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 well pleased 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. I _like_ the 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 matinees. 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 strolled up 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. _He_ was 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
must _love_ Martha. You must _love_ her--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 he did 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 to winning 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 is _wanting to win_ more 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 you
_move_ things. 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 and grasped 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!"