Part 12 (1/2)
In a moment she cried again, ”He wants to know will you be goin'
to-morrow morning?”
”NO!” shouted Neale again, and going into the bathroom locked the door behind him.
When rather damp as to hair, he came out, silence and the smell of frying bacon told him that Katie had left the telephone to get his breakfast ready. Gee Whiz! He didn't want any breakfast, not with a taste like that in his mouth.
To act the part of a lone wolf of sixteen, one must read poetry. He had never read much poetry except some of Milton's Paradise Lost, for a specially loathed English Literature course at Hadley. But there were plenty of poetry books in the library at home. After some false starts, Neale began to know his way among them, concentrating on the slim volumes with pasteboard covers and paper backs.
”Beneath the bludgeonings of chance ...”
Yes, Neale too would hold up an unbowed, b.l.o.o.d.y head.
”... without fear, without wish, Insensate save of a dull crushed ache in my heart....”
... ”Just to reach the dreaming, And the sleep.”
Sitting alone in the darkened library how Neale soaked himself in this sort of thing, hunting up one page and down another till he found the voice that spoke to him.
”The irresponsive silence of the lands The irresponsive sounding of the sea Breathe but one language and one voice to me Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof!”
When Katie's carpet-sweeper and feather-duster and kind, gossiping voice sounded too close, he escaped out of doors, but not on his bicycle.
That, like his tennis-racket brought up painful memories. Every evening he walked to the Boulevard, and gazed over the Hackensack meadows till the sun set.
”No sweet thing left to savor; no sad thing left to fear....”
On the evening of the third day, a letter from West Adams arrived, announcing that Jenny was up and around, and the farm-house was ready for Neale. The evening after that, Neale was undressing in the slant-ceilinged big-beamed, white-washed bedroom, as familiar to him as his room at Union Hill--but uncontaminated with any of the new, troubling sensations. The air of the hills blew in at the window. Neale felt that it was a different air. He began to feel a difference in himself, but fell asleep in the midst of this perception. The next morning, scorning the mill, the barn-yard, the brook, he climbed to the highest back-pasture where the young white birches and quivering aspens, skirmishers of the unconquered forest, were leading the way in the reconquest of the fields man had taken from them. Here he lay down and prepared to nurse his sorrow....
”Pain gnaws at my heart like a rat that gnaws in a drain....”
But what was this? What was this? As unexpectedly as the impudent little mick had sprung out of the ground to carry off his s.h.i.+nny ball, so did a cheerful little imp of high spirits spring up in his heart, leaping and skipping to meet the glory of the great sun pouring down its mellow gold upon him through the flickering, tricksy aspen leaves. He lay back on the soft, deep moss, his hands clasped under his head. Huge, jovial-looking clouds floated, piled up in strong, rounded ma.s.ses against the summer sky. Miles off in the valley he could see the Hoosick River winding its way among the green, green hills. He was warmed, cool, alive ... and, oh, yes, there was no use in pretending otherwise, mighty well pleased to be alive.
The ten-year-old Neale when suddenly the glamor had faded from his lead soldiers, had never wasted time in pretending that it was there. He had risen at once, left the little heap of clumsily-made mannequins to lie foolish in their flaking paint, and sliding down the banisters, had gone out of doors in a great hurry. Well, he wasted no time now. He looked with an ironic eye upon the glamorless lost illusion, with the paint flaking off, and hurriedly turning his back on it all, he went, metaphorically, out of doors.
What had happened after all? He'd thought the world of Don Roberts, who had turned out a four-flusher. Well, he'd been stung. But why holler so about it? And whose fault was it? His own, for not knowing better. Don hadn't ever pretended to be any less of a four-flusher than he was. It was just that he, Neale, had been taken in by a cheap, flashy guy when any kid ought to have had enough sense to see through him, and those would-be smart college-man airs and manners.
But anyhow if that was a false scent, it had put him on a true one.
There was a lot inside those slim, pasteboard covered books beside rats gnawing in drains, and twilight and all-goneness. You bet your life there was. Neale had never dreamed what was inside them, poems that stood up to a glorious day like this, and called it brother, poems of foot-free wanderings and high-hearted scorn of prosperity and conventions.
”I tell you that we, While you are smirking And lying and s.h.i.+rking Life's duty of duties, Honest sincerity, We are in verity Free!
Free as the word Of the sun to the sea; Free!”
Neale's voice quavered with another sort of emotion ... that was the doctrine! ”Off with the fetters!” He pictured himself in a blue flannel s.h.i.+rt and flowing neckerchief, alone, or with some perfect comrade, knowing reality, sneering at railway trains and cities.
It was a gorgeous dream ... but of course the first Tuesday in September found him back at a desk at Hadley with all the grinding and polis.h.i.+ng wheels of that well-appointed educational mill at work on the corners of his individuality, bent on turning out the fifty young Seniors smooth and identical, the perfection of the Hadley type. And since this was the last year, the faculty speeded up the hunt and all the pack put their noses to the ground and ran their legs off in pursuit of mathematics and science. The pace was cruelly hot, and it was specially hard for Neale because he had yielded to the captain's entreaties and had come out for the football team. He made left tackle with little compet.i.tion and through October and November practised almost without coaching (Hadley permitted athletics but was too busy to encourage anything so childish), and played and was beaten with painful regularity.
Neale found himself dropping far below the rating he had maintained in the lower cla.s.ses. He began to pant and strain as he had the first year.
It was a gruelling race; but temperamentally he liked races and his wind got better as the months went by. He cut out all superfluities--no dancing--no reading for amus.e.m.e.nt except on Sunday mornings, and then only short poems about Vagabondia and the Open Road. Work, work, work through every waking hour. By April he had risen to sixth in his cla.s.s, and felt grimly sure of holding his stride to the end.