 CHAPTER XXXI. The iron hudson flowed sullenly, far below the ice-enameled rock on the palisades, where stood Ruth and Carl, shivering in the abrupt wind that cut down to defile. The scowling slady river was filled with ice-flows and chunks of floating water drenched snow that broke up into booming sheets of slush. The sky was solid cold gray, with no arch and no hint of the lost sun. Crows winging above them stood out against the sky like pencil marks on clean paper. The estates in upper New York City across the river were snow-cloaked, the trees chilly and naked, the houses standing out as though they were freezing and longing for their summer wrap of ivy, and naked were the rattling trees on their side of the river, on the palisades. But the cold breezes enlivened them, the sternness of the swift, cruel river and miles of brown shore, made them gravely happy. As they trapped briskly off atop the hills towards the fiery, to New York, five miles away, they talked with a quiet, quick seriousness which discovered them to each other. It was too cold for conversational fencing. It was too splendidly open for them not to rejoice in the freedom from New York streets and feel like heroes conquering the miles. Carl was telling of Girolaman, of Plato, of his first flights before country fairs, something of what it meant to be a newspaper hero, and of his loneliness as a dethroned prince. Ruth, dropped her defences of a chaperone young woman, confessed that now that she had no mother to keep her mobilized and in the campaign to get nearer to society, and a decent marriage, she did not know exactly what she wanted to do with life. She spoke tentatively of her vague settlement work. In all she said, revealed and honesty as forthright as though she were a god-eyed fanatic, instead of a lively-voiced girl in a blue corduroy jacket with collar and cuffs of civet and buttons from Venice. Then Carl spoke of his religion, the memory of Forrest Haveland. He had never really talked of him to anyone save Colonel Haveland and Tetherton, the English aviator, but now this girl, who had never seen Forrest, seemed to have known him for life. Carl made vivid by his earnestness the golden hours of work together in California, the confidences in New York restaurants, his long passion for the Brazilian trip. Ruth's eyes looked up at him with swift comprehension, and there was a tear in them as he told in ten words of the message that Forrest was dead. They turned gay, Ruth's dirty, charming shoulders shrugging like a Frenchman's, with the exhilaration of fast-walking and keen air, while her voice light and cheerful with graceful modulations and the singer's freedom from twang rejoiced. I'm so glad we came, I'm so glad we came, but I'm afraid of the wild beasts I see in the woods there. They have no right to have twilight so early. I know a big newspaper man who lives in Pompton, New Jersey, and I'm going to ask him to write to Governor about it. The legislature ought to pass a law that dusk shan't come till seven, Saturday afternoons. Do you know how glad I am that you made me come, and how honored I am to have you tell me, Lieutenant Haveland, and the very bad Carl that lived in Girolaman? It's—I'm glad. Seiji, we'll have to hurry like the Dickens if we're going to catch a ferry in time to get you home for dinner. I have an idea. I wonder if we dare. I have a friend, sort of a distant cousin, who married her, a husband in Wilkenhurst, from the Palisades, not very far from the ferry. I wonder if we could make her invite us both for dinner. Of course she'll want to know all about you, but we'll be mysterious and that will make it all the more fun, don't you think? I do want to prolong our joint. You see? I can't think of anything I'd rather do. But do you dare impose a perfectly strange man on her? Oh, yes. I know her so well that she told me what kind of tie her husband had on, when he proposed. Let's do it. A telephone. There's some shops ahead there, and that settlement ought to be a telephone there. I'll make her give us a good dinner. If Laura thinks she'll get away with hash and a custard with a cherry in it, she'd better un-deceive herself. They entered a tiny wayside shop with a sale of candy and padlocks and mittens. While Ruth telephoned to her friend, Mrs. Laura Needham, Carl bought red and blue and lemon-colored all-day suckers, and a sugar-mouse, and a candy-kitten, with green ears and real whiskers. He could not but hear Ruth telephoning, and they grinned at each other like conspirators, her eyelids and little wrinkles as she tried to look wicked, her voice amazingly innocent as she talked. Carl carefully arranging his purchases before her, making the candy-kitten, do the sugar-mouse round and round the telephone. Hello? Hello? Is Mrs. Needham there? Hello? Oh, hello, Laura, dear! This is Ruth! Fine? I feel fine. But, chilly! Listen, Laura, I've been taking a tramp along the palisades. Am I invited to dinner with a swan? What? Oh, yes, I am. Certainly, I'm invited to dinner. Well, my dear, go in town by all means, with my blessing, but that shan't prevent you from having the opportunity to enjoy being hospitable. I don't know. What fairy do you catch? The seven-twenty? No, no, I don't think we can get there till after that, so you can go right ahead and have the bitty get ready for us. All right, that is good of you, dear, to force the invitation on me. She flushed as her eyes met Carl's. She continued, But seriously, will it be too much of a tax on the bitty if we do come? We're dreadful cold, and that's a long, cool way to town. Thank you, dear. I shall be returned unto you, after not too many days. What? Who? Oh, man! Why, yes, it might be, but I'd be twice as likely to go tramping with Olive as with Phil. No, it isn't. Well, as usual, he's getting to be quite a dancing man. Well, if you must know, oh, I can't give you his name, he's— She glanced at Carl appraisingly. He's about five foot tall, and has a long French shovel beard and a lovely red nose, and he's listening to me describe him. Carl made the kit and chased the mouse furiously. Perhaps I'll tell you about him some time. Goodbye, Lordeer. She turned to Carl, rubbing her cold ear with the telephone receiver, and pressed against it. And, caroled, her husband is held late at the office, and Laura is going to meet him in town, and they're going to the theatre, so we'll have the house all to ourselves. Exciting! She swung around to telephone home to tell them she would not be there for dinner. As they left the shop, went over a couple of blocks for the Winkenhurst trolley, and boarded it, Carl did some swift thinking. He was not above flirting, or if the opportunity offered, carrying the flirtation to the most delicious, exciting, uncertain length they could. Here, with dinner in their own house. With a girl interesting yet unknown, there was a feeling of sudden intimacy, which might mean anything. Only when their joined eyes had pledged mischief while she telephoned, she had been so quiet, so frank, so evidently free from a shame-faced erotic curiosity, that now he instantly dismissed the query. How far could I go? What does she expect, which outside of pure romances, really does come to men? It was a wonderful relief to dismiss the query, a simplification to live in the joy each moment gave of itself. The hour was like a poem, yet he was no extraordinary person. He had, in the lonely years of a dead room, been tortured with the un-moral longings which good or bad men do feel. As they took their seats in the car and Ruth beat on her knees with her fur-line gloves, he laughed back, all together happy, not pretending as he had pretended with the EWC. Happy, but hungry. Mrs. Needham should have been graciously absent by the time they reached her house, a suburban residence with a large porch. But as they approached Ruth cried, shh, there seems to be somebody moving around in the living-room. I don't believe Laura's gone yet. That would spoil it, come on, let's peep, let's be Indian scouts. Cautioning each other with warning-pads, they tiptoed guiltily to the side of the house and peered in at the dining-room window, where the shade was raised a couple of inches above the sill, a noise at the back of the house made them start and flatten against the wall. Big chief, whispered Carl, the Redskins are upon us. But old brown barrels shall make many and one the bite the dust. Hush, silly! Oh, it's just the maid. See, she's looking at the clock and wondering why we don't get here. But maybe Mrs. Needham is in the other room. No, because the maid's sniffing around. There, she's reading a postcard, someone left on the side table. Oh, yes, and she's chewing gum. Laura has certainly departed. Probably be Laura's chewing gum herself at the present moment. Now that she's out from under the eye of the maid, Laura always was refined. But I wouldn't trust her to be proof against a feeling of wild dissipation. You can get out of chewing gum. If you live in Winklehurst. They had rung the doorbell on the porch by now. I'm so glad, said Ruth, that Laura's gone. She is very literal minded. She might not understand that we could be hastily married, and even Lisa House this way, and still be only tea acquaintances. The maid did not yet answer. Waiting in the still porch, winter everywhere beyond it, Carl was all excited anticipation. He hastily pressed her hand, and she lightly returned her pressure, laughing, breathing quickly. They started like convicted lovers as the maid opened the door. The consciousness of their staring made them over-embarrassed, and they stammered before the maid. Ruth fled upstairs while Carl tried to walk up bravely, though he was tingling with the game. When he had watched, discovering as everyone newly discovers after every long chilly walk, that water from the cold tap feels amazingly warm on hands, congealed by the tramp, and was loitering in the upper hall. Ruth called to him from Mrs. Needham's room. I think you'll find hairbrushes and things in Jack's room on the right. Oh, I'm very stupid. I forgot this was our house. I mean, in your room, of course. He had a glimpse of her twisting up a strand of naturally wavy brown hair, a silver-backed hairbrush, bright against it. Her cheeks flushed to an even crimson, her blue corduroy jacket off, warmly intimate in its stead, a blouse of blue satin, opening in a shallow triangle at her throat. With a tender, big brotherness, he sought the room that was his, not Jack's. No longer was this the house of other people, but one in which he belonged. No, he heard himself explain, she isn't beautiful. Easter Nash was nearer that, but golly, she is such a good pal. And she is beautiful if an English lane is. Oh, stop. Yes, Miss Winslow, coming. Am I ready for dinner? Watch me. She confided as he came out into the hall. Isn't it terribly confusing to have our