Father looked as though he considered this mere arguing for the sake of arguing, and said something drily, looking around at the plain, old countrified room, about Neale's not being willing to live as his grandfather had, two generations ago.
The upshot of the talk was, as it always was, that theyagreed once more to let things run on and perhaps something would turn up.
The next morning Father and Mother went back to New York, to finish the preparations for their adventure. Mother cried a little when she kissed Neale good-by, but Grandmother kissed her son without a quiver, though she clung to Grandfather's arm. She and Grandfather and Neale and old Si and Jennie stood in the front yard looking after the carriage. It was almost like seeing a newly married pair go off after the wedding. Neale's mother kept turning to look back at them, her April face like a bride's, colored through tears by excitement and anticipation. Neale stood up, taller than his tall old grandfather now, broad, massive, his tanned face like a man's. But, to his amazement, there awoke in his heart for the last time, a little boy, a little boy who was frightened and grieved at being left alone.
Half-way down the hill, the carriage stopped and they saw Neale's mother spring out and run back up the hill, beckoning to Neale.
"Forgot something," conjectured Grandfather.
Neale bounded down towards her. They met half-way between the carriage and the house. Mother's face was still wet with her tears but she was not crying now. A glory was on her tremulous face. Neale never forgot how she looked at that moment.
There was something she was trying to tell him and although all she could bring out, as she took his big hands in hers was, "Neale, dear, dear Neale," she knew by the look on his face that she had told him.
The little boy in Neale's heart, appeased, consoled, comforted, melted away forever, without bitterness, without regrets. The over-grown young man looked down at his mother, with an absolute trust in her love, and a robust confidence in himself. "I'll be all right, Mother dear," he told her heartily, meaning a great deal more than he said.
Then she went back to her husband, and Neale went back to his punting.
As he ran furiously after the ball, reeking with sweat underthe brazen August sun, it came to him suddenly, so that he stopped short for an instant to think of it, wonderingly, that he had never seen his father and mother look at each other, except with affection. And besides this old, old knowledge which had hung there so long he had never seen it before, there was a new picture ... the animation and excitement on their faces, as they talked of their setting off together for distant travels, the gaiety of Mother's laugh, as they told of the fun they were having to make ready for the unknown, to get the right clothes, to learn Spanish.... "I've been on the point of buying a mantilla," she had said. "Don't you think I would look well in a mantilla, Neale?"
Mother had never seemed half as young to Neale as now. She must have been an awfully nice girl, he thought, going soberly to recover his ball.
Although he had of late seen very little of home, and had occasionally felt irked to know that his parents expected him to make a semi-regular appearance there, Neale found New York rather queer and empty at first with no background whatever but the football house.
He encountered something of the same queer, gone feeling as he lined up in the first game of the season, with all of the trusted Old Guard disappeared, with no Tod McAlpine beside him, on whom to leave the responsibility for the outcome of events. Of all the old supermen in whom he had put his trust, only Marshall the Captain was still there, at right guard. Things looked black to Neale. Such raw beginners could never hold together against any seasoned team.
And yet they did. Week after week of the early season, they registered victory after victory; never with sensational scores, but with steady defense that kept their goal line uncrossed, with drive enough to punch out a touch-down of their own. It came to Neale slowly that this was no kid team after all. It had about the usual proportion of seasoned players and recruits; only now he was one of the old timers. It came to him also that Bunny Edwards the Soph quarter was obviously trusting in him as he used to trust in Tod McAlpine. At first it was horrifying to Neale to have some one depending onhim! He had all he could do to stand up under his own responsibility, heavy on his own shoulders for the first time. Presently he realized that possibly Tod McAlpine had had his own secret misgivings too, in the days when Neale depended on him. It was by no means wholly physical and muscular, the hardening and maturing that went on in Neale, those first weeks of his last football season.
This deepening of his sense of responsibility deepened his capacity for emotion along with the rest of his personality.The other Seniors, even good old Gregg theorizing and spinning talk about things he'd read in books, seemed off in another world to Neale, a light, bright, boyish, somewhat foolishly unreal, although very care-free world. But although he sometimes groaned at the fierce, stark suffering which was the inevitable penalty of caring so fiercely and starkly about anything as he cared about football, he did not envy Gregg and the other outsiders. Envy them? Heavens, no! They were playing at life; he was living!
