 CHAPTER XIV The Apparently Satisfactory Development of the Tura-Car in the late spring of 1914 was the result of an uneconomical expenditure of energy on the part of Carl. Only he followed by letter the trail of every amateur aviator, every motoring big-game hunter. He never led up for an afternoon. Banzale had lost interest in the whole matter. Whenever Carl thought of how much the development of the Tura-Car business depended upon himself, he was uneasy about the future and bent more closely over his desk. On his way home, swaying on a subway-strap, his pleasant sensation of returning to Ruth was interrupted by worry in regard to things he might have done at the office. Nights he dreamed of lists of prospects. Late in May he was disturbed for several days by headaches, lassitude, nausea. He lied to Ruth, guess I have eaten something at lunch that was a little off. You know what these restaurants are. He admitted, however, that he felt like a symptom. He stuck to the office, though his chief emotion about life and business was that he wished to go off somewhere and lie down, die gently. Directly after a Sunday bruncheon, at which he was silent and looked washed out, he went to bed with typhoid fever. For six weeks he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the boisiness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun. That loss was to Ruth, like a snickering hobgoblin, attending the specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed, she mourned and mourned for her lost boy. While she hid her fear and kept her blossoms fresh, and her hair well coiffed, and mothered the stern man who lay so dreadfully still in the bed, he was not shaved every day. He had a pale beard under his hollow cheeks. Even when he was out of delirium, even when he was comparatively strong, he never said anything gaily foolish for the sake of being young and noisy with her. During convalescence Carl was so weirdly gentle that she hoped the little boy she loved was coming back to dwell in him, but the hawk's wings seemed broken. For the first time Carl was afraid of life. He sat and worried, going over the possibilities of the Turricar, and the positions he might get if the Turricar failed. He was willing to loaf by the window all day, his eyes on a narrow, blood-red stripe in a Navajo blanket on his knees, along which he incessantly ran a fingernail back and forth, back and forth, for a whole quarter hours while she battled out from Kipling and London and Conrad, hoping to rekindle the spirit of daring. One sweet drop was in the cup of iron. As woodland playmates they could never have known such intimacy as hovered about them when she rested her head lightly against his knees, and they watched the Hudson, the storms and flurries of light on its waves, the windy clouds and the processions of barges, the beetle-like ferries and the great steamers for Albany. They talked in half sentences, understanding the rest, tough and winter. Might be a good trip. Carl's hand was always demanding her thick hair, but he stroked it gently. The coarse, wholesome vigor was drained from him. Part even of his slang went with it. His g was not explosive. He took to watching her like a solemn baby. When she moved about the room, thus she found the little boy Carl again, lap-full-throated and secretly cried over him, as his sternness passed into a wistful obedience. He was not quite the same impudent boy whose naughtiness she had loved, but the good child who came in his place, did trust her soul, and she acted upon her soul. When Carl was strong enough, they went for three weeks to point pleasant on the Jersey coast, where the pines and breakers from the open sea yield his weakness and his multitudinous worries. They even swam once, and Carl played at learning two new dances, strangely called the Foxtrot and the Lulufato. Their hotel was a vast bar in all porches, white flannels and handsome young Jews chatting tremendously with young Juices, but its ballroom floor was smooth, and Ruth had lacked music and excitement for so long that she danced every night, and conducted an amiable flirtation with the mysterious young man of Harvard accent, Jewish features, fine brown eyes, and tortoise shell-rimmed eyeglasses, while Carl looked on, a contented wallflower. They came back to town with ocean breeze and pine scent in their throats, and sea sparkle in their eyes, and Carl promptly tied himself to the office desk as though sickness and recovery had never given him a vision of play. Ruth had not taken the point pleasant dances seriously, but as day on day she stifled in a half-darkened flat that summer. She sometimes sobbed at the thought of the moon-path on the sea, the reflection of lights on the ballroom floor, the wave-like swish of music mad feet. The flat was hot, dead, the summer heat was unrelenting as bedclothes drawn over their head and lashed down, flies and sneering circles mocked the listless hand she flipped at them. Too hot to wear many clothes yet hating the disorder of a flimsy