home, and even three Toby children already made for us this way? Her glance, eyes that always startled him with blue where dark brown was expected. Even teeth showing headcock side long, cheeks burning with fire of December snow. Her glance and all her manner trusted him, the outlaw. It was not as an outsider, but as her comrade that he answered. Golly, have we a family, too? I always forgot, so sorry. But you know, get so busy at the office. Why, I think we have one. I'll go look in the nursery and make sure, but I'm almost positive. No, I'll take your word for it. You're around house more than I am, but oh, say, speaking of that, that reminds me. Woman, if you think I'm going to buy you a washing machine this year? When I've already bought you a napkin ring and a portrait of Martha Washington? Oh, well, I knew I should have a cruel husband. Joy, I think the maid is prowling about and trying to listen. Sh! The story Laura will get out of her. While the maid served dinner, there could scarce have been a more severely correct pair. Though Carl did step on her toe when she was saying to the maid in her best offhand manner, oh, lay, will you please tell Miss Needham that I stole a handkerchief from my, I mean, from her room. But when the maid had been unable to find any more imaginary crumbs to brush off the table and left them alone with their hearts and the dessert, a most rowdy young married couple quarreled violently over the washing machine, he still refused to buy for her. Carl insisted that, as suburbanites, they had to play cards, and he taught her pinnacle, which he had learned from at the bartender of the Bowery Saloon, but the cards dropped from their fingers, and they sat before the gas-log in the living-room in a lazy, perfect happiness, when she said, All the while we've been playing cards and playing the still more dangerous game of being married, I've been thinking how glad I am to know about your life, somehow. I wonder if you have told still very many. Practically no one. I do. I'm really not fishing for compliments, but I want to be found understanding. There'd never been anyone so understanding. Silent then. Carl glanced about the modern room. Ruth's eyes followed. She nodded, as he said. But it's really an old farmhouse out in the hills, where the snow is deep, and there's logs in the fireplace. Yes, and rag carpets. And old Ruth listened a bobsled with, Golly, I suppose it is a little premature to call you Ruth, but after our being married all evening, I don't see how I can call you Miss Winslow. No, I'm afraid it would scarcely be proper under the circumstances. Then I must be Mrs. Erickson. Oh, it makes me think of Norse galleys and northern seas, of course. Your galley was the airplane. Mrs. Erick. Her voice ran down. She flushed and said defensively. What time is it? I think we must be starting. I telephoned I would be home by ten. Her tone was conversational as her words. But as they stood waiting for a trolley car to the New York Ferry, on a street corner transformed by an arc light that swung in the wind and cast wavering films of radiance among the vague wintery trees of a woodlot, Ruth tucked her arm under his, small beside his great bolster, and sighed like a child. Very cold. He rubbed her hand protectingly, her mouse-like hand in its furline glove. His canny, self-defensive scotch-like Norse soul opened its gates. He knew a longing to give him passion to protect her. A well-meaning desire to have shy secrets with this slim girl. All the poetry in the world sounded its silver harps within him because his eyes were opened. And it was given to him to see her face. Gently, he said. Yes, it's cold and there is big gray ghosts hiding there in the trees, with their leathery wings that were made out of seafog by the witches, folded in the front of them in their glumming attis over the bony, knobby joints on their wings, with big round, platter eyes, and the wind is calling us. It's trying to snatch us on the arctic snowfields to freeze us, but I'll fight them all off. I won't let them take you, Ruth. I'm sure you won't, Carl. And oh, you won't let Bill Donahue keep you from running away, not for a while yet? Maybe not. The sky cleared, she tilted up her chin and adored the stars, stars like the hard cold fighting sparks that fly from a trolley-wire. Carl looked down fondly, noting how fair-skinned was her forehead, in contrast to her thick, dark brows, as the arc light's brilliance rested on her worshipping face. Her lips, a tremble, slightly parted. She raised her arms, her fingers wide-spread, praising the star gods. She cried only, Oh, all this! But it was a prayer to a greater God-pan, shaking his snow-encrusted beard to the roar of northern music. To Carl her cry seemed to pledge faith in that star-sky and the long trail and glorious restlessness that by a dead fireplace of white smooth marble would never find content. Like sword-points those stars are, he said, then. Then they heard the trolley-car's flat wheels grinding on a curve. Its searchlight changed the shadow-haunted woodland to a sad group of scanty trees, huddling in front of an old billboard with its top broken and the tattered posters flapping. The wanderers stepped from the mystical romance of the open night into the exceeding realism of the car. Highly realistic, wooden floor with small muddy pools from lumps of dirty melting snow. Hot air. A smile of Italian workmen, a German conductor with the sniffles, a row of shoes mostly wet and all wrinkled. They had to stand, most realistic of all. They read the glossy car signs advertising soap and little cigars and the enterprising local advertisement of William P. Smith and Sons, all northern New Jersey real estate, cheaper than rent. So instantly the children of the night turned into sophisticated young New Yorkers, who apologizing for fresh air yawns, talked of the theatrical season. But for a moment a strange look of distance dwelt in Ruth's eyes, and she said, I wonder what I can do with the winter stars we found? Will ninety-second street be big enough for them? CHAPTER 32 OF THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK For a week, the week before Christmas, Carl had seen neither Ruth nor Gertie, but of the office he had seen too much. They were rushing work on the tow-car to have it on the market early in 1913. Every afternoon or evening he left the office with his tongue scaly from too much nervous smoking, poked dully about the streets not much desiring to go any place nor to watch the crowds. After all the curiosity had been drawn out of him by hours of work. Several times he went to a super-movie, a cinema palace on Broadway above seventy-second street, with an entrance in New York colonial architecture, and crowds of well-to-do Jewish girls and opera cloaks. On the two bright mornings of the week he wanted to play truant from the office, to be off with Ruth over the hills and far away. Both mornings there came to him a picture of Gertie wanting to slip out and play like Ruth, but having no chance. He felt guilty because he had never bidden Gertie to come tramping, and guiltily he recalled that it was with her that the boy Carl had gone to seek out fortunes. He told himself that he had been depending upon Gertie for the bread and butter of friendship, and begging for the opportunity to give the stranger Ruth Winslow, deities of which she already had too much. When he called Sunday evening he found Gertie alone reading a love story in a woman's magazine. So glad you came, she said. I was getting quite lonely. She was as gratefully casual as ever. Say, Gertie, I've got a plan. Wouldn't you like to go for some good long hikes in the country? Oh, yes, that would be fine when spring comes. No, I mean now in winter. She looked at him heavily. Why, isn't it pretty cold, don't you think? He prepared to argue, but did not think of her as looking heavily. He did not draw swift comparisons between Gertie's immobility and Ruth's lightness. He was used to Gertie, was in her presence comfortably understanding and understood, but find whatever expected in her as easily as one finds the editorial page or the sporting page in a familiar newspaper. He merely became mildly contentious and made questioning noises in his throat as she went on. You know, it's pretty cold here. You can say all you want about the cold and all that in Minnesota, but really, the humidity? Rats, it isn't so very cold, not if you want fast. Well, maybe anyway, I guess it would be nice to explore some. All right, let's. I do think people are so conventional, don't you? Said Gertie while Carl Discerny stole one of Ray's best cigars out of the humidor. Awfully conventional, not going out for good long walks. Dorothy Gibbons and I did find the nicest place to walk up in the Bronx Park, and there's such a dear little restaurant right on the water. Of course, the water was frozen, but it seemed quite wild, you know, for New York. We might take that walk whenever you'd like to. Oh, Bronx Park. Gee, Gertie, I can't get up much excitement over that. I want to get away from this tame city and forget all about offices and parks and people and everything like that. Now she clucked in a patronizing way. We mustn't ask New York to give us wilderness, you know. I'm afraid that would be a little too much to ask of it. Don't you think so yourself? Carl groaned to himself. I won't be mothered. He was silent. His silence was positively noisy. He wanted her to hear it. But it is difficult to be sulky with a bland, plump woman of thirty, who remembers your childhood trick of biting your nails and glances up at you from her embroidery, occasionally patting her brown silk hair or smoothing her brown silk waist in a way which implies a good digestion, a perfect memory of morning's lessons of her Sunday School class, and a mild disbelief in men as anything except relatives, providers, card players, and nurselings. Carl gave up the silence cure. He hummed about the room running over the advertising pages of magazines, discussing plateau fraternities, and waiting till it should be time to go home. Their conversation kept returning to the fraternities. There wasn't much else to talk about. Before, to-night, they had done complete justice to all other topics. Jiroleman, Benny Rusk, Joe Jordan's engagement, Adelaide Benner, and symphony concerts. Gertie embroidered, padded her chair, smoothed their waist, looked cheerful, rocked and spoke, embroidered, padded her chair, smoothed their sleeve, looked amiable, rocked and spoke, embroidered, patbed. At a quarter to ten Carl gave himself permission to go. Said he, I'll have to get on the job pretty early tomorrow, not much taking a A.C. here in New York, the way you can in Jiroleman. So I guess I'd better. I'm sorry you have to go so early. Gertie carefully stuck her embroidery needle into her doily, rolled it up