Yes, he was living and at a higher emotional pitch than he had ever known. He did not think of himself as an individual. He was flesh of one flesh, bone of one bone with his teammates. Once in the Amherst game a smash into the line had piled up without gain. The heaped mass of legs and bodies squirmed itself apart, friends and enemies crawled to their position. All but one, and that was the big Slav tackle, who lay limp and white as if dead.
"Time out!"
Neale flung himself against Fate. He fell on his knees beside the prostrate man, and took the bullet head into his arms. "Mike," he pleaded. "Not now!We need you, Mike!" Like a mother with a baby lying between life and death, he hung over that coarse, bruised face. All the love he had ever felt for any one seemed shallow compared to his yearning over this debauched, foul-mouthed, hairy boozer.
He could have kissed the ugly blue mug as the eyelids flickered, the color came back, and the giant rolled to his feet and lumbered back into the line.
The season rolled along. The luck seemed finally to have changed. They were almost through, with the best record in years. Then two days before the final game, Marshall the Captain broke a bone in his foot. The faces of the team were grave (all but that of Dodd, the sub thus let into the Varsity) as they gathered in the dressing-room before the game. The coach looked them over, casting about for the right note, and had the inspiration to lay by his usual impassioned, florid appeal.
"Nicholson will play center," he began, his plain, heavy words like iron; "Burke and Dodd guards; Mike and Larsen tackles; Greenway and Huggins, ends; Edwards quarter. Crittenden and Wallace halves; Bascomb full-back. Crittenden will act as Captain." He looked full at Crittenden, "It's the last time you'll wear the blue and white, Neale Crittenden!"
Neale throbbed like a great brazen bell, struck by the hammer.
Andrews turned his eyes on the team and made the rest of his speech short and hard.
"Boys, it's easy to lose and it's hard to win. Don't be fooled by the rooters saying you made a game fight. Whatwouldyou do? Run away? Take it from me, there's a time in every game when either team can win. It's the team that has the sand, that's got the guts to put in an extra poundright then, that wins! I'm not telling you this Cornell team is easy. They're damned hard. But you've got weight enough, you've got speed enough, you know football enough. Now you go out there on the field, and show me you've got guts enough to win!"
With set jaws and grim, resolute hearts, the team, Neale at their head, trotted out on the gridiron. "It's the last time you'll wear the blue and white, Neale Crittenden!" He was clanging to that note.
They were lucky to get through the first half with a clean slate. Cornell came fast and hard, but time after time they held them and punted out of danger. The ten minutes' intermission seemed to last barely ten seconds and they were at it again, dead-locked, swaying from one forty-yard line to another. "Looks like a tie-game, barring a fluke," thought Neale, and then with an angry throb of alarm, "By God, I believe we're letting up! Here's where we put in that extra pound!"
"Six, n-int-e-e-n-f-o-r-t-y-f-i-v-e!" the quarter was droning. "No!" cried Neale, "Change that! Four-seven-two-eight!" It was his own straight buck, and he went into the line witha headlong hurdle. "I'll give the signals for a play or two, Bunny," he called to the quarter as they lined up again, "Seven-fourteen-thirty-three," he barked and took the ball on a cross buck, rolling and plunging for four yards, "Three-seven-nine-four." Again he started on the cross buck, bluffed at receiving the ball, hit the defense head down, yelling, "Help me!" and just as he fell saw Wallace skirting outside of tackle with the delayed pass, stiff-arming the end, shaking off the defensive quarter and on for a good ten yards. As he got up, Neale grabbed Edwards round the neck and whispered, with lips close to his ear, "We've got 'em started, Bunny! You run the plays now. Get the idea? Shoot 'em outside, till they open up, then plug Billy and Mike through the guards. Keep mixing 'em up, and speed,speed!"
