Rough-Hewn Part 54

"That wasn't in the least what I said, or meant!" protested Mr.

Livingstone warmly.

"It happens to be fresh in my mind," said Mr. Crittenden, half apologizing for his unusual loquacity, "because to-day, walking on the Due Macelli, I happened to see a case of his tools, and outside, just glued to the window, a young Italian mechanic, gazing in at them, his face on fire with his admiration and appreciation. Quite a long way, isn't it, for a Yankee creator to reach out a helpful and stimulating hand? But he's a first-rater, of course, a genius. The rest of us can't hope to do that."

Later, as they all went down the stairs together, Marise asked him, "But there isn't anything ... is there? ... that the rest of us, not creative geniuses, can hope to do that's creative?"

She had not the faintest idea what he could find to answer. She herself could conceive of no answer possible. With all the intelligent people she had ever known, it had been axiomatic that there _was_ no answer.

He did not speak at once. She had noticed that he often took time to reflect seriously on what you had said before he replied. Marise had never seen any one before who seemed to give so much more care to understanding what you said than to concocting something that would sound well to say in answer. There were times when, incredible as it seemed, Mr. Crittenden seemed really to use language to express what he meant rather than to attain his ends. She waited now, and as she waited she was aware of the erectness and vigor of the tall body stepping beside her. In the corridor he halted for a moment, facing her, his head bent thoughtfully, his eyes shadowed by his broad brow, his hand, that powerful athlete's hand of his, meditatively over his mouth as he considered.

He had given her question a good deal of thought, and yet when he took his hand down to speak he said abruptly, impulsively, as though the words had broken up through what he had been meaning to say, "Couldn't we ... any of us ... couldn't we hope to create a beautiful human relationship? Beautiful and enduring?"

CHAPTER XLVIII

Neale was in despair at his dumb helplessness before the inert resistance of social relations. A man with any adroitness would not submit pa.s.sively to this sprung-up-from-nowhere tradition that he and Livingstone and Marise Allen and Eugenia Mills formed an indissoluble foursome, never to advance or retreat save in a solid bloc, like a French family, with all the uncles and cousins and aunts. How had it started? _He_ certainly had had nothing to do with it. That's what you got for being stiff-jointed and literal as he was about personal relations. The practised old hands ran circles around you, and had things all their own way.

Such at least was the color of Neale's meditations when he was alone in his own room. When, as one of the quartet, he set off on a new expedition, he could think of nothing but his light-headed pleasure at being there at all, walking beside her, catching sidelong glimpses of her when he was supposed to be looking at a statue or a fresco, talking to her over the others' heads, trying to say something to _her_, through the infernally "general" conversation which Livingstone kept up as though his tongue were hung in the middle.

And there was a certain advantage too--he was not flexible-minded enough to label it, but he recognized and was quick to profit by it--this parading around in a group gave the most intoxicating quality of intimacy to the brief, s.n.a.t.c.hed occasions when he did manage to see her alone; even though a good many of these few precious moments were, as a matter of actual fact, pa.s.sed on a noisy street-corner, waiting for a tram-car to come and carry her off, or on a narrow Roman sidewalk, trying to keep abreast of her as she stepped quickly through the dense, sauntering Italian crowd, stopping five deep to stare at something in a window, or holding noisy and affectionate family reunions on the sidewalk. None of that mattered. The noise, the clatter of tongues, the pressing and shoving of the crowd, the ear-piercing yells of the street-vendors--it was all essential silence to Neale because none of it was directed at keeping him apart from Marise, as was the low-toned urbane conversation of the sight-seeing quartet.

He let himself go like a boy--as indeed he never had as a boy--on the few occasions when he waylaid her in the street, without Eugenia Mills, who seemed to have as great a pa.s.sion for her society as he had. He was really a little out of his head with suspense, after an hour of anxious waiting about, smoking nervous cigarettes, his eyes on both ends of the street at once, his heart leaping up when he thought he saw her tall, n.o.bly borne figure in the distance, dying down sickly when it turned out to be some other dark-haired girl. When finally she was really there he was too elated for pretense, swooping down on her, his hat in his hand, grinning--he knew it--like an idiot. He saw people in the street turn and look after him meaningly and smile to each other--and what did he care how big a fool he looked to them!

