently recovered.

  He shook his head, “His niece. Mr. England is a bachelor.” He turned, looked around for Luigi. “I think I’ll have another glass of wine. How about you?”

  I agreed, because of the occasion. And Luigi, beaming his approval on Briggs, brought the wine.

  Briggs lifted his glass in solemn toast. “To my high resolve!”

  I joined him in his toast. Love and wine dissolved his ego, and for the first time, it seemed to me, there was a light, dim though it was, of humility on his face. This was not the man I had seen a few months ago, sitting in cold antagonism to life before the dismal fire in Dedham. The transformation was complete.

  But I was jumping to conclusions.

  The next day, to my complete astonishment, Briggs was as cool and aloof as he had ever been.

  At first, I told myself the change was probably due to the tortures of his new love and, perhaps, to more than ordinary obstacles to his high resolve. But as the days went by, and he crawled deeper into the depths of himself, I saw it was not his new love. His problem, it became apparent to me watching him, was mental rather than emotional. His eyes were troubled with thought and not with passion. He seemed a man faced with a great decision and unable to make it, unable, to say either yes or no. I had seen him quite easily face the important decisions of the first lamb chop and the first glass of wine, and I was puzzled as to what this decision might be. I sought him out but he avoided me. He lunched alone.

  Later, Dan England, when I got to know him well, explained that Briggs was going through, what Dan called, his dark hours. “First, in the soaring adventures of the soul, there is jubilation, a feeling of release and triumph.” Dan spoke with his usual grandiloquence. “Then, when all is luminous and Paradise seems only across the street, the sudden night falls over you, falls heavily over you, and you lose your way. You grope in suffering and in despair. You are alone, you are sure, and abandoned. Then, if you have courage, if you have faith, if you have persevered, moving forward through the dark, the night is lifted as suddenly as it fell and you find yourself exalted, alive with a joy, beside which your former jubilation seems empty and small. You are one with Truth and Beauty, one with the Almighty. The dark hours are the price you pay. Only fools believe the high road is easy.”

  “What is this feeling of exaltation like?” I asked him.

  “How would I know? It has to be felt to be described, and even then it cannot be adequately described.” His eyes seemed almost wistful as he stared into the glass of wine he had in his hands. “All I know is what I find in the lives of the saints.”

  “But Briggs—you don’t think he had any experience of this sort, do you?”

  “I like to think so, if even only in a lesser degree. He has come a long way.”

  I was profoundly skeptical that Briggs had ever any such experience. However, there was no doubt he was groping toward a decision of some sort.

  His decision, when he made it, was quite dramatic. On Easter Sunday morning, Briggs’s religious page, “erupted,” as Dan, in his rhetorical fashion, put it afterward, out of the tomb of cowardice and compromise.” Across the top was an enormous headline:

  CHRIST RISES FROM TOMB!

  and the whole page was vividly given over to Matthew’s acount of the Resurrection.

  It was an eruption of a sort. For Briggs went Ratherskin one better. He rewrote Matthew’s account, making it a news story, reporting in clear, quick language Christ’s resurrection as happening that morning. “This morning early while it was still dark,” he wrote, “Mary Magdalen and the other Mary went out to the sepulcher where the body of God, who was put to death on Friday, was laid.” And thus, through the whole story.

  Briggs’s page ran through the early editions before it was discovered and killed. It, unlike Ratherskin’s page (as Dan described it) made little stir, caused little comment. About the only remark I heard about it was from the motion-picture editor who considered it “cheap.” I doubt, indeed, if the page would ever have been killed had not an advertising evangelist stormed early into the office to protest the omission of his picture from the page.

  But to hear Dan tell of it later, it was a revolutionary declaration of faith that rocked the city for hours. It was not, Dan said, until well into the day when late morning Easter services were begun, that peace of mind was generally regained. Then, in his words, the lambent sermons and melodious choral and organ music, prepared especially for the occasion, restored the usual dull equanimity of the day.

  There was, however, one indisputable consequence of the page. Taggart saw his opportunity. Briggs was promptly fired.

  On Easter Monday, Briggs and Dan England and I had lunch together at Luigi’s.

  It was my first meeting with Dan England. He was tall, well over six feet, huge but not gross, impressive in all ways—surpassing, indeed, the already fabulous idea I had of him.