Bunny got the idea. He snapped out his signals, and shot his offense like a boxer hammering a groggy opponent. With Mike back, he ran Neale and Wallace outside, inside, across, on the weak side: then suddenly dropped back to straight battering-ram football, and sent Mike at the apex of a straining, stamping tandem, straight through and over the defense to the fifteen yard line. The team was crazy with success—prancing like stallions. "Come on, boys!" Neale went a yard on a straight buck, dug his toe-cleats in as he fell, plunged and squirmed for another yard and a half. Wallace shot through a quick opening for three. With Larsen back and first down, Billy sheered off inside for a couple of yards, the Swede got another two straight ahead, Mike running from position made only a bare yard, but enough!
"First down, to the line to go!" said the referee. Neale heard his signal. "Damn the torpedoes, go ahead!" he thought. He flew at the line, bone and muscle transfigured by flaming will—a hard body dove against his knees—he staggered, leaned forward, churned his knees up and down a tenth of a second that seemed to drag for an hour, forward he staggered, strained forward, then fell. When the mass got off him he found he had got to the two-yard line. "Give it to me again!" he whispered, passing Bunny.
Larsen stuck his blonde head close up to theirs, "For Christ's sake, letmetake it! It's my last game. I won't play no more after to-day!"
"Neither will I," thought Neale, but he nodded and they lined up with Larsen back.
"Look out for a funny one," cried the Cornell quarter, as the signals began. "Cap and quarter had a consultation—"
As the center's fingers contracted for the snap-back, Neale shot out of his tracks, and crashed into the defensive half. "Got him flat-footed," he thought, remembering as they both went down to swing his feet wide in the hope of getting the defensive quarter as well. He rolled clear at once, and looked back to see if he could be of any help. It wasn't necessary. Practically all the two teams were heaped in a human haystack, from the base of which emerged a grinning blonde face. Under the face were two huge hands some six inches over the line, clutching the ball, on which emotional Swedish eyes were weeping beatific tears.
Neale kicked a fairly easy goal. The trainer let him suck a little water from a sponge, whispering out of the corner of his motionless mouth, "Andy says minute and a half to play. Hold the ball and line up slow!"
But the team had tasted too much blood to stall. They went down on the kick-off like a pack of wolf-hounds. They smashed two plays for a loss, and after a punt, they punched the ball to midfield before the whistle blew and the game was over.
Nicholson tossed the ball to Neale. "Here's your ball, Cap!"
Neale saw Mike Blahoslav kissing Bunny Edwards. He himself was hugging Gus Larsen, when the pandemonium from the grand-stand struck them. He was lifted on a platform of shoulders and carried to the gate surrounded by a cheering, singing, crazy mob of rooters.
"That's so," he thought, "therewasa crowd looking on!" He had not thought of the bleachers, or heard a cheer since the second half began.
They packed into the 'bus, Varsity inside, scrub on top.The 'bus went off at a gallop. For a few blocks the rooters ran along, throwing cigarettes and cigars through the windows. Neale leaned back and luxuriously lit a cigar. He had been thinking about that first cigar for the last month. Oh, faugh! It tasted hot and dry and burned his mouth. No matter! He threw it away and leaned back in a golden reverie.
Would he ever again know such blessed unalloyed content?
Probably not.
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 Saturday?Please say yes.We take the 9 o'clock boat from 125th St."
The first thing he noted next Saturday 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 manœuvering 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 astonishing number of the more spectacular plays. The morning passed 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" wasgreat! 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 her-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 class-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 sunshine flooding in at the windows, in no way incompatible with the flat, stale beer and stinking cigar-butts 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 pussy-cat fur upon histongue, 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 slashing 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 passion for walking, so they walked in the afternoons along Riverside Drive, in Central Park, along the driveway by Fort Washington 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 passedwithout 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-superstition, 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 asset, 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 Cæsar'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 doyouthink, 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 shielding it from any random glances of his room-mate, began reading, "The Last Ride Together."
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."
"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."
Neale lifted a stein from its hook, poured it full from the pitcher and took a long drink.
"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 allyouknow. 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, onlyIhave 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?"
"Wantsusto 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, overlooking 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 heought 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 roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand."
"Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand."