negligee, she panted in by a window, while the venomous sun glared on ten roofs, and a few feet away snarled the ceaseless trrrr of esteem riveter that was creaking new flats to shut off her view of the Hudson. In the lava-paved backyard was the insistent, file-like voice of the janitor's son who kept piping, Hey, Millie! Hey, Millie's got a girl! Millie got a girl! Hey, Millie! She imagined herself going down and slaughtering him, vividly saw herself waiting for the elevator venturing into the hot sepulcher of the back areaway and there becoming too languid to complete the task of ridding the world of the dear child. She was horrified to discover what she had been imagining and, presently, imagined it all over again. Two blocks across from her, seen through the rising walls of the new apartment houses, were the drab windows of a group of rundown tenements, which broke this sleek respectability of the well-to-do quarter. In those windows, Ruth observed foreign-looking idle women, not very clean, who had nothing to do after they had completed half an hour of slobbering housework in the morning. They watched their neighbors breathlessly. They peered out with the petty, virtual and curiosity of the workless, at whatever passed in the streets below them. Fifty times a day they could be seen to lean far out on their fire escapes and follow with slowly craning necks and unblinking eyes the passing of something—ice wagons, undertakers wagons, ole-clo men. Ruth surmised, the rest of the time, ragged hair and greasy of wrapper, gum-chewing and yawning. They rested their unlovely stomachs on discolored sofa cushions on the window-sills and waited for something to appear. Two blocks away they were. Yet to Ruth they seemed to be in the room with her, claiming her as one of their sisterhood. For now she was a useless woman as they were. She raged with the thought that she might grow to be like them in every respect, she, Ruth Winslow. She wondered if any of them were Norwegians named Ericsson. With the fascination of dread she watched them as closely as they watched the world, with the hypnotisation of unspeakable hopelessness. She had to find her work, something for which the world needed her, lest she be left here, useless and unhappy in a flat. In her kitchen she was merely an intruder on the efficient maid. And there was no nursery. She sat apprehensionally on the edge of a chair, hating the women at the windows, hating the dull persistent flies, hating the wetness of her forehead and the dampness of her palm, repenting of her hate and hating again, and taking another cold bath, to be fresh for the homecoming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother and whom of all the world. She did not hate. Even on the many cool days when the streets in the flat became tolerable and the vulture women of the tenements ceased to exist for her, Ruth was not much interested, whether she went out or someone came to see her. Every one she knew, except the Dunleveys, and a few others, was out of town, and she was tired of all of Dunleveys' mirth and shallow gossip. After her days with Carl in the valley of the shadow, Olive was to her a stranger, giggling about strange people. Phil was rather better. He occasionally came in for tea, poked about, stared at the color prints, and said cryptic things about feminism and playing squash. Her settlement house classes were closed for the summer. She brooded over the settlement work and accused herself of carrying less for people than for the sensation of being charitable. She wondered if she was a hypocrite. Then she would take another cold bath, to be fresh for the homecoming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother and toward whom, of all the world's energies, she knew that she was not hypocritical. This is not the story of Ruth Winslow, but of Carl Erickson. Yet Ruth's stifling days are a part of it, for her unhappiness meant as much to him as it did to her. In the swelter of his office, looking, motor hooting, gasoline-reaking Broadway, he was aware that Ruth was in the flat, buried alive. He made plans for her going away. But she refused to desert him. He tried to arrange for a week more of holiday for them both. He could not. He came to understand that he was now completely a prisoner of business. He was in a rut, both sides of which were hedged with back work that had piled up on him. He had no desire, no ambition, no interest, except in Ruth, and in making the Torah car pay. The Torah car company had never paid expenses as yet. How much longer would old van sale be satisfied with millions to come in the future? Perhaps. Carl even took work home with him. Though for Ruth's sake he wanted to go out and play. It really was for her sake he himself liked to play, but the disease of perpetual overwork had hold on him. He was glad to have her desert him for an evening now and then, and go out to the Peace Waters Country Club for a dance with Phil and Olive Donalubby. She felt guilty when she came home and found him still making