Rough-Hewn/Chapter 30
CHAPTER XXX
The two had passed a long evening together. Miss Wentworth's father was attending the annual banquet of the American Philological Association and the young people, left to themselves, had dined downtown at the Lafayette. It was their first meal alone together, all the more intimately alone because of the shifting crowd of strangers about them. How natural it had seemed to look across the table and see Miss Wentworth there! As natural as though he could look forward to an endless succession of days together; yet so tinged with romance that even the banalities of their small-talk had vibrated with emotional significance.
When dessert and coffee and Neale's cigar could be dragged out no longer, they had strolled side by side up deserted lower Fifth Avenue.
Now they were standing silent, watching the periodical rise and fall of the gushing fountain in Madison Square. At first the pool lay quiet; then the surface was troubled; then swelling, mounting, the jet of water burst through and shot upward, to sink again, leaving only waning ripples behind it. It made the young man think of a great many things, which were none the less moving and poignant to him because they have moved every thoughtful human being since the beginning of time. As he looked gravely down on the pulsations of the gleaming water, it symbolized to him the rhythm of the universe; the recurrent rhythm of the generations—human life with its one little spurt of youth and glory sinking so soon, so fatally soon to the sterile, routine movements of age. But when he spoke, his voice was as casually off-hand as ever.
"There's a fountain in Rome," he said, "where, if you throw a coin in, you're sure to come back to it. I wonder if it would work with this one!"
"I didn't know you'd ever been in Rome."
"I haven't. I got that out of Crawford's 'Ave Roma.'"
"What makes you so anxious to come back to Madison Square?"
"I'm not. I'd rather find a fountain that would send me round the world. But there isn't much chance of that, and I thought if you'd throw one in too—both at the same time, you know—it might fix things so that we'd come back together."
She gave him a steady, thoughtful look, took a penny out of her purse. "All ready, go!"
The two coins splashed into the pool. "I hope there will be as lovely a moon then as there is to-night," she said.
"I wonder," thought Neale, "just how much she meant by that."
When Neale got back to his room, the Gang was not there in full force, only Robertson, the knowing little Soph. and Gregg, drinking beer and smoking their pipes. Neale kept back a grimace of distaste at seeing Robertson, his broad boy's face set in its usual expression of solemn, self-conscious wiseness in the ways of the world. The rest of the Gang found Robertson comic and enjoyed having him around to laugh at, as many people enjoy a visit to the monkey-house in a zoo, and see nothing but the comic in the humanness of simian antics. But he disquieted Neale to his very soul, as another set of people are disquieted and troubled by a visit to the monkey-house and see nothing to laugh at in simian antics.
One evening of little Robertson and his loud-proclaimed disillusion with the world and the human race moved the rest of the Gang to delighted howls of laughter for days afterwards; but though Neale laughed with the rest (nobody could help laughing at Robertson, he was such an owl!), it rather took the shine off Schopenhauer and pessimism, and that was a real privation for a Senior.
As he came in, Gregg was quoting,
"But sweet as the rind was, the core is;
We are fain of thee still, we are fain,
O sanguine and subtle Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain."
"Go ahead, Johnny," he said, "sounds lovely—like any other fairy tale."
"Fairy tale!" cried little Robertson. "Fairy tale, you blue-nosed Puritan! That's all you know. You've been neglecting your opportunities."
Neale answered sharply, "Puritan be damned! I'm no Earl Hall Christer! I know Swinburne enough sight better than you do."
At the sight of Robertson's round eyes goggling at him under his bulging forehead, he was amused at his own annoyance, and taking another drink went on indifferently, "All I'm saying is, maybe prostitution was a dainty art in Ancient Greece, or maybe Swinburne knew some high class practitioners, but here in New York, on the Heights—maybe the thought of Becky Blumenthal without her shimmy gives you an æsthetic thrill, but if it does, you've got a stronger stomach than I have. Take it from me, kid, if you want any poetry out of all that, you'd better stick to Swinburne."
"Yep," agreed Gregg, "I'm with you, Crit. I don't like the professionals. They're a mercenary crew. They're 'out for the stuff, and if you ain't got enough, biff, kerslap, out you go!' Why doesn't some gay little lady just looking for a good time give us the high sign, the way they do in books. Does she? She does not!"
The subject of the discussion pleased Robertson immensely, of course, but he was outraged at the middle-class narrowness of his elders' views. He got up languidly, put on his cap, and standing by the door, pronounced judgment.
"All women," said little Robertson the Soph., "belong to the Trade, more or less, in one way or the other. I won't go so far as to say that every woman has her price, only I have never met one who hadn't!"
Neale and Gregg gazed at him spell-bound. He turned away, calling airily over his shoulder, "Well, ta! ta! A May night's no time for debates. I'm going out for a stroll on Morningside to prove my theory."
After they had had their laugh out, Gregg said, "Doesn't he think he's a heller?"
"Wants us to think so," grunted Neale. "Where's all the Gang?"
"Oh, some of them are boning for the exams, and some are chasing chippies, and Billy Peters is off on some of his usual footless fussing. Been calling on a girl all winter and I don't believe he's even had his arm around her yet, except at dances. The kid!"
Neale filled his pipe, held the match over it and puffed gently until the tobacco glowed an even red all over the top. What would Gregg say, he wondered, to his attitude towards Miss Wentworth? And Gregg himself! Neale knew perfectly well Gregg wrote long, weekly letters to that innocent-faced up-state girl whose picture stood on the dresser over there. He also knew perfectly well that Gregg was a regular Sir Galahad when it came to her. Oh, Lord! How like that blatant idiot Robertson, they were! It made him feel like a fool kid himself, the bluff they always kept up. Weren't they getting grown-up enough to drop this inside-out hypocrisy?
