In June 1899 when Hadley Prep. unlocked its grim doors and spewed forth
the fifteen-year-old Neale for his third vacation, he did not as he had
always done before, go at once with Mother to West Adams and the
saw-mill. The invariable program of his journey there, Mother's two
weeks' stay with him to get him settled, her going on to visit vague
relatives of her own elsewhere in Massachusetts, and her return to spend
the rest of the summer with Father, was upset by the news from the West
Adams Crittendens. Jenny, the hired girl, had been to visit friends in
Troy, and had fallen ill on her return. The doctor thought it might be
typhoid. Certainly they did not want a boy visitor bothering around,
until the matter was settled and they knew whether they were in for a
long siege.
The Crittendens like all methodical people were quite at a loss when
circumstances interfered with their routine. If there was one part of
Neale's year the rightness of which they did not doubt, it was the
summer spent in the country where his father had grown up. Now they were
confronted with a perfectly new aspect of the problem of what to do with
him. They solved it by not doing anything for the present. Mrs.
Crittenden went off to visit the usual relatives in Massachusetts,
delicate old ladies, whose nerves could not hold out against the idea of
a great ramping boy; and Neale was left temporarily with his father to
wait developments in West Adams.
The first days of liberty were sweet enough, after the strain of
examinations. Neale loafed or rode his wheel (he had a new 24-inch frame
bicycle now) at random up to Hudson Heights, and beyond on the
Palisades. But less than a week of this was enough. He tried to amuse
himself with baseball again, but it was not as he remembered it. The
three years he had been at Hadley Prep. had separated him from his old
friends. They were no longer to be found. Some were at work, some had
moved away. The boys playing ball seemed absurdly young. The vacant lots
themselves were absurdly small and rough. How could he have played
there? He gave the thing up and moped.
What was there to do? He got on his wheel again and went out over the
Plank Road as far as Passaic, swung left through Montclair, the Oranges,
out to Elizabeth and home through Newark. Home was just as dull as he
had left it. Neale was bored to desperation, and on a chance went into
the parlor and opened the book-case. He was no great reader. In his own
room there was a fair collection of Henty, G. Manville Fenn and Harry
Castleman, but none of these seemed worth re-reading. He didn't suppose
these grown-up books in the library could be worth anything, but he took
down a volume to see.
"Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within twenty miles of
the sea. My first most vivid impression of the identity of things seems
to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.
At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place over-grown
with nettles was the churchyard ... and that the dark flat wilderness
beyond the churchyard intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with
scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden
line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which
the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers
growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
"'Hold your noise!' cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
among the graves at the side of the church porch. 'Keep still, you
little devil, or I'll cut your throat!'"
Half an hour later Neale was still standing by the book-case, the book
in his hand, his mouth hanging open, shivering in the clammy mist
together with Pip and the man with the iron chain. An hour later he was
tucked into the Morris chair, among the cushions of which he hid the
book when the dinner bell made him reluctantly lay it aside.
What made him hide it? An invincible sense of moral decency made him
hide it. He would have shuddered and cowered like a modest girl whose
bed-room door is opened inadvertently by a stranger, at the very idea of
carrying the book to the table and pouring out to his father what it
made him feel. With a shy, virginal delicacy he stood guard,
half-frightened, half-enchanted, over the first warm gush from the
unexpected well-springs of emotion in his heart. If his father had come
into the room, had seen what he was reading and asked him how he liked
it, he would have answered briefly, "Oh, all right."
But for the next three days he did nothing but live with Pip, and feel
intolerable sympathy, far deeper than anything he had ever felt in his
own healthy life, for the convict victim of society. On the afternoon of
the third day, his heart pounding hard with hope, he was in the
row-boat, in the track of the steamer. The Morris-chair in which he sat,
swayed up and down to the ocean rhythm of the great deeps which bore him
along. He peered forward. There was the steamer at last, coming head on.
He called to Provis to sit still, "she was nearing us very fast," ...
"her shadow on us," ... and then, oh, _gosh_! ... the police-boat, the
betrayal, the summons to surrender!
Neale's soul recoiled upon itself in a shudder of horrified revolt. He
recognized the traitor, a white terror on his face. Grinding his teeth,
Neale leaped at his throat. With a roar the water closed over their
heads ... he would never let him go, never, never.... Down they went to
the depths, to the black depths, fiercely locked in each other's arms.
Neale smothered and strangled there ... and came up into another world,
the world of books.
At the table that night, his father looked at him and asked, "You're not
getting a cold, are you, Neale?"
"No, I guess not," said Neale, blinking his reddened eyelids, and eating
with a ravenous appetite his large slice of rare roast beef.
After that, time did not hang heavy on his hands. The days were not long
enough. The volume which stood next to "Great Expectations" was called
"The Tale of Two Cities." "Which two cities?" Neale wondered. He opened
it and began to read. In a moment, wrapped in a caped great-coat, shod
with muddy jack-boots, he was plodding up-hill beside the Dover Mail,
his hand on his horse-pistol. The panting rider on his blown horse--the
message, "Wait at Dover for Mam'selle,"--the answer in capital letters,
"RECALLED TO LIFE!" With a long quivering breath Neale slid back a
century and a quarter, into a world vibrating with sorrow, hope,
indignation, hatred, love.
He dipped his handkerchief in the muddy wine spilled in the street; he
looked up, not surprised to see the squalid joker scrawl "BLOOD," on the
wall; he climbed the filthy staircase, and averted his eyes in horrified
sympathy from the ruin of humanity who sat in the dark, cobbling shoes.
And then, brushed in with great colorful strokes, the causes and authors
of the filthy stairway, the squalid joker, the ruined man, the endless
misery. With the four serving-men pouring out the chocolate of
Monseigneur, Neale began to burn, like a carefully constructed bon-fire,
alight at last. He had never in his life before, given a conscious
thought to social injustice or the poor, but every instinct for fair
play, sound and intact in his heart, flared up hotly and honestly, as he
gave himself naively to the spell of the magnetic exaggeration and
over-emphasis of the story. He had "had" the French Revolution in his
history at Hadley Prep. and could have recited correctly almost any date
in it. But, quite literally, he had no idea until after he had finished
the story, that this panting, bleeding, weeping, thundering book had any
connection with what he had learned at school.
"David Copperfield" was good, not so terribly exciting as the others,
but solid food on which Neale, aware for the first time of his hunger,
feasted with a deep content--all except the parts about Dora, who made
him tired. After this for a change, he reached up to a shelf above and
took down at random one of the set in green and gold binding. This was
"Kidnapped." Thereafter he read nothing but green and gold, till his
eyes gave out and his father drove him out to spend a whole afternoon on
his wheel.