the doily meticulously, laid it down in the center table, straightened the pile of magazines which Carl had deranged and rose. But I'm glad you could drop up this evening. Come up any time. You don't have anything better to do. Oh, what about a tramp? If you know some place that is better than Bronx Park, we might try it. I, uh, yes, why sure. We'll have to some time. And Carl, you're coming up to have Christmas turkey with us, aren't you? I'd like to, a lot, but, darn it, I've accepted another invitation. That was absolutely untrue, and Carl was wondering why he had lied. When the storm broke, Gertie's right arm effectively held out from the elbow, the hand drooping in the attitude of a refined hostess saying good-bye, dropped stiffly to her side. Slowly she thrust out both arms, shoulder high on either side. With her fist clenched, her head back and slightly on one side her lips open in agony, the position of crucifixion. Her eyes looked up, unseeing, then closed tight. She drew a long breath, like a sigh that was too weary for sound, and her plump placid left hand clutched her panting breast, while her right arm dropped again. All the passion of tragedy seemed to shrink in her hopeless gesture, and her silence was a wall muffled and despairing. Carl stared, twisting his watch chain with nervous fingers, wanting to flee. It was raw woman, with all the properties of Giroleman and St. Orgel's cut away, who spoke, her voice constantly rising. Oh, Carl, Carl, why, why, why, why don't you want me to go walking with you now? Why don't you want to go anywhere with me any more? Have I displeased you? Oh, I didn't mean to. Why do I bore you so? Oh, Gertie, oh, cheap thunder, whimpered at this made youth. A more mature Hock Erickson struggled to life and soothe her. Gertie, honey, I didn't mean listen. But she moaned on, standing rigid, her left hand on her breast, her eyes red, moist, frightened, fixed. We always played together, and I thought here in this city we could be such good friends, with all the different new things to do together. Why, I wanted us to go to Chinatown and theaters, and I would have been so glad to pay my share. I've just been waiting and hoping you would ask me, and I wanted us to play and see so many different new things together. It would have been so sweet, so sweet. We were good friends at first, and then you, you didn't want to come here any more, and, oh, I couldn't help seeing it more and more and more and more. I've been seeing it, but I didn't want to see it, but now I can't fool myself any more. I was so lonely till you came tonight, and when you spoke about tramping, and then it seemed like you just went away from me again. Why, Gertie, you didn't seem—and long ago I really saw it, the day we walked in the park, and I was wicked about trying to make you call me El Trude, Carl Deere. Indeed, you didn't call me that or anything you don't like. And I tried to make you say I had a temperament and about Adelaide and all, and you went away and I thought you would come back to me that evening. Oh, I wanted you to come so much. You didn't even phone. And I waited up till after midnight, hoping you'd phone. I kept thinking surely you would. And you never did. You never did. And I listened and listened for the phone to ring, and every time there was a noise. But it never was you. It never rang at all. She dropped back in the Morris chair, her eyes against the cushion, her hair disordered, both her hands gripping the left arm of the chair, her sobs throat-catching and long throb, throb, throb in the death-still air. Carl stared at her, praying for a chance to escape. Then he felt an instinct prompting him to sob with her. Pity, embarrassment disgust, mingled with his alarm. He became amazed at Gertie, easily going Gertie Cowells, had any passion at all, and indignant that it was visited upon himself. But he had to help. He moved her chair and, squatting boisely on its arm, stroked her hair, begging, Gertie, Gertie, I did mean to come up that night. Indeed I did, honey. I would have come up, but I met some friends. Couldn't break away from them all evening. A chill ran between his shoulder blades. It was a shock to the pride he took in Ruth's existence. The evening in question had found Ruth for him. It seemed as though Gertie had dared with shrewish shrillness to intrude upon his beautiful hour. But Pity came to him again. Stroking her hair, he went urgently on, Don't you see, my blessed, I wouldn't hurt you for anything. Just tonight, why you remember first thing I wanted us to plan for some walks? Reason I didn't say more about it was I didn't know as you'd want to, much. My Gertie, anybody would be proud to play with you. You know so much about concerts and all sorts of stuff. Anybody to be proud to. He wound up with a fictitious cheerfulness. We'll have some good long hikes together, eh? It's better now, isn't it, kitty? You're just tired tonight. Has something been worrying you? Tell old Carl all about it. She wiped her tears away with the adorable gesture of a child trying to be good. And like a child's was her glance, bewildered, hurt, yet trusting, as she said in a small, shy voice. Would folks really be proud to play with me? We did used to have some tear-times, didn't we? Do you remember how we found some fools gold and we thought it was gold and hid it on the shore of the lake and we were going to buy a ship? Do you remember? You haven't forgotten all our good times while you've been so famous, have you? Oh no, no. But why don't, Carl, why don't you? Why can't you care more now? Why do care? You're one of the bulliest pals I have, you and Ray. And Ray. She flung his hand away and sat, bold upright, angry. Carl retired to a chair beside the Morris Chair fidgeting, Can you beat it? Is this Gertie and me? He inquired in a parenthesis in his heart. For a second as she stared hottingly at him, he spitefully recalled the fact that Gertie had once discarded him for a glee-club dentist. But he submerged the thought and listened with a rather forced big-brother error as she repented of her anger and went on. Carl, don't you understand how hard it is for a woman to forget her pride this way? The hot air of being one of the elite of Gerulemen again flashed out. Maybe if you'll think real hard, you remember I used to could get you to be so kind to talk to me without having to beg you so hard, why? I'd been here to New York and known the nicest people before you'd ever stirred a foot out of Gerulemen. You were... Oh, please forgive me, Carl, I didn't mean to be snippy. I just don't know what to think of myself, and I did used to think I was a lady, and here I am, practically up and telling you and... She leaned from her chair towards his and took his hand, touching it, finding its hard bony places and a delicate white follows of flesh between his coarsened yet shapely fingers, tracing a scarce seen vein on the back, exploring a well-beloved yet ill-known country. Carl was unspeakably disconcerned. He was thinking that, to him, Gertie was set aside from the number of women who could appeal physically, quite as positively as though she were some old aunt who had for twenty years seemed to be the same adult, plump, an interesting age. Gertie's solid flesh, the monotony of her voice, the unimaginative fixture of her round cheeks, a certain increasing slackness about her waist, even the faint, stuffy domestic scent of her. They all expressed to him her lack of humor and fancy and venturesomeness. She was crystallized in his mind as a good friend, with a plain soul and sisterly tendencies, awkwardly said. You mustn't talk like that, Gertie. We'll be in a regular scene if you don't watch out. We're just good friends, and you can always bank on me, same as I would on you. But why must we be just friends? You wanted to be rude, but he was patient, mechanically stroking your hair again, leaning forward most uncomfortably from his chair. You stammered. Uh, I've been—oh, you know, I've wandered around so much that it's kind of put me out of touch with even my best friends, and I don't know where I'm at. I couldn't make any alliances. Gee, that sounds affected. I mean, I've got to sort of start in now all over, finding where I'm at. But why must we be just friends, then? Listen, child, it's hard to tell. I guess I didn't know till now. What it does mean—but there's a girl. Wait, listen. There's a girl. At first I simply thought it was good fun to know her, but now, Lord Gritty, you'd think I was pretty sentimental if I told you what I think of her. God, I want her so much right now. I haven't let myself know how much I wanted her. She's everything. She's sister and chum and wife and everything. It's—but I am glad for you. Will you believe that? And perhaps you understand how I felt now. I'm very sorry I let myself go. I hope you will. Well, please go now. He sprang up, only two ready to go, but first he kissed her hand with a courtly reverence, and said, with a sweetness new to him, Dear, will you forgive me if I've ever hurt you? And will you believe how very, very much I honor you? And when I see you again, there won't be— We'll both forget all about tonight, won't we? We'll just be the old Karl and Gritty again. Tell me to come when— Yes, I will. Good night. Good night, Gritty. God bless you. He never remembered where he walked that night when he had left, Gritty. The exercise, the chill of the night, gradually set his numbed mind working again. But had dwelt with Ruth, not with Gritty. Now that he had given words to his longing for Ruth, to his pride in her, he understood that he had passed the hidden border of that misty land called being in love, which cardiographers have variously described as a fruitful tract of comfortable harvest, as a labyrinth with walls of rose and silver, and as a trendless realm of unhappy ghosts. He stopped on a street corner where, above a saloon with a large beer sign, stretched dim tenement windows toward a dirty sky. And on that drab corner, glowed for a moment, the mystic light of the rose of all the world. Before a taminy saloon, Chen Hai, yearning toward a girl somewhere off to the south, Carponil recalled how Ruth had worshipped the stars, his soul soared, lark and hawk in one triumphant over the matter of factness of daily life. Carl Erickson, the mechanic, standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and cigars and stationary shop around a corner, was one with the young priest saying mass, one of the suffragist women defying a juring mob, one with Ruth Winslow, listening to the ringing stars. God, help me to be worthy of her. Nothing more did he say in words, yet he was changed, forever. Changed. True that when he got home half an hour later and in the dark ran his nose against an open door, he said, damn it! Very naturally. True that on Monday, back in the office, that awaits its