Rough-Hewn/Chapter 33
CHAPTER XXXIII
He had called her "his Brunhilda" with honest sincerity; with all his heart he thought he meant it. Of course he was fighting for success to put in Martha's hands. His honor was pledged to win for Martha's sake. His deep affection for Martha underlay his delight in learning to play the game. All this went without saying, and he said it even to himself with less and less frequency during the next year.
He had, as a matter of fact, less and less time and strength to give to anything outside his business. This focussing of energies began to have its usual result. He felt the eyes of the older men in the organization turned on him with curiosity, with approval, and with a little jealous alarm which gave him the utmost pleasure. He saw in the younger men's eyes the appraising, combative, watchful look with which one tackle surveys his opponent. All his life-long mystic intensity of conviction of the worthwhileness of winning games, flared and blazed hot and lusty in his heart as he recognized that he was now head over ears in the turmoil of the biggest game he had yet encountered.
Of course the real purpose of the game was to take care of Martha—that was axiomatic!
The middle of his third year in business was marked by a considerable raise in salary and an enlargement of territory with corresponding increase from sales commissions, which proved conclusively that he was now accepted as one of the live-wires of the organization. And when barely a week later, Professor Wentworth was notified of his appointment as exchange professor for the next academic year to one of the German universities, the moral of the two events was clear. It was time for a rather long engagement to end; time for Martha to set a definite date for the wedding before her father's departure for Berlin.
With the setting of the date the relations of the three took on another aspect—like a change of lighting at the theater. Everything was as it had been, and yet everything was different. Professor Wentworth considered himself already eliminated by the younger generation, and although they invited him to share the new home on his return from the year in Germany, he assured them that he would under no conditions cumber up the background in any such fashion, and began to make plans for joining forces with another widowed professor whose children were now all married. His resigned, philosophic acceptance of his soon-to-be exit from their stage set them further from him and closer to each other, as if he had already stepped out from their lives and closed the door behind him. They occasionally felt a little self-conscious awareness of being alone with each other which was new to them. As Martha quaintly phrased it, she now began to feel not only that she was engaged but that she was going to be married. The feeling was a new one, gave a new color to her thoughts and sometimes made her feel a little queer.
Neale told her that he understood this and felt with her that he was stepping forward into a new phase of their relation; and he did feel this at intervals. But while this was the only change that had occurred in Martha's life, it was overshadowed in Neale's by his intuition that he had now come to a crucial moment in his business career. He recognized perfectly the feel of the moment in the game when one side or the other wins, although half the time may yet remain to be played through. In football it lasted but an instant, that well-remembered poise on the very crest of the will-to-win. In business it would last—he had no idea how long—but he felt that he had been well coached by life, that his training had left him with the endurance to-stick it out—years if necessary. His pride as a fighter hardened and set. He felt again the single-hearted passion to win out at any cost to himself or others which had been the meat and marrow of his football days. In short he began to be considered by all the experienced eyes about him as a remarkably promising young American business-man.
But now for the first time he did not pass on to Martha the excited exuberant sense of triumphant force, the salty tang of pushing a weaker man where he had not wished to go. Nowadays when he stepped into Professor Wentworth's apartment he found Martha with excitements and interests of her own—of her own and his too. After the first slightly startled recognition that he had opened the door upon a quite unexpected scene, he always focussed his eyes to the other distances, and discussed as animatedly as Martha the relative advantages of suburban and upper-west-side locations, and looked over with her the list of apartments to let. But when he left her, he had scarcely reached the bottom of the stairs before he was again in his own world, crouching warily with tense muscles, alert to catch his opponents off their balance. He occasionally cast a mental glance back at the scene he had left, but it was already out of focus. As a matter of plain fact he did not care a picayune whether they lived in a suburb or on 145th Street, or in what kind of book-case they kept their books, nor whether they had twin beds of mahogany or white enamel. He told himself that what he did care about was that Martha should be suited in those details about which she seemed to care so much.
