Rough-Hewn/Chapter 35
CHAPTER XXXV
Neale had set the wheels of his business life whirring at such speed and there were so many of them that they continued to turn clatteringly around and around after Martha had gone away, not only from him but from America; for she had sailed at once with her father for Berlin. Neale watched them whirring for weeks before he perceived that they were running down, and for weeks after that before he perceived that he felt no impulse to keep them moving. There didn't seem to be much point to things, any more. Martha had done what in his heart he wanted done. And yet he was far from satisfied. He missed her outrageously, missed having her there, didn't know what to do with himself. And yet he had not been overjoyed at what he had been on the point of doing with himself. He must be hard to suit, he thought, fretting to feel himself still confused and uncertain, with no zest in things. Damn it, what did he want?
A week after Martha's departure he had a letter from Grandfather, written on blue-lined paper, reading, "Dear Neale: Wharton just came in to say he wants the Melwin spruce and heard you had bought them. He wanted 'em for twelve hundred (couldn't find out what you'd paid for them I guess). I said fifteen hundred and stuck to it. He squirmed some. But I knew through Ed that he wanted them for a New York order he's got for big stuff. And there aren't any others around here that'll come up to his specifications. So I made him toe the mark. He left a check for $300 (which I enclose) and will pay spot cash for the rest before beginning to cut."
Neale sat at his desk, looking hard at the piece of cheap paper which brought him the news that in a short time he would have eight hundred dollars more in the bank than he had had before. And without turning his hand over. All he had done was to know that the Melwin spruce were worth a lot more than was thought by the Iowa cousin who had inherited that distant woodlot. Easy money! Somebody had paid him high for that piece of knowledge,—who? Wharton, of course, would certainly get it out of somebody's else hide, or he would never have gone in for the deal.
He sat dreaming, remembering his timber-cruising trip, remembering the choppers and woodmen he had known around Grandfather's. Men like that would work all a year around in all weathers, all their days, to get as much as he would have for doing nothing.
He drew a long breath and turned to enter the check in his check-book. A queer sort of a world. And after all, he stood in much the same relation to the Gates family as the lumbermen did to him, working enough sight harder for enough sight less money. That seemed to be the way things were. But it didn't seem quite square.
A hasty mental calculation showed him that with this money he would have over two thousand dollars. Clear. Not so bad! He considered the matter, wondering why he felt no more elation, and decided that it was because he could not for a moment think of anything he specially wanted to do with two thousand dollars. Always before this he had thought he was making money to give to Martha. Was it possible that he had been using Martha as an excuse? No, no, he explained hastily to himself, the point was that Martha had, air women had, some definite use to make of money. It bought things they wanted and thought important, suburban houses and mahogany twin beds and what not. Martha could easily have spent that sum to buy things that pleased her. The only use he could think of for it was to use it over again to make more money. And then what? It didn't seem much of a life to do that over and over.
He looked around him at the busy outer office, filled with haste and a sense of the importance of its processes. There was more to it than making money. That was the foolish, reforming-professor's idea of "sordid business." You were in it, not because you wanted the money but because it was the biggest game in the world, and it was fun to win out. All right then. He would win out.
But no matter how much time he put into his efforts to win out, there was a lot of time left over. Neale did not succeed in filling that leisure to his satisfaction. He went out more than he had ever before, accepted invitations to dinner from all the married men in the office and lunched with all the unmarried, and had them out for meals with him. But still there was time left over. He went to the theater, to loud hearty farces that made him laugh, at first; but they very soon seemed all cut by the same pattern and he found himself sitting them out as grimly and smilelessly as Americans read their comic supplements.
It was not that he was lonely because he was alone. Never in his life had he found the slightest alleviation to loneliness in merely having some one, any one, with him. The truth was that when he was alone he fell to thinking. And he did not know what to make of his thoughts. They mostly consisted of an answerless question, so answerless in the nature of things, that it was foolish to formidate it — the same old question you always ran into when you stopped to think, "what are you doing all this for, anyhow?"
In football days that question had been silenced by the instant fierce, all-sufficient answer, "For the team!" What was the present equivalent of the team now? It looked remarkably like Neale Crittenden, all by himself—not such a very big inspiring goal when you stopped to think of it. The best thing evidently was not to do much stopping to think.
