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 manoeuvering
to break up group formation and string out the party two by two--Neale
and Miss Wentworth being the important two. But that might very well be
only because she wanted to talk football. She had seen all the home
games, knew the players' names, and for a girl, remembered an
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"
was _great_! And wasn't "Harry Richmond" a racy, crazy sort of tale? Did
she know "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray?" He grinned internally with an
amused cynicism, remembering for whom he had crammed up on this line.
But he felt a difference. When she spoke about Henry James, he admitted
frankly that he'd never heard of him. There was an honest quality about
Miss Wentworth that made it seem underhanded and unnecessary to bluff.
Silent they stopped where the road pitches steeply down to the river.
Speech seemed impertinent when the Hudson lay below, vast and mystic in
the early-falling December dusk.
Then the rest of the party came up, shrieking out, "Oh, didn't he
_r-a-m-ble_!" Neale saw Miss Wentworth home to the door of her apartment
house, 114th Street, just off the Drive. He noted the number of the
apartment. And found it again a good many times in the months to come.
There were other things which helped fill the void left by football. One
of these, quaintly enough, was 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 his tongue, what a sick loathing for
wholesome fare! But these gilded youth swilled down each his kegful of
Nietzsche and turned with equal zest to handfuls of gum-drops like "The
Cardinal's Snuff-box."
As for Neale, he joined in the discussions as briskly as any, but with
reservations. He never quoted or mentioned Emerson, although he thought
of him a great deal. He never discussed anything or any one he really
cared a snap about. In occasional moments of insight (which came to him
because he talked less babblingly than the others and listened more) he
suspected that all the other 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 passed without his seeing her, he found himself missing her
very much indeed.
Meanwhile the mid-years were long past, spring almost at hand, the
tongues of the Gang, after all the winter's practice, wagged more freely
than ever. The first Friday in April, Elliott came in, pulling from the
deep pocket of his rain-coat, a bag of limes and a bottle of gin, and
announcing something better than beer for that evening.
"It's up to you, kid," Neale ordered Robertson, the Soph., whom they
tolerated because his self-important airs amused them, "you're the
youngest. Beat it to the drug-store and bring back as many siphons as
you can carry."
After the rickeys were mixed, the cheese cut, the cracker-tin set out,
the tongues began to clack, and the resounding generalities to unroll
themselves before the fresh gaze of those young eyes, dazzled by the
brilliance of their explorations into the nature of things. Elliott was
saying wisely, "Laws? Everybody knows that laws are a conspiracy among
mediocrities to keep the strong from taking too much property." He let
this soak in and went on, "And moral systems are similar conspiracies to
prevent monopolies of less tangible things." Elliott delighted in
polysyllables, which he did not as yet always handle with entire
accuracy. Gregg, who did not like either polysyllables or Elliott,
commented on this, "What book did you get that out of? And what's the
moral?"
"The moral is, that morals are a sham. Man obeys the law only because he
is afraid of the herd-majority. But a free spirit doesn't mind the
criticism of mediocrities, he glories in it."
"So he feels all right, does he?" asked Gregg, "when he clears out to
Canada with the contents of the safe, or his best friend's wife. As a
matter of fact, he feels like a dirty dog."
"Oh, but that is just force of habit, race-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 Caesar's ghost! That wasn't so bad! He'd have to remember that
in the next theme he wrote.
Gregg was disposing of him sardonically, "Oh, yes, we know Brown's
soaking up the economic interpretation of history like a sponge. Have a
mind of your own, Brown. You don't have to believe all your Prof. tells
you. What do _you_ think, Crit?"
Neale sailed cautiously a little nearer his real thought than he usually
ventured, with the casual comment, "Well, there do seem to be some
things a man can't bring himself to do, no matter how much he wants to.
I wonder if maybe it isn't just inherited race-experience warning us off
from what's bad for man in the long run."
Brown came back for revenge, "Oh, yes, we know the rest, what's that but
the anthropology course? Have a mind of your own!"
"As a matter of fact, pleasure's the only motive," Elliott laid down the
final dictum. "Every time you do something you do it because you'd
rather. If you didn't, you'd do something else."
Some one brought out another profundity deep enough to match this,
affirming, "Oh, of course, everything's relative!"
And this was still so new an aphorism to them, that they let it alone,
the party breaking up over a last round of weak rickeys squeezed from
the bottle.
Neale waited till he saw Gregg deep in "Venice Preserved"; then he
opened a small volume, and shielding it from any random glances of his
room-mate, began reading, "The Last Ride Together."