One evening he found even as he was with her, his attention wavered, dimmed, and fixed itself on a deal he was planning with his grandfather, a small affair which he hoped to put through on the side, but from which, as he was to handle it by himself, he expected quite a brilliant percentage of profit. He answered Martha at random, came back to her world with a guilty start, excusing his lapse by explaining to himself that he was eager for that profit only because it would considerably add to the sum he was laying by for the equipment of the new home. As he sat listening to Martha and agreeing with her, and at the same time speculating about the age and condition of the oak on the tract he hoped to buy, and how much of it was big enough to make quarter-sawing profitable, he thought whimsically that he was as good as married already, that he was doing just what was done by all the husbands he knew.
Martha stopped suddenly, as if he had spoken aloud, or as if she had been struck by a new thought, "Neale, do you realize it! We're really going to be married—just like anybody else. I don't believe I ever thought we really would!"
"Didn't you?" he said. "I always had a sort of notion we would." But although this was not the first time she had expressed this feeling, something about her accent, or aspect, crystallized into tangible form anticipations which had been as vague in his case as in hers.
About this time he began to notice that instead of misty, in-the-distant-future glances at what marriage was to mean, came concrete, definite, recurring pictures of one scene after another in the life before them. His imagination, never very quickly aroused or very flexible by nature, began to be prodded by circumstances into an unwonted activity on the subject of Martha and this marriage. He saw her in his mind's eye across the breakfast table, on the other side of the hearth, or even sitting on the arm of his chair with his arm around her, as she often sat now while they talked over their plans. But (it was one of the first intimations he had of the storm before him) he encountered some curious dumb resistance deep in his heart when he tried to think of her more intimately with the veils of girlhood gone, as his wife. Something within flashed up with chivalric swiftness to shut out such thoughts. He amazed himself once or twice by feeling his face hot, as though with shame at the idea of making Martha, Martha whom he loved so much, his wife. What sort of morbid prudery was this? As soon as it was passed he found it incredible; and felt it again. "Perhaps it wasn't so incredible after all. Maybe that was the price you paid for knowing something about life." It was inevitable—what must be felt by every man who had not been brought up in a vacuum. And it was really all right and nothing to be squeamish over. Human nature is what it is, and there's no use dressing it up in high-sounding names!
If that had been all he had to worry him! But there were other things. More than once he had felt a new exasperation rise in him when Martha would go on discussing the color of wall-paper and window-curtains. Hang it all, he was ready to agree with her whatever way she wanted it—wasn't that enough without dragging him into a discussion of details he didn't understand or care about? Nothing of any great importance, such passing moments of impatience, and yet he had gloried in his certainty that Martha and he agreed on everything! More troubling still—he remembered so distinctly the first time—bending together over a book, a strand of Martha's hair had touched his cheek. He could still feel the shiver with which he had drawn away—true, he had not realized what was taking place—had felt subconsciously as if a spider were walking across his face—but just the same, three years ago though he might have recoiled, his next impulse would have been to snatch that tress of hair and kiss it. Why didn't he kiss it now? Why, here it was again, just as if they were married already: that was the way so many husbands he knew acted with their wives! Of course all this was to be expected, too: you get used to things; you can't go on being thrilled by familiar sensations. In the nature of things marriage could not be as transcendent as people pretended, when men and women are so far from being transcendent!
And yet little by little whenever in the pauses of his business he gave a thought to his personal future he felt it all there again, heavier and heavier, weighing down leadenly every thought which he tried to send ahead into the life he meant to make so happy for Martha.
At this, for a short time, he fell into an inner panic, lost his head, thought himself abnormal, incapable of ordinary human life. He was afraid to see Martha, and was in his heart immeasurably relieved when she was called off by a wedding in her Aunt's family to a somewhat lengthy visit in Ohio. He wanted to have it all out with himself while she was gone—make an end of all this nonsense. But what he did was to think of it as little as possible.
With Martha gone he was able to occupy his mind entirely with business problems, and the release from tormenting personal worries was grateful to him. He had been intensely ill-at-ease. He was relieved that his discomfort was passed, quite passed.