One evening unwarily he allowed something alarming to happen to him, something worse than stopping to think. After a solitary dinner at Reisenweber's he strolled along 59th Street, and, as it seemed too early to go back to his room and he had nothing else to do that evening, stepped into a concert at Carnegie Hall. He stepped in to get rid of a few hours of his restless uneasiness and he came out so devoured by restless uneasiness that he could not think of going to bed, but walked up and down the streets for hours trying to forget the shouts of the brass, the long sweet cries of the violins. They seemed to call his name over and over … to summon him out, up, to some glory … little by little they died away, leaving him in the same flat, inner silence as before, hearing nothing but the banging clatter of the elevated and the clang of the surface-car bells. A little before dawn he went back to bed, exhausted. What sort of a life was this, anyhow?
He was less away from the city than usual, now, spent more time at his desk, which was usually in those days heaped with work that had formerly been done by other men. The office was shifting its routine, rearranging the work to meet the strain of the Manager's failing health. It was whispered that Mr. Gates—the "young Mr. Gates"—though only fifty-three, might have to pull out altogether. That would mean promotion all around. Neale knew by the character of the work on his desk that when promotion was served out, he would get his share.
Flittingly once or twice, it occurred to him that all the managers of departments were but mortal, and that in time all their private offices would be filled by the men now working at desks in the outer rooms. How would he like in the end to move into Mr. Gates' office, he wondered? This thought, casual and fantastic though it was, moved him to inquire whatever was the matter with Mr. Gates' health anyhow? He was told that the older man was "threatened with a complete nervous breakdown due to overwork." Neale like all other American business-men had heard that phrase all his life. The very wording of it was as familiar to him as the name of a standard make of soap or collar. But he found he did not after all really know what it meant. What happened to anybody who had a complete nervous breakdown? Mr. Gates came and went about as usual although not so regularly, looking about the same—spare, dry, hard, well dressed, well shaved, attentive, silent. Neale looked at him with some curiosity, wondering how a threatened nervous breakdown showed itself, and deciding skeptically that there was probably the same amount of nervousness about it as about everything—less in it than people made out—money for specialists mostly.
One day he was consulting a letter-file near the door to the manager's office, which stood ajar. Over the file, Neale could see the familiar scene: Mr. Gates' private secretary standing to the right of his employer in a respectful attitude, a bunch of letters in his hand. Mr. Gates adjusted his eye-glasses, their fine gold chain gleaming yellow against the hard gray of his thin cheeks. He took a letter off the pile and held it up before him. To Neale's astonishment the paper shook as though a high wind were blowing through the room. A look of anxious effort came into the older man's face. He leaned his elbows on the table and tried to take the letter in both hands, but it fell out of his trembling fingers upon the desk and slid to the floor. Mr. Gates stooped, secured it with difficulty and lifted his head to recover his position. As he did this, with rather a jerk to get his balance, the drooping loop of his eye-glass chain caught on the key of the drawer and tore his glasses off. They fell on the desk with a little tinkling clatter, broken; and instantly Mr. Gates flung the letter from him, put both hands over his face and burst into tears. Neale heard the sound of his sobbing. His secretary, looking concerned, but not surprised, sprang to the heavy door and slammed it shut.
Neale stood frozen with one hand on a letter in the file, frightened for the first time in his life, so frightened that it made him sick. When he recovered presence of mind enough to move, he tiptoed away to his own desk and sat down before it, shaken. So that was a nervous break-down! Good God!
He wasn't so sure he wanted to move up ultimately into that office.
For a long time after this he was haunted by the recollection of that scene, and especially by the sound of those strange, shocking sobs. Sometimes they woke him up at night, as though it were a sound in the room. They recurred to him at the most inopportune moments, in a train, at table, as he undressed for the night in a bedroom of a country hotel.
He would have given anything not to have heard them. He tried everything to drown them out.
He turned again at this time to books, and took down from the shelves, volumes he had not looked at since college, books of speculation, abstract thought, history. He found Gregg's marks in one or two and wondered how Gregg was liking it being a professor out in California. That was far away, and so was Gregg. And so were the books. They looked different in his hand; remembered pages had not the same message. He could not seem to put his mind on them as he had. It wandered to other things. A long time since he had tried to use his mind in that way. He had had mighty little time for reading abstract stuff.
Once, starting off on a trip sure to be tiresome, with a long wait in the late evening at Hoosick Junction, he chanced to put into his valise a volume of Emerson. He read the newspaper on the train up, the news, the financial page, and what was going on in the world of sports. But he left the paper in the train, and as he settled himself for the dreary wait in the dreary, dusty, empty station he opened the Emerson. What were some of those places he used to think so fine?… "Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree, for the better securing of the bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.…
"The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word.… But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom … to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. Leave your theory as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee!"
