Rough-Hewn/Chapter 41
CHAPTER XLI
1909
Neale sat idly in front of the black-and-white façade of the Orvieto Cathedral, trying idly to make up his mind on a matter of no importance whatever and not getting on very fast. In his pocket was his ticket back to New York and his ship sailed in a week. But, of course, it did not sail from Orvieto. Should he go south to Naples where most of the passengers took ship? If he did, he could stop over four or five days in Rome. It might be interesting to revisit Rome. Or should he go north to Genoa, where the ship was due to stop the day after leaving Naples? He had not seen Genoa at all and he might be missing something worth while. It ought to stir any American's imagination to hang about the docks where a certain visionary, middle-aged sailor-man had gone up and down trying to raise the funds for a mad attempt to prove the world absolutely different from what everybody else had thought.
He sat there looking up at the Cathedral, deciding now for Genoa and now for Rome, and in between times forgetting all about the matter, so evenly balanced were the advantages, so unimportant was the whole business. When he finally stood up to go back to his inn, he remembered that he had still not settled which train to take.
He took a coin out of his pocket. He'd toss up. Heads for Naples, tails for Genoa.
The coin flashed up in the sun, and fell on the stone steps. In the intense, somnolent silence of the little provincial square its tinkle sounded loud and clear. All the loungers turned their heads quickly at the sound. Neale stooped over it.
Heads, Naples. All right. He'd inquire when he got to Rome if they didn't perhaps run a boat-train down, just before sailing time.
As he was unstrapping his suit-case that night in his room in the Roman pension, it did not greatly surprise him to have Livingstone knock at the door and step in. Livingstone had been at that pension before, during Neale's first leisurely sauntering visit to Rome; Livingstone had turned up at the pension in Florence before Neale left; he had run across Livingstone in a Paris café sitting alone at a table, looking as much like an attaché of the Embassy as he could manage. Livingstone was no tourist but one of the professional inhabitants of Europe; an American, that much he admitted, though neither hints nor direct British questioning had ever extracted from him his birthplace in the States. He was the sort of man who had learned how to cross his long thin legs elegantly so that the toe of one slim foot pointed downward. As at the same time he was wont to fold his arms over his hollowed chest, stoop his shoulders and droop his neck, and as he wore gray gaiters and carried a walking stick he had good reason to flatter himself that he had altogether the distinguished, pinched, sickly, aristocratic look of the traditional promising young-old diplomat. Neale was not surprised to see him in Rome. He would not have been surprised to see him anywhere—except perhaps at work. It was Neale's guess that three or four years from now he would have screwed up his courage to wearing a monocle.
"Hello, Crittenden," he said, "it is you, is it? When Michele told me you had turned up again, I was sure he must be mistaken. I understood you were on the high seas, on your way back to the land of the free and the home of bad cooking."
Without being invited, he sank down in a chair to watch Neale unpack and wash, asking, "You were going back to New York, weren't you?"
"Yes, I still am. I'm only in Rome for five days. But I won't be long in the States. I'll be on my way to China and the East."
Livingstone was mildly interested. "You don't say so! Well, you might really get there by starting off to New York. But I admit I don't see the connection. Why don't you take a P. and O. for India?"
"A little business to attend to first. A small inheritance to cash in on."
"Inheritance!" cried Livingstone, sitting up straight. "The very word makes my mouth water. Why doesn't that ever happen to me?" The expression on his face was like that of the loungers in front of the Cathedral when they heard the coin drop.
Through the lather of soap-suds on his face, Neale laughed, "A very two-for-a-cent inheritance. An old great-uncle I hardly knew—never saw him but once or twice, years ago when I was a kid, left me his home and his little old-fashioned saw-mill and wood-working plant, back up at the end of nowhere in Vermont."
"No money!" sympathized Livingstone. "But then of course you can sell all that for something. But no real money at all?"
"There's what he had in the savings bank—about four thousand dollars, the executor writes. Just enough to do nothing at all with."
Livingstone made a mental calculation. "I wouldn't wonder if you might get fifty dollars a month out of the whole thing. And that's enough. Ma foi! That's enough if you cut corners a little. I only have eighty-five. And then you can always give an occasional English lesson to piece out. You won't need ever to do a lick of work or ever live in the States. Mes felicitations! That's the life! You'll be knowing Europe as well as I do, next. How soon will you be back?"
