CHAPTER XXXII
Father had written from Caracas that Mother was taking the next boat back to New York because she needed a lot of dental work done and hadn't any confidence in Venezuelan dentists, but when Neale met Mother at the dock she told him at once, laughingly, that the dental work was only an excuse, and that she had come to have a visit with her son. She had added with a whimsical defiance that, such being the fact, she had no intention of putting up the usual Crittenden bluff of something different.
"I'm not a Crittenden," she told Neale gaily in the cab on the way to the hotel, "though I married into the family so young! And now that I've worn a mantilla, with a rose in my hair, I'm not going to try any longer to pretend that I am."
Neale looked at her, admiring her now quite distinguished appearance, but feeling a little alarm at her tone. She sounded almost disturbingly electric.
"I've come up to have a real New York spree with my big son and his nice girl, now that he has condescended to let us know he has a nice girl," she told him, her smiling eyes at once tender and a little mocking. "You can afford it, can't you, since your last raise?"
"Oh, I can afford anything in reason."
"Your father says they tell him you're getting on splendidly."
"They never let on as much to me," said Neale drily, "though they are treating me very white as to pay."
They were at the hotel door now, where Mother made arrangements for a stay of a month.
"Dental work takes so long," she told Neale gravely in the elevator, making him laugh outright. She looked very well 83 pleased at this, and after they were inside her room, stood up on tiptoes and gave him another kiss.
He had never entirely recovered from his father's chance remark that Mother had been only twenty when she married. She must have been about as old as he was now when he first began to remember her. Just a girl,—and she had seemed older to him then than now.
He told her this as he unstrapped her valise. "You seem younger to me everytime I see you—lots younger now than when I was six or seven years old."
She laughed out. "I was a child myself when you were six or seven." She turned grave for a moment. "If I had you to bring up, now that I am a really grown person with a personality of my own and some experience of the world, I'd do it very differently. I'd make a better job of it."
"You made a good enough job," he protested mildly. "How can you look at me and think you could have done any better?"
She stopped her unpacking to laugh. "It just spoils a person for other forms of joking to live with one of you dry Crittendens. Other people's humor seems so flamboyant. I like the Crittendens," she pronounced judicially, "though I did waste about twenty years of my young life trying to make myself into one. I'm glad you're one. But if you try to make Martha into one—"
"Martha's one already," he told her triumphantly. "We're exactly alike—the way we think and do things. That's why we get on so well together." At this Neale's mother looked at him so hard that he felt a little annoyed, and turned the talk back to its earlier channel.
"How else would you have brought me up, I'd like to know?"
"I'd have taken dynamite to you," she informed him briskly.
"Dynamite?"
"Oh, you don't understand. And I daresay it would have been too early anyhow. You'll probably get your share of dynamite when your turn comes." She changed the subject: "How's business? Seriously!"
Seriously he told her of the results of his promotion six months before from the "intelligence bureau," as he called it, to the real business of life, to buying and selling. "The only real money is in that," he told her, warming as he spoke. "All those other jobs, office jobs, don't lead you anywhere. Buying and selling, especially selling, that's where you get ahead. I'm earning twice what I did, and by this time next year I'll be doing twice what I'm doing now. I may soon be able to do a little on the side, on my own hook, pick up something good and dispose of it well. Grandfather is sure I can. He may have some tips for me later on. Grandfather is a wise old scout."
Mother laid some underwear away in a drawer. As she shut it, she asked casually: "Do you read any Emerson nowadays, Neale?"
How in the world did Mother know he had ever read Emerson? "No, I don't," he said.
She noted the shortness of his tone with raised eyebrows, and began to hang up her dresses in the closet.
Neale looked at her back with some uneasiness. He felt his privacy threatened, and, stiffening, put up the bars. And apparently Mother sensed the change, for she at once dropped her intimate tone and began making gay plans for "having some fun" during her stay, plans in which dental engagements played a conspicuously small part. It turned out to be a very light-hearted month. Mother's month in the dentist's chair. Neale and Martha were quite shaken up out of the quiet, jog-trot routine of their peaceful days and long evenings of serious reading together. Mother took them to the theater and to dinner at out-of-the-way restaurants of which, like most sober resident New Yorkers, they had never heard the names. In the daytime, she and Martha, of whom she had grown very fond, went around a good deal together, looking at the innumerable expensive and occasionally beautiful objects on view in the shops of a big city; or visiting museums, or going to matinées. They heard a good deal of music, all three of them. Mother had chosen a hotel near Carnegie Hall, so that frequently, when they had nothing else to do, they strolled up on foot and listened to whatever was being played. They had an occasional dinner with Professor Wentworth and Martha in their apartment on 122d Street, and Mother went off by herself to look up the old friends of Union Hill days, the few who were not scattered.