They fostered, for these queer, unprivate, intimate moments, a little tradition of their own, a tacit understanding that they would save up for them the things they specially wanted to talk about, the questions they wanted to ask each other that were no business of other people.

They talked as fast as they could, sometimes Marise, sometimes Neale, as though they could never get caught up on what they had to tell each other. Neale was astounded to hear himself chattering, fairly chattering. They talked a good deal about Ashley, a great deal about their personal likes and dislikes, a good deal about what Neale was trying to get out of Europe. This seemed to interest Marise, curiously to interest her. She was always bringing him back to it. He was, she told him, new in her experience of Americans-in-Europe. She had seen so many, all her life, and thought she had them all sorted and labeled "...

the kind, like my father, who find themselves just in their element at last in the religious seriousness of Europe about eating and drinking.

Sometimes I think they're the ones who get the most out of it. No, oh, no, there's another sort, the ones I specially love. The middle-aged school-teacher who saves up her money and comes just once comes at forty-five with a ripe mind and fresh, fresh eyes, such as no European can have. I'll never forget what I heard one of them say in Paris. I was tearing along, trying to get to the market and back before I had to go to a cla.s.s, my mind full of nothing but the price of new potatoes and a terribly hard set of velocity exercises I'd just begun. I came up behind two such dear, dear American tourists, and heard one of them say, so happily, with a long breath of satisfaction, 'I've waited all my life to see that.' I looked around wildly to see what she was talking about. And there stood Notre Dame! Had I seen it? No, too many picayune cares on my mind. But I looked at it then, looked as though it were the first time _I'd_ ever seen it.

"And then there are the rich Americans who want to buy everything and do buy everything, and go away empty-handed. And the kind who want to be what they think is sophisticated, who feel it's really worth spending your life learning how to order a meal with the right manner in the most expensive restaurants in every city, and to know how to find the horridest cafe-chantants that don't dare advertise in the papers, and that the people of the country never go to see.

"And then the other kind, who come over, the whole family of them, and go to register at the New York Herald--you know the sort, 'Mr.

Jehoshaphat Jones, President of the J. Jones Farm Implement Company of Broken Ridge, Indiana, together with Mrs. Jones, Miss Elizabeth Jones, Miss Margaret Jones and Master J. Jones Jr. are stopping at the Hotel Vouillemont. They will shortly start on a tour of the chateau Country, and after that expect to travel in Switzerland.' You can see Mrs. Jones cutting that notice out and sending it home to Broken Ridge. They're _nice_, I like that kind, when they don't get too tired and begin to snap at each other. I always feel such a deep sympathy for Jehoshaphat when I see him dragging his sore feet around over a hard, hard museum floor; and such a sympathy for Mrs. Jones, when he makes them all stand around at an Alpine railway station while he delightedly figures out and explains how the funicular works."

There were times when she ran on, mirthful, flashing, keen, droll, amusing herself and making him laugh as nothing had ever made him laugh before, out of sheer, light-hearted hilarity. As he watched her, talking animatedly in her beautiful, clearly articulated English, her plastic face a comic mask, fooling and bantering till she had him shouting, and yet with that core of shrewd observation and real intelligence underlying all she said, sometimes he remembered with a start his first sight of her up there on the roof--what was the meaning of that unearthly sadness the moon had shown him?

She was not, it is true, by any means always gay on these stolen talks together. She could be stern and brief, as when he asked her challengingly, one day, "Well, you've been in Europe all your life, nearly. What have _you_ got out of it?" She answered, "To work hard and not to expect much from anything--except from music."

Her face that was sometimes as meltingly soft as a Correggio girl-saint, looked dark and set. He had been so disconcerted by her look and accent, that like the lump he was, he had found nothing to say before she hailed her tram-car and left him.