"I'm not coming back," said Neale, buttoning on a clean collar. "When I've cashed in and got what I can out of my uncle's business I'm going overland to San Francisco, and from there to the East."
Livingstone considered this, "Well, they do say that Chinese cooking is super-excellent once you get used to it."
"I'm not going for the cooking."
"No? What are you going for?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Neale rather sharply. "Because I feel like it. Why shouldn't I?"
Livingstone perceived that he had run on a hidden reef and backed off. "Don't you want to come on into the salon and let me present you to the crowd?" he asked standing up and moving towards the door. "Since you were here some awfully nice people have come over from the Pension Alfierenti. Poor old Alfierenti died suddenly and his place is shut up for the present."
"No, thanks," said Neale. "I'm going up on the roof for a smoke before I go to bed."
"Oh, yes," Livingstone remembered, "you always did prefer the terrazza and your solitary pipe to the society of the ladies. Well, there is a nice view from up there; but between a view and a pretty girl who could hesitate?"
"Who, indeed?" said Neale dryly, going off up the stairs.
The plaster floor and low walls of the terrazza gleamed white and empty. As Neale had hoped there was not a soul there. Below him spread the roofs and domes and streets of Rome, richly-colored even in the white light of the moon, hanging like a great lamp over the city.
He took the corner that had been his favorite before, in the black shadow cast by a thick-leaved grape-vine, and perching on the edge of the wall, looked down meditatively on the city as he filled his pipe.
Well, so here he was in Rome—just as if something had pushed him here, where least of all places he had expected to find himself again. Odd that his year of travel should end with a second visit to the first European city that had stirred his imagination, that had given him a hint of what it was he had come to Europe to see. It was during his first stay in Rome that he stopped being a dumb, Baedecker-driven tourist, that he first got the idea of what Europe might teach him better than America could. It was here that he first thought of trying to get from Europe some idea of what men during a good many centuries had found worth doing.
For, unlike America, Europe was crammed full of objects little and big that men alone or in groups had devoted their lives to create. America had tried a number of experiments—once; but Europe had tried them all, so many times, at such different periods, in so many, so various centers of civilization! Such a crowded graveyard of human endeavor might perhaps suggest a satisfactory motive (if one existed) for going on living.
For a long time he had made no headway, had discovered no general underlying motive—indeed much of what he saw filled him with utter astonishment at the things men had cared for, even to the point of giving their lives to win them.
He still remembered that morning during his first stay, when he had stared with stupefaction at the rows of portrait-busts in the Capitoline Museum. So many men, most of them apparently intelligent had schemed and plotted through long years—and what for? To be the conventional head of an unworkable Empire, top-heavy with administration; to endure the hideous tedium of ceremony and pompous ritual which the office had imposed; to be forced to work through sycophants and grafters, to be exiled from healthy human life into a region where in the nature of things you could never hope to see one spontaneous sincere expression on any human face; where your life, your work, your reputation hung on the whim of the Prætorian Guard or the disgruntled legions on a distant frontier—why, if you lay awake nights you couldn't think of a more thankless job than being a Roman Emperor! And yet for centuries men had sacrificed their friends, their honor, their very lives to hold the office. Those old Romans, for all they looked so like ordinary every-day men you meet in the street, must have had a queer notion of what was worth-while in life!
Then he had left Rome and gone away without plan, anywhere the train would take him; and wherever he had gone he had walked about, silently attentive to what men had done with their lives. That was what he had been looking for as he walked around on battle-fields, or gazed up at Cathedrals or looked seriously at the statues thick-sown as the sands of the sea all over European cities; that was what he had been looking for as he sat alone in a pension bed-room reading a history or a biography that helped him fit together into some sort of a system all the diverse objects he had been considering.
Wherever he went, wherever he looked, he was like an archæologist raking over an inexhaustible kitchen-midden—he was surrounded by relics of innumerable generations crowding the long centuries during which men had lived and died on this old continent. Perhaps if he looked hard enough at what they had left behind them he might find out what men really wanted to do with their lives—perhaps he might get some hint of what he could do with his own life.
That was a subject he had never stopped to consider in America. Nothing in American life had suggested that you might have any choice except between different ways of earning your living. And yet he reflected it was rather an important question—at least as important as which baseball league you were going to root for.
