Part 1 (1/2)
Rough-Hewn.
by Dorothy Canfield.
CHAPTER I
In the spring of 1893 Strindberg had just published ”A Fool's Confession,” D'Annunzio was employing all the multicolored glory of his style to prove ”The Triumph of Death”; Hardy was somberly mixing on his palette the twilight grays and blacks and mourning purples of ”Jude the Obscure”; Nordau, gnas.h.i.+ng his teeth, was bellowing ”Decadent” at his contemporaries who smirked a complacent acceptance of the epithet ...
and, all unconscious of the futility and sordidness of the world, Neale Crittenden swaggered along Central Avenue, brandis.h.i.+ng his s.h.i.+nny stick.
It was a new yellow s.h.i.+nny stick, broad and heavy and almost as long as the boy who carried it. Ever since he had seen it in the window of Schwartz's Bazar, his soul had yearned for it. For days he had h.o.a.rded his pennies, foregoing ice-cream sodas, shutting his ears to the seductive ding-dong of the waffle-man's cart, and this very afternoon the immense sum of twenty-five cents had been completed and now he owned a genuine boughten stick, varnished and s.h.i.+ny. What couldn't he do with such a club! He beat it on the sidewalk till the flag-stones rang; he swung it around his head. What stupendous long-distance goals he was going to make! How he would dribble the ball through the enemy!
Spring had turned the vacant lots into sticky red mud, but Central Avenue was hard if somewhat undulating macadam. It had stone curbs too, that bounced the ball back as if specially designed for side-boundaries by a philanthropic Board of Supervisors. Somewhere along it he was sure to find a game in progress. Yes, there they were in front of Number Two School. Neale broke into a run and coming up breathless plunged into the scrimmage.
s.h.i.+nny as played on Union Hill in the nineties had none of the refinements of its dignified cousin, field-hockey. Roughly divided into two sides, an indeterminate number of players tried with their sticks to knock a hard rubber ball to opposite ends of a block. Team work was elementary: the slowest runner on each side lay back to ”tend gool”; the rest, following the fortunes of the ball, pelted to and fro in a seething melee of scuffling feet and clas.h.i.+ng sticks. After each goal the ball was brought to the middle of the block, the two captains took their stand with sticks on either side of it. ”One,” they rapped their sticks on the pavement; ”two,” they rapped them together; ”one, two, one, two.” Then pandemonium broke out shrilly, sticks rapping against each other or against opposing s.h.i.+ns, yells of ”s.h.i.+nny on your own side,” a welter of little boys battling around the ball as it shot up and down, sometimes advancing rapidly, sometimes stationary among a vortex of locked sticks until finally a lucky knock drove it past one or the other side street.
Once as they were walking back after a goal, Fatty Schmidt noticed Neale's new weapon. ”Oh, you gotta new s.h.i.+nny. Where'd you get it?
Schwartz? Huh, them kind ain't no good; they split.” Neale was silent as an Iroquois, but he had already begun to doubt. The heavy new stick didn't seem to be turning out what he had expected. It tripped him up occasionally and he never got it on the ball as quickly as he had his old home-made locust-shoot with the k.n.o.b of root at the end. But he kept his doubts to himself, let out another notch of speed, and tried harder.
It began to go better. He stopped a dangerous rush by hooking Franz Uhler's stick just as he was about to shoot for goal. Another time unaided he took the ball away from Don Roberts, lost it, but Marty Ryan retrieved it, and Neale and Marty raced down almost on top of the opposing goal keeper. Marty hit the ball a terrific crack. ”Gool!” they cried exultingly, then on another note, indignantly, ”Hi there, drop that!” For as the ball bounded along the street, a ragged little boy who had sprung up from nowhere grabbed it and made off. The pack gave chase.
The little gamin had a good start but the bigger boys ahead of Neale were gaining on him. He turned off eastward. As Neale tore along he saw Marty and Franz catch up with the little kid, and then ... what was this? Where did all those other boys come from?
With a whoop of joyous exultation he recognized the familiar ambush, the welcome invitation to battle. ”Come on, fellers!” he yelled back to his own crowd. ”Hoboken micks!” And with the rest of the Union Hill crowd charged through a fire of stones at the invaders.
Then it was that the new s.h.i.+nny stick vindicated itself. Swinging it like a crusader's two-handed sword, Neale hacked and hewed. He landed on the funny-bone of a boy struggling with Marty for the ball. He landed on another mick's ribs. He heaved the stick up and was going to smash a hostile head when the enemy broke and ran. Triumphant, the Union Hill boys chased them to the edge of the hill, and sent a volley of stones after them as they scrambled down the steep path among the rocks, but pursued them no further. Below was the enemy's country. The Union Hill crowd never ventured down the rocks to the level cinder-filled flats beside the railroad tracks. That was Hoboken and a foreign land.