Often she made him talk, talk as he had never dreamed of talking to any one, leading him on to flight of wordy self-expression, such as he blushed afterwards to remember, sure that he must have bored and wearied her. And yet there never was such a listener as she, attentive, silent, except for just the occasional comment that launched him off on further talk, when his self-consciousness coming warningly forward bade him stop before he seemed a solemn a.s.s. She made him intensely desire to share with her everything that was in his mind. Helpless before the compelling personal look with which she listened to him, he poured it all out pell-mell, what he had been struggling to lay hold of, ever since he had left Hoosick Junction.

"One of the things that keeps coming over me, is the variousness of folks. We don't begin to take enough account of that. Plants now, they're various too--sure they are. An Alpine harebell is as different from an oleander as I am from a natural-born artist. But everybody that has any sense knows that an oleander would freeze and starve to death if you planted it up near a glacier. You can tell that much, just by looking at it. But you can't tell a thing, not a doggoned _thing_ about a human being just by looking at him, can you?"

Marise agreed with intense conviction that you can tell less than nothing by looking at a human being.

"And then the human race has got itself so mixed up. There isn't the slightest chance, not one in a million, that a harebell will spring up in a Roman garden, and be burned to a crisp by sunlight that just makes an oleander feel good and comfortable. But that's what happens the whole enduring time with folks."

"Why, I wonder," cried Marise, with a startled look, "if that is what happened to me."

"I know it's what happened to me," said Neale. "I believe it happens to lots more folks than have any idea of it. They blame it on the climate, so to speak. But the climate's all right for some one else. It's not _their_ climate, that's all. Let's start out on a hunt for our climate, will you?"

"I'm afraid it's very hard to make a guess at it," said Marise soberly but making no comment on the "our."

"It surely is. It's terribly hard. The point is that n.o.body but the person himself can make any sort of a guess at it. And it's awfully hard for _him_. Wouldn't you think, when it is so hard under the best of circ.u.mstances, that folks would try to teach every youngster to make the best sort of guess possible as to where he really belongs? But they never give you any hint of that, in any of the 'education' you get in school or out of it. They seem to be in mortal terror for fear you will find it out yourself. They jam your beak down on the chalk-line and hope to goodness you'll never look up long enough to see that only your own foolishness keeps you there. Or they keep you there till you've tied yourself up with responsibilities, so you _can't_ get out. Whatever is the fashion of your country and of your century, that's the thing for you to do, whether or not.

"I believe that's what Europe has done for me, made me realize that our present fashion isn't foreordained, nor the only one natural to men.

Think of all the centuries after the Roman bridges went down, when people got along without bridges, because no provision was made to keep alive the minds that happened to be born with latent constructive powers. No, no, there must be no fooling around with G.o.dless abstract mathematical ideas, nor fiddling with compa.s.ses. A crucifix or a sword must be in every man's hand. Every man must be a fighter or a saint, if he was to be allowed by public opinion to have his necessary share of esteem and self-respect. And there are so many kinds of folks besides fighters and saints! Century after century they died without having lived, and we're walking around over their dust this minute. And yet even the fighters and the saints needed bridges! And here we are in the twentieth century, jumping the life out of anybody who isn't interested in building bridges, and hooting at him if he feels the impulse to try to be a saint. It's enough to make you tear your hair out by handfuls, isn't it?"

Another day Marise launched him off on the same theme by asking him skeptically, "Well, suppose you could have your own way about things, what would you do to help people find their own right group and work and climate and surroundings? I don't see how there is the faintest possibility of helping them."

"I'd start in," said Neale, "by suggesting to them, all through their youth, in every way possible, the idea that folks could and should move freely from the life they're born to, to another one that suits their natures. They have to do it while they're young and foot-free, don't they? I wouldn't start in by hammering them over the head with the idea that there are only one or two cla.s.ses that anybody wants to belong to.

I'd jump with all my weight on that idiotic notion that one cla.s.s is better than another, as if any cla.s.s was any good at all for you, if it's not the one you belong to naturally! I'd grease the ways to get from one to another, instead of building fences, especially if the change would mean making less money. Just think of all the natural-born carpenters and mechanics that fall by chance into professors' families, or millionaires' homes. They never get any chance in life. Just look at the hullaballo that was made about poor old Tolstoi's wanting the simplicity of a working-man's life. Just look at the fiendishly ingenious obstacles that are put in the way of any working-man's son who wants the culture and fineness and harmonious living that got so on Tolstoi's nerves. And look, even Tolstoi was just as bad as the rest.