calculations. But she hummed waltzes while she put on a thin blue silk dressing gown and took down her hair. I can't stand this grubby shut-in prison! She finally snatched up him on an evening when he would not go to the first night of a roof garden. He snarled back. You don't have to. Why don't you go with your bloomin' Phil and Olive? Of course, I don't ever want to go myself. See here, my friend, you have been taking advantage for a long time now of the fact that you were ill. I'm not going to be your nurse indefinitely, she slammed her bedroom door. Later she came stalking out, very dignified, and left the flat. He pretended not to see her. But as soon as the elevator door clanged and the rumbling old car had begun to carry her down away from him, the flat was noisy with her absence. She came home eagerly sorry to find an eagerly sorry carl. Then while they cried together and he kissed her lips, they made a compact that no matter for what reason or through whose fault they might quarrel, they would always settle it before either went to bed. But they were uncomfortably polite for two days, and obviously were so afraid that they might quarrel that they were both prepared to quarrel. Carl had been back at work for less than one month. But he hoped the Torah car was giving enough promise now of positive success to permit him to play during the evening. He rented a Vinzel car for part time, planned week-end trips, hoped they could spend. Then the whole world exploded. Just at the time when the investigation of Twilight Sleep indicated that the world might become civilized, the powers plunged into a war whose reason no man has yet discovered. Carl read the headlines on the morning of August 5, 1914, with a delusion of not reading news but history, with himself in the history book. Ten thousand books record the Great War and how bitterly Europe realized it. This is to record that Carl, like most Americans, did not comprehend it, even when recruits for the Kaiser marched down Broadway with German and American flags intertwined, even when his business was threatened. It was too big for his imagination. Every noon he bought himself half a dozen newspaper extras and hurried down to the bulletin boards on the Times and Harold buildings. He pretended that he was a character in one of the fantastic novels about a world war, when he saw such items as Russians invading Prussia, Japs will enter war, airplane and submarine attacks, English cruiser. Rats, he said, I'm dreaming. There could be a war like that. We're too civilized. I can prove the whole thing's impossible. In a world puzzle nothing confused Carl more than a question of socialism. He had known as a final fact that the alliance of French and German socialist workmen made war between the two nations absolutely impossible, and his knowledge was proven ignorant, his faith folly. He tentatively bought a socialist magazine or two to find some explanation and found only greater confusion on the part of the scholars and leaders of the party. They, too, did not understand how it had all happened. They stood amid the ruins of international socialism, sorrowing. If their faith was darkened, how much more so was Carl's vague, untutored optimism about world brotherhood? He had two courses to discard socialism as a failure, or to stand by it as a course of action which was logical, but had not as yet been able to accomplish its end. He decided to stand by it. He could not see himself plunging into the unutterable pessimism of believing that all of mankind were such beastly fools that, after this, one great sin. They could not repent and turn from tribal murder. And what other remedy was there? If socialism had not prevented the war, neither had monarchy or bureaucracy, bourgeois peace movements nor the church. With the whole world at war Carl thought chiefly of his own business. He was not abnormal. The press was filled with bewildered queries as to what would happen to America. For two weeks the automobile business seemed dead, saved for a grim activity in war-trucks. Van Zile called in Carl and shook his head over the future of the tour car, now that all luxuries were threatened. But the Middle West promised a huge crop and prosperity. The East followed, then slowly the South. Despite the closed outlet for its cotton crop, within a few weeks all sorts of motor-cars were selling well, especially expensive cars. It was apparent that automobiles were no longer merely luxuries. There was even a promise of greater trade than ever. So rapidly were all the cars of war-warring nations being destroyed. But once Van Zile had considered the possibility of letting go his tour car interest in order to be safe, he seemed always to be considering it. Carl read fate in Van Zile's abstract manner. And if Van Zile withdrew Carl's own stock would be worthless. But he stuck to his work with something of a boy's frightened stubbornness and something of a man's quiet sternness. Fear was never far from him. In an airplane he had never been greatly