CHAPTER XV
With June came examinations at Hadley. Long, long experience and concentration on the subject had taught Hadley administrators exactly how to time their training so that when examinations came, the boys would be in the pink of condition. Two weeks later they would be stale, horribly, sickeningly stale, but nobody at Hadley cared a continental what happened two weeks after examinations. That was no business of theirs. Weary, but still docilely answering the crack of the ring-master's questions, the thoroughly disciplined Troupe of Trained Boys went through subject after subject, with the automatic rear and plunge of circus-riders breaking paper hoops. That was all right. Those were only the Hadley examinations. They expected to be able to pass those.
But now for the College Entrance examinations, the Apollyon which from afar their professors at Hadley had pointed out to them, straddling over all their roads, belching out brimstone-fire on all who tried to pass. With much trepidation hidden under his usual decent impassivity, Neale journeyed up to take his first examinations at Columbia. He was glad that the first chanced to be in history. That was one of his good subjects. He stood a better chance there. With a careful air of carelessness, he went up to the proctor's desk, took one off the pile of the printed examination sheets, and with it in his hand, not entirely steady, he went back to his seat. Safe from observation there, he laid it before him and his eyes leaping to know the worst, took in the first three questions at one glance. Holy Smoke! Was this all? Was it for this he had sweat blood! There was an outline map of the United States, with a request to mark on it the location of such idiotically well-known places as Acadia, Pittsburg, New Orleans. There was "French and Indian Wars. State causes immediate and remote." There was, "What do you consider to be the relation between the Missouri Compromise and the Civil War? Justify your opinion in 500 words. "
Neale leaned back in his chair faint with relief. Why, he could eat it up like candy. And he ate it up like candy; emerging from it, his head in the air and the world at his feet. This aspect caused him to be chastened by a gang of Sophomores who played hare and hounds with him (he was the hare), through Riverside Park from 120th to 8ist Street, where his long legs finally distanced them.
The other examinations were of the same sort, exactly the same sort, of a childish facility compared to anything the Hadley professors had described. Why—it came to Neale with a shock—why, the Hadley purpose had not been to enable them to pass the exams.—it had been to use Hadley boys to exalt the name of Hadley throughout the collegiate world! He felt a deep resentment, a burning bitterness as at having been taken in; and by people who had consciously intended to, who had known very well what they were about, and had taken advantage of his defenselessness. He thought of those four years of driving drudgery and causeless dread, and hated Hadley as the quintessence of cheating. The idea that the subjects of his study had any value other than as legal tender for college entrance, that he was the better off for his thorough acquaintance with them did not once cross his mind. In that respect, too, he was a product of Hadley.
He came away from the last examination, as stale and worthless as an overworked colt. The Sophomores let him alone. He looked to them as though he had not been able to pass.
A wide, green pasture with running brooks is the best place for a tired colt, and it was such a one that Neale now entered, his head hanging, his big legs like cotton twine. Oh, shucks! What was the use of anything?
Grandfather and Grandmother kept a Crittenden shut mouth about his drawn face and sallow skin, and at first were careful to keep out of the way and let him even more alone than usual. He fell into bed at eight o'clock, unable to keep his eyes open another moment, and lay as though he were dead for twelve or fourteen hours every night, awaking to see the country sun shining in on the slant, hewed beams over his head, and to hear the country sounds, as clear as crystal coming in through the open window; the mill-brook chanting, the wind in the big maple, the bright, brazen call of the rooster, the sociable grunting of the pigs.
The pigs were a great comfort to Neale at this time. After he had washed in the brown rain-water in his wash-bowl, and had gone down to the clean, sunny kitchen, always empty at this hour, and had eaten heartily of the fried potatoes, hash, and pan-cakes which he found waiting for him in the warming-oven of the kitchen stove, he sauntered out, a doughnut in his hand, to lean over the pig-pen and commune with the pigs. He stood there an hour at a time, occasionally scratching their backs as an excuse for staying so long with them, but for the most part gazing dreamily down, lost in the magnificent sensuality of their joy in life. They had always been fed an hour or so earlier, so there was no excitement in their profound beatitude, none of the homeric scramblings of mealtimes. Neale was not ready for that yet. What he needed, what slowly floated him up from the depths, was their rapt ecstasy of repletion, their voluptuous pleasure in sinking thoughtfully into the cool, wet filth and the glow of their peace as they stood sunning themselves, visibly penetrated to every fleshly cell of their vast bodies, by the most perfect accord with the scheme of the universe, as they saw it. Neale gazed at them as they lay sprawled in the mud, or moved about very slowly, grunting very gently, occasionally turning upon the boy a small, wise, philosophic eye; and they did his heart good, like medicine.