Because _he_ happened to want simplicity and a hardy open life, didn't he start on the warpath to drive everybody else to it. Good Lord, why try to hold up one ideal as the only one for millions of men, who have a million various capacities and ideals and tastes? They'd enrich the world like a garden, with their lives, if public opinion only allowed them to be lived."

"Do you know Rabelais," asked Marise, "and his motto, '_Fay ce que vouldras_?' Everybody in his day thought it fearfully immoral."

"Oh, I suppose that every wise man since the beginning of the world has found it out in his way before now. But they're not allowed to tell the rest of us plain folks so we understand. Or maybe you don't understand anything till you find it out for yourself. I don't believe I do. Do you?"

"I'm sure," said Marise with a quiet bitterness in her tone that burned like a drop of acid in Neale's mind, "I'm sure that I personally haven't found out anything, nor do I understand anything whatever. Nor, till this minute did anybody ever suggest to me that there was really something worth while to find out. n.o.body--n.o.body but you--ever dreamed of asking me to go on a quest to understand. That's why I--go on, go on with it. Why do you stop?"

But that day Neale had been too much startled by the glimpse of a somber discontent under her keen bright intelligence, and too much moved by her speaking of his bringing something different into her life to "go on."

He tried desperately to think of some way to ask her about it, to offer to help her, to implore her to open her heart as he was opening his.

But he was stricken with shyness, with a fear lest he had misunderstood, lest he say the wrong thing. He could only look at her hopelessly. What a clumsy, heavy-handed china-smasher he was, anyhow!

But such glimpses of what lay beneath the surface did not come often, though he thought about them a great deal. He wondered if there was any connection between them and her evident habit of not talking seriously, of bantering keenly about superficial things, rather than giving any idea of what she was really thinking. Perhaps she did not trust people enough to give them any idea of what she was really thinking. Perhaps she fell into that grim mood when she thought seriously. Why should she?

And yet she was always making him talk seriously, about ideas he really cared about.

Once he said to her clumsily, "I must bore you to death, with all these half-baked ideas of mine, when you're used to such brilliant talkers."

She startled him with the energy and vivacity of her answer, "Oh, I _hate_ what you call brilliant talkers. I'm so sick of them! You can't imagine what it is to me, like a long drink of clear water, to hear somebody trying to say what he really thinks."

He asked, sincerely and navely at a loss, "Why, why does anybody talk at all, if not to say what he thinks?"

She answered, with a certain smile of hers which always made him uneasy, a dry, ugly smile, "Don't you realize that the real purpose of talk is to pull the wool over the eyes of the person you are talking to, to make him think you are more clever than you are, and to get something out of him for yourself that he would not let you have if he knew you were taking it?"

Then with one of her lightning changes to that melting look and smile before which he always succ.u.mbed wholly, she went on, "The truth is that I hope all the time that in your thinking over and over there may be a hint for me, who was never taught to do the least bit of thinking for myself. So go on, let me see it all, just as it comes. Let me pick out for myself what will be of use to me."

Well, if she wanted that, she should have it--or anything else he could give her. It was part of the reeling, glamorous intoxication into which she cast him, to hear himself going on like a stump-speaker. And she was adroit at hitting on subjects that made him talk. One day as they were amusing each other by describing their school-life, his as different from hers as if they had been brought up on different planets, football was mentioned. In no time she had him helplessly loquacious, explaining football to her. Think of having to explain football to anybody! He explained how you played it, and some of the rules, and how terribly you cared about it. And suddenly found that he had explained it to himself, that he really understood it for the first time.

"It's a kind of education that America has worked out for herself unconsciously, I believe, the American college idea of sports. No American undergraduate dreams of playing to amuse himself. He'd scorn to. _He plays to win._ That's the American idea. And it's a splendid one. To give every ounce in you to do what you set out to do--no lackadaisical dilettantism--your whole heart in it--and _go to it_!

That's the way for men to live."