frightened. He could himself, by his own efforts, fight the wind. But how could he steer a world war, or a world industry? He tried to conceal his anxiety from Ruth, but she guessed it. She said one evening, Sometimes I think we too are unusual because we really want to be free. And then a thing like this war comes and our bread and butter and little pink cakes are in danger. And I realize we're not free at all. And we're just like the rest, prisoners, dependent on how much the job brings and how fast the subway runs. Oh, sweetheart, we mustn't forget to be just mad no matter how serious things become. Standing very close to him, she put her head on his shoulder. Sure mustn't. Must stick by each other all the more when the world takes a run and jumps on us. Indeed we will. Unsparingly the war's cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along the edge of a business precipice. Looking down, he became so accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called courage, began to come to life again, laughing. Let a darned old business bust if she's going to. Only it refused to bust. It kept on trembling while Carl became nervous again, then gaily defiant, then nervous again, till the alternation of Groom and Bravado disgusted him and made Ruth wonder whether he was an office slave or a freebooter, as he happened to be both at the time. It was hard for him to be either convincingly. She accused him of vacillating. He retorted the suspense kept them both raw. To add to their difficulties of adjustment to each other, and to the egomad world, Ruth's sense of established amenities was shocked by the appearance of Carl's pioneering past as revealed in the lively but vulgar person of Martin Dockerel, Carl's former aviation mechanic. Martin Dockerel was lanky and awkward as ever. He still wrote postcards to his aunt in Fall River and admired Berlisk Shoal choruses, but he no longer played the mouth organ publicly, for he had become so well-to-do as to be respectable, as for an agent for the Des Moines Auto Truck Company. He had toured Europe selling war trucks or lorries, as the English called them, first to the Balkan states, then to Italy, Russia, and Turkey. He was for a time detailed to the New York office. It did not occur either to him or to Carl that he was not welcome to drop in any time often as possible to slap Carl on the back loudly recollect the time when he had got drunk and fought with policemen from San Antonio, or to spend a whole evening belligerently discussing the idea of war or types of motor-trucks when Ruth wistfully wanted Carl to herself. Martin supposed, because she smiled, that she was interested as Carl in his theories about airplane scouting and more. Ruth knew that most of Carl's life had been devoted to things quite outside her own sphere of action, but she had known it without feeling it. His talk with Martin showed her how sufficient his life had been without her. She began to worry least he go back to aviation. So began their serious quarrels. There were not many of them, and they were forgotten out of existence in a day or two. But there were at least three pitched battles during which both of them believed that this ended everything. They quarreled always about the same thing which had intimidated them before. The need of quarreling through apropos of this every detail of life came up. Ruth's conformities, her fear that he would fly again, her fear that the wavering job was making him indecisive. And Martin Dockerel kept coming, as an excellent starting point for discussion. Ruth did not dislike Martin's roughness, but when the ex-mechanic discovered that he was making more money than was Carl, and asked Carl in her presence, if he'd like a loan, then she hated Martin, and would give no reason. She became unable to see him as anything but a bore, an unpleasant service, whose friendship with Carl indicated that her husband, too, was an outsider. Believing that she was superbly holding herself in, she asked Carl if there was not some way of tactively suggesting to Martin that he come to the flat only once in two weeks instead of two or three times a week. Carl was angry. She said furiously what she really thought and retired to Aunt Emma's for the evening. When she returned she expected to find Carl as repentant as herself. Unfortunately, that same Carl, who had declared that it was pure egotism, to regard one's own religion or country as necessarily sacred, regarded his own friends as sacred, a noble faith which is an important cause of political graft. He was ramping about the living-room, waiting for a fight. And he got it. The moment of indiscretion, the inevitable time when believing themselves fearlessly frank, they exchanged every memory of an injury. Ruth pointed out that Carl had disliked Florence Cruden as much as she disliked Martin. She renewed her accusation that he was vacillating scoffed at Walter Magnus, whom she really liked, Gertie Cowles, whom she had never met, and even hesitantly, Carl's farmer relatives. And Carl was