It was so absolutely new to Neale to consider that question—any abstract question indeed—that for some months after he had shut down his desk in the office of the Gates Lumber Company, he felt his head whirl at the notion of trying to find an answer—an answer to any question, let alone so compendious a one as what it was that men wanted to do with their lives. The cogs and wheels of disinterested impersonal thought which had started to work in college, were stiff with disuse and refused to turn. All he had been able to do was to wonder, and stare, and read memoirs and histories, feeling like a strange cat in a very much cluttered garret. Was there anything in Europe that would really mean anything to him, to an American who was not esthetic, who refused to pretend, who frankly thought the average picture-gallery a dreary desert?
And then, very slowly, he had begun to make a guess that there was an arrangement in what looked so wildly hit-or-miss; as on the day when happening upon the little triumphal arch in Rheims he had at last got under his skin the idea of the Roman Empire, far-reaching, permeating with its law, customs, speech, the tiniest crevices of the provinces. To think of Romans living and governing and doing business in a little, one-horse, Gallic town like this! Maybe it hadn't been such a crazy aspiration to want to be Emperor—sort of like being President of the Standard Oil Company to-day. You knew in your heart that the job was too big for any man, but it was warming to your imagination even to pretend you were running a machine that covered the whole known world. And probably all of them had an illogical hunch that they would get away with it—and, by Jupiter, a lot of them had, and died peacefully in their beds. After all, so far as ordinary horse-sense went, wasn't devoting yourself to gathering together a great deal more money than you could possibly use, at least as odd a way of spending a human life as trying to hang on to the tail of the Roman Empire? And yet there were countless thousands of men all over Europe as well as in the United States who were hoping with all their souls that Fate would allow them to do just that. And a few did get away with it—just as some of the Emperors had. But it killed a great many—the Manager of the Gates Lumber Company, for instance. Every man knew that it might be the death of him, just as in the first century an Emperor knew he'd be lucky if he were killed quick. But nobody hung back for that in either century. Nobody really believed it would get him! Why, a year ago, Neale Crittenden himself had been tearing along towards it as hard as he could pelt.
Well, good God, you had to do something with yourself. You couldn't float along, your boneless tentacles rising and falling with the tides, like that jelly-fish of a Livingstone!
What was there for a man to do with himself? At all times evidently, some men had been satisfied in producing art of some kind or another—that wasn't any good for Neale. He hadn't an ounce of artistic feeling, wasn't even a craftsman, let alone an artist. And many men in every epoch had cared about fighting. That was more his sort—if you were sure you could find something worth fighting for! And many men had wanted to run things—not only for the feeling of personal power, but to straighten out the hopeless muddles humanity was always getting itself into.… He had lost the frail thread of his thought in a maze of speculations, comparisons, half-formulated ambitions.
But he had always come back to his problem. He did not hurry. He had left the Gates Lumber Company so that he would not need to hurry! Sometimes he had caught a glimpse of the thread, lost it, felt it between his closing fingers, let it slip again. And whenever it escaped him and he found himself staring again at a jumbled confusion with no clue to its pattern, he had lit his pipe and smoked reflectively, his eyes fixed on whatever detail of European life chanced to be before them, a stained-glass window at Chartres, a crowded noisy café in Milan, the hydraulic cranes unloading cargoes from the Congo under the tower of Antwerp Cathedral. What men had left behind them looked from the outside like a heaped-up pile of heterogeneous junk, some good and some bad, and no way of guessing how any of it came to be. But Neale hung fast to that guess of his that there might be some meaning for him in it all, if he could only be patient enough and clear-headed enough to pick it out. He had never been an impatient temperament but he certainly had not of late years been especially clear-headed. During this reflective pause in his life, he felt his mind re-acquiring its capacity to do some abstract thinking. Released temporarily as he was from the necessity for immediate activity his head slowly cleared itself from the cloudy fumes given off by energy automatically rushing into action, blindly, planlessly. He began to perceive that he had been carried off his feet by the conviction of his time that activity, any activity at all, is all-sufficient, provided it is taken with speed, energy and decision. Neale had acquired speed, energy and decision in activity, but he'd be damned, he told himself once in a while, if he'd run his legs off any longer without seeing which way he was going.