He slammed the book shut again. It made him feel as that confounded music had, stirred up, restless, unhappy, ashamed. It was a voice from another sort of world, a voice that he would rather not hear, because there was nothing to be made of what it said. What could you do about it? Neale detested stirring up ideas about which there was nothing to be done. And he knew a great deal more now than he once had about the many, many things that could not be done.
But shutting the book, even slamming it shut, did not silence the voice. He sat alone under the one smoky kerosene lamp, staring into the dusty, dreary, empty waiting-room and heard it clear and calm and summoning, "Leave your theory as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee!" He looked about him desperately, but there was not a soul in the station save himself, nor a house near the tracks. There was not a sound to drown out the deep humanity of that summoning, challenging voice.
He made an impatient rebellious gesture. Summoning? That was all very well. But to what? To something better than he had, more worth while than he was? Well, what was there? Where could it be found? Those vague high-sounding phrases were easy enough to write, but what could you do about it in real life? What was the matter with what he had?
The matter with it was that it was bare and dingy and empty, like the room in which he sat. But what was not? Everything was like that, if you didn't believe the nonsense written about it, if you looked at it and saw it. It wasn't to be supposed that he, Neale Crittenden, would go and be a missionary, was it, or any of those pious priggish make-shift devices to pretend that you were doing something worth while? Or join the Salvation Army and beat a drum? He was an American business-man. What in hell did Emerson think you could do?
He got up and walked restlessly around the dreadful little room, helpless before its bareness. Nothing to read in the place, not even a time-table. Nothing but the Emerson. He went over to where it lay on the bench, opened his valise, put the book back in, down among his shirts, and snapped the valise shut on it. A whistle sounded down the track. He looked at his watch. No, his train was not due for half an hour yet. He went to the door and watched a through freight roll past, noting the names on the cars as they flashed into the light from the station-agent's window,—N. Y. Central, Père Marquette, Wabash, Erie, Boston and Maine,—shoes and groceries and hardware, structural-steel, cement—all the thousand things needed every day to keep the wheels of daily material life moving, all made, bought and sold, shipped and handled by men like him. All necessary honest goods, all necessary honest work … but that couldn't be all of life! The train pounded off, the silence of the night closed in on him, and in that silence he heard the echo of those appalling sobs, and the slam of the door. Queer thing, human life was, wasn't it? Think of poor Mr. Gates paying that price, and very likely for something he didn't care so much about when he got it. It wasn't the price you paid, that bothered Neale. If it were something worth your while, you were willing to pay all you had. But to pay so much, just to make money for Neale Crittenden … he couldn't see it that way. He'd have a smoke on it anyhow.
As he filled his pipe it came to him that once before he had felt the same aching restlessness, so intense that it was pain. That was the time when he had gone stale. He'd been put out of the game, and had sat on the side-lines eating his heart out. He was there again, gone stale, out of the game. He had the strength, he had the speed, now as then. Why was it he stood outside the game? Other men were giving their souls to it. Maybe he was a quitter, after all. There had certainly been quitting or something the matter in his relations with Martha … how empty life was without Martha.… But he was mighty glad he wasn't going to marry her.
He was a fine specimen anyhow!
"Well now, well now," he shook himself together, "let's consider all this. What's the best thing to do when you go stale and have a slump?" Atkins had showed him what to do that other time. He had actually profited by it in the end, profited immensely by being temporarily out of the game, so that he could consider and understand the real inwardness of what it was all about.
Why, perhaps that was what he needed to do now, pull out for a while, get away from the whole thing, look at it from a distance, get a line on what it was all about.
He sucked on his pipe, cocking his head sidewise to look at the ceiling, his hands deep in his pockets. There was nothing to hinder his taking a year off. He had money enough. And not a tie on earth to prevent his doing as he pleased. He'd lose his job, of course. But he didn't seem to be just madly in love with his job anyhow. And there were other jobs.
"Well, by George, why not?"
Where should he go? Anywhere that wasn't the lumber business. There was the whole world, the round globe hurtling through the infinite. What in God's name was he doing in Hoosick Junction?
There was England; and France; and Italy; and after that, why, anywhere again! Wherever he pleased … the East, China, and where there were Malays and jungles. When his money gave out, if he still wanted to stay on he could earn his living as well there as here. "There!" That meant anywhere else. Anywhere else must be less dusty and frowsy and empty than here.
Why under the sun had he not thought of this before? Their damned old labels do stick after all. But he would soak them off!
His heart unfolded from its painful tight compression. The way out? Why had he been so long in seeing it? The way out was to put on your hat and go.