He was aware that the girl was very still, listening with bent head.
"Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Ægean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; we...."
"Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Ægean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf 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 hearIts melancholy, long withdrawing roar,Retreating to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world."
"But now I only hearIts melancholy, long withdrawing roar,Retreating to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd 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 trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo 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 plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night."
"Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo 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 plainSwept 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 thedegree 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 downtown 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."
May, 1905.
Neale had never, so to speak, received any letters in his life until his parents had gone off to Rio; but since then letters had filled what personal life he had found time for. It was surprising how much more freely people spoke out in the written word than in talk. The weekly bulletins from Mother, and Father's occasional letters gave him more of a feeling of intercourse with his parents than he had ever known when they lived under the same roof. And he was sure that in no other way could he ever have come to look into the clear integrity of Martha's heart as he had in the letters which had come to him from all over Europe, where she had been wandering with her father during his sabbatical year of freedom.
In the April after his graduation, Martha had written from England that she was hurrying the end of her travel-year so that she could be home to take a Palisading walk with him on May sixteenth. May sixteenth was the date of their last walk together on the Palisades, the walk which had ended in the sweet, wordless understanding between them. Her frank recognition of it as an anniversary to be remembered showed how far along the year of separation and frequent letter-writing had brought them.
He was thinking of Martha, the wonderful Martha her letters had revealed, as he waited for her on May sixteenth in the parlor of her father's apartment. He found it almost impossible to listen to what Professor Wentworth was saying, and tried in vain to answer the traveler's questions about Columbia news. The Wentworths had been in Norway and Spain and England and Greece, while Neale had not been out of New York; but he knew no more of Columbia than they.With the bestowal of the impersonally broadcasted degree, Columbia had dropped him as unceremoniously as it had failed to welcome him when he arrived—"and quite right, too," thought Neale. He detested the florid sentimentality of some other universities, the maudlin old grads singing of bright college years!
So he knew nothing whatever about Columbia to report. Besides, Professor Wentworth naturally enough was inquiring about what had been happening to the faculty during his absence, and Neale had never had the faintest guess that any of his professors led a three-dimensional life. But most of all, his year in business, in an office surrounded by men who had never been near a university had set him immeasurably far from the academic world. In an attempt to satisfy Martha's father he now made a great effort to look back at college life, but he was looking back at it from the wrong end of a telescope. It was inconceivably small and far away. He had not realized till now how much the year in business had changed him, how rapidly he had left behind him the horizon of his college years. Well, that was as it should be—to live hard in the present without brooding over the past or dreaming of the future....
Then Martha came in, and he forgot college altogether, forgot Professor Wentworth, he even forgot the business world as he looked half-shyly, half-confidently into her blue eyes—the same, but, oh, how startlingly more real and alive than the dream-like memory picture he had been treasuring all those months.
They crossed the ferry, they stepped off briskly up the zig-zag path, then when the last house was hidden behind the rocks, they stopped. Martha lifted her smiling face to his. As their lips touched, Neale was thrilled by a wave of emotion,—exaltation rather than passion. "How dear, how sweet, how incredibly pure and good she was!"
The moment passed; as they walked on from time to time their eyes met frankly. "Oh, but I'm glad to be walking with you again, Neale," said Martha at last. "It's as if wehadn't been separated at all—yes, you do look older—ever so much older—and yet about the same."
"Oh, I'm just the same, Martha," he told her briefly with a weighty, significant accent.
It was the only reference made by either of them to what was in their hearts. But it was enough for both of them. What afinegirl, Neale thought, not to want, any more than he did, a lot of goings-on to express feelings! As they tramped along energetically, Martha was talking of what the year had been to her. She spoke of picture-galleries and Gothic cathedrals, and palaces and ruins; but what she said, and what Neale heard was that nowhere had she met any one whom she liked better than Neale. Neale felt himself relax in an ineffable content, and knew by contrast how anxious he had been.
Then they made their fire and cooked their bacon, ate their lunch, and Neale lighted his pipe peaceably and happily. They sat in a sunny, sheltered corner of the rocks, overlooking the river, their hearts sheltered and sunny, and in the intervals of their talk they looked at each other in quiet satisfaction. How good it was to be together again!