victims equally after Sunday's golden or dreary, he forgot Ruth's existence for hours at a time. True that at lunch with two van-sile automobile salesmen he ate winter schnitzel and shot dice for cigars, with no signs of a mystic change. It was even true that dining in the Brevorut with Charlie Forbes he thought of Istra Nash, and for a minute was lonely for Istra's artistic dissipation. Yet the change was there. End of Chapter 32 Chapter 33 of Trail of the Hawk This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Mike Vendetti. MikeVendetti.com Trail of the Hawk by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 33 From Titherington, the aviator, in his Doventure home, from a millionaire amateur flyer among the orange groves at Pasadena, from his carpenter father in Jirollamon, and from Gurdia, New York, Carl had invitations for Christmas. But none that he could accept. Van Zyl had said pleasantly, Going out to the country for Christmas? Yes, Carl had lied. Again he saw himself as the dethroned prince, and remembered that one year ago, sailing for South America to fly with Tony Bean, he had been the lion at a Christmas party in a ship-board, while Martin Dockneril's mechanic had been a friendly slave. He spent most of Christmas Eve alone in his room, turning over old letters and aviation magazines with pictures of Hawk Erickson, wondering whether he might not go back to that lost world. Josiah Bagby Jr., son of the eccentric doctor at whose school Carl had learned to fly, was experimenting with hydroplanes, and with bomb-dropping devices in Palm Beach, and imploring Carl as the steadiest pilot in America to join him. The dully, noiseless room echoed the music of a steady motor carrying him out over a blue bay, Carl's own answer to the temp provision was, Rats! I can't very well leave the tour car now, and I don't know as I've got my flying nerve back yet, besides, Ruth. Always he thought of Ruth, uneasy with the desire to be out dancing, laughing, playing with her. He was tormented by a question. He had been threshing out for days. Might he permissibly have sent her a Christmas present? He went to bed at ten o'clock on Christmas Eve, when the streets were surging with voices and gay steps when rollicking piano tunes from across the street penetrated even closed windows in a German voice's riches milk chocolate, was caressing old taunam-bom, old taunam-bom, by a groan-sanding blutter. Then, slept for nine hours, woke with rapturous remembrance that he didn't have to go to the office, and sang, The Banks of Cesscatchewan in his bath. When we returned to the house after breakfast he found a letter from Ruth. The day before Christmas and all through the mansion, the maids with turkeys are stirring, please, pardon the scantion. Dear playmate, you said on our tramp that I would make a good playmate, but I'm sure that I should be a very poor one if I did not wish you a glorious merry Christmas and a new year that will bring you all the dear things you want. I shall be glad if you do not get this letter on Christmas Day itself if that means that you are off at some charming country house, having most chaotic, is that the way it is spelled? Probably not. Time, but if by any chance you are in town, won't you make your playmates shout to you from her backyard, a part of your Christmas. She feels shy about sending this illusory greeting with all its characteristic sloppiness of writing, but she does want you to have a welcome to Christmas fun, and won't you please give the tour a car a pair of warm little slippers from Ruth Gaylord Winslow. P.S. Mrs. Terrell has sent me an angel miniature Japanese garden with a tiny pagoda and real dwarf trees, and a bridge that you expect an Alfred noise lander on, and, oh, Carl, and it's a goldfish in a pool, Miss R. Winslow. All the dear things I want, Carl repeated standing tranced in the hall oblivious of the Dr. Landlord's snooping at his back. Ruth, blessed, do you know the thing I want most? Say, great. I'll hustle out and send her all the flowers in the world. Oh, no, I've got it. He was already out of the house hastening toward the subway. I'll send her one of those lingerie tea baskets with all kinds of baby pots of preservatives and tea balls and stuff. Wonder what Dundlovy sent her. Rats, I don't care, Jiminy, I'm happy. Meet a palm-beach to fly? Not a chance. He had Christmas dinner in State with the California Exiles Club. He was craftily careless about the manner in which he touched a letter in his pocket for gloves, which tailors have been inspired to put on the left side of dressed pearls. Twice, Carl called at Ruth in the two weeks after Christmas. Once she declared that she was tired of modern life, that socialism and agnosticism shocked her, that the world needed the courtly stiffness of mid-Victorian days, as so ably depicted in the works of Mrs. Florence Barkley. Needed haircloth as a scourge for white tango dancing banks. As for her, Ruth announced she was going to be mid-Victorian just as soon as she could find a hair-locket, silk mitts, and an elderly female tortoise-shell cat, with an instinctive sense of delicacy. She sat bolt upright on the front of the most impersonal French guilt chair in the drawing-room, and asserted that Phil Dundlovy, with his safe ancestry of two generations of wholesalers and strong probabilities about the respectability of still another generation, was her ideal of a Christian gentleman. She wore a full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the middle, her right hand laid flat over her left, in her lap, her vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself, and tucked one smooth silk-clad, un-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered her poise of a vicarage, remarking, I have been subject to very careless influences lately. She called him neither Carl nor Mr. Erickson, nor anything else, and he dared not venture on Ruth. He went home and bewilderment, as he crossed Broadway he loitered insolently, as though challenging the flying squadron of taxicabs to run him down. What do I care if they hit me? he inquired savagely of his sympathetic and a plotting self. Every word she had said he examined, finding double and triple meanings, warning himself not to regard her mood seriously, but unable to make the warning take. On his next call there was a lively Ruth who invited him up to the library, read extracts from Stephen Lelac's Nonsense novels, turned companiably serious, and told him how divided were her sympathies between her father, the conscientiously worried employer, and a group of strikers in his factory. She made coffee in a fantastic percolator, and played dubasi and ragtime. At ten-thirty the hour at which he had vehemently resolved the go, they were curled up in two big chairs, eating chocolate peppermints and talking of themselves at propose of astronomy and the tour car and Lincoln Berksley's daring, and Mason Winslow and patriotism and Giroleman, Ruth's father drifted in from his club at a quarter to eleven. Carl now met him for the first time. He was a large stomach, bald, sober, friendly man, with a glat stone collar, a huge watch chain, kindly trousers, and painfully smart tan boots. A father of the kind who gives cigars and non-committal encouragement to daughter-suiters. It takes a voice with personality and modulations to make a fifteen-minute telephone conversation tolerable, and youth to make it possible. Ruth had both. For fifteen minutes she discussed with Carl the question of whether she should go to Marion Brown's dinner dance at Delmonico's as Phil Wist or go skiing in the Winchester Hills as Carl Wist, the coming Saturday, the first Saturday in February, 1913. Carl won. They arrived at a station in the Bedford Hills bearing long, curved, proud Norwegian skis, which seemed to hypnotize the other passengers. To Carl's joy, for he associated that suit with the palisades and their discovery of each other, Ruth was in her blue corduroy with high lace boots and a gray sweater jacket of silky wool. Carl displayed a tweed Norfolk jacket, a great sweater, and mittens unabashed. He had a marvellous pack which he informed the inside Ruth contained wool and sword and the magic rug of Baghdad. Together they were apple-cheeked, chattering children of outdoors. For the horizon weight of dark clouds, clear sunshine, lay on clear snow as they left the train and trotted along the road, carrying their skis beyond the outskirts of the town. Country sleigh bells jinked down a hill, children shouted and made snow houses, elders snapped their feet and chucked, fine day! New York was far off and ridiculously unimportant. Carl and Ruth reached an open sloping field where the snow that partially covered a large rock was melting at its lacy crystal edges, staining the black rock to a shiny wetness that was infinitely cheerful in its tiny reflection of the blue sky at the zenith. On a tree whose bleak bark the sun had warmed, vagrant sparrows in hand-me-down feathers discussed rumors of the establishment of a breadcrumb line and the better day that was coming for all pro-talitarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out against a red barn. The litter of corn silk and straw in a barn-yard was transformed from discorted muck to a teslin of warm silver and old gold. Not the delicate red and browns and greys alone, but everywhere the light is well, caress the senses. A distant dog barked good-natured greeting to all the world. The thawing land stirred with promise that spring might in time return to lovers. Oh, to a day is beautiful as it's beautiful as frosting on a birthday cake! cried Ruth as she slipped her feet into the straps of her skis, preparing for her first lesson. These skis seemed so dreadfully wrong and unmanageable. Now I get them on like seven-foot table knives in my silly feet like oint-seeds in the middle of the knives. The skis were unmanageable. One climbed up on the other and Ruth tried to lift her own weight. When she was sliding downhill a hillock they spread apart, eager to chase things lying in entirely different directions. Ruth came down between them, her pretty nose plowing the wet snow-trust. Carl speeding beside her, his obedient skis exactly parallel, lifted her and brushed the snow from her furs and her nose. She was laughing. Falling, getting up, learning at last the zest of coasting and of handling those gigantic skates on level stretches, she accompanied him from hill to hill through fences, skirting thickets, till they reached a hollow at the heart of a farm, where a brooklet led into deeper woods. The afternoon was passing. The swarthy clouds marched grimly from the east, but the low sun red-lettered the day. The country-bred Carl showed her how thin sheets of ice formed on the bank of the stream and jutted out like shells of an elfin cupboard, delicate and curious-edged as Venetian