  He talked constantly and colorfully, as I had expected, but the most striking quality about him was one I had not expected—his humility. He spoke little of himself, mostly of others, and if he spoke against a man, which he did rarely, he almost always made it a point that he was not speaking against the man but against his misuse of talents or endowments. He could be vigorous, even vehement, against what he considered the stupidities of men, but the men themselves he found somehow innocent and lovable and, almost always, enchanting. He was a combination of extraordinary wisdom and childlike innocence. His face was the face of a poet, and his body the body of a stevedore. His feet were large, his gait ungainly, yet his hands, big enough though they were, were almost poetical with their long, beautifully drawn thumbs and graphically radial fingers. The rhythmic movement of his hands when he talked, though unobtrusive, contrasted strangely to the general awkwardness of the movement of the rest of his body.

  Dan had the rare gift of being able to make everybody seem important—Briggs, Luigi, me—everybody. That day he devoted his gift to Briggs. He elaborately extolled him in all ways, for his courage, his vision, his originality. He made it seem as if the idea of what he called the eruptive Easter page had begun entirely in the mind of Briggs (a
nd not, as it had, of course, in his own tale of Ratherskin), and he made the rather pallid Briggs appear as a brave pioneer of a new and powerful journalism and a picturesque pilgrim on a shining road to sanctity.

  Briggs was transformed—for that lunch time, at least. He was suddenly almost a stranger, emanating warmth and even affection, obviously proud of himself and yet curiously humble, boyishly humble in his pleasure, it seemed to me, of having in some way lived up to Dan’s idea of him.

  It was Briggs’s day, all right. Dan saw to that.

  Dan spoke in his usual manner—grandiloquently in a full, rich, rather rhetorical language. But so natural was he, so genuine in his feelings, his speech seemed in no way artificial.

  “Alvin,” he said addressing Briggs by his first name, “you have brought to this poor, unhappy city, deep and dark in the sentimentalities of science and progress, the hard, realistic blessings of the spirit!” (This, despite the fact that only early editions of Briggs’s page had seen the light, and very few had read it.) “Who knows but some poor member of the millions, now hidden in fear and ignorance, may discover for the first time the story of life’s triumph over death and, inspired, strike magnificently out against the cowardice and dullness of the world?”

  He poured himself a glass of wine and went on, “Remember the cry of the poet against the petty, maudlin, conventional observance of Easter, the polite inanities of the preachers, the babbling church-door gossip of the congregation, the new hats, the fashion shows, the insensibilities and inconsequentialities that make pallid and sickly the glorious day—remember the lines?

  Good God, and this is Easter!—this thin chatter,

  This empty fuss and hat-and-gown parade!

  Oh, where the burst of cataclysmal wonder

  Of souls who break their tombstones to be free?

  The rending light, the deep exultant thunder

  Proclaiming Death is dead on Calvary?….

  This day the very earth might cleave asunder

  And from the cleft Christ rise again for me!

  I think, Alvin, you have sent lightning and thunder into the lives of the smug and the cautious. You have made a fool of yourself in the cause of the spirit. Thus, you have proved yourself wise and courageous, and you will find yourself among the happiest of men.”

  He lifted his glass in toast. “Exsultemus!”

  The speech, the whole scene in fact, for all its high spirits, struck me (as, I’m sure, it would have struck anyone) as being largely fantastic. I was sure that Briggs’s page, regardless of Dan’s enthusiasm, had sent lightning and thunder into nobody’s life; had, indeed, changed nobody one whit—nobody, that is, except Briggs.

  There is no doubt Briggs was changed.

  I know very little about the dark hours and the exaltation that attend the adventures of the soul, but I could clearly see that Briggs that day was about as happy as it is possible for a man to be. There was nothing fantastic about that. Dan had definitely affected the quality of his day.

  Chapter 4

  Dan England is so convincing in my memory, it is almost impossible to present him, fabulous though he was, as other than convincing from the beginning. But I had certain reservations after the spell he cast over that Easter Monday lunch at Luigi’s had faded before the sobriety and the reality of the day.

  I felt, for one thing, as I suggested, that he might well be too theatrical to be real, too good to be true. Briggs and his conversion had struck me very much the same way. Dan had been a newspaperman, and I was well aware of the inclination of newspapermen to dramatize themselves, to create legends of themselves and try to live up to them. I was also aware of the truth that the most eccentric, the most incredible people that newspapermen meet are not those they meet in line of duty in the streets and the alleys but those they rub elbows with in the office. If you want to find men—or women, for that matter—with extraordinary idiosyncrasies, with strange obsessions and strange dreams, and strange maladies, too, look for them in a newspaper office. Scratch that curious combination of sentiment and cynicism which is a newspaperman and you may discover anything from a grass eater to a diabolist.

  Briggs, with his ache of futility was, I think, quite a good illustration. The most fanatical numerologist I ever met, for example, was the financial editor of a metropolitan daily. (When he died just before his sixtieth birthday, some wag in the city room wrote that he died at 59 and 7/8ths.)