Once in a while Neale talked over his business prospects with Mother when she asked him about them and he couldn't get out of it, and they agreed that he would be able to marry in another year. And having agreed in this opinion. Mother was apt to fall very silent for a time. But this suited Neale, who found intimate personal talk disconcerting. It always made him uneasy when another human being rattled the handle of the door to his inner secret garden. One of the things he most loved in Martha was that she took so much for granted without talking about it. They understood each other instinctively, he felt, without need of explanation. He suspected that Martha had her own inner garden, and prided himself on respecting her right to it. He was no one to go rattling handles of doors that were none of his. He found Martha especially restful and satisfying after one of these talks with Mother, lightly and passingly as Mother glanced over those sensitive places. He constantly felt that Mother was trying to open a door he wished to keep shut, that she was trying to say something that he had no desire to hear. He and Martha were all right. What business had Mother to look at them that way?
She did nothing after all, beyond looking, and went away at the end of her month, having committed no greater crime than to whisper brokenly to Neale as she kissed him good-by, "Neale, it's not enough to—Neale, you must love Martha. You must love her—not just—"
At this Neale had quickly assumed the cold look of distaste which she knew so well, and she had ventured no further.
After her departure, Neale fell with relief back into his old routine of quiet, comfortable life-in-common with Martha, with none of the prickling electric uncertainties he had felt in Mother. Odd how much better he knew Martha than he did Mother; how sure he was beforehand of what Martha would think and say, whereas he had been uncomfortably unsure of Mother. He felt he knew Martha as he knew himself, through and through.
This conviction was a great satisfaction to him. He often thought of it with pride, and with a secret pity and scorn for people who found life and human relationships so complicated and mysterious. That sort of thing was just a novel-writer's rubber-stamp convention. What was there so darned mysterious about your own nature, about a sensible woman's nature? Nothing. If you were a sane, normal man, you found your mate in the world just as normally as you found your place in the business world. With a healthy, honest, fine girl like Martha, there would be none of those double-and-twisted emotional complications you read about in books.
He was away from New York a good deal at this time, taking, as one of the younger salesmen, the more difficult and less remunerative territories, and when he came back to the city it was like coming home, to ring the bell of the Wentworths' apartment and have Martha herself come to open the door for him, her eyes as clear and honest as sunlit water.
They always had a good deal to tell each other after these separations. Martha about her work at the Speyer School, where she had begun to help a little in visiting the families of the poorer children, Neale about his business, which he was finding more and more absorbingly interesting, for which he was feeling much of the zestful passion he had felt for football. He talked a great deal to Martha about the resemblance of football to business. One of the many things he loved about Martha was her knowledge of football. Of course, strictly speaking, like all other outsiders, she knew nothing whatever about football; but she knew as much as any spectator could, and, brought up from birth as she had been in one or another college community, she had a second-nature familiarity with the psychology of the game, with the fierce, driving concentration, the eager, devout willingness to devote every throb of your pulse, every thought in your brain to winning the game; and it seemed perfectly natural to her, as it did to Neale, to step into another world where all the mature energies were focussed in the same way.
"It's just like football," Neale often told her, his eyes gleaming. "Having played football gives you as great an advantage as though you were in training and the other fellows soft. I often feel as if I ought to go and look up old Atkins and thank him. He was teaching me enough sight more than how to play backfield defense! That everlasting pounding of his on the idea of knowing where the ball is before you go for it— Gee whiz, you'd never guess how many fool mistakes that's kept me from. I see the other fellows wasting money on buying drinks and tickets to shows and champagne suppers for hard-shelled old buyers who haven't an interest left in life beyond screwing the price down an eighth of a cent—wallowing in any-old-how just to get going,—the way I used to; and I think of old Atkins, lie low, keep my mouth shut, and size up the enemy's formation till I see their weak place, and then!" The brilliance of his eye, the grimness of his set jaw, the impact of one great fist in the palm of the other hand showed what happened then. He went on. "One game's just like the other, and the thing that wins in both is wanting to win more than the other fellow does." He turned serious, almost exalted, and said: "Sometimes I used almost to think it was the way religion must be for people who believe in it—it puts you in touch with some big force—I've felt it in football—I guess everybody always feels it who really gets going enough to care about anything with all that is in him—if you give every bit of yourself—don't keep anything back—want to win more than anything else in the world—why, all of a sudden some outside source of power that's hundreds of volts higher than normal begins to flow through you—and you move things. It's wonderful, but you can't have it cheap. It costs you all you've got."
One evening as they sat thus, Martha perched on the arm of Neale's chair, the quiet air about them crackling and tingling with the high-tension current, Martha caught and grasped a comparison which had long been floating elusive in the back of her mind. She jumped up and ran to the piano. "Listen, it's like this," she told him, and played with one hand, clear and defiant and compelling, the call of the young Siegfried. "That was how it was in football. And now—" She sat down before the piano, and, stretching out both hands over the keys, she filled the room with the rich clamor of the same theme reinforced by all the sumptuous strength of harmony.
Neale sprang to his feet. "You know what Siegfried went through fire to find," he cried, stooping to put his lips on Martha's cheek. "All he wanted was to get to Brunhilda. And that's all I want, my Brunhilda! All I want in the world!"