He opened Martha's first letter with pleasure. Letters were all right: they didn't harry you with emotional overtones. He read her entertaining account of the prostrate condition of both families over the elaborate wedding ceremony impending. Everybody it seemed was frantic with nerves—except the bride-to-be and her young man, of course, who paid no attention to anybody or anything but themselves. Neale thought he felt a note of good-natured satire in this, and smiled appreciatively. That was exactly what he felt about fussy weddings. Martha always felt as he did.
With the thought an inner door clanged open, and sickeningly there was the whole thing to begin again! What if Martha had been feeling as he had? What did a decent girl feel before her marriage anyhow? Did she dread it perhaps—or on the other hand, had she too lost the thrill—were they already like some of the married couples he knew who kissed with listless lips, looked at one another with stolid glassy eyes? No, Martha was all right! Martha wouldn't change! But didn't that make it worse? What did she expect to find in marriage? Could he give Martha what she expected to find in marriage? He had never once before thought of that, absorbed as he had been by his own disquiet. He was overwhelmed by this new complication, and for many days would not allow himself even to glance at it. He hated the idea of thinking about it. He hated the whole idiotic tangle he kept getting into. Why, damn it, getting married was no such complicated affair! Look at all the imbeciles who sailed into it, a vacuous smile on their lips and nothing whatever in their heads, and made a success of it! A man wasn't a woman, thank God! and couldn't be expected to divine what a woman wanted out of marriage. People who did not expect too much of it, or of anything, were the only ones with intelligence.
Just at this time he got his first chance at a big order. An industrial suburb was projected to house the operatives of a new machine-tool manufacturing plant in the Connecticut valley. The contractors had never been Gates customers and no one in the office thought that young Crittenden had the ghost of a show of landing the order—no one, that is, but young Crittenden himself. The contract would run up into the millions of board feet: forgetting Martha, marriage, every personal element in life, Neale started after it.
He studied the buyer, the situation, the sort of lumber needed. He sat up nights going over the architect's specifications; made up alternative schedules for spruce, oak, yellow pine interior trim; clear or "grade A" shingles. Then, delving deep in the information he himself had collected, he rechecked his figures, shaving the margin of safety down till he was sure his bid would be lower than any other firm's, and yet safe—no danger of leaving the firm in the hole. The Gates Lumber Co. could count on its usual percentage of profit and Neale Crittenden on his biggest commission yet, to add to the sum he was laying aside for the new home.
When his bid was finally in the contractor's hands, and routine office and road work threatened to leave him with time to think, Neale turned hastily back to his private deal with Grandfather. Grandfather's intimate knowledge of all the possible timber-tracts in his region was a gold mine. There were always wood-lots in the back valleys being sold for taxes, or for very little because, all the older generation dying off, the western heirs did not care enough about the little old family land-holdings to come east and investigate them. And even if they had, knowing nothing of the eastern or indeed of any lumber market, they had no notion of the potential value of their inheritance. Neale resolved to take part of his little savings for the use of the new household, to buy up a few such wood-lots, and turn them over at a big profit. He felt sure of himself now, sure he could swing such an operation, and taking advantage of the Labor Day vacation, he went up to West Adams to spend the week-end and talk it over with Grandfather.
Nothing ever changed in Grandfather's home. Grandfather and Grandmother did not look so very much older to Neale at twenty-four than they had to the eight-year-old, having always looked as old as possible. Jennie, the hired girl, had aged more than the old folks, he noted, as she went with him up the steep stairs to the little slant-ceilinged room now incredibly low and tiny.
He sat down on his little-boy bed, a thousand forgotten memories standing thick about him. He saw his mother leading in the sleepy little Neale, and now he saw that she was young, young as Martha, so young herself … as young as Martha! He was the strong, purposeful, determined young man, sitting on the bed and looking at that long-past scene, and yet he was also the sleepy little boy, feeling on his lips his young mother's kiss. "Good-night, Neale." "Good-night, Mother."