Neale's report of his year took longer than Martha's because they both felt that hers had the irrelevant passing interest of a vacation-time, while his was to have enduring importance for them both. It was, he told her, the same phase in the business world as a freshman year in college, and although he had not made a brilliant outer success as yet, he felt, on the whole, satisfied with the way he had got his feet under him and had begun to know his way about. He gave a droll little color to the account of his job in the office, the one they had evidently given him as an experiment, to be tried out in cheap materials first—he representing the cheap materials! The business had grown and grown; at first, a generation ago, the product of Mr. Gates' business ability; later on, too large even for what the "old man" could keep under his remarkably capacious hat. Then twenty years ago, other people—Mr. Gates' son, Neale's father, the clever and forceful manager of the Chicago office, a branch-manager in Ottawa,—had begun to keep it under their respective hats. Important matters were decided orally in a personal talk between the different department heads, who, having the required information at their finger-tips, needed no figuring or statistics to help their decisions. This had lasted all the while Neale was growing up, but by the time he graduated, some of the younger members of the organization had begun to feel that perhaps the stock of information vital to the conduct of the business ought to be copied off from the several brains which possessed it, and set down in some more accessible form. Mr. Belden, the Ottawa manager, knew all about the lumber market in eastern Canada, the average quality of mill-run spruce in each section and what the chances were of getting it on time for a given order; Mr. Gilman, at the Chicago office, could snap back over the long-distance wire any question you cared to put about Wisconsin or Northern Michigan lumber regions. But they were neither of them so young as they had been nor was Mr. Crittenden, whose specialty was the selling-end of Eastern and foreign lumber markets. Even the "young Mr. Gates" was now over fifty. They were all mortal, the health of the "young Mr. Gates" was far from good; and furthermore the business kept steadily growing so that it was very inconvenient to have to wait to consult men widely separated.
"Do you get it?" asked Neale, lying in the sun on the Palisades, smoking, looking up at a sweet, well-beloved face and delighting in her eager, intelligent interest in his story. "Do you get it? Half the bunch thought a card-catalogue the foolishest, new-fangled waste of time; half of them didn't know whether it was or not; all of them wanted some sort of tabulation of inside information, and none of them knew how to go about it any more than if they'd been asked to bake a batch of bread or write a theme on the Crusades. The half that wanted to stick to the old ways and keep it all safe under different people's hats were dead set against spending any money on any fool system of collecting and classifying information. And the other half weren't by any means so sure of their ground that they wanted to spend a lot of cash to get an expert. And, anyhow, where could you find anexpert? If you let one of those 'business-system' people inside the office he'd be trying to run the whole works. Maybe the idea was all right, but you couldn't get it executed. Well, while the whole proposition was up in the air, and everybody chewing the rag about it, somebody knocks at the door, and who is it? Why, Crittenden's son, just out of college, wanting a job. All nonsense, college, and yet whatwouldit have taught a boy if not how to straighten out and classify information? Anyhow you could get him for next to nothing: boys out of college never expect to be paid anything to speak of, and a good reason why; because they aren't worth anything. Give him a year's try at it! Crittenden's son ought to have alittlenatural sense. It won't cost much; he can't do any harm; maybe he might work out a system that would be useful.
"So they offered the job at slightly more than office-boy wages to the college graduate. And what didhethink about it? How had he been trained for such work?Youknow, Martha, how he'd been trained. What he knew about orderly arrangement of information was about what would go on the head of a pin! He'd been learning afewscattered items about English Literature and Greek Philosophy, and the latest inaccuracy about atoms; and a whole lot about how to get a football over a given line under given conditions. But incidentally and on the side, he'd had a pretty thorough course in poker, and a poker-face was the necessary equipment forthatsituation!"
He and Martha laughed, a light-hearted young laugh, that did them good and made them feel closer than ever to each other in the conspiracy of two against the world.
The rest of the year had been, Neale told her, a slow, dogged struggle to find out what after all it was nobody's business to tell him; to invent a system of recording what he found out that would not only be fool-proof but stenographer-proof; to collect exact statistics as to the cost of production and transportation; and to bring together items of account-keeping that had never before had even a speaking acquaintance with each other.
