Rough-Hewn

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

He tried desperately to think of some way to ask her about it, to offer to help her, to implore her to open her heart as he was opening his. But he was stricken with shyness, with a fear lest he had misunderstood, lest he say the wrong thing. He could only look at her hopelessly. What a clumsy, heavy-handed china-smasher he was, anyhow!

But such glimpses of what lay beneath the surface did not come often, though he thought about them a great deal. He wondered if there was any connection between them and her evident habit of not talking seriously, of bantering keenly about superficial things, rather than giving any idea of what she was really thinking. Perhaps she did not trust people enough to give them any idea of what she was really thinking. Perhaps she fell into that grim mood when she thought seriously. Why should she? And yet she was always making him talk seriously, about ideas he really cared about.

Once he said to her clumsily, "I must bore you to death, with all these half-baked ideas of mine, when you're used to such brilliant talkers."

She startled him with the energy and vivacity of her answer, "Oh, I hate what you call brilliant talkers. I'm so sick of them! You can't imagine what it is to me, like a long drink of clear water, to hear somebody trying to say what he really thinks."

He asked, sincerely and naïvely at a loss, "Why, why does anybody talk at all, if not to say what he thinks?"

She answered, with a certain smile of hers which always made him uneasy, a dry, ugly smile, "Don't you realize that the real purpose of talk is to pull the wool over the eyes of the person you are talking to, to make him think you are more clever than you are, and to get something out of him for yourself that he would not let you have if he knew you were taking it?"

Then with one of her lightning changes to that melting look and smile before which he always succumbed wholly, she went on, "The truth is that I hope all the time that in your thinking over and over there may be a hint for me, who was never taught to do the least bit of thinking for myself. So go on, let me see it all, just as it comes. Let me pick out for myself what will be of use to me."

Well, if she wanted that, she should have it—or anything else he could give her. It was part of the reeling, glamorous intoxication into which she cast him, to hear himself going on like a stump-speaker. And she was adroit at hitting on subjects that made him talk. One day as they were amusing each other by describing their school-life, his as different from hers as if they had been brought up on different planets, football was mentioned. In no time she had him helplessly loquacious, explaining football to her. Think of having to explain football to anybody! He explained how you played it, and some of the rules, and how terribly you cared about it. And suddenly found that he had explained it to himself, that he really understood it for the first time.

"It's a kind of education that America has worked out for herself unconsciously, I believe, the American college idea of sports. No American undergraduate dreams of playing to amuse himself. He'd scorn to. He plays to win. That's the American idea. And it's a splendid one. To give every ounce in you to do what you set out to do—no lackadaisical dilettantism—your whole heart in it—and go to it! That's the way for men to live."

He was aware that Marise looked at him surprised by his fire. He was surprised by it, himself. He guessed perhaps he was ready to go back to work; perhaps he'd had enough of sauntering around. "That's what you learn in college athletics—how to give yourself to some aim and not to keep anything back for yourself. That's great, you know," he told her imperatively. "It is! It takes the personal littleness out of a boy to give his all to reach a goal. It makes a man out of a boy. But, oh, Lord!" he burst out with a great swing of his arm, "When that has made you a man, why don't they let you know that you have more goals to choose from than just different ways of making your living, most of them just buying and selling different sorts of things? You're trained in athletics to put your very heart and all of it, into what you do. That's fine! But why don't they train you just as hard to put your whole intelligence into being sure that what you're putting your heart into is worth doing, and is what you're meant to do? They don't train you for that, they won't even let you have a quiet minute to think of it yourself. They keep you up in the air all the time, whooping it up about your duty to 'win out!' to win the game! Sure, any man that's got blood in his veins wants to win the game. But which game? It's all very well, turning a boy into a grown-up human being, but you've got to...."