It was supper time now. The victors said ”So long” to each other and dispersed. Neale, somewhat lame but elated, went up the wooden steps of the porch. He stood his stick up in the umbrella-stand, went to the bathroom, washed his hands, brushed his hair, at least the top layer of it, and went quietly down to the dining-room. There he ate his b.u.t.tered toast and creamed potatoes and drank his cocoa silently, while his father and mother talked. He paid no attention to what they said. He was living over again the fight of the afternoon, and forecasting fresh conquests for the future. His mother pa.s.sed him a sauce-dish of preserved cherries and a piece of cake. After he had eaten this, he got up silently and went back to his room. His mother looked after him tenderly. ”Neale is a _good_ boy,” she said. Although he was no longer there, she still saw his honest round face, clear eyes, fresh color. She smiled to herself lovingly.
Her husband nodded, ”Yes, he's a good boy.” After a thoughtful pause, he added, ”Seems an awfully _quiet_ kid, though. I mean he keeps things to himself. You haven't any idea whether he's having a real boy's fun or not. He makes so little noise about it.”
As he pa.s.sed through the hall Neale lingered a moment to handle the s.h.i.+nny stick again. He looked at it carefully to see if perhaps there was not a little blood on it.
CHAPTER II
Union Hill had been created by two very different cla.s.ses of home-makers, a fact which was obvious from its aspect. Its undistinguished frame buildings for the most part sheltered families who, having to live somewhere, had settled there where inadequate communication with the rest of the world kept rents down. Side by side with this drab majority, but mingling with it little, a few well-to-do business men had built comfortable, roomy homes in an uninspired compromise between their business connections in the city and their preference for open-air life for their families. This narrow ridge of trap rock continuing the Palisades southward between the partly reclaimed back lots of Hoboken and the immense, irreclaimable salt marshes of the Hackensack Valley, had a certain picturesqueness, had seemed to promise freedom from malaria (supposed at that time to result from the breathing the ”miasma” hanging low about swamp land), and certainly offered fresher air than a flat on a New York street or a town beside a New Jersey marsh. It was a one-sided sort of compromise in which the families came out rather badly. Whatever natural beauty might be inherent in the site was largely nullified by the tawdry imaginings of small architects and building contractors, and despite popular medical theories, the malaria was about the same on the hill as on the flats. But though the advance of the suburban idea was already developing more attractive sites at no very great distance, few families moved away. With the ma.s.sive immobility characteristic of humanity, the scattered well-to-do families of Union Hill stuck it out, grim and disillusioned, taking the consequences of their error of judgment rather than lose the sensation of stability, which means home.
Little Neale was quite unconscious of all this. To his ten-year-old thoughts ”the Hill” was home, and where could you live except at home?
It never occurred to him that there might be other or better homes--the Hill was where he lived. He accepted it as uncritically as he accepted life, school, his parents. Being, for that region where every one took quinine as a matter of course, rather a healthy boy, he accepted the initial facts of nature without criticism or much interest, working off the surplus of his young energy in baseball, s.h.i.+nny and guerilla skirmishes with the boys from other localities.
His unconcern with the world around him, except for the details of boy-life, was complete. Home was warm and secure; he did not inquire whether other homes might be less warm or more elegant. Food was good to eat, though meals with adult conversation between his father and mother were tedious and occupied far too much time that might have been spent in play. His father was kind and remote. Neale thought very little about his father. He went away in the morning after breakfast and came in just before supper. He was in the lumber business, and when he went away, it was to the ”office.” Neale never went to the office; but once in a while, on Sat.u.r.days, Father took him walking down the long flight of wooden steps, down to the enemy's country where, thanks to the size of his father's protecting figure, never a Hoboken mick dared to throw a mudball; across the railroad track and a long, long way on paved sidewalks till they came out on a wide, noisy, muddy street filled with trucks drawn by horses with gleaming round haunches. And on the other side of the street there wasn't any more land, but long sheds that stuck out into the oily, green Hudson River. These sheds had huge doors through which the big, dappled horses kept hauling trucks, in and out.
Some of the wharves had s.h.i.+ps tied beside them. Occasionally these were sailing s.h.i.+ps with bow-sprits slanting forward over the street, but more often steamers, black except for a band of red down near the water. As Neale walked along, although he never ventured to ask his busy father to stop and let him stare his fill, he could catch glimpses through the doorways of what went on inside the sheds. There were steep gang-ways, sloping from the plank floor of the pier to the s.h.i.+ps, and up and down these, big men in blue jumpers wheeled hand-carts, always moving at a dog-trot. Through other openings, bundles of boxes tied together with rope slid down sloping boards, and other men with sharp hooks were always loading them on trucks or unloading them from trucks; or huge bales descended from the air, dangling at the end of a clinking chain.
This bustle and noise, the strange tarry smells and the clatter of steam winches exhilarated Neale, excited him, made something quiver and glow within him. He longed to go in and be part of it.
But Father never went inside, and it never occurred to Neale to explain how he felt, and to ask Father please to take him in. Silent as an Iroquois, he walked beside his father, who often glanced down, baffled, at the healthy, personable little boy beside him, looking so exactly like any other well-dressed, middle-cla.s.s little boy.
And yet, often before he fell asleep at night, Neale heard again the clanking clatter of the great unloading cranes, smelled again the intoxicating tarry salty ocean smells and felt again something quiver and glow within him.