"I've traced a plank from the tree to tide-water, inch by inch, my note-book in my hand, setting down every sixteenth of a cent per board foot that it cost till we sold it to the retail dealer, watching it as if it were the prince-royal of a reigning house and I the secret-service man set to keep track of him! I've covered reams of paper figuring out the cost of the office-work of getting that plank sold—extra office-work, you know, not ordinary overhead;—and, by heck, I don't see how they've ever managed to run their old business a minute, the haphazard way they've been going at it! Nobody knew anything, notallof anything! I seem to have been marking time, but just you wait till I get out of the office and into the real game. I know more about some things than any of the buyers, even the old-timers."
"Well, there must be a big profit in business or they wouldn't be able to conduct it that loose way," said Martha.
"Oh, the profits are big, all right," Neale concurred. "Old man Gates has more cash than he knows what to do with. And not one of his grandchildren amounts to a whoop. When his son, the one who's our General Manager now, retires, there won't be a Gates left in the Gates Lumber Company."
"They won't mind," said Martha.
"You bet your life they won'tmind," said Neale. "Far from it! Most likely they've hardly heard the name of it. They're all living in Europe now, buying villas and things out of the money the Company makes. Our Mr. Gates never sees any of his family except when he takes a vacation and goes to Florence or England. Alltheywant out of the lumber business is a fat wad of easy money."
"That's not right," said Martha suddenly. "That's not right."
"It's not right if getting something for nothing is wrong," Neale agreed casually. "But what are you going to do about it? There you are. That's the way things go."
Martha made no answer. There was a little silence. Then she said: "All that account-keeping, that detail work—it doesn't seem so terribly interesting to me, Neale. Haven't you found it awfully dull sometimes?"
Neale rolled over and sat up with an effect of entering again into active and energetic life. "Well, I might have," he said finally. "But you know, Martha, that I have a special reason for wanting to get on quick in business, and I've been mighty glad enough to grab hold of any end that was handy." He smiled at her confidently. "All a fellow needs in the business world is a crack in the wall to get his toes into for a start. I've got my crack. Now you just watch me climb!"
It was perfectly understood between them what he was climbing to reach.
Father had written from Caracas that Mother was taking the next boat back to New York because she needed a lot of dental work done and hadn't any confidence in Venezuelan dentists, but when Neale met Mother at the dock she told him at once, laughingly, that the dental work was only an excuse, and that she had come to have a visit with her son. She had added with a whimsical defiance that, such being the fact, she had no intention of putting up the usual Crittenden bluff of something different.
"I'm not a Crittenden," she told Neale gaily in the cab on the way to the hotel, "though I married into the family so young! And now that I've worn a mantilla, with a rose in my hair, I'm not going to try any longer to pretend that I am."
Neale looked at her, admiring her now quite distinguished appearance, but feeling a little alarm at her tone. She sounded almost disturbingly electric.
"I've come up to have a real New York spree with my big son and his nice girl, now that he has condescended to let us know he has a nice girl," she told him, her smiling eyes at once tender and a little mocking. "You can afford it, can't you, since your last raise?"
"Oh, I can afford anything in reason."
"Your father says they tell him you're getting on splendidly."
"They never let on as much to me," said Neale drily, "though they are treating me very white as to pay."
They were at the hotel door now, where Mother made arrangements for a stay of a month.
"Dental work takes so long," she told Neale gravely in the elevator, making him laugh outright. She looked very wellpleased at this, and after they were inside her room, stood up on tip-toes and gave him another kiss.
He had never entirely recovered from his father's chance remark that Mother had been only twenty when she married. She must have been about as old as he was now when he first began to remember her. Just a girl,—and she had seemed older to him then than now.
He told her this as he unstrapped her valise. "You seem younger to me every time I see you—lots younger now than when I was six or seven years old."
She laughed out. "I was a child myself when you were six or seven." She turned grave for a moment. "If I had you to bring up, now that I am a really grown person with a personality of my own and some experience of the world, I'd do it very differently. I'd make a better job of it."