He kept all this to himself, smoking in thoughtful silence. When the pipe was finished, he yawned and stretched, "Guess I'll turn in. Going to read all night?"
Gregg looked up from his book, "I'll put the shade over the light so you can get to sleep. I want to finish this Philosophy A stuff, Plato's Republic. Have you read the last book yet? It's great dope!"
The next day Neale and Miss Wentworth were sitting by their little gipsy fire in a nook among the Palisades, over-looking the river. Luncheon had long been finished, the dishes packed away, and they continued to sit still, Miss Wentworth looking at the view, Neale looking at her and turning over in his mind the problem, "How can a man with no money, and no prospects of ever earning any, ask a girl to marry him? He can't. But suppose there's a chance that the girl … well, no matter what she may be thinking, wouldn't it be the decent thing to let her know how he feels? Of course he ought to! What's the answer, then? There isn't any answer."
"A penny for your thoughts, Mr. Crittenden."
"I was wondering," Neale lied glibly, "whether you didn't know me well enough to stop calling me Mr. Crittenden."
She met his eyes squarely, "All right, I'll call you Neale, if you'll call me Martha. I hate formality between friends."
He weighed her intonation carefully. Had she accented the word, "friends"? Did she mean it as a warning? Well, whether or not she meant it, that was the only line he could decently take.
As they started on the five-mile walk back to the ferry, their talk dodged personalities. They talked about the trees and rocks and wild-flowers and books and music—the music to which Martha had been introducing Neale that winter, the music which, little by little, was beginning to speak to his heart more powerfully, more directly even than poetry. Then, gradually, with a deep sense of tranquil comradeship, they stopped dodging personalities, no longer felt any need to talk, strode forward side by side, silent, each sure of the other. Neale felt quiet and happy and at the same time miserable and uncertain. Could he find words to tell her? Must he in honor wait till he had a place in the world to offer?
At the end of their long march, they came to the edge of the cliff and stood for a long time staring down at the great river, shimmering and iridescent far below them in the spring haze. Only a few miles further south along these cliffs and only a few years ago, the little Neale had sat alone and swung his feet and dreamed. How simple life had been for him then!
Still without a word, they went down the zig-zag path to the ferry landing, and stood waiting for the boat. It was very still, except for the water splashing on the stony beach. Without thought, without planning it, the fullness of Neale's heart unsealed his lips. He began to speak in a low tone, his voice rough and uneven with emotion.
"Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand."
"Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we …"
his breath failed him and he was silent. Over there beyond that wide expanse of lapping water lay the world with its houses and railways, its business, its spider-web of human relations. Here in the shadow they were alone together.
"But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar.
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world."
He stopped. Now that he had come to what he wished to say, he dared not.
"Don't you know the rest?" asked the girl softly.
"Yes," said Neale huskily, "I know it."
She waited for him to go on, and when he did not, she said, "Well, no matter. I know it too."
She stood beside him in the blue twilight, her fair head raised, her eyes looking far over the water. Neale was certain that she too was silently repeating,
"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new.
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night"
The great day was over. The Yew Tree had been planted and orated over. The scared Valedictorian had stumbled through as much of his speech as he could remember. Neale, with a hundred other Seniors had stood up and received the degree of Bachelor of Arts, which the President, "By-the-authority-in-him-vested" scattered broadcast over them. Neale was through with college. College was through with Neale.
Father and Mother were there, come up specially from the other side of the Equator, though Father tried to pretend that business had brought him north. They strolled about the campus, went down-town and had luncheon together, all three outwardly calm in the traditional Crittenden manner, in spite of the emotion boiling under the surface of their little family party.
What boiled hardest under Neale's surface was a great haste to find his place in the business-world, to begin to make money, to have something to offer Martha. Before he had met Martha he had had dreams of asking to go back to college for a Master's Degree—in anything, just to go on with the studies he had found so interesting, to play football again, to sit, care-free, smoking his pipe and talking philosophy with Gregg. But even in his dreams he had felt that all that was only a little boy's scheme to dodge real life. And now he felt no sympathy with dreams. He wanted to get out and tackle real life with all his strength. He smarted under the feeling that he had no right to speak to Martha.
So when Mother went up to her room to rest from the strain of throttling her feelings down to her men-folks' standard of outward calm, and he and Father went into the lobby to light cigars, he said at once, "Father, I want to start in to-morrow to hustle for a job."
Father looked pleased. It even occurred to Neale that Father looked relieved. "Anything special in sight?" he asked.
"No, I'm just going to knock at all the office doors till I find one where they don't throw me out."
Father puffed awhile. "Naturally I'd like to have you with me, but I couldn't offer you anything but a clerkship. And I'm convinced that the opportunities to rise are greater here at the center of things. Now I've worked a good many years for the firm and I believe Gates would give you a job on my recommendation. Want to try it?"
"I'll try anything that'll give me a start."
"To-morrow too soon, if I can make an appointment for you?"
"I'll be there."
"Of course you won't draw much of a salary at first; I think I'd better keep your allowance going for a few months at least."
"Nothing doing, Dad! It's white of you to suggest it, but I'm on my own now. If you get me a job, that's more than plenty. If I can't live on my wages, I'll black boots after office hours."