equally unpleasant. At her last thrust he called her a thin-blooded New Yorker and slammed his bedroom door. They had broken their pledge not to go to bed on a quarrel. He was gone before she came out to breakfast in the morning. In the evening they were perilously polite again, Martin Dockrell appeared, and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the British Air Accord, to get life's supreme sensation scouting ten thousand feet in the air, while dozens of batteries fired at him, a nose-to-earth voloplane. The thinking, Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer, and as one who not merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured, and Martin Dockrell seems so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might go. Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter of fact chatter about a kind of wandering, which shut her out as completely as a project of war. I don't know, said he, but what the biggest fun in chasing around the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a handout and sneak on a blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every breaky and constable out there after you. That's living. When Martin was gone, Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended to be absorbed in a magazine. He took from the mess of papers and letters that lived in his inside coat pocket a war map. He had clipped from a newspaper and drew tactical lines on it. From his room he brought a small book he had bought that day. He studied it intently. Ruth managed to see that the title of the book was Airplane and Air Scouting in the European Armies. She sprang up and cried, Hock, why are you eating that? Why shouldn't I read it? You don't mean to, you... Oh no, I don't suppose I have the nerve to go on enlist now. You've already pointed that out to me. I've been getting cold feet. But why do you shut me out? Why do you? Oh, good Lord. Have we got to go all over this again. We've gone over it and over it and over it till I'm sick of telling you it isn't true. I'm very sorry, Hock. Thank you for making it clear to me that I'm a typical silly wife. And thank you for showing me I'm a clumsy brute. You've done it quite often now. Of course, it doesn't mean anything that I've given up aviation. Oh, don't be melodramatic. Or if you must, don't fail to tell me that I've ruined your life. Very well, I won't say anything then, Ruth. Don't look at me like that, Hock. So hard stunning me. Can't you understand? Haven't you any perception? Can't you understand how hard it is for me to come to you like this? After last night and try? Very nice of you, he said grimly. With one cry of, oh, she ran into her bedroom. He could hear sobbing. He could feel her agony dragging him to her. But no woman's arms could drag his anger this time to let it ache again. For once he definitely did not want to go to her. So futile to make up and quarrel, make up and quarrel. He was impatient about their distant sobs, expressed so clearly a wordless demand that he come to her and make peace. Hell! he croaked. Jerked his topcoat from its nail and left the flat. Eleven o'clock, but chilly November evening. End of Chapter 41 Chapter 42 of Trail of the Hawk This Libra Vox recording is in the public domain, recording by Mike Vendetti, mikevendetti.com. Trail of the Hawk by Sinclair Lewis Chapter 42 Dizzy with all the problems of life, he did not notice where he went. He walked blocks, took a trolley car, got off to buy a strong cigar, took the next trolley that came along, was carried across the 59th Street Bridge to Long Island. At the eighth or tenth stop he hurried out of the car, just as it was starting again. He wondered why he had been such a fool as to leave in the dark street. A flat-faced wooden houses with door yards of trampled earth and general air of poverty, goats, and lunch pails. He tramped on. A sullen and youthless man. Presently he was in shaggy open country. He was frightened by his desertion of Ruth but he did not want to go back nor even telephone to her. He had to diagram where and what and why he was. Determine what he was to do. He disregarded the war as a cause of trouble. Had there been no extra business pressure caused by the war there would have been some other focus further misunderstandings. They would have quarreled over clothes and aviation. Aunt Emma and Martin Dockerel poverty and dancing quite the same. Walking steadily with long periods when he did not think but stared at the dusty stars or the shaky ill-lighted old houses. He aligned her every fault unhappily rehearsed every quarrel in which he had been to blame. His lips moving as he emphasized the righteous retorts he was almost certain he had made. It was not hard to find faults in her. Any two people who have spent more than two days together already have the material for a lifelong feud. In traits which at first were amusing or admirable, Ruth petty manners, of which Carl had been proud, he now cited as snobbish affection. He did not spare his reverence, his