When he was ashamed to stand there any longer … although no one ever commented on it, and indeed no one was there to see it, except Grandmother and Jenny busy in the house, he loitered along the path which led to the seldom-used foot-bridge across the mill-brook. The sound of the water always threw him into another contemplative pause here. He often lay down on the rusty-colored pine-needles and lay looking up at the distant dark green branches of the forest-roof, the voice of the water rising and falling, so insistent that he could think of nothing else, so unintelligible that it made him think of nothing at all, sliding, breaking, turning, slipping down, leaping up, like an endlessly curving line drawn endlessly before his eyes. He usually shut his eyes after a little, and not infrequently added an hour or two of sleep to the fourteen he had spent in his bed; this time, sleep not black and opaque, but shot through with the gleaming pattern of the brook's song.
One morning when he woke up, while he still lay in bed staring up at the beams over his head, some chance association of ideas made him think of Hadley and he was astonished to find his resentment against Hadley had gone. Hadley seemed very remote and vague to him. He did not hate it any more. He could scarcely remember what Hadley had been like. Nor anything that he had studied there. That day for the first time he went down to the mill, walking, not sauntering, his legs solid under him again.
He found Grandfather and old Si "making out" very badly, with no boy to "take away." The last one had followed all his predecessors into the cotton-spinning mills at North Adams, and as this was haying-time no other help was to be had. The two old men had to stop the saw every few minutes till Si could run around and catch up on taking away. It was fretful work, like trying to lace up your shoes with one hand. Neale stood and watched them for a while. Then although he had not really meant to say it, he was not sorry to hear his voice suggesting, "Why don't you take me on? I haven't got anything else to do."
"What say, Si?" asked Grandfather, laughing so at the idea, that Neale was nettled and had a picture of how unutterably lazy he had looked for the last fortnight!
Si spit tobacco-juice into the mill-race and shifted his quid.
"Wa'll, I know hands is scurse these days, but land! have we got down to taking anybody?"
Neale was used to the Yankee roughness which they meant for humor, but this touched him a little closely. Didn't they think he could do any work?
Grandfather puckered his old face into a grin and nodded him into the job.
"If so be so, then so be it. Kin or no kin, I guess we can afford to pay him what we were giving Hubbard."
So Neale bought a suit of overalls at the general store and began to work. For the first three days he wished with all his heart he'd kept his mouth shut. Handling green beech for ten hours a day was very different from helping out a half-hour at a time. Besides, his muscles and above all his hands were pitifully soft after an indoor winter and his fortnight of vegetating. It didn't seem worth while to make an ox of himself for five cents an hour and board—the wage of unskilled labor in that non-unionized Arcadia—but he was ashamed to quit on a job that was always handled by boys of his age; Nobody had asked him to do it. He had offered himself, pushed himself in. It would be too worthless to back out. But, oh gee! he was tired when he got through at six o'clock, and clumped heavily up the hill after Grandfather and Si, walking, it seemed to him, with as stiff and aged a gait as theirs. He shovelled supper up, starved, starved to his toes, and staggered to bed immediately afterward. The first week he lost five pounds. Thereafter he gained steadily, and all solid muscle.
After a time he mastered the mill-hand's basic axiom, "Never lift a plank if you can slide it," his hands stopped blistering and hardened, and he grew muscles in various places up and down, his back, where he had never had any before, so that the boards became singularly lighter in his hands.
And then, just when he had mastered his job, the water-god took a hand in the game. Since the spring rains, there had been nothing but the gentlest showers. The mill-pond had shrunk to a pool, and grass began to show far down its dried-up sides. The water no longer ran over the mill-dam. One day about five o'clock the mill stopped, with a log half-sawed.
"No water," said Silas, "got to shut down till the pond fills up." They sat down instantly, hanging their empty hands over their knees, in an ecstasy of idleness. They managed to finish that log by supper time, but the drought held.
Soon they could saw only by pondfuls. A couple of hours in the early morning, a scant hour after lunch, and somewhat less after supper, in the twilight. Between times Si patched belts, or hoed corn, or sat and smoked, Grandfather pottered around the garden, or sat and smoked as he waited for the pond to fill.
This was delightful—just enough work for exercise, and lots of blameless leisure. But with so many hours to read, Neale ran through at an alarming rate the books he had brought with him. Even "Vanity Fair" didn't hold out forever, and with Dobbin and Amelia finally united, Neale was at the end of his literary resources. Boredom settled down heavily. Si's reiterated anecdotes lost all savor; he had read all the books on the sitting-room book-shelves, or had given them up as hopeless. He felt bound by his contract to be on hand whenever the mill could be run, so that long walks were out of the question.
At last as he sat gloomily killing time trying to whittle a wooden chain, and making a botch of it, he seemed to remember one rainy day when he was a little boy, wandering into a room with another book-case in it. Not being a little girl, he had had small interest in exploring the inside of the house, and where that room was he had forgotten; but if there had been any books in it, they were there still; no single decade ever made any change in that house. It was worth having a look.
