Neale

“ You haven't looked a bit well lately, anyhow. And I'm not surprised. The way those children take it out of you!"
"Damn that woman!" thought Neale. That sterile life of hers had starved out from her even the capacity to understand a really human existence when she saw it. Not that she had ever seemed to have any considerable seed-bed of human possibilities to be starved, even in youth, if he could judge from his memory, now very dim, of how she had seemed to him in Rome, when he had first met her, along with Marise. ”

“ Intensely curious, Neale turned the pages over. What else had struck the fancy of that young man, so many years ago, before he dreamed that he was to be a business man and a father. It was like looking straight into some one's heart; the first time Neale had ever dreamed of such a thing.
There they were, those glimpses of what had fed his father's spirit. Neale read them because they were marked. Some he understood, others he only felt.
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." ”

“ But this interlude was the only time when, even for a moment, Neale was delivered from his desolation at seeing her so far from his world, from any world he could possibly hope ever to make his own. That brilliant musician—how wonderful to be able to play the piano like that!—that beautiful young woman of the world, the center of this brilliant cosmopolitan crowd, friend of titled Roman ladies, and ministers—was it she whom he had followed in the street like any pushing, thick-skinned bumpkin, to whom he had poured out what he had never before breathed to any living being? ”

“ There was nothing surprising about that, thought Neale, applauding with all his might. Heavens, how beautifully she made music, how beautifully, how intelligently, with such a clear, sure certainty of her own powers! Of course everybody there admired her, paid court to her, made her the center of one group after another—always except the group where he stood! He felt heart-sick to be so cut off from her. As a matter of fact he was not in the least literally cut off from her. She kept relentlessly introducing him to one person after another whom he did not wish to meet. ”

“ She hoped to have a letter from Neale today. She hoped so, suddenly, again, with such intensity, such longing, such passion that she said to herself, "What nonsense that was, that came into my head, out on the road in the dark, the other night, that Neale and I had let the flood-tide of emotion ebb out of our hearts! What could have put such a notion into my head?" What crazy, fanciful creatures women are! Always reaching out for the moon. Yes, that must have been the matter with her lately, that Neale was away. She missed him so, his strength and courage and affection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With a long quivering breath Neale slid back a century and a quarter, into a world vibrating with sorrow, hope, indignation, hatred, love.
He dipped his handkerchief in the muddy wine spilled in the street; he looked up, not surprised to see the squalid joker scrawl "Blood," on the wall; he climbed the filthy staircase, and averted his eyes in horrified sympathy from the ruin of humanity who sat in the dark, cobbling shoes. ”

“ Neale stopped short, and surveyed his companion with amusement and admiration. "Good for you!" he cried. "Tell the truth and shame the devil and set an example to all honest men. Mr. Welles, you have my esteem." ”

“ Neale looked over at her gratefully. Mother was all right.
The football season slid along, the Varsity improving every week. Neale glowed with caste-loyalty as Saturday after Saturday he watched the prowess of his big brothers. Every day he felt himself stretching up, broadening out, nearer to their stature, though nobody else gave him a thought. Life was full of big and generous and absorbing matter. ”

“ In that walk of five blocks he saw thousands of persons, but they were not the soldiers who protected the line, nor the laborers who made the road. These were the travelers, the business people, the stragglers, the nondescripts, the parasites, the criminals, the desperadoes, and the idlers—all who must by hook or crook live off the builders.
Neale was conscious of a sudden exhilaration. The spirit was still in him. After all, his defeated ambition counted for nothing in the great sum of this work. How many had failed! ”

“ But where was Neale? The habits of life were all powerful; and all her habits had been formed under Durade’s magnetic eye. Neale retreated and so did spirit, courage, hope. Love remained, despairing, yet unquenchable.
Allie’s resignation established a return to normal feelings. She ate and grew stronger; she slept and was refreshed.
The caravan moved on about twenty-five miles a day. At the next camp Allie tried walking again, to find her feet were bruised, her legs cramped, and action awkward and painful. ”

“ He glanced at Neale a little apprehensively, but the young man said nothing. He was following out a thought, not entirely new, a guess which he had subconsciously made before, that there was a long hostility between his mother and his grandfather. The idea stirred a great deal in his own head, which he felt no desire to examine.
"I tell you what, Neale," said the old man, observing the other's silence and emboldened by it. "I tell you what, Neale," the old man took his pipe out of his mouth and spoke more loudly, "don't you get to thinking women are too darned important. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Had Neale ever thought he scorned girls who sat cool and dressed-up on a bench while others played tennis? As soon as the set was over, he went to sit beside her. She glanced at him out of her gray eyes and looked away again. Neale's pulse beat more quickly and he looked hard at the curve of her cheek. Then they began to talk. Before she went in to lunch, she had told him with a wistful note in her voice, that she was glad she'd met him, because most of the people at the hotel bored her so. Neale answered (the truth striking him for the first time) , that most of the people bored him too. ”

“ Slingerland can wait to see me.”
Neale’s horse grazed along the green border of the brook. The water ran with low, swift rush; there were bees humming round the autumn flowers and a fragrance of wood-smoke wafted down from the camp; over all lay the dreaming quietness of the season and the wild.
Allie sat down upon the rock, but Neale, changing his mind, stood beside her. Still he did not trust himself to face her. ”