  I had heard so much about Dan from Briggs that I was well prepared to accept him when I first met him. Still, I had those reservations. Was he dramatizing himself ? Was he merely an imagination gone wild?

  It was not until later, when I got to know him better and became a regular visitor to his home, that I saw him more clearly, saw him as being very real and quite sane.

  It was raining the spring evening I first went to Dan’s house.

  I drove out with Briggs. Curiously, Briggs had been reluctant about my going out to visit Dan. I thought, at first, it was that he, with perhaps an exaggerated sense of possession, had wanted to keep his friend to himself. But later I discovered his reluctance was due only to his hesitancy about my meeting the lady of his life, Dan’s niece. He saw me as a possible rival (he saw every man as a possible rival, persuaded that all men at sight of his lady must fall down and worship), and he was too uncertain of himself to expose himself willingly to competition.

  Dan had invited me out, but the invitation seemed in terms of Briggs, and I hesitated to presume. After my first visit to the house I realized that my sensitivity had been exaggerated. With Dan, one and all were welcome, and for entrance into his hospitality and affection there were no conditions and requirements whatsoever. Good and evil, poor and rich, young and old, bright and dull, right and wrong, white and black and all the colors in between were welcome to his companionship. And this attitude of his was not benevolent only. He loved to have people around him, especially, as he said, “at dusk and the coming of dark, for the coming of dark is the foreshadowing of blindness and death and a time when it is not good for man to be alone.” He liked people, all people, and each individual was a special experience for him, much as going to a play or a symphony or on a hunting trip might be for the rest of us.

  I was, however, forced to trick Briggs into taking me out. It was not difficult, I must admit. Briggs had been telling me a story that Dan had recently told, of a young man, an astrophysicist, who with the aid of atomic-power propulsion had made a trip to the planet, Venus, and of a most extraordinary situation he found there. I bluntly told Briggs (this being my strategy) that I didn’t believe Dan told the stories he recounted to me. I accused him of making, in his idolatry, a myth out of Dan England, giving him powers that Homer, Dumas, and Verne all put together did not have.

  Briggs indignantly accepted the challenge. He would show me. Thus that rainy spring evening I drove out with him to Dan’s house.

  Dan’s story of the astrophysicist—Evening Star he titled it—plays an important, a critically important part in his life. It is also a good illustration of Dan’s manner of thinking and his philosophy. It might be well to give the idea of it here and now while we are, so to speak, driving out to Dan’s house.

  Chapter 5

  The story, as Dan told it, began very much as so many of the stories of interplanetary adventures begin—with the building of the space ship, the selection of the crew, the precariousness of the launching of the ship, the terrors and extraordinary experiences of the flight, the perils of the landing on the distant planet, and the rest of it. But, in Dan’s story, from the moment the hero, Denis—who was pilot, navigator, and crew all in one—landed on the planet, the story was altogether different. There were no giant octopi there nor dwarfish balloon men with goggly eyes nor pterosaurian monsters nor horrific phenomena of any sort. The people on the planet were like people on earth and the animals like our animals and life there was, as Denis saw it, very much as life had been on Earth in the thirteenth century. People were primarily agric
ultural and rural; towns were small; there was no such device as money, and all trade was carried on by barter. The inhabitants were serene, relaxed, and happy. Morning, noon, and night, the homes and streets and squares were amiable and colorful with singing and dancing.

  Dan likened life on the planet to that in Paraguay four hundred years before, when the Musical Kingdom thrived under the inspiration and guidance of the Jesuits. As in Paraguay, the people lived with music, singing and dancing at all hours, individually and collectively. The Musical Kingdom on the planet, like the Musical Kingdom in Paraguay, was next door to Paradise.

  The rulers of the many small communities on the planet were chosen for their compassion and charity. There were no castes and no degrees of rich and poor. Special distinctions were given only for special excellence in living or for special achievements in art and agriculture. He who excelled in courtesy (or in courage) or he who with his own hands carved the best staircase (or the handsomest statue) or grew the finest apple (or the loveliest rose), he alone was rewarded with special acclaim. The greatest reward for a man was to have a song written, and sung, about him.

  Now Denis, Dan’s hero, proud in his scientific knowledge, found all this, while poetical, very backward. Transportation was primitive, communication crude. The people had, for example, no concept of the importance of saving time. Leisure was treasured there as is speed with us. And, worst of all in the astrophysicist’s eyes, the study of science was practically unknown. Denis, the progressive scientist, desired to change all this.

  Nobody on the planet could understand, though Denis and they had developed a satisfactory language of communication, why Denis wanted to change their lives. The telephone, as he described it, appalled them, and the automobile they considered ghastly. No one seemed to want to talk to any distant point or to move faster.