Rough-Hewn

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Neale sat at his desk, looking hard at the piece of cheap paper which brought him the news that in a short time he would have eight hundred dollars more in the bank than he had had before. And without turning his hand over. All he had done was to know that the Melwin spruce were worth a lot more than was thought by the Iowa cousin who had inherited that distant wood-lot. Easy money! Somebody had paid him high for that piece of knowledge,—who? Wharton, of course, would certainly get it out of somebody's else hide, or he would never have gone in for the deal.

He sat dreaming, remembering his timber-cruising trip, remembering the choppers and woodmen he had known around Grandfather's. Men like that would work all a year around in all weathers, all their days, to get as much as he would have for doing nothing.

He drew a long breath and turned to enter the check in his check-book. A queer sort of a world. And after all, he stood in much the same relation to the Gates family as the lumbermen did to him, working enough sight harder for enough sight less money. That seemed to be the way things were. But it didn't seem quite square.

A hasty mental calculation showed him that with this money he would have over two thousand dollars. Clear. Not so bad! He considered the matter, wondering why he felt no more elation, and decided that it was because he could not for a moment think of anything he specially wanted to do with two thousand dollars. Always before this he had thought he was making money to give to Martha. Was it possible that he had been using Martha as an excuse? No, no, he explained hastily to himself, the point was that Martha had, all women had, some definite use to make of money. It bought things they wanted and thought important, suburban houses and mahogany twin beds and what not. Martha could easily have spent that sum to buy things that pleased her. The only use he could think of for it was to use it over again to make more money. And then what? It didn't seem much of a life to do that over and over.

He looked around him at the busy outer office, filled with haste and a sense of the importance of its processes. There was more to it than making money. That was the foolish, reforming-professor's idea of "sordid business." You were in it, not because you wanted the money but because it was the biggest game in the world, and it was fun to win out. All right then. He would win out.

But no matter how much time he put into his efforts to win out, there was a lot of time left over. Neale did not succeed in filling that leisure to his satisfaction. He went out more than he had ever before, accepted invitations to dinner from all the married men in the office and lunched with all the unmarried, and had them out for meals with him. But still there was time left over. He went to the theater, to loud hearty farces that made him laugh, at first; but they very soon seemed all cut by the same pattern and he found himself sitting them out as grimly and smilelessly as Americans read their comic supplements.

It was not that he was lonely because he was alone. Never in his life had he found the slightest alleviation to loneliness in merely having some one, any one, with him. The truth was that when he was alone he fell to thinking. And he did not know what to make of his thoughts. They mostly consisted of an answerless question, so answerless in the nature of things, that it was foolish to formulate it—the same old question you always ran into when you stopped to think, "what are you doing all this for, anyhow?"

In football days that question had been silenced by the instant fierce, all-sufficient answer, "For the team!" What was the present equivalent of the team now? It looked remarkably like Neale Crittenden, all by himself—not such a very big inspiring goal when you stopped to think of it. The best thing evidently was not to do much stopping to think.

One evening unwarily he allowed something alarming to happen to him, something worse than stopping to think. After a solitary dinner at Reisenweber's he strolled along 59th Street, and, as it seemed too early to go back to his room and he had nothing else to do that evening, stepped into a concert at Carnegie Hall. He stepped in to get rid of a few hours of his restless uneasiness and he came out so devoured by restless uneasiness that he could not think of going to bed, but walked up and down the streets for hours trying to forget the shouts of the brass, the long sweet cries of the violins. They seemed to call his name over and over ... to summon him out, up, to some glory ... little by little they died away, leaving him in the same flat, inner silence as before, hearing nothing but the banging clatter of the elevated and the clang of the surface-car bells. A little before dawn he went back to bed, exhausted. What sort of a life was this, anyhow?

He was less away from the city than usual, now, spent more time at his desk, which was usually in those days heaped with work that had formerly been done by other men. The office was shifting its routine, rearranging the work to meet the strain of the Manager's failing health. It was whispered that Mr. Gates—the "young Mr. Gates"—though only fifty-three, might have to pull out altogether. That would mean promotion all around. Neale knew by the character of the work on his desk that when promotion was served out, he would get his share.