As he sat now alone on the roof, overlooking the many, many monuments left as token of what men had wanted to do with their lives, he brought up and considered the few conclusions—the guesses at truth—the year had brought him. They didn't seem to amount to much, they were ridiculously slight as the sum-total of a year's earnest thought, but all this sort of thinking was so new and hard for him! At least such as they were, they were his own thoughts—he hadn't taken them on anybody else's say-so; and simple and inadequate as they seemed from the outside, they might be the first step towards understanding the truth—the truth for him.
To begin with, he hadn't in the least found out what men wanted or why they wanted it—all his classification had been like pressing wild-flowers and sticking them in a herbarium with the right Latin name tacked on—it cleared up some of the clutter, perhaps, but it left you mighty far from understanding life. All that he had learned from his classification was that men wanted a lot of contradictory things, and what one man would sell his soul to get, would break another one's heart to have. Well, wasn't that perhaps a clue? Wasn't it just that innate diversity which was at the root of a great many tragedies? Wasn't the trouble that men wouldn't let themselves act as individuals? Men were so hopelessly tied to the fashion of their century. Yes, men were fashion-ridden: they had no call to laugh at women's continuous-performance-vaudeville of big-sleeves, tight-lacing, hobble-skirts! Women cared about clothes, and every woman except a few dowds was out to look like every other woman, and just a little more so; men cared about the business of the world, and every man except a few freaks felt that he ought to outdo every one else at whatever all the men of his time were doing. And nobody wanted to be a freak. But the truth was that there were all sorts of men in the world all the time—who ought normally to do all sorts of different things. But did they? No, they didn't. No matter what you really wanted to do with your life, no matter what your particular life was best suited for, human tradition was always inflexibly insisting that you try to cut your life by the pattern considered fashionable at the time and in the place where you lived—try to be an Emperor in Imperial Rome, try to be a millionaire in twentieth century New York. People didn't seem able to consider even for a moment that there must be lots of men so made that they would prefer anything to the process of becoming an Emperor or a millionaire.
There rose before Neale now the restless, unhappy face of the young Frenchman he had come to know in Bourges, who one evening as they sat in the park near the Cathedral, poured out to him in a bitter flood his horrified sense of the closing in on him of bonds which he hated, which were being forged around him by the irresistible forces of social tradition and family affection. Fighting helplessly against overwhelming odds, he was slowly being shoved into becoming a petit fonctionnaire in Bourges for all his life.… "Here, in this hole!" he had cried looking around him with wild young eyes, like a rat in a trap. But there was his dear Maman's certainty that this feeling was mere youth, that he would soon settle down, and be contented in his office, and always, always be quite close to her; there was the relief of the family far and wide, now that he was safe, safe for life in a good little position with a nice little pension at the end! "Safe! How loathe being safe!" he had cried. "Why wasn't I born three hundred years ago, so that I could have gone out with Champlain! Or later with Du Chaillou?"
In spite of all his sympathy for the poor kid, Neale hadn't seen then nor could he see now why anybody need wait for a Champlain or a Du Chaillou to come along. It looked as though the boy's grievance was because what he was meant to do didn't happen to be in fashion when he lived. Neale couldn't see what prevented him from getting right up on his feet from off the bench where he agonized, and marching off to the nearest port to work his way to Senegal, if that was where he thought he'd have the chance to use that latent stifled something in him which could never live in Bourges. Of course, it would give his mother a jolt, but if she was any kind of a mother, she'd want her son to have what was best for him. That was sure, if anything was. And as for the cousins and the aunts and uncles butting in … to hell with them! What business was it of theirs?
Neale had a suspicion that very likely the boy would be horrified by Senegal, not get on a bit better than in Bourges, and be mighty glad to come back to the safeness and comfort that irked him so now. If he had had pep enough to get on in Senegal, or anywhere else on his own, wouldn't he have had pep enough to cut loose from his leading-strings before this? Now was the time to do it, now or never, before he had acquired any personal responsibilities of his own choosing, that would really be an insuperable barrier to change. Neale felt nothing but the profoundest sympathy for people who found out they were in the wrong pigeon-hole after they had tied themselves up so they couldn't move. That was so awful a fate, that it did seem as though all grown-ups ought to league together in an impassioned effort to give youth as free a choice as possible. Instead of which—look what they'd done to this poor kid! Neale knew by the look of him how nervously sensitive he was. They'd trained nervous sensibility into him, instead of energy and combativeness. And then they brought to bear on him the thousand-pound-to-the-square-inch pressure of public opinion which provincial and family life in a small French town exerts on youth, to prevent its ever guessing at its essential freedom to seek out its own.