passion, his fondness. He mutilated his soul like a hermit. He recalled her pleasure in giving him jolly surprises in writing unexpected notes addressed to him at the office as fussy discontent over normal life. He regarded her excitement over dances as evidence that she was so dependent on country club society that he would have to spend the rest of his life, judging for her. He wanted to flee. He saw the whole world as a conspiracy of secret sinister powers that are concealed from the child, but to the man are gradually revealed by a pitiless and never-index accession of misfortunes. He would never be footloose again. His land of heart's desire would be the office. But the ache of disappointment grew dull. He was stunned. He did not know what had happened, did not even know precisely how he came to be walking here. Now and then he remembered and knew that he had sharply left Ruth—Ruth is dear girl—remembered that she was not at hand, ready to explain with love's lips the somber puzzles of life. He was frightened again, and beginning to be angry with himself for having been angry with Ruth. He had walked many miles. Brown fields came up at him through the paling darkness. A signboard showed that he was a few miles from Maniola. Likely the coming dawn uplift him. He tramped into Maniola, with a half plan of going on to the nearby Hampstead Plains aviation field, to see if there was any early morning flying. It would be bully to see a machine again. At a lunch wagon he ordered buckwheat cakes and coffee, sitting on a high stool before a seven-inch shelf attached to the wall, facing an array of salt casters and ketchup bottles, and one of those colored glass windows with a portrait of Washington, which give, to all lunch wagons, their air of sober refinement. Carl ate solemnly, meditatively. It did not seem to him—in a noble setting for his grief. But he was depressed when he came out to a drab first light of day that made the street seem hopeless and unrested after the night. The shops were becoming visible gray and chilly, like a just awake and janitor and slippers, suspenders and tousled hair. The pavement was wet. Carl crossed the street, stared at the flying speckled cover of a magazine, six months old, that lay in a shop window, lighted by one incandescent. He gloomily planned to go back and have another cup of coffee on the shelf before Washington's glossy but benign face. But he looked down the street, and all the sky was becoming a delicate and luminous blue. He trotted off toward Hempstead Plains. The aviation field was almost abandoned. Most of the ambitious line of hangars were empty now, with faded grass thick before the great doors that no one ever opened. A recent fire had destroyed a group of five hangars. He found one door open, and three sleepy youngsters and sweaters and khaki trousers bringing out a monoplane. Carl watched them start, bobbed his chin to the music of the motor, saw the machine canter down the field and ascend from the dawn to the glory of day. The rising sun picked out the lines of the Uniqlo's framework and hovered on the silvery wing surface. The machine circled the field at 200 feet elevation smoothly, peacefully, and peace beyond understanding came to Carl. He studied the flight. Good and steady. Banks a little sharp, but very thorough. First rate. I believe I could get more speed out of her if I were flying, like to try. Wonderingly he realized that he did not want to fly, that only his lips said, like to try. He was almost as much an outsider to aviation as though he had never flown. He discovered that he was telling Ruth this fact in an imaginary conversation, was commenting for her on Dawn Sky and the planes before him and his alienation from exploits in which she could not share. The monoplane landed with a clean plane. The aviator and his mechanics were willing it toward the hangar. They glanced at him uninterestedly. Carl understood that. To them he was a typical bystander here where he once starred. The aviators stared again. Let go of the machine, walked over, exclaiming, Say, aren't you Hawk Erickson? This is an honor. I heard you were somewhere in New York. Just missed you at the Arrow Club one night. Wanted to ask you about the Bagby Hydro. Won't you come in and have some coffee and sinkers with us? Proud to have you. My name's Barry. Thanks. Be glad to. While the youngsters were admiring him hearing of the giants of earlier days, while they were drinking inspiration from this veteran of twenty-nine, they were in turn inspiring Carl by their faith in him. He had been humble. They made him trust himself, not egotistically, but with a feeling that he did matter, that it was worthwhile to be in tune with life. Yet all the while he knew that he wanted to be by himself, because he could thus be with the spirit of Ruth, and he knew subconsciously that he was going to hurry back to Maniola and telephone her. As the dog trotted down the road, he noted the old Dutch houses for her. Picked out the spot where he had once had a canvas