glass, and how through an opening in the ice she could spy upon a secret world of clear water, not dead from winter but alive with piratical black bugs over sand of exquisitely pale gray, like Lilaputin submarines in a very sea. A rabbit hopped away, among the trees beyond him and Carl following its trail, red to her the forest hieroglyphics, tracks of rabbit and chipmunk and crow, a field mouse and house cat. In the snow-paved city of night animals with its edifices of twiggy underbrush. The setting sun was overcrowded now, the air sharp, the groves uneasily quiet, branches contracting in the returning cold ticked like a solemn clock of the woodland, and about them slunk the homeless mysteries that at twilight revisit even the tiniest forest to wail of the perished wilderness. I know there's Indians snaking along in there, she whispered, and wolves and outlaws, and maybe a Hudson Bay factor coming in a red Mackinac coat, and maybe a mountain policeman and a lost girl. Saying which remarked Ruth, the brave young man undid his pack and disclosed to the admiring eyes of the hungry lass, meaning me, especially the hungry, the wonders of his pack, which he had been covertly eyeing amid all the perils of the afternoon. Carl did not know it, but all his life he had been seeking a girl who would, without apologetic explanation, begin a story with herself and him for its characters. He instantly continued her kale. And from the pack the brave young hero whose new Norfolk jacket she admired such a lot. As I said, from the pack he pulled two clammy blue hard-boiled eggs and a thermos bottle filled with tea into which I've probably forgotten to put any sugar. And then she stabbed him and went swiftly home. Don't be frivolous about food, just one hard-boiled egg and you perish. None of these gentle convenience store-box-picknicks for me. Of course I ought to pretend that I have a bird-like appetite, but as a matter of fact I could devour an English mutton chop for kidneys and two hot sausages and then some plum-putting in a box of chocolates, assorted. If this were a story, said Carl, knocking the crusted snow from dead branches and dragging them toward the center of a small clearing, the young hero from Girolemon would now remind the city gal that it is only among God's free hills that you can get an appetite. And then the author would say nothing had ever tasted so good as those trout yanked from the brook and cooked to a turn on the sizzling coals. She looked at the stalwart young man so skillfully frying the flapjacks and contrasted him with the effeminate fobs she had met on Fifth Avenue. But meanwhile, squaw, you better tear some good dry twigs off this brush for kindling. Gathering twigs while Carl scrambled among the roots for dry leaves, Ruth went on again with their story. Yes, said the fair maid of wilds, obediently bending her poor patient back to cruel behest of the stern man of granite. May I put something into the story which will politely indicate how much the unfortunate lady appreciates as heavenly snow placed in contrast at the beastly city, even though she is so abominably treated. Yes, but as I warned you, nothing about the effect of the outer doors on the appetite. All you've got to do is watch as city broker, eat fourteen pounds of steak, three pots of coffee, and four black cigars at a Broadway restaurant, to realize that the effeminate city man occasionally gets up quite some appetite too. My dear, she wailed! Aside from the vulgarity of thing, you know that no one ever admits to real interest in food. I am so hungry that if there is any more mention of eating, I shall go off in a corner and howl. You know how those adorable German Christmas stories always begin. The reason why she avoided Bitterwretch was because her soul was hurt at being kept out of the secret of the beautiful, beautiful food that was hidden in the hero's pack. Now let's have no more imaginary menus. Let's discuss the gentski and the musical asses till you are ready. Already now, he proclaimed, kneeling by the pyramid of leaves, twigs, and sticks he had been erecting. He led a match and kindled a leaf. Fire ran through the mass and rosy light brightened the darkened snow. By the way, he said, as with cold fingers he pulled at the straps of his pack, I'm beginning to be afraid that we'll be a lot later getting home than we expected. Well, I suppose I'll go to sleep on the train and wake up at every station and wail and make you uncomfortable, and Mason will be grieved and disapproving when I get home late. But just now I don't care. I don't. It's la belle aventure. Carl, do you realize that never in my twenty-four, almost twenty-five now, never in all these years have I been out like this in the wilds, in the dark, not even with Phil? And yet I don't feel afraid, just terribly happy. You do trust me, don't you? You know I do. Yet when I realize that I really don't know you at all. He had brought out from the pack graniteware plates and cups, a stoop pan and a coffee pot, a ruddy paper of meat and a can of peas, rolls, Johnny cake, maple syrup, a screw-top bottle of cream, pasteboard boxes of salt and pepper and sugar, lamb chops, coiled in a covered stoop pan, loudly broiled in their own fat, and to them the peas, heated in the nor can, were added when the coffee began to foam. He dragged a large log to the side of the fire and roofed there, sitting. Gorge shamelessly, Carl himself, did not eat reticently. Night snow was falling now, driven by them on the rising wind. The fire, where hot coals had piled higher and higher, was a refuge in the midst of the darkness. Carl rolled up another log for protection from the weather and placed it at right angles to the first. You were saying at Mrs. Needham's that we ought to have an old farmhouse, he remarked, while he snuggled before the fire her back against the log, her round knees up under a chin, her arms clasping her legs. Let's build one right here. Instantly she was living it. In the angle between the logs she laid out an outline of twigs, claiming, here is my room with low ceiling and exposed rafters, and a big open fireplace, not a single touch of pale pink or rose buds. Then here's my room, with a workbench and a bed nine feet long that I can lose myself in. And here outside my room, said Ruth, I'm going to have a brick terrace and all around it you'll try growing in pots on the brick wall. I'm sorry I'm blessed, but you can't have a terrace, don't you realize that every brick would have to be carted two hundred miles through this wilderness? I don't care, if you appreciated me you'd carry them on your back, necessary. Well I'll think it over. Oh look here, I'm going to have a porch made out of fresh saplings outside of my room, and it'll overlook the hills and it'll have outside cots with olive-grave irony blankets over them, and when you wake up in the morning you'll see the hills in the first sunlight. Glorious, I'll give up my terrace though I do think I was weedled into it. Seriously Ruth, wouldn't you like to have such a place, back in the wilderness? Love it, I'd be perfectly happy there, at least for a while. I wouldn't care if I ever saw another air gate or fat rind maiden singing in thirty sharps. Listen, how would this be for a sight? Let me stick some more wood here on your side of the fire. Once when I was up in high Sierras in California I found a wooded bluff. You looked a thousand feet straight down to a clear lake green as midsauce, pretty nearly, not a wrinkle in it. There wasn't a sound anywhere except when the leaves rustled. Then on the other side you looked up onto a peak covered with snow and a big eagle sailing overhead, sailing and sailing hour after hour. And you could smell the pine needles and sit there and look way off. Would you like it? Oh, I can't tell you how much. Have to go there some day. When you're president of the van sale company you must give me a tour car to go in, and perhaps I shall let you go too. Right, I'll be chauffeur and cook and everything, quietly exultant at her sweet unworded promise of liking. He hastily said to cover that thrill, even a poor old low-brow mechanic like me does get a kind of poetic fervor out of a view like that. But you aren't a low-brow mechanic, you make me so dreadfully weary when you're mock humble. As a matter of fact, you're a famous man and I am a poor little street-wave. For instance, the way you talk about socialism when you get interested and let yourself go, really excited. I'd always thought that aviators and other sorts of heroes were such stored dubs. Gee, it'd be natural enough if I did like to talk. Imagine the training and being with the English superintendent at the mine. And I was telling you about in hearing Frazier lecture and knowing Tony Bean with his South American interest, and most of all, of course, knowing Forest Haveland. If I had any pep in me. Of course I'm terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help waiting right in and wanting to talk to everybody about everything. Yes, yes, of course I'm at vomiting and slangy, too. I wonder if everyone isn't, except in books. We've left our house a little unfinished, Carl. I'm afraid we'll have to bless it. We'll have to be going as past seven now and we must be sure to catch the eight oh nine and get back to town about nine. I can't tell you how sorry I am. We must leave our house in the wilds. You really have enjoyed it. He was cleaning the last of the dishes with snow and packing them away. You know, he said cautiously, I always used to feel that a girl, you say you aren't in society, but I mean a girl like you. I used to think it was impossible to play with such a girl unless a man was rich, which I excessively am not. With my little money tied up in the tour car. Yet here we have an all-day party, and it costs less than three really good seats at the theater. I know. Phil is always saying that he is too poor to have a good time, and yet his grandmother left him $15,000 capital in his own right. Besides his allowance from his father and his salary from the law firm, and he infuriates me sometimes, aside from the tactableness of the thing, I quite plainly suggesting that I am so empty-headed that I won't enjoy going out with him unless he spends a lot of money and makes waiters and ushers obsequious. There are lots of my friends who think that way, both girls and the men. They never seem to realize that if they were just human beings, as you and I have been today, and not hidebound members of the dance and tea league, they could beat that beastly artificial old city. Phil once told me that no man, mind you, no one at all, could possibly marry on less than $15,000 a year. Simply proved it beyond a question. That lets me out. Phil said that no one could possibly live on the west side. Of course the fact that he and I are both living on the west side