Rough-Hewn

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

For a long time he had made no headway, had discovered no general underlying motive—indeed much of what he saw filled him with utter astonishment at the things men had cared for, even to the point of giving their lives to win them.

He still remembered that morning during his first stay, when he had stared with stupefaction at the rows of portrait-busts in the Capitoline Museum. So many men, most of them apparently intelligent had schemed and plotted through long years—and what for? To be the conventional head of an unworkable Empire, top-heavy with administration; to endure the hideous tedium of ceremony and pompous ritual which the office had imposed; to be forced to work through sycophants and grafters, to be exiled from healthy human life into a region where in the nature of things you could never hope to see one spontaneous sincere expression on any human face; where your life, your work, your reputation hung on the whim of the Prætorian Guard or the disgruntled legions on a distant frontier—why, if you lay awake nights you couldn't think of a more thankless job than being a Roman Emperor! And yet for centuries men had sacrificed their friends, their honor, their very lives to hold the office. Those old Romans, for all they looked so like ordinary everyday men you meet in the street, must have had a queer notion of what was worth-while in life!

Then he had left Rome and gone away without plan, anywhere the train would take him; and wherever he had gone he had walked about, silently attentive to what men had done with their lives. That was what he had been looking for as he walked around on battle-fields, or gazed up at Cathedrals or looked seriously at the statues thick-sown as the sands of the sea all over European cities; that was what he had been looking for as he sat alone in a pension bed-room reading a history or a biography that helped him fit together into some sort of a system all the diverse objects he had been considering.

Wherever he went, wherever he looked, he was like an archæologist raking over an inexhaustible kitchen-midden—he was surrounded by relics of innumerable generations crowding the long centuries during which men had lived and died on this old continent. Perhaps if he looked hard enough at what they had left behind them he might find out what men really wanted to do with their lives—perhaps he might get some hint of what he could do with his own life.

That was a subject he had never stopped to consider in America. Nothing in American life had suggested that you might have any choice except between different ways of earning your living. And yet he reflected it was rather an important question—at least as important as which baseball league you were going to root for.

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. All he had been able to do was to wonder, and stare, and read memoirs and histories, feeling like a strange cat in a very much cluttered garret. Was there anything in Europe that would really mean anything to him, to an American who was not esthetic, who refused to pretend, who frankly thought the average picture-gallery a dreary desert?

And then, very slowly, he had begun to make a guess that there was an arrangement in what looked so wildly hit-or-miss; as on the day when happening upon the little triumphal arch in Rheims he had at last got under his skin the idea of the Roman Empire, far-reaching, permeating with its law, customs, speech, the tiniest crevices of the provinces. To think of Romans living and governing and doing business in a little, one-horse, Gallic town like this! Maybe it hadn't been such a crazy aspiration to want to be Emperor—sort of like being President of the Standard Oil Company to-day. You knew in your heart that the job was too big for any man, but it was warming to your imagination even to pretend you were running a machine that covered the whole known world. And probably all of them had an illogical hunch that they would get away with it—and, by Jupiter, a lot of them had, and died peacefully in their beds. After all, so far as ordinary horse-sense went, wasn't devoting yourself to gathering together a great deal more money than you could possibly use, at least as odd a way of spending a human life as trying to hang on to the tail of the Roman Empire? And yet there were countless thousands of men all over Europe as well as in the United States who were hoping with all their souls that Fate would allow them to do just that. And a few did get away with it—just as some of the Emperors had. But it killed a great many—the Manager of the Gates Lumber Company, for instance. Every man knew that it might be the death of him, just as in the first century an Emperor knew he'd be lucky if he were killed quick. But nobody hung back for that in either century. Nobody really believed it would get him! Why, a year ago, Neale Crittenden himself had been tearing along towards it as hard as he could pelt.

Well, good God, you had to do something with yourself. You couldn't float along, your boneless tentacles rising and falling with the tides, like that jelly-fish of a Livingstone!

What was there for a man to do with himself? At all times evidently, some men had been satisfied in producing art of some kind or another—that wasn't any good for Neale. He hadn't an ounce of artistic feeling, wasn't even a craftsman, let alone an artist. And many men in every epoch had cared about fighting. That was more his sort—if you were sure you could find something worth fighting for! And many men had wanted to run things—not only for the feeling of personal power, but to straighten out the hopeless muddles humanity was always getting itself into.... He had lost the frail thread of his thought in a maze of speculations, comparisons, half-formulated ambitions.

But he had always come back to his problem. He did not hurry. He had left the Gates Lumber Company so that he would not need to hurry! Sometimes he had caught a glimpse of the thread, lost it, felt it between his closing fingers, let it slip again. And whenever it escaped him and he found himself staring again at a jumbled confusion with no clue to its pattern, he had lit his pipe and smoked reflectively, his eyes fixed on whatever detail of European life chanced to be before them, a stained-glass window at Chartres, a crowded noisy café in Milan, the hydraulic cranes unloading cargoes from the Congo under the tower of Antwerp Cathedral. 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. He had never been an impatient temperament but he certainly had not of late years been especially clear-headed. During this reflective pause in his life, he felt his mind re-acquiring its capacity to do some abstract thinking. Released temporarily as he was from the necessity for immediate activity his head slowly cleared itself from the cloudy fumes given off by energy automatically rushing into action, blindly, planlessly. He began to perceive that he had been carried off his feet by the conviction of his time that activity, any activity at all, is all-sufficient, provided it is taken with speed, energy and decision. Neale had acquired speed, energy and decision in activity, but he'd be damned, he told himself once in a while, if he'd run his legs off any longer without seeing which way he was going.