“ Not of Neale! Was that what had come of the great hour on Rocca di Papa? Was that what human beings were?
She had gone further this time, but now she was brought up short by the same blankness at the name of Neale, the same impossibility to think at all. She could not think about Neale tonight. All that must be put off till she was more like herself, till she was more steady. She was reeling now, with shock after shock; Cousin Hetty's death, 'Gene's dreadful secret, the discovery no longer to be evaded of what Vincent Marsh meant and was. . . . ”

“ Neale looked thoughtful. "I'm no mystic. Their way of managing life often looks to me like sort of lying down on the job. I'm no mystic and I'm no fish. Looks to me as though the thing to do isn't to go off in a far corner to get your momentary glimpse of daylight, but to batter a hole in the roof of your cave and let daylight in where you live all the time. ”

“ The shame of being forced to meet degraded men, the pain from Durade’s blows, the dread that every hour he would do the worst by her or kill her, the sudden and amazing recognition between her and her father—these became dwarfed and blurred in the presence of the glorious truth that Neale was there. ”

“ For the first time Neale began to wonder about himself, to wonder what sort of a human being he was anyway, that he didn't seem to fit in really, with any crowd. There was always so much of himself left over, shut out from companionship, left in the dark, alone and silent, while with a little corner of himself he danced and talked to girls, and drank and played poker, and talked to Gregg; for there was an immense lot of which he never spoke even to Gregg. For instance they never talked about girls, and Neale was thinking a good deal about girls. ”

“ The great day came and Neale, flustered and tense, was put out in the first round according to schedule. It didn't surprise him, although deep in his heart he had had a fluttering hope—but no matter. What happened to him was of no consequence. ”

“ They had arrived at some momentous decision.
“But this message reads at my discretion,” said Neale. “It’s a plain surprise to me. I’ve no intention of making you lose your back pay, or of firing you, either.”
“You’ll probably do both—unless we can get together,” asserted Coffee.
“Well, can’t we get together?”
“That remains to be seen,” was the enigmatic reply.
“Ill need you both,” went on Neale, thoughtfully. “We’ve a big job. We’ve got to put a force of men on the piers while we’re building the trestle... Maybe I’ll fall down myself. Heavens! I’ve made blunders myself. ”

“ Neale O’Neil came out, yawning as he had gone to bed, and opened the door of the shed in which the automobile had been lodged in lieu of a proper garage. Neale always looked over the car before they started the day’s run, as all careful chauffeurs should. 172
The children ran for the automobile, of course, before Neale could back it out of the shed; and as Tess and Dot and Sammy jumped on the steps to ride out, a white hen flew from the tonneau with a wild squawk. ”

“ In one of the quiet silences, full to the brim with their nearness to each other, Neale remembered what he had meant to do with this afternoon, what he had so self-consciously planned to say. The thought made him abashed and humble. How infinitely deeper life was than you could ever know till you began to live. He had thought he loved Marise as much as a man could love a woman. He saw that he had only begun to guess what love could be, that it is a tie between two struggling human beings, as well as between a man and a woman, and that it is not to be had without effort and growth. ”

“ And then, brushed in with great colorful strokes, the causes and authors of the filthy stairway, the squalid joker, the ruined man, the endless misery. With the four serving-men pouring out the chocolate of Monseigneur, Neale began to burn, like a carefully constructed bonfire, alight at last. He had never in his life before, given a conscious thought to social injustice or the poor, but every instinct for fair play, sound and intact in his heart, flared up hotly and honestly, as he gave himself naïvely to the spell of the magnetic exaggeration and over-emphasis of the story. ”

“ She motioned him down beside her. "Oh, Neale, I'm so glad! How'd you happen to be so early? Maybe if we stay right out here, where the children won't know where we are, we can have a few minutes quite to ourselves. Touclé is going to get tea tonight. Neale, sit down a minute. I want to tell you something. I'm awfully upset. I went over to help Mr. Welles transplant his Brussels sprouts, and we got to talking. Neale, what do you suppose has been in his mind all this time we've been thinking him so happy and contented here?"
"Doesn't he like Crittenden's? Find it dull?" ”

“ Neale was a gambler. Probably he had a grudge against this Durade.... I need not meet Neale, it seems, I am somewhat—overwrought. I wish to spare myself further excitement.”
“Lee—listen!” returned General Lodge, violently. “Neale is a splendid young man—the nerviest, best engineer I ever knew. I predicted great things for him. They have come true.” ”

“ Neale saw men fixing a windlass over the mouth of the old mine; saw a man at last disappear into its depths. And after a long pause he saw from the movements of the other men that the body had been drawn to the surface and that they were bending over it. A moment later, Starmidge separated himself from the rest, and came in Neale's direction. He nodded his head energetically at Betty as he drew within speaking distance.
"All right, Miss Fosdyke!" he said. "It's not your uncle. But—it's the other man, Mr. Neale!—no doubt of it!"
"Hollis!" exclaimed Neale. ”

“ Coffee spread wide his arms. “Ask me something easy. Why was the bottom dry and solid? Why did it rain? Why did solid earth turn into quicksand?”
Neale slapped the note-book shut and rose to his feet. “Gentlemen, that is not the talk of engineers,” he said, deliberately.
“The hell you say! What is it, then?” burst out Coffee, his face flushing redder.
“I’ll inform you later,” replied Neale, turning to the lineman. “Somers, tell this gang boss, Colohan, I want him.”
Neale left the tent. He had started to walk away when he heard Blake speak up in a fierce undertone. ”