doesn't count. And the cheapest good apartments near Fifth Avenue cost $4,000 a year. And then one can't possibly get along with less than two cars and four maids and a chauffeur. Can't be done. He's right, palsy. Only three maids might as well be dead. The pack was ready now. He was swinging it on to his back and preparing to stamp out the fire. But he dropped his burden and faced her in the low firelight. Ruth, you won't make up your mind to marry Phil, you're sure you will. You'll play with me a while, won't you? Can't we explore a few more? She laughed nervously, trying to look at him. As I said, Phil won't condense to consider poor me till he has $15,000 a year. And that won't be for some time, I think, considering he is too well bred to work hard. But seriously, you will? I don't know how to put it. You will let me be your playmate, even as much as Phil is, while we're still. Carl, I have never played as much with anyone as with you. You make most of the men I know seem very unenterprising. It frightens me. Perhaps I oughtn't to let you jump the fence so easily. You won't let Phil lock you up for a while. No? What's the we be going? Thank you for letting the outlaw come to your party, the fire's outcome. With the quenching of the fire, they were left with smothering darkness. Where do we go? She worried. I feel completely lost. I can't make on a thing. I feel so lost and so blind after looking at the fire. Her voice betrayed that he was suddenly a stranger to her. With hasty assurance, he said, stite, see, we head for that tall oak up the slope. Then, through the clearing, keeping to the right, you'll be able to see the oak as soon as you get the firelight out of your eyes. Remember, I used to hunt every fall as a kid, and come back through the dark. Don't worry. I can just make out that tree now. Right. Now, for it. Let me carry my skis. No, you just watch your feet. His voice was pleasant, quiet, not too intimate. Don't try to guide yourself by your eyes. Let your feet find the safe ground your eyes will fool you in the dark. It was a hard pull, the way back, encumbered with pack and two pair of skis which they dared not use in the darkness. He could not give her a helping hand, the snow was still falling, not very thick nor savagely wind-borne, yet stinging their eyes as they crossed open moors and the wind limped upon them. Once Ruth slipped on a rock or a chunk of ice and came down with an infuriating jolt. Before he could drop the skis, she struggled up and said dryly, Yes, it did hurt, and I know you're sorry, and there's nothing you can do. Carl grinned and kept silence. Though with one hand, as soon as he could get it free from the elusive skis, he lightly patted her shoulder. She was almost staggering, so cold was she and so tired, and so heavy was the snow caked on her boots. When they came to a sharp rise, down which shone an irradiance of an incandescent light, Rhodes right up there, blessed, he cried cheerly, I can't, yes I will. He dropped the skis, put one arm about his shoulder, and one about her knees. And almost before, she had finished crying, Oh, no, please, don't carry me. He was halfway up the slope. He set her down safe by the road. They caught the 809 train with two minutes to spare. It's warmth in the dingy softness of the place seats. Seem polite, he'll. Ruth rubbed her cold hands with a smile depreciating, intimate, and her shoulder drooped toward him. Her whole being seemed turned toward him. He cuddled her right hand within his, murmuring, See, my hand's a house where yours can keep warm. Her fingers curled tight and rested there contentedly. Like a drowsy kitten, she looked down at her two hands. A little brown house, she said. CHAPTER XXIV While scientists seek germs that shall change the world while war comes or winter takes earth captive, even while love visibly flowers of power, mighty as any of these, lashes its human pack-train, on the dusty road to futility. The day's work is the name of that power. All these days of first love Carl had the office for lowering background. The warm trust of Ruth's hand on a Saturday did not make plans for the tour-car any the less pressing on a Monday. The tyranny of nine to five is stronger, more insistent, in every department of life than the most officious oligarchy. Inspectors can be bribed, judges softened, and recruiting sergeants evaded, but only the grace of God will turn three thirty into five thirty. And Mr. Erickson of the tour-car company, a not vastly important employee of the mothering Van Zael Corporation, was not entitled to go home at three thirty, as a really rational man would have done when the sun gold misted the windows and suggested skating. No longer was business essentially an adventure to Carl, doubtless, he would give it up and have gone to Palm Beach to fly a hydro for a Bagby junior had there been no Ruth. Bagby wrote that he was coming north to prepare for the spring's experiments. Wouldn't Carl consider joining him? Carl was now between his salary and his investment in the tour-car company, making about four thousand dollars a year and saving nearly half of it against the inevitable next change in his life. Whatever that should be. He would probably climb to ten thousand dollars in five years. The tour-car was promising success. Several had been ordered at the Abrobiel Show, the Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia agents of the company reported interest. For no particular reason apparently Milwaukee had taken them up first, three Milwaukee people had ordered cars. An artist was making posters with beautiful gypsies and a tour-car and tourists whose continents showed lively appreciation of the efforts of the kind of tour-car manufacturers to please and benefit them. But the head salesman of the company laughed at Carl when he suggested that the tour-car might not only bring the money but really take people off to a larger freedom. I don't care a hang where they go with the thing as long as they pay for it. You can't be an idealist and make money. You make the money and then you can have all the ideals you want. Give away some hospitals and libraries. They walked and talked, Ruth and Carl. They threaded the Sunday afternoon throng on Upper Broadway where, on every clear Sunday, all the apartment dwellers, if they had remembered to have their trousers pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation, promenaded like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting apartment houses and uninspiring Upper Broadway shops. While two blocks away, glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and Hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks in the Soldiers and Sailors Monument is nearly deserted. Together they scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top hat and was thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause makes honest friendship. But hating the same people makes alliances so delightful that one can sit up late nights talking. At the opening of the flying season Carl took her to Hampstead Plains Aviation Field and, hearing his explanations, she at last comprehended emotionally that he really was an aviator. They tramped through Staten Island. They had tea at the Manhattan. Carl dined with Ruth and her father once he took her brother Mason to lunch at the Arrow Club. Ruth was ill in March, not with a mysterious and romantic malady, but with a grip, which she wrote Carl made her hate the human race. New York charity in Shakespeare. She could not decide whether to go to Europe or to die in a swoon and be buried under a mossy headstone. He answered that he would go abroad for her and, every day, she received tokens bearing New York postmarks, yet obviously coming from foreign ports, a souvenir card from the Perias, stating that Carl was visiting Cuddes and Tea, Dimitri Filodofius, and we are enjoying our drive so much, Dim, sense his love. Wish you could be with us. An absurd string of beats from Port Said and a box of Syrian sweets, a Hindu puzzle guaranteed to amuse victims of the grip, and gold fabric slippers of China with long letters nonchalantly relating encounters without laws and wrecks and new varieties of disease. He called on her before her nose had quite lost the grip or her temper the badness. Phil Dunleavy was there, lofty and cultured and evening clothes, apparently not eager to go. He stayed till ten minutes to ten, and by his manner of cold surprise when Carl tried to influence the conversation, was able to keep it to the Chrysler violin recitals, the architecture of St. John the Divine, and Whitney's polo, while Carl tried not to look sulky, and maneuvered to get out the excellent things he was prepared to say on other topics, not unlike the small boy who wants to interrupt with players and tell them about his new skates. When Phil was gone Ruth sighed and said voluptrantly, Poor Phil, he has to work so hard, and all the people at the office, even the firm, are just as common as they can be, common as the children at my beastly old settlement house. What do you mean by common, Bristol Carl? None of our class. What do you mean by our class? And the battle was set. Ruth refused to withdraw Common, Carl recalled Abraham Lincoln and Golden Rule Jones, and Walt Whitman on the subject of the common people, though as to what these sages had said he was vague. Ruth burst out. Oh, you can talk all you like about theories, but just the same in real life, most people are common as dirt, and just about as admissible to society. It's all very fine to be good to servants, but you would be the first to complain if I invited the cook up here. Give her and her children education for three generations. She was perfectly unreasonable and right in most of the things she said. He was perfectly unreasonable and right in all of the things he said. Their argument was absolutely hot and hurt them pathetically. It was difficult at first for Carl to admit that he was at odds with his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension of which they would soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then he was trying not to be too contentious but was irritated into retorting. After thirteen minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers. He remembering the fact that she was a result of city life, she the fact that he wasn't the product of city life. And fact which neither of them realized saved subconsciously was in the background Carl himself had come in a few years from Oscars Erickson's backyard to Ruth Winslow's library. He had made the step naturally, as only an American could. But it was a step. She was lotterly polite. I'm afraid you can't quite understand what the niceties of life mean to people like Phil. I'm sorry he won't give them up to the first truck driver he meets. But I'm afraid he won't and occasionally it's necessary to face