"Oh, damn it!" he cried impatiently, dismayed to feel that with the memory of his mother, he was aware as though of a palpable presence in the room there, of women … of women as different from men, emotionally exacting, wanting something different from men, with some fine-spun impossible ideal of what could be had out of human nature, troubling, hampering the real business of life … and yet all the time an inevitable part of things! For an instant he felt brutally angry with them, with their superfine weakening notions, and had for the first time the exasperated feeling that they were an element in life which you could neither do anything with, nor do without. The ewig-weibliche,—good heavens! All it did was to snarl things up! Neale got up from the bed and went over to the wash-stand, amazed at himself, his fit of fury passed, unable to conceive what had started him off on such an explosion. What under the sun possessed him, veering around like a crazy weather-cock from one high-strung mood to another, more shifts of feeling in a day than he had ever used to know in a year! He would put it all out of his mind, all! He simply would not allow himself to think of it again, to think of all that, he would not!
He went hastily down the stairs and fell to talking business with Grandfather, talking to very good purpose, too. To-day their projects went far beyond the little tract of second-growth oak they had first thought of. Grandfather, wily old spider, at the center of a wide-flung web, knew many tips which he was more than willing to pass on to his favorite, Neale,—Neale who had the other half of the combination and could sell at top prices what Grandfather could buy at rock-bottom. He was in fact delighted with Neale's ideas and the energy with which Neale laid his plans. "Why, you're worth two of your father!" he cried exultantly, as they sat again, the next morning on the porch and went into details. "I never could see why Dan'l didn't get on better! He never seemed to care enough about it, and by thunder, you got to care if you're going to get anywhere." The old man paused, took breath, and brought out, with an attempt to sound casual, "I've thought sometimes 'twas your mother made him that way. She's a nice girl, your mother is, Neale, but I never thought she pushed your father the way she ought to."
He glanced at Neale a little apprehensively, but the young man said nothing. He was following out a thought, not entirely new, a guess which he had subconsciously made before, that there was a long hostility between his mother and his grandfather. The idea stirred a great deal in his own head, which he felt no desire to examine.
"I tell you what, Neale," said the old man, observing the other's silence and emboldened by it. "I tell you what, Neale," the old man took his pipe out of his mouth and spoke more loudly, "don't you get to thinking women are too darned important. That's what your father did. He was going good … but that softened him right up."
Neale still said nothing, a succession of well-remembered scenes from his early home-life evoked by his grandfather's words.
The old man cried out now, in a burst of long-contained resentment, "Your father ought to have gone enough sight further than he did! Yes, he had ought to!" He looked keenly into the hard, strong face of his grandson and said proudly, "But you will!"
Neale felt so queer a disquiet at all this, that he got up abruptly and clapped on his hat. All kinds of different pieces were fitting together before his eyes into some sort of a pattern. He wanted to get away by himself and look at it to see what pattern it was.
"I'm going up to the far wood-lot," he said. "I can remember when the pines were just coming in there. I want to see how much they grow in fifteen or twenty years." But he had no interest in the young pines, and he was not at all thinking of them as he strode hurriedly up the stony sunken wood-road. He was thinking of Martha. Out of nowhere there had come to him the recollection of saying good-by to her at the station. He had kissed her good-by, and as clearly as though he had just now stooped to her, he could remember that the very instant their lips met he had been wondering if he would have time to get down to the office before Mr. Gilman came in from Chicago. He wanted Gilman's support for his scheme to follow the shifting center of supply with a branch office in the Gulf States. Were the figures he wanted filed under L for Louisiana or Y for Yellow pine?
He laughed rather grimly to himself, marching rapidly up through the second-growth birch on which with one corner of his eye he was automatically setting a possible value. If Grandfather only knew, he wouldn't think he needed any exhortation to avoid uxoriousness. He was not very proud of that remembered moment at the station. It was all very well ot to be uxorious but …
When a clear tiny brook crossed the road, he stopped to draw breath, for, without knowing it, he had been hurrying as if not to miss an appointment up on the mountain. He saw his father stooping to say good-by to his mother at the train as the yearly summer vacation began. He had seen that good-by every June of his little boyhood, but he had never looked at it, till, a man grown, he now stood stock-still on the mountain and stared back through the years into his father's face. What he saw there was startling and troubling to him. He stood frowning sternly down at the brook. He was very, very unhappy and he resented his unhappiness. But his unhappiness was nothing to the remorse which now shook him. If that was what marriage could mean to a man and a woman, what right had he to ask Martha to accept what he had to give? Martha was so fine, so true—dear, dear Martha! To his amazement, almost to his fright, he saw the brook waver and flicker and knew that the tears were in his eyes. For God's sake, what was the matter with him?