"You made a good enough job," he protested mildly. "How can you look at me and think you could have done any better?"
She stopped her unpacking to laugh. "It just spoils a person for other forms of joking to live with one of you dry Crittendens. Other people's humor seems so flamboyant. Ilikethe Crittendens," she pronounced judicially, "though I did waste about twenty years of my young life trying to make myself into one. I'm glad you're one. But if you try to make Martha into one—"
"Martha's one already," he told her triumphantly. "We're exactly alike—the way we think and do things. That's why we get on so well together." At this Neale's mother looked at him so hard that he felt a little annoyed, and turned the talk back to its earlier channel.
"How else would you have brought me up, I'd like to know?"
"I'd have taken dynamite to you," she informed him briskly.
"Dynamite?"
"Oh, you don't understand. And I daresay it would have been too early anyhow. You'll probably get your share of dynamite when your turn comes." She changed the subject: "How's business? Seriously!"
Seriously he told her of the results of his promotion six months before from the "intelligence bureau," as he called it, to the real business of life, to buying and selling. "The only real money is in that," he told her, warming as he spoke. "All those other jobs, office jobs, don't lead you anywhere. Buying and selling, especially selling, that's where you get ahead. I'm earning twice what I did, and by this time next year I'll be doing twice what I'm doing now. I may soon be able to do a little on the side, on my own hook, pick up something good and dispose of it well. Grandfather is sure I can. He may have some tips for me later on. Grandfather is a wise old scout."
Mother laid some underwear away in a drawer. As she shut it, she asked casually: "Do you read any Emerson nowadays, Neale?"
How in the world did Mother know he had ever read Emerson? "No, I don't," he said.
She noted the shortness of his tone with raised eyebrows, and began to hang up her dresses in the closet.
Neale looked at her back with some uneasiness. He felt his privacy threatened, and, stiffening, put up the bars. And apparently Mother sensed the change, for she at once dropped her intimate tone and began making gay plans for "having some fun" during her stay, plans in which dental engagements played a conspicuously small part. It turned out to be a very light-hearted month, Mother's month in the dentist's chair. Neale and Martha were quite shaken up out of the quiet, jog-trot routine of their peaceful days and long evenings of serious reading together. Mother took them to the theater and to dinner at out-of-the-way restaurants of which, like most sober resident New Yorkers, they had never heard the names. In the daytime, she and Martha, of whom she had grown very fond, went around a good deal together, looking at the innumerable expensive and occasionally beautiful objects on view in the shops of a big city; or visiting museums, or going to matinées. They heard a good deal of music, all three of them. Mother had chosen a hotel near Carnegie Hall, so that frequently, when they had nothing else to do, they strolledup on foot and listened to whatever was being played. They had an occasional dinner with Professor Wentworth and Martha in their apartment on 122d Street, and Mother went off by herself to look up the old friends of Union Hill days, the few who were not scattered.
Once in a while Neale talked over his business prospects with Mother when she asked him about them and he couldn't get out of it, and they agreed that he would be able to marry in another year. And having agreed in this opinion, Mother was apt to fall very silent for a time. But this suited Neale, who found intimate personal talk disconcerting. It always made him uneasy when another human being rattled the handle of the door to his inner secret garden. One of the things he most loved in Martha was that she took so much for granted without talking about it. They understood each other instinctively, he felt, without need of explanation. He suspected that Martha had her own inner garden, and prided himself on respecting her right to it.Hewas no one to go rattling handles of doors that were none of his. He found Martha especially restful and satisfying after one of these talks with Mother, lightly and passingly as Mother glanced over those sensitive places. He constantly felt that Mother was trying to open a door he wished to keep shut, that she was trying to say something that he had no desire to hear. He and Martha were all right. What business had Mother to look at them that way?
She did nothing after all, beyond looking, and went away at the end of her month, having committed no greater crime than to whisper brokenly to Neale as she kissed him good-by, "Neale, it's not enough to—Neale, you mustloveMartha. You mustloveher—not just—"
At this Neale had quickly assumed the cold look of distaste which she knew so well, and she had ventured no further.