facts. Niceties of the kind he has... nice? Really? Or heavy eyebrows arched in a frown? If you're going to get nice on me, of course, you'll have to be condense-sending and that's one thing I won't permit. I'm afraid you'll find that one has to permit a great many things, sometimes apparently. I must permit great rudeness. Have I been rude? Have? Yes, very. He could endure no more. Good night, he growled, and was gone. He was frightened to find himself out of the house, the door closed between them, no going back without ringing the bell. He couldn't go back. He walked a block, slow and credulous. He stood hesitant before the nearest corner drugstore, shivering in the March wind, wondering if he dared go into the store and telephone her. He was willing to concede anything. He planned app phrases to use. Surely everything would be made right if he could only speak to her. He pictured himself crossing the drugstore floor, entering the telephone booth, putting five cents in the slot. He stared at the red and green globes in the druggist window, inspected the display of soaps, and recollected the fact that for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving soap, and he had to use an ordinary hand soap. Golly, I must go in and get a shaving stick. No, darn it. I haven't got enough money with me. I must try to remember to get some to-morrow. He rebuked himself for thinking of soap when love laid dying. But I must remember to get that soap just the same. So grotesque his man, the slave and angel. For while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all his agony. He went into the store, but did not telephone to Ruth. There was no sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly ice-cream soda and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he knew not what. He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her. But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into defiant straightness. He thrust his hands into his side pockets of his top coat and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of niceness. He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go anywhere now, mingle with any sort of people, be common and comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the result of losing his job or of being robbed of his interest in the Turricar. He glanced, interestingly at a pretty girl, recklessly, went into a cigar store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again. As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went over every word Ruth or he had said. And when he reached his room he sat deep in an armchair, like a hurt animal, crouching. His coat still on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged to his leg straight out before him, his hands in his trouser pocket. While he discontentally contemplated a photograph of Forest Habland in full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau, among tangled ties, three cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff buttons, and a haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not know how the play would end. But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in earnest. Forest Portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no picture of Ruth, that he wanted one next time he saw he would ask her. Then he remembered. He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over, gloweringly, and chewed it without lighting it. The right corner of his mouth vicious in appearance. But his tone was plentative as he mourned. How did it all start, anyway? He drew off his top coat and shoes and put on a shabby, though once expensive slippers. Slowly he lay on his bed. He certainly did not intend to go to sleep. But he awoke at two a.m. Dressed, the light burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and dry in his mouth, a victim of all the woes since Troy burned. He shucked off his clothes as he shook an ear-corn. When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual greeting a shining new day, till he realized that it was not a shining day. It was an ominous day. Everything was wrong. That something had happened, really had, was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His cheap reaction was not rick-op and ser-or dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to un-waste the whole affair. Hang it, he groaned. Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth, poor kid. It was rotten to row with her. Her completely all in with the grip. At three in the afternoon he telephoned her house. Myth Ruth, he was informed, was asleep. She was not very well. But the maid pleased ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ixen when she awoke. Certainly the maid would. But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him call again, for days, and Ruth never called him. He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance, on the platform of the subway station at Seventy Second Street. She was with Phil Donnelly. She looked well. She was talking gaily, oblivious of old sorrows. Certainly not in need of Carl Irexen. That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train, stood there alone, do at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society. But suddenly, not wishing to go, not wishing to go anywhere, nor do anything, friendless, bored, driftwood in the city. So easily had the hawk swoop down into her life, going by chance, but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away. For three days he planned a headachey way to make an end of his job and joined Bagby Jr. in his hydroplane experiments. He pictured the crowd that would worship him. He told himself stories unhappily and long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever displace Phil. On the third afternoons, suddenly apparently without cause, he bolted from the office and at a public telephone booth he called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone. "'Can I come up to-night?' he said urgently. "'Yes,' she said. That was all. When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shame-facedly, and confessed that she had wanted to telephone him. Together, like a stage-chorus, they contested. "'I was grouchy. I was beastly. I'm honestly sorry.' "'Well, you forgive?' "'What was it all about?' "'Really, I do not know. I agree with lots of the things you—' "'No, I agree with you, but just at the time, you know.' Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about her shoulders, lightly, but his fingertips were sensitive to every third of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished, intensely conscious of her hair and its individual scent. He did not kiss it. She was scared. She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz. It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano lamp they were silent, happy. He merely touched her hand. When he went, but he sang his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman. I found her again. It isn't merely play now. He kept repeating. And I have learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it says though I learned a new language. Gee, I'm happy. CHAPTER XXXIV On an April Sunday morning Carl rose with a feeling of spring. He wanted to be off in the Connecticut hills, among the silver-grey worm fences, with larks rising on the breeze, and pools of ripple and yellow crocus blossoms afire by the road, where towns white and sleepy woke to find the elms misted with young green. Would there be any crocuses out yet? That was the only question worth solving in the world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The stead brownstone houses of the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the automobile district up past Central Park. Sniffing whistly at damp grass, pale green amid old gray marbling, how a bare patch of brown earth, without a single blade of grass, could smell so stirringly of coming spring. A girl on Broadway was selling wild violets, white and purple, and in front of wretched old houses down a side street, in the Negro District, a darky and a tan derby, and a scarlet tie was caroling, bandying to spring, to muck and birds do sing, and he flowers him so sweet along, dear old bio. Above the darky's head elevated trains roared on the fifty-third street trestle, and up Broadway streaked a stripped motor-car, all steel chassis and grease-modeled, board seat in lured order of gasoline. But sparrows splashed in the pools of sunshine, in a lull, the darky's voice came again, chanting passionately, into spring, spring, spring. And Carl clambered, I've got to get out to-day. Terrible glad it's a half-holiday. Wonder if I'd dare telephone to Ruth. At a quarter to three they were rollicking down the smart side of Fifth Avenue. One could see that they were playmates by her dancing steps and his absorption in her. He bent a little toward her, quick to laugh with her. Ruth was in a frock of flowered taffeta. I won't wait till Easter to show off my spring clothes. It isn't done any more, she said. It's as stupid as Bobby's not daring to wear a straw hat one single day after September 15th. Is the aviator brave enough to wear his after the 15th? Think. I don't know you then. In September? I can't understand it. But I knew you, blessed, because I was sure spring was coming again. And that distinctly implied Ruth. Of course it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the spirit of spring last Wednesday, when I lost my marquee's ring. I was a spirit of vetrol. But now I'm a poet. I have thought it all out and decided that I shall be the American Saperol. At any moment I am quite likely to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb, and indict several stanzas on the back of a calling card while the crowd glops around me in an odd ring. I feel like kidnapping you and making you take me aeroplaning, but I'll compromise. You're to buy me a book and take me down to the Mason Epony for Tea, and read me poetry while I yearn over the window-boxes, and try to look like Nicolette. Buy me a book with spring in it, and a princess, and a sky like this, cornflower blue, with bunny-rabbit clouds. At least a few in the avenue's flower garden of pretty debutantes, in pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots, were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes. I wonder who they all are. They look like an aristocracy, less but made of the very best material, said Carl. They're like maids of honour in young nights, disguised in modern costumes. They're charming. Charmingly useless, insisted our revolutionary. But he did not sound earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything. Less great than joy of life, a day for shameless luxury raiding in the sun, and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted silk, were silver things, and jades, satin gowns, and shoe-buckles