Neale was in despair at his dumb helplessness before the inert
resistance of social relations. A man with any adroitness would not
submit passively 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, snatched 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, passed 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 passion 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,
nobly 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 class, 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 ass. 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 nobody 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
circumstances, 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 godless abstract
mathematical ideas, nor fiddling with compasses. 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 classes that anybody wants to belong to.
I'd jump with all my weight on that idiotic notion that one class is
better than another, as if any class 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. Nobody--nobody 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 naively 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 succumbed 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."
He was aware that Marise looked at him surprised by his fire. He was
surprised by it, himself. He guessed perhaps he was ready to go back to
work; perhaps he'd had enough of sauntering around. "That's what you
learn in college athletics--how to give yourself to some aim and not to
keep anything back for yourself. That's great, you know," he told her
imperatively. "It is! It takes the personal littleness out of a boy to
give his all to reach a goal. It makes a man out of a boy. But, oh,
Lord!" he burst out with a great swing of his arm, "When that _has_ made
you a man, why don't they let you know that you have more goals to
choose from than just different ways of making your living, most of them
just buying and selling different sorts of things? You're trained in
athletics to put your very heart and all of it, into what you do. That's
_fine_! But why don't they train you just as hard to put your whole
intelligence into being sure that what you're putting your heart into is
worth doing, and is what you're meant to do? They don't train you for
that, they won't even let you have a quiet minute to think of it
yourself. They keep you up in the air all the time, whooping it up about
your duty to 'win out!' to win the game! Sure, any man that's got blood
in his veins wants to win the game. But _which_ game? It's all very
well, turning a boy into a grown-up human being, but you've got to...."
"I wonder," broke in Marise thoughtfully, "I wonder what might turn a
girl into a grown-up human being?" And then before Neale could open his
lips she blushed, shook her head as if at a slip on her part, and said
quickly, "Oh, there's my car, now."
She ran out to take it. Neale stood on the corner, cursing the whole
race of tram-cars.
When it passed him, close to him in the narrow street, he caught sight
of her face. It was bent downward as if to hide it from the other people
in the car. He saw that there was a very faint smile on her lips as if
she could not keep it back, a little sweet, secret, happy smile. Her
whole face was softly shimmering with it.
Good heavens! why hadn't he gone on with her! He leaped forward and
sprinted after the rapidly disappearing car.
And stopped short in the midst of the traffic. You can't make love in a
_street-car_! What an imbecile he was!
* * * * *
Often, after she had left him, he pelted off into the Campagna, walking
for miles "like a madman," said the leisurely Italian countrymen, slowly
stepping about their work. Neale felt himself rather mad, as though the
steady foundations of his life had been rent and shattered, as by a
blast of dynamite.
Dynamite? What was it somebody had said to him once, about dynamite? He
tried to think, but could not remember. Perhaps it was something he had
read in a book.
Once, after such a headlong tramp, he came in and wrote a long letter to
his mother, telling her all about Marise; a strange thing for him to do,
he thought, as he dropped the letter in the box. But everything he did
now seemed strange to him. Strange and yet irresistibly natural.