hanger and fancied himself telling her those days. He did not remember that this hanger he had known Istra, Istra Nash, the artist whose name he scarce recalled. Istra was an incident. Ruth was the meaning of his life. And the solution of his problems came all at once, when suddenly it was given to him to understand what that problem was. Ruth and he had to be up and away immediately, go anyplace, do anything, so long as they followed new trails and followed them together. He knew positively, after his lonely night, that he could not be happy without her as comrade in the freedom he craved. And he also knew that they had not done the one thing for which their marriage existed. They were not just a man and a woman. They were a man and a woman who had promised to find new horizons for each other. However much he believed in the sanctity of love's children, Carl also believed that merely to be married and breed casual children and die is a sort of suspended energy, which has no conceivable place in this overall complex and unwilly world. He had no clear nor ringing message. But he did have, just then, an overpowering conviction that Ruth and he, not every one, but Ruth and he, at least, had a vocation in keeping clear of vocations and that they must fulfill it. Over the telephone he said, Ruth dear, I'll be right there. Walked all night, got straightened out now. I'm in Minneapolis. It's all right with me now. Blessed, I want frightfully much to make it all right with you. I'll be there in about an hour. She answered yes, so noncommittedly that he was smitten by the fact that he had yet to win forgiveness for his frenzy in leaving her, that he must break the shell of resentment which would increase her after a whole night's brooding between sullen walls. On a train unconscious of its uproar he was bespelled by his new love. During a few moments of their lives ordinary real people, people real as a toothbrush, do actually transcend the coarsely physical aspects of sex and feeding and do approximate to the unwavering glow of romantic heroes. Carl was no more a romantic hero lover than as a celebrated aviator. He had been a hero adventurer, he was a human being. He was not even admirable except as all people are admirable from the ashmand to the king. There had been nothing exemplary in his struggle to find adjustment with his wife. He had been bad in his impatience, just as he had been good in his boyish affection. In both he had been human, even now, when without reserve he gave himself up to love. He was aware that he would ascend, not on godlike pinions, but by a jerky old apartment house elevator, to make peace with a vexed girl who was also a human being, with a digestive system and prejudices, yet with a joy that encompassed all the beauty of banners and saluting swords, romantic towers, and a fugitive queen, a joy transcending trains and elevators and prejudices. Carl knew that human girl as the symbol of man's yearning for union with the divine. He desired happiness for her with a devotion, great as the passion in Galladad's heart when all night he knelt before the high altar. He came slowly up to their apartment house, if it were only possible for Ruth to trust him now. Mingled with his painfully clear remembrance of all the sweet things Ruth was and had done, was a tragic astonishment that he, the same he who was all hers now, could possibly have turned impatiently from her sobs. Yet it would have been for good, if only she would trust him. Not till he left the elevator on their floor did he comprehend that Ruth might not be awaiting him, might have gone. He looked irresolutely at the grill of the elevator, shut on the black shaft. She was here when I telephoned. He waited. Perhaps she would peep out to see if it was he who had come up in the elevator. She did not dare peer. He walked the endless distance of ten feet to the door, unlocked it, labored across the tiny hall into the living-room. She was there. She stood supporting herself by the back of the Davenport. Her eyes red-edged and doubtful, her face tightened, expressing an enemy or dread or shy longing. He held out his hands like a prisoner, beseeching royal mercy. She in turn threw out her arms. He could not say one word. The clumsy sign called words could not tell his emotion. He ran to her, and she welcomed his arms. He held her, abandoned himself utterly to her kiss. His hard-driving mind relaxed was her body in his arms. He knew, not merely with his mind, but with the vaster powers that drive mind and emotion and body that Ruth, under the shoveled dressing gown, was the glorious lover to whom he had been hastening this past hour. All the love which civilization had tried to turn into normal married life had escaped the efficiency-spooning hook and had flowered. It's all right with me now, she said, so wonderful. All right. I want to explain. Had to be by myself. Find out. Must have seemed so unspeakably. Oh, don't, don't explain. Our kiss explained. While they talked on the Davenport together, reaching