Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/396

 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.

As he sat now alone on the roof, overlooking the many, many monuments left as token of what men had wanted to do with their lives, he brought up and considered the few conclusions—the guesses at truth—the year had brought him. They didn't seem to amount to much, they were ridiculously slight as the sum-total of a year's earnest thought, but all this sort of thinking was so new and hard for him! At least such as they were, they were his own thoughts—he hadn't taken them on anybody else's say-so; and simple and