After her departure, Neale fell with relief back into his old routine of quiet, comfortable life-in-common with Martha, with none of the prickling electric uncertainties he had felt in Mother. Odd how much better he knew Martha than hedid Mother; how sure he was beforehand of what Martha would think and say, whereas he had been uncomfortably unsure of Mother. He felt he knew Martha as he knew himself, through and through.
This conviction was a great satisfaction to him. He often thought of it with pride, and with a secret pity and scorn for people who found life and human relationships so complicated and mysterious. That sort of thing was just a novel-writer's rubber-stamp convention. What was there so darned mysterious about your own nature, about a sensible woman's nature? Nothing. If you were a sane, normal man, you found your mate in the world just as normally as you found your place in the business world. With a healthy, honest, fine girl like Martha, there would be none of those double-and-twisted emotional complications you read about in books.
He was away from New York a good deal at this time, taking, as one of the younger salesmen, the more difficult and less remunerative territories, and when he came back to the city it was like coming home, to ring the bell of the Wentworths' apartment and have Martha herself come to open the door for him, her eyes as clear and honest as sunlit water.
They always had a good deal to tell each other after these separations. Martha about her work at the Speyer School, where she had begun to help a little in visiting the families of the poorer children, Neale about his business, which he was finding more and more absorbingly interesting, for which he was feeling much of the zestful passion he had felt for football. He talked a great deal to Martha about the resemblance of football to business. One of the many things he loved about Martha was her knowledge of football. Of course, strictly speaking, like all other outsiders, she knew nothing whatever about football; but she knew as much as any spectator could, and, brought up from birth as she had been in one or another college community, she had a second-nature familiarity with the psychology of the game, with the fierce, driving concentration, the eager, devout willingness to devote every throb of your pulse, every thought in your brain towinning the game; and it seemed perfectly natural to her, as it did to Neale, to step into another world where all the mature energies were focussed in the same way.
"It's just like football," Neale often told her, his eyes gleaming. "Having played football gives you as great an advantage as though you were in training and the other fellows soft. I often feel as if I ought to go and look up old Atkins and thank him. He was teaching me enough sight more than how to play back-field defense! That everlasting pounding of his on the idea of knowing where the ball is before you go for it—Gee whiz, you'd never guess how many fool mistakes that's kept me from. I see the other fellows wasting money on buying drinks and tickets to shows and champagne suppers for hard-shelled old buyers who haven't an interest left in life beyond screwing the price down an eighth of a cent—wallowing in any-old-how just to get going,—the way I used to; and I think of old Atkins, lie low, keep my mouth shut, and size up the enemy's formation till I see their weak place,and then!" The brilliance of his eye, the grimness of his set jaw, the impact of one great fist in the palm of the other hand showed what happened then. He went on. "One game's just like the other, and the thing that wins in both iswanting to winmore than the other fellow does." He turned serious, almost exalted, and said: "Sometimes I used almost to think it was the way religion must be for people who believe in it—it puts you in touch with some big force—I've felt it in football—I guess everybody always feels it who really gets going enough to care about anything with all that is in him—if you give every bit of yourself—don't keep anything back—want to win more than anything else in the world—why, all of a sudden some outside source of power that's hundreds of volts higher than normal begins to flow through you—and youmovethings. It's wonderful, but you can't have it cheap. It costs you all you've got."
One evening as they sat thus, Martha perched on the arm of Neale's chair, the quiet air about them crackling and tingling with the high-tension current, Martha caught andgrasped a comparison which had long been floating elusive in the back of her mind. She jumped up and ran to the piano. "Listen, it's like this," she told him, and played with one hand, clear and defiant and compelling, the call of the young Siegfried. "That was how it was in football. And now—" She sat down before the piano, and, stretching out both hands over the keys, she filled the room with the rich clamor of the same theme reinforced by all the sumptuous strength of harmony.
Neale sprang to his feet. "You know what Siegfried went through fire to find," he cried, stooping to put his lips on Martha's cheek. "All he wanted was to get to Brunhilda. And that's all I want, my Brunhilda! All I want in the world!"