What sheep men were! … making long detours through open country to get around fences that had long since blown down.
In all the centuries of Roman Emperors had there been a single one of the misfits with good enough sense to see that he had got into the wrong job, and energy enough to pull out? Galba had declined the nomination a term or two, but in the end he'd accepted office—and got his throat cut inside a year. Even a high-class mind like Marcus Aurelius could think of no solution except, after office-hours, to write a book sympathizing with himself, like a fine-haired Corporation President solacing his soul by collecting cloisonné.
Of course the fashion of the country and the century was sure to fit some men. Old man Gates now: he had wanted to succeed in business, to be a millionaire, as much as Vespasian had wanted to be Emperor, and he had furiously enjoyed every hard-hitting moment of the life-and-death struggle which had carried him up from owning a small saw-mill in Connecticut to being the head of a rich and powerful company. He had died at eighty, as lusty and hard and sound an old condottiere as any other professional fighter who bestrode a bronze horse in an Italian piazza. But how about his son? What perhaps would the "young Mr. Gates" have liked to do with his life, if it had ever been suggested to Mm that he might do something else than go on making money by selling lumber for as much as possible above the price that had been paid for it?
What life-long mal-adjustment had resulted in that dreadful, twisted, weeping, elderly face which even now Neale could not forget?
Neale puffed a while silently, staring over at the Janiculum Hill, black with its dense trees beyond the moonlit city, until the distressing memory became less acute and he could go back calmly to his own problem. He was that much to the good anyhow. At least he'd found out what he did not want to do. He did not want to give his life to doing something simply because a lot of other men thought it was the only thing to do. At least he was sure that failure was certain along that road. And he was convinced that happiness—satisfaction, at least—was possible in human life. All his stored-up and accumulated health and strength and vitality made him sure that a sort of happiness was probable, even inevitable, if you had the good sense to get hold of the job you were intended to do. But what did he, Neale Crittenden, want to do? What was he intended for? He had asked himself that question a great many times and never had answered it yet. He looked again over at the Janiculum from which the beacon was flashing its message of red—white—green across Imperial Rome, across the Vatican. Over there stood the Garibaldi monument. There was a man who had known what to do with his life. He had created something. Oh, he was a product of his time, no doubt, and the busy little frock-coated Cavour had played a necessary part, but admitting all that, where would the Risorgimento have been without Garibaldi? In the fire and passion of his great heart, he had forged the sword of Italian Unity. Out of chaos he had created something with an ordered unity of its own. That was real creation. Was there any of it left to do—some little corner that an ordinary man could tackle?
Alone on the roof he pondered this, his hands clasped across his knees, his head tipped back, looking across the ancient city at the man who had kindled a fire in those old ashes.
And then, little by little, as the silence and beauty of the night spread out before his eyes in widening silver circles, he ceased pondering, ceased thinking even vaguely of himself, his life, other men's lives. He sat dreaming, his eyes as wide as a child's, his lips relaxed, his face absent and unconscious of self as that of one who listens absorbed and entranced to distant music. Moonlight—Italy!
Aware that he was no longer alone, he turned his head slowly and saw that a tall girl in white had come silently up the winding iron steps and was standing at the top looking at the sky. The moon shone full and soft upon her, from head to foot. He saw her as clearly as though it had been noon, and yet she looked as unearthly and mysterious as the night. She evidently thought herself alone. She stood perfectly motionless, her dark eyes fixed on a palely distant star. Neale thought he had never in his life seen anything more touching than the profound sadness of her young face.
He had not moved, had scarcely had time to draw breath; but she had felt him there. She turned her face toward where he sat, her head a little bent, searching the darkness of the corner from under long, finely-drawn brows. She saw him, looked straight into his eyes, her own shining deep and soft upon him. He was still too lost in his own enchanted dream to be able to move, to look away. He gazed at her as though she were part of the night, of the beauty.
Without a sound she turned back and sank like a dream from his sight.