out again and again for the hands that now really were there, Ruth agreed with Carl, that they must be up and away. Not wait till it should be too late. She too saw how many lovers plan under the June honeymoon to sail away after a year or two and see the great world and, when they weary die, know that it will still be a year or two before they can flee to the Halcyon Isles. But she did insist that they plan practically, and it was she who wondered, but what would happen if everyone was skipping off like us? Who'd bear the children and keep the fields plowed to feed the ones that ran away? Golly, cried Carl, which that were the worst problem we had, maybe a thousand years from now, when everyone is so artistic that they want to write books. It will be hard to get enough drudges, but now look at any office with the clerks tolling away day after day, even the unmarried ones. Look at all the young fathers of families giving up everything they want to do to support children who do the same thing right over again with their children. Always handing on the torch of life, but never getting any light from it. People don't run away from slavery often enough. And so they don't ever get to do real work either. But, sweetheart, what if we should have children some day? You know, of course we haven't been ready for them yet, but some day they might come anyhow. And how could we wander around? Oh, probably they will come some day, and then we'll take our dose of drudgery like the rest. There's nothing in our dear civilization punishes as it does be getting children. For poisoning food by adulterating it, you may get fined fifty dollars. But if you have children, they call it a miracle as it is. And then they get busy and condemn you to a lifetime of being scared by the boss. Well, darling, please don't blame it on me. I didn't mean to get so oratorical blessed, but it does make me mad the way the state punishes one for being willing to work and have children. Perhaps if enough of us run away from nice normal grinding, we'll start people wondering just why they should go on toiling to produce a lot of booze and clothes and things that nobody needs. Perhaps, my hawk, don't you think, though, that we might be bored in our Rocky Mountain cabin if we were there for months and months? Yes, I suppose so, Carl Mus, the rebellion against stuffy marriage has to be a whole lot wider than some little detail like changing from city to country. Probably for some people the happiest thing would be to live in a oboehemean flat and have parties, and for some to live in the suburbs and get the Mrs. Elected President of the Village Improvement Society. For us, I believe it's change and keep going. Yes, I think so, hawk, my hawk. I lay awake near you all night last night, realizing that we are one, not because of a wedding ceremony, but because we can understand each other's make-believes and seriousness. I knew that no matter what happened, we had to try again. I saw last night by myself that it was not a question of finding out whose fault a quarrel was, that it wasn't anybody's fault, but just conditions, and we'll change them. We won't be afraid to be free. We won't, Lord, life's wonderful. Yes, when I think of how sweet life can be. So wonderfully sweet. I know that all the prophets must love human beings. Oh, so terribly. No matter how sad they are about the petty things that lives are wasted over. But I'm not a prophet. I'm a girl that's awfully much in love. And, darling, I want you to hold me close. Three months later, in February 1915, Ruth and Carl sailed for Buenos Aires, America's new export market. Carl was the Argentine Republic manager for the Van Zile Motor Corporation, possessed of an important salary, a possibility of large commissions, all hopes like comets. Their happiness seemed a thing enchanted. They had not quarreled again. The SS Sangreal, for Buenos Aires and Rio, had sailed from snow into summer. Ruth and Carl watched dials of palms turned to fantasies, carved of ebony in rose and garnet sunset waters, and the vast sky laughed out in stars. Carl was quoting Kipling. The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass. And the deuce knows what we may do. But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail. We're downhill, down on the old trail, the trail that is always new. Anyway, he commented, Deuce only knows what we'll do after Argentine. And I don't care, do you? Her clasping hand answered as he went on. Oh, say blessed, I forgot to look in the directory before we left, New York, to see if there wasn't a society for the spread of madness among the respectable. It might have sent us out as missionaries. There's a flying fish, and tomorrow I won't have to watch clerks punch a time-clock, and you can hear a sailor shifting the ventilators, and there's a little star perched on the formast, singing. But the big thing is that you're here beside me, and we're going. How bully it is to be living, if you don't have to give up living in order to make a living. The end.