H
e wanted to run forward, take their hands, cry, "At last!" He seemed to hear his voice wording it. But, not glancing at them again, he established himself on a chair by the doorway between the two rooms.
It was safe to watch the two girls in this Babel, where words swarmed and battled everywhere in the air. Ruth was in a brown velvet frock whose golden tones harmonized with her brown hair. She was being enthusiastically talked at by a man to whom she listened with a courteously amused curiosity. Carl could fancy her nudging Olive, who sat beside her on the Jacobean settee and was attended by another talking-man. Carl told Ruth (though she did not know that he was telling her) that she had no right to be "so blasted New-Yorkishly superior and condescending," but he admitted that she was scarcely to blame, for the man made kindergarten gestures and emitted conversation like air from an exploded tire.
The important thing was that he heard the man call her "Miss Winslow."
"Great! Got her name—Ruth Winslow!"
Watching the man's lips (occasionally trying to find an excuse for eavesdropping, and giving up the quest because there was no excuse), he discovered that Ruth was being honored with a thrilling account of aviation. The talking-man, it appeared, knew a great deal about the subject. Carl heard through a rift in the cloud of words that the man had once actually flown, as a passenger with Henry Odell! For five minutes on end, judging by the motionswith which he steered a monoplane through perilous abysses, the reckless spirit kept flying (as a passenger). Ruth Winslow was obviously getting bored, and the man showed no signs of volplaning as yet. Olive's man departed, and Olive was also listening to the parlor aviator, who was unable to see that a terrific fight was being waged by the hands of the two girls in the space down between them. It was won by Ruth's hand, which got a death-grip on Olive's thumb, and held it, to Olive's agony, while both girls sat up straight and beamed propriety.
Carl walked over and, smoothly ignoring the pocket entertainer, said: "So glad to see you, Miss Winslow. I think this is my dance?"
"Y-yes?" from Miss Winslow, while the entertainer drifted off into the flotsam of the party. Olive went to join a group about the hostess, who had just come in to stir up mirth and jocund merriment in the dining-room, as it had settled down into a lower state of exhilaration than the canons of talk-parties require.
Said Carl to Ruth, "Not that there's any dancing, but I felt you'd get dizzy if you climbed any higher in that aeroplane."
Ruth tried to look haughty, but her dark lashes went up and her unexpected blue eyes grinned at him boyishly.
"Gee! she's clever!" Carl was thinking. Since, to date, her only remark had been "Y-yes?" he may have been premature.
"That was a bully strangle hold you got on Miss Olive's hand, Miss Winslow."
"You saw our hands?"
"Perhaps.... Tell me a good way to express how superior you and I are to this fool party and its noise. Isn't it a fool party?"
"I'm afraid it really is."
"What's the purpose of it, anyway? Do the people have to come here and breathe this air, I wonder? Iasked several people that, and I'm afraid they think I'm crazy."
"But you are here? Do you come to Mrs. Salisbury's often?"
"Never been before. Never seen a person here in my life before—except you and Miss Olive. Came on a bet. Chap bet I wouldn't dare come without being invited. I came. Bowed to the hostess and told her I was so sorry my play-rehearsals made me late, and she wassoglad I could come,after all—you know. She's never seen me in her life."
"Oh? Are you a dramatist?"
"I was—in the other room. But I was a doctor out in the hall and a sculptor on the stairs, so I'm getting sort of confused myself—as confused as you are, trying to remember who I am, Miss Winslow. You really don't remember me at all? Tea at—wasn't it at the Vanderbilt? or the Plaza?"
"Oh yes, that must have been——I was trying to remember——"
Carl grinned. "The chap who introduced me to you called me 'Mr. Um-m-m,' because he didn't remember my name, either. So you've never heard it. It happens to be Ericson.... I'm on a mission. Serious one. I'm planning to go out and buy a medium-sized bomb and blow up this bunch. I suspect there's poets around."
"I do too," sighed Ruth. "I understand that Mrs. Salisbury always has seven lawyers and nineteen advertising men and a dentist and a poet and an explorer at her affairs. Are you the poet or the explorer?"
"I'm the dentist. I think——You don't happen to have done any authoring, do you?"
"Well, nothing except an epic poyem on Jonah and the Whale, which I wrote at the age of seven. Most of it consisted of a conversation between them, while Jonah was in the Whale's stomach, which I think showed agility on the part of the Whale."
"Then maybe it's safe to say what I think of authors—and more or less of poets and painters and so on. One time I was in charge of some mechanical investigations, and a lot of writers used to come around looking for what they called 'copy.' That's where I first got my grouch on them, and I've never really got over it; and coming here to-night and hearing the littery talk I've been thinking how these authors have a sort of an admiration trust. They make authors the heroes of their stories and so on, and so they make people think that writing is sacred. I'm so sick of reading novels about how young Bill, as had a pure white soul, came to New York and had an 'orrible time till his great novel was accepted. Authors seem to think they're the only ones that have ideals. Now I'm in the automobile business, and I help to make people get out into the country—bet a lot more of them get out because of motoring than because of reading poetry about spring. But if I claimed a temperament because I introduce the motorist's soul to the daisy, every one would die laughing."
"But don't you think that art is the—oh, the object of civilization and that sort of thing?"
"I donot! Honestly, Miss Winslow, I think it would be a good stunt to get along without any art at all for a generation, and see what we miss. We probably need dance music, but I doubt if we need opera. Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera—or war or fiction. I'd like to see all the shoemakers get together and refuse to make any more shoes till people promised to write reviews about them, like all these book-reviews. Then just as soon as people's shoes began to wear out they'd come right around, and you'd read about the new masterpieces of Mