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 back-field 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!"
CHAPTER XXXIII
1907.