of rhinestones, the sleek motor-cars whisked by, in an incessant line, the traffic policeman, knotted familiarly to handsome drivers, pools on the asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze tasted a spring. Car-botter-gates-palms tucked it under his arm, and they trotted off, in Madison Square. They saw gallant and courtly old man with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and a smile of inquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissist in his buttonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs, and smiled to see one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to build for himself and his sparrow-bride, a bungalow, in the foothills of the Metropolitan Tower. "'I love that old man,' exclaimed Ruth. "'I do wish we could pick him up and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, "'I apprily, sir, of thy good will. Come, thou forthfaring, with two vagabonds who do quest high and low, the land of nowhere, something like that. Go on, Carl, be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of Arcadia. Go ask him. Braid too. Besides, he might monopolize you. He'll go with us without his knowing it. Anyway, isn't it strange how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without even speaking to them? You know them the rest of your life and play games with them. The Maison, the P&A, you must quest long, but great is your reward, if you find it. Here is no weak remembrance of lost Paris, but a French-Canadian desire to express what he believes Paris must be. Therefore a super-Paris, all in brown velvet and wicker tables, and at the black long window edged with boxes red with geraniums, looking to a backyard garden whose rose beds lead to a dancing fawn terminal in a shrine of ivy. They set grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had to place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of venison, and Carl red from Yeats. He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew and misty mirror and the fluttering wings of love, till now. His hand rested on her gloved hand. Tony the waiter, re-re-rearranged the serving-table when Ruth broke the spell with, You aren't very reverent with perfectly clean gloves. They chattered like blackbirds at sunset. Carl discovered that being a New Yorker she knew part of it as intimately as though it were a village, and nothing about the rest. She had taught him Fifth Avenue, told him the history of the invasion by shops, the social differences between East and West, pointed out the pictures of friends in photographer's wall cases. Now he taught her the various New Yorks he had discovered in lonely rambles. Together they explored shells of visual section, and the Oxford Quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation dwells in two-door corridors, upper Greenwich Village, the home of battalion tables de hote, clerks, social workers, and radical magazines, of alley rookeries, and the ancient Jewish burying-ground, lower Greenwich Village where rundown American families with Italian lodgers live on streets named for kings in wooden houses with gambered roofs and colonial fan lights. From the same small panel windows where frousy Italian women stared down upon Ruth, Ruth's ancestors had leaned out to greet General George Washington. On open wharf near Tenth Street they were bespelled by April. The Woolworth Tower to the south was a immortal shaft of ivory and gold against an unwinking blue sky, challenging the castles and cathedrals of the old world, and with its supreme art dignifying the commerce which built and uses it. The Hudson was lustrous with sun and a sweet wind sang from unknown Jersey Hills across the river. More to the wharf was a coal barge with a tiny dwelling cabin at whose windows white curtains fluttered. Beside the cabin was a garden attended by the bargeman's comely white-browed wife, a dozen daisies and geraniums in two starch boxes, trudging down the river a scarred tramps-teamer whose rusty sides the sun turned to damask rose, bobbed in the slight swell, heading for an open sea with a pretty flag of flicker and chanting men as they cleared deck. I wish we were going with her. Maybe to Singapore or Nagasaki, Carl said, slipping his arm through hers, as they balanced on the string-piece of the wharf, sniffing like deer at the breeze, which for a moment seemed to bear from distant burgeoning woods a shadowy hint of burning leaves, the perfume of spring and autumn, the eternal wander-call. Yes, Ruth mused, and moonlight in Java, and the Himalayas on the horizon, and the veil of Kashmir. But I'm glad we have this, blessed. It's a day planned for lovers like us. Carl? Yes, lovers, courting in spring like all lovers. Really, Carl, even spring doesn't quite let me forget the covenances our home waiting. We're not lovers? No, we... Yet you enjoy today, don't you? Yes, but... And you'd rather be loafing on a dirty wharf looking at a tramp steamer than taking tea on a plaza. Yes, you know, perhaps, and you're protesting because you feel it's proper to it. And you really trust me so much that you're having difficulty in semi-alarmed? Really? And you'd rather play around with me than any of the skull and bones or hasty-putting men you know, or a foreign diplomat with spayed beards. At least they wouldn't. Oh, yes, they would, if you'd let them. But you wouldn't. So, to sum it up, then we are lovers and it's spring and you're glad of it. And as soon as you get used to it, you'll be glad I'm so frank, won't you? I will not be bullied, Carl. You'll be having me married to you before I can scream for help. If I don't start at once, probably. Indeed, you will not. I have the slightest intention of letting you get away with being masterful. Yes, I know, blessed. These masterful people bore me, too. But aren't we moderate enough so we can discuss, frankly, the question of whether I'd better propose to you some day? But boy, what makes you suppose that I have any information on this subject? That I've ever thought of it? I credit you with having a reasonable knowledge that there are such things as marriage. Yes, but oh, I'm so confused. You've bullied me into such a defensive position that my instinct is to deny everything. If you turned on me suddenly and accused me of wearing gloves, I'd indignantly deny it. Meantime, not to change the subject, I'd better be planning and watching for a suitable day for proposing, don't you think? Consider it. Here's this young Erickson, some sort of a clerk, I believe. No, I don't think he's a university man. You know, discuss it clearly. Think it might be better to propose to day. I ask your advice as a woman. Oh, Carl, dear, I think not to-day. I'm sorry, but I really don't think so. But some time perhaps? Some time perhaps. Then she fled from him and from the subject. They talked after that, only of the sailors that loafed on West Street, but in their voices was content. They crossed the city and on the Brooklyn Bridge, watched the suburbanites going home, crowding surface, car, and elevated. From their perch on the giant spider's web of steel, they saw the long island sound steamers below them passing through a maelstrom of light on waves that trembled like quicksilver. They found a small Italian restaurant, free of local color halons, and what Carl called hobo-hemians, and discovered Frito Misto, and Chianti, and Zavogano, a pale-brown custard-flavored, like honey, and served in tall, thin, curving glasses. While the flat proprietus and a red shawl and a large brooch came to ask them, Everything all right, eh? Carl insisted that Walter McMonney, the aviator, had once tried out a motor that was exactly like her, including the Italian accent. There was simple and complete bliss for them, in the dingy pine and plaster room, adorned with fly-spec calendars, and pictures of Victor Emanuel and President McKinley, copies of the Boletino de la Cera, and several vinegar bottles. The theater was their destination, but they first loitered up Broadway, shamelessly stopping to stare at shop windows, pretending to be Joe the Shooklerk and Becky the Cashier, furnishing a block flat. Whether it was anything but a game to Ruth will never be known, but to Carl, there was a hidden high excitement in planning a flower box for the fire escape. At proposed of nothing, she said, as they touched El's Bose with this sweet-hearting crowd. You're right. I am sorry I ever felt superior to what I called common people. People? I love them all. It's... come. We must hurry. I hate to miss that one perfect second, when the orchestra is quiet and the lights wink at you and the curtain's going up. During the second act of the play, when the hero unawoke to love, Carl's hand found hers. And it must have been that night, when standing between the inner and outer doors of her house, Carl put his arms about her, kissed her hair. Timothy kissed her sweet cold cheek and cried, Bless you, dear. But for some reason he does not remember when he first did kiss her, though he had looked toward that miracle for weeks. He does not understand the reason, but there is the fact her kisses were big things to him. Yet possibly there were larger psychological changes, which occulted everything else, at first, but it must have been on that night he first kissed her, for certainly it was when he called on her a week later that he kissed her for the second time. They had been animated, but to course, that evening a week later he had tried to play an improvisation called The Battle of San Juan Hill, with the knowledge of the piano limited to the fact that if you struck alternate keys at the same time there appeared not to be a discord. I must go now, he said slowly as though the bald words had a higher significance. She tried to look at him and could not. His arms encircled her. With fright and happiness she tilted back her head, and there was the ever new surprise of the blue-o-irises under dark brows. Uplifted wonder her eyes spoke, his head drooped till he kissed her lips. The two bodies clamored for each other, but she unbounded his arms crying, No! No! No! He was enfolded by a sensation that they had instantly changed from friendly strangers to intimate lovers, as she said. I don't understand it, Carl. I've never let a man kiss me like that. I suppose I've flirted like most girls, but and been kissed sketchily at silly dances with this. Carl? Carl, dear? Don't ever kiss me again until, oh, not till I know why I'm scarcely acquainted with you. I do know how dear you are, but it appalls me when I think of how little background you have for me. Dear, I don't want to be sore and spoil this moment, but I do know that when you're gone I'll be a coward to remember that there are families and things and want to wait till I know how they like you at the very least. Good night, and I... Good night, dear, blessed, I know.