Anybody but a Crittenden, dealing with Crittendens, would have gone to Grandfather or Grandmother and asked where that book-case was. But it did not occur to Neale to do that, and if he had thought of the possibility, he would never have done it. That would have meant talk about his wanting to read, about what books he liked, and why he liked them … all sorts of talk from which Neale shrank away as he did from physical pawing-over. He set off silently, with a casual air, upon his search, looking first into the darkened best-room, and going from that to the garret, the attic over the ell, and the woodshed loft. There were scattered books in all these places; in the best-room a few big, illustrated, show-off books, with gold on the bindings, like the Doré Bible he had so often looked at, and the big Pilgrim's Progress that he had opened only once. In the garret were dusty old school-books of past generations, and in the attic over the ell, piles of well-bound black books, with gold lettering, which turned out to be, desolatingly, nothing but by-gone Congressional Records and Census Reports. But he had not found the little brown book-case which he dimly remembered. Perhaps it wasn't here at all. Well, he'd try the chambers, mostly vacant now, which had been so full in the days Grandfather liked to tell about, when he was a little boy, one of fourteen children all growing up tumultuously together in this big old house.
Neale went down the attic stairs and began to open doors. Nothing doing. Everywhere the same sparsely furnished room, with painted floor, braided mat, dark old bed and battered dresser, and ladder-back, flag-bottomed chairs. Their vacancy struck cold even on Neale's not very impressionable mind. "A room that hadn't been lived in for a long time was the limit, anyhow," he thought.
But at the other end of the hall from his own low-ceilinged, little boy's room, he found one like it, rather more cheerful. The sun came in through a dormer window as it did in his own room. He remembered now that this was the room Father had always had, till he went away to college and after that to New York to live. And there, sure enough was the little book-case. Of course. He must have seen it lots of times, going by when the door was open. Now, what was in it? Maybe, after all, nothing to his purpose; probably this had been used like the shelves in the attic as a place to put volumes that nobody wanted to read.
Mather's Invisible Providence—sounded religious. Neale did not even take it out. A big, old book with the back off proved, when he opened it, to be Rollin's Ancient History. With a true Hadley horror for learning anything out of hours, he slammed it shut, and took down the next one, Butler's Analogy. Seemed as though he had heard of that one. He sat down on the edge of the little four-poster, and opened it at random, skimming the pages. Oh, awful! Fierce! Worse than religious! He put it back, discouraged, and ran over the titles on that shelf. A name struck his eye. Emerson. Wasn't there a poem by Emerson at the beginning of "The Children of the Zodiac?" Neale like every one else at that time had read a good deal of Kipling, although he was vague as to Emerson.
He took down Volume I, and opened to the first page.
"But thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws."
"Pretty rough sledding!" thought Neale, "bad as Butler."
He turned over a page. His eye was struck by a thick black pencil-mark along the margin; a passage that had interested somebody. Neale read, "I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day."
An idea knocked at Neale's head. He looked up from the book to take it in. It echoed and re-echoed in his brain, the first idea about history which had ever penetrated to fertilize the facts piled up by Hadley. Gee! there was something to that! Neale began to walk around it speculatively. Wonder if that's true? Sounds good.
Were there perhaps more passages marked? He turned over the pages again and came on another of the black pencil lines in the margin.
"When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more."
"Time is no more …" The grandeur of those four words unrolled a great scroll from before Neale's eyes.
Say, who was it who had marked these places, anyhow? Who was it, who, before Neale, had sat in this low-ceilinged room and had caught that glimpse of timeless infinity? Neale turned back to the fly-leaf and found written in a familiar, handwriting, "Daniel W. Crittenden, Williams 1876."
Why, that was Father!
Neale stared at the name. Could it be Father? Yes, he had gone to Williams and although 1876 was incredibly long ago, that might have been Father's class. And this was Father's room! He looked about him, astonished.
For the first time in his life it occurred to Neale that his father had not always been a father and a successful, conservative business man of forty-something, but that long, long ago he had also been a person.
The idea made Neale feel very shy and queer as though through the pages of this chance-found book he were spying on the privacy of that unsuspecting person. But all the same, it was too strange that Father should have … what else had he marked? 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."
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, on kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
"Life only avails, not having lived." Good enough!
"For every stoic was a stoic, but in Christendom, where is the Christian?" every word underlined in ink.
"Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of pleasure which concealed it." On the margin the note was, "True, think of E. B." "Wonder who E. B. was," thought Neale, "but the old man's right."
Ah, this is bully! "Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will … but thou, God's darling, heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them.…"
Why, this was not marked! The old man must have been asleep at the switch.
Neale stopped turning the pages and jumping from one marked passage to another. He began to read for himself, a deep vibration within answering the organ-note which throbbed up at him out of the page.
"This," he said to himself, after a long, absorbed silence, "this is my meat."
There was a good place on top of the plate-beam of the mill, dry and safe. One morning before Grandfather and Si came down to work, Neale climbed up to this, dusted it clean of the litter of a century or more and put the three volumes there. Whenever the water got low, and the mill shut down, and Si went off to oil the harness and Grandfather to have a visit with Grandmother in the kitchen, Neale clambered up and clinging with one hand, reached in and took out a volume … any one of the three. From there to the top of the highest lumber-pile outside, in the clean sunlight.
The pungent smell of the newly-sawed wood, the purifying wind, wide space about him, solitude, silence, and this deep, strong voice, purifying, untroubled, speaking to him in a language which was his own, although he had not known it.