Rough-Hewn Part 29

CHAPTER XXIX

The end of the football season was a door slammed in Neale's face forever. He had given four years of his life to football, flung them joyfully and proudly to feed the sacred flame. Now for the rest of his life, he was to be shut out from the temple of the only religion which had as yet been offered him. For the rest of his life--he was no post-mortem Atkins to hang enviously and piteously about watching other men doing the real thing.

Neale did not find this realization tragic, because it seemed to him that it was the common lot, and he had a poor opinion of those who cry out melodramatically against the common lot. The thing to do was to accept the common lot without undignified comment. So he did not give a Latin groan, nor cry out a Russian curse on Destiny, when he woke to the knowledge that the aim of his life had been taken away, that he had lived the last of his Homer. He set his jaw and began to try to adjust himself to the life without any goal which he was henceforth to share with the rest of the under-graduates.

But the days seemed very long and empty, none the less, in spite of his grim refusal to complain.

Into the middle of one of these empty days dropped a note from Miss Wentworth: "Dear Mr. Crittenden: Now that you can stoop to earthly affairs, won't you go Palisading with a party of us next Sat.u.r.day?

_Please say yes._ We take the 9 o'clock boat from 125th St."

The first thing he noted next Sat.u.r.day was that Berkley was not of the party. He still thought of Miss Wentworth as "Berkley's girl," and he was annoyed at the pleasure he felt in finding her unpre-empted. The second thing was that she never did anything to block his manoeuvering to break up group formation and string out the party two by two--Neale and Miss Wentworth being the important two. But that might very well be only because she wanted to talk football. She had seen all the home games, knew the players' names, and for a girl, remembered an astonis.h.i.+ng number of the more spectacular plays. The morning pa.s.sed quickly. At noon they huddled around their camp-fire on the edge of the cliffs, ate broiled bacon sandwiches and drank coffee. Then they started back. On the last stretch of the road when the other girls began to tire, Miss Wentworth still swung along unflagging, and Neale saw to it that he was by her side. They ran out of athletic reminiscences. She ventured hesitatingly on books and her uncertain face cleared when Neale chimed in enthusiastically.

"She's surprised to find a football man who's got beyond Munsey's,"

thought Neale. No, he hadn't read "The Egoist," but "Richard Feverel"

was _great_! And wasn't "Harry Richmond" a racy, crazy sort of tale? Did she know "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray?" He grinned internally with an amused cynicism, remembering for whom he had crammed up on this line.

But he felt a difference. When she spoke about Henry James, he admitted frankly that he'd never heard of him. There was an honest quality about Miss Wentworth that made it seem underhanded and unnecessary to bluff.

Silent they stopped where the road pitches steeply down to the river.

Speech seemed impertinent when the Hudson lay below, vast and mystic in the early-falling December dusk.

Then the rest of the party came up, shrieking out, "Oh, didn't he _r-a-m-ble_!" Neale saw Miss Wentworth home to the door of her apartment house, 114th Street, just off the Drive. He noted the number of the apartment. And found it again a good many times in the months to come.

There were other things which helped fill the void left by football. One of these, quaintly enough, was cla.s.s-work! Many electives were open to Seniors. Neale had chosen rather at random; Philosophy, Ethics, Anthropology, English Lit. and Modern History. There was really nothing whatever to do now with his time except study, and to his surprise, those courses which had been but names printed in the catalogue, turned out very much alive once Neale began to put his mind on them.

Another interest was what he called with pretended scorn, "Gregg's gab-fests." It amused Neale to poke fun at Gregg's pretensions to being an intellectual, but he liked and admired his room-mate none the less.

Their room came to be the favorite loafing-place of all the speculatively minded of their acquaintance, and Neale was surprised to find how many there were of them, who liked, as much as he and Gregg to discuss "things in general."

Every Friday evening, unless there was a dance or an athletic contest, from ten to two A.M. some of the Gang would haunt the Den, lolling in the shabby, easy chairs and on the beds, smoking pipes, drinking beer and spouting out all they knew of modern thought. In theory the meeting was open to all shades of opinion, but the boys were without exception filled with the painless misanthropy of youth, afraid of nothing except appearing priggish (by which they, like many other people, meant reasonably clean-mouthed), carelessly ready to agree to any sweeping indictment of mankind; this, although their youth and gloriously perfect digestions made them serenely confident that their own little rafts would eventually drift to a smiling harbor in the country of easy money and orange blossoms.

They took their pessimism, as they did their beer, in great undiscriminating gulps, which affected their healthy organisms no more than the blowing of the wind. With it they drugged their bodies, swigging away heartily at both narcotics till at last they dropped to insensibility, only to crawl out from under the table the next morning, their young eyes invincibly bright, their breaths sweet, their stomachs indomitably craving good food, finding the honest winter suns.h.i.+ne flooding in at the windows, in no way incompatible with the flat, stale beer and stinking cigar-b.u.t.ts left from the night before. An adult might have drunk of the bitter waters of disillusion with more caution, have carried his load of pessimism with less outward unsteadiness, but later on, what dead p.u.s.s.y-cat fur upon his tongue, what a sick loathing for wholesome fare! But these gilded youth swilled down each his kegful of Nietzsche and turned with equal zest to handfuls of gum-drops like "The Cardinal's Snuff-box."