He sat down on a fallen log, looking back down towards the valley and found that far beneath him lay the sunburned, flat, upper pasture where in his junior year he had practised so fiercely to learn how to punt. He cast a glance of heart-sick envy back at the sweating, anxious boy who could conceive of nothing worse in life than to have a kick blocked. How lucky kids were, only they didn't know it, never for a moment to dream of such a heavy burden of obscure misery as that which now sickened his heart.
What was the trouble? What was the trouble? He had everything in the world a man could work for. Why then, did he stand there leaden-hearted, as wretched as a man who canot pay his debts?
The feeling of oppression, of weight was intolerable, like a physical constriction. He stretched his great arms and shook himself and drew a long breath, trying to throw it off physically. In the back of his mind stood his father, looking down at his mother, but now he would not look him in the face, for if he did he would see that he was not in love with Martha, deep and tender as was his affection for her.
With this sudden involuntary formulation of what he had been fighting not to formulate, the trouble and restlessness and disquiet dropped away, and left Neale, sitting, his face gray and grim, looking steadily at what he ought to have seen long ago, at what he had known for a long time.
That was what the trouble was: he was a man who could not pay his debt, and he owed it to the person he loved best.
Well, it was better, infinitely better now that he knew what there was to face. He could face anything, anything, if he could see it. His native energy rose up, that energy which had been so carefully and steadily trained to aggressive strength. He wouldn't take anything lying down! He would stand up to this!
The young man with the hard strong face sat as silent and motionless as though he did not breathe. The bright sun wheeled slowly across the sky. The shadows stretched longer.
When he finally rose to his feet, stiff and lame with his long immobility, he had constructed a new little world in which to live, different from what he had foreseen but tolerable, probably all that could be expected by any one who had an honest mind. At least it was constructed on things exactly as they were.
These were the foundations and boundaries of his new world: a profound doubt as to whether any one outside of books is ever in love as men and women are traditionally supposed to be; a certainty that with his deep affection for Martha, his respect for her, his liking for all her ways, he could make her happy … happy enough …; and be happy with her … as happy as any one in this world was likely to be; the probability that a normal healthy man married to a young and comely woman would fall in love with her sufficiently at least to satisfy any conception she would be likely to have of love, sufficiently to satisfy what any honest open-eyed man had a right to expect from love; a guess that in the long run such a marriage would be more to his taste (possibly also to Martha's) than a more absorbing, exciting union. It would certainly be all right for Martha if they had children. The point was that he could do infinitely more for her, advance and succeed and triumph, unclogged by too much personal life. He did not, he decided, looking back over his life, seem to be the sort of man who really cared much for personal life. He never had. His few tentative steps towards it had always made him miserable, a fish out of water. What he really did care for, what he had always liked when he got it, was a chance to use his strength and wits in competition with other men. Wasn't that after all the real business of life? Wasn't that after all what women wanted of men? That was at the bottom of the marriages he saw about him, in the homes of the older men where he occasionally was asked to dinner. He could give Martha all they gave to their apparently quite-satisfied wives … and more, much more!… because Martha was such a dear, dear girl.
And that was enough! Enough for any one! He did not feel very light-hearted, it is true. But life evidently was not a very light-hearted business. And he was no grimacing, God's-in-His-Heaven, professional optimist. You took what was coming to you. And what was coming to him was plenty good enough for anybody!
The thought of Father and Mother knocked at the door, but he turned the key in the lock, and started down the mountain to his grandfather, the most promising young business man who had ever entered the employ of the Gates Lumber Company.