As for Neale, he joined in the discussions as briskly as any, but with reservations. He never quoted or mentioned Emerson, although he thought of him a great deal. He never discussed anything or any one he really cared a snap about. In occasional moments of insight (which came to him because he talked less babblingly than the others and listened more) he suspected that all the other slas.h.i.+ng young radicals and iconoclasts might also be holding back secret articles of faith from defilement.

One element in his life that he never mentioned to the Gang, was the amount of time he was spending with Miss Wentworth. He had called on her one evening shortly after the Palisading trip, alleging as an excuse that he owed her a dinner call for the picnic lunch she had provided. He had called several times since then, with no excuse at all. He had been one of her box-party at "Candida" and somewhat over-paid his debt by taking her to "Out of the Wilderness," and Barnum and Bailey's circus.

He had dined several times at the Wentworth apartment, discussed the Republican Party with her quiet, widowed, impressive father, and had learned to leave him in peace with his Evening Post after dinner. Miss Wentworth kept up on her college athletics, and Neale took her to the Basket-ball games, the Dual Gym. Meet with Yale, the Hockey games, the Indoor Track Meet at the 69th Regiment Armory. She had a great pa.s.sion for walking, so they walked in the afternoons along Riverside Drive, in Central Park, along the driveway by Fort Was.h.i.+ngton Point. By the time the ice had broken up in the spring, Neale had discovered two things: first that Miss Wentworth was not like any other girl he knew, she didn't flirt, wasn't piqued if he was silent, he felt no impulse to bluff or play-act before her, she was more like another fellow than a girl--only a very much more attractive fellow than he had ever met. The secondary discovery, which alarmed as well as thrilled him, was that if three days pa.s.sed without his seeing her, he found himself missing her very much indeed.

Meanwhile the mid-years were long past, spring almost at hand, the tongues of the Gang, after all the winter's practice, wagged more freely than ever. The first Friday in April, Elliott came in, pulling from the deep pocket of his rain-coat, a bag of limes and a bottle of gin, and announcing something better than beer for that evening.

"It's up to you, kid," Neale ordered Robertson, the Soph., whom they tolerated because his self-important airs amused them, "you're the youngest. Beat it to the drug-store and bring back as many siphons as you can carry."

After the rickeys were mixed, the cheese cut, the cracker-tin set out, the tongues began to clack, and the resounding generalities to unroll themselves before the fresh gaze of those young eyes, dazzled by the brilliance of their explorations into the nature of things. Elliott was saying wisely, "Laws? Everybody knows that laws are a conspiracy among mediocrities to keep the strong from taking too much property." He let this soak in and went on, "And moral systems are similar conspiracies to prevent monopolies of less tangible things." Elliott delighted in polysyllables, which he did not as yet always handle with entire accuracy. Gregg, who did not like either polysyllables or Elliott, commented on this, "What book did you get that out of? And what's the moral?"

"The moral is, that morals are a sham. Man obeys the law only because he is afraid of the herd-majority. But a free spirit doesn't mind the criticism of mediocrities, he glories in it."

"So he feels all right, does he?" asked Gregg, "when he clears out to Canada with the contents of the safe, or his best friend's wife. As a matter of fact, he feels like a dirty dog."

"Oh, but that is just force of habit, race-superst.i.tion, cowardice before convention."

"Shucks! You fellows are on the wrong track," broke in Brown, "all man really cares about is his three meals a day. That's what makes the world go round! When the cave-man's wife was stolen, he went on the warpath for the same reason a cowboy lynches a horse-thief, because he can't afford to lose valuable property. Now the modern woman is no longer an a.s.set, but a liability...." He paused, so filled with admiration for his own metaphor struck out in the heat of discussion, that he could not go on. Great Caesar's ghost! That wasn't so bad! He'd have to remember that in the next theme he wrote.

Gregg was disposing of him sardonically, "Oh, yes, we know Brown's soaking up the economic interpretation of history like a sponge. Have a mind of your own, Brown. You don't have to believe all your Prof. tells you. What do _you_ think, Crit?"

Neale sailed cautiously a little nearer his real thought than he usually ventured, with the casual comment, "Well, there do seem to be some things a man can't bring himself to do, no matter how much he wants to.

I wonder if maybe it isn't just inherited race-experience warning us off from what's bad for man in the long run."

Brown came back for revenge, "Oh, yes, we know the rest, what's that but the anthropology course? Have a mind of your own!"

"As a matter of fact, pleasure's the only motive," Elliott laid down the final dictum. "Every time you do something you do it because you'd rather. If you didn't, you'd do something else."

Some one brought out another profundity deep enough to match this, affirming, "Oh, of course, everything's relative!"

And this was still so new an aphorism to them, that they let it alone, the party breaking up over a last round of weak rickeys squeezed from the bottle.

Neale waited till he saw Gregg deep in "Venice Preserved"; then he opened a small volume, and s.h.i.+elding it from any random glances of his room-mate, began reading, "The Last Ride Together."

CHAPTER x.x.x

The two had pa.s.sed a long evening together. Miss Wentworth's father was attending the annual banquet of the American Philological a.s.sociation 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 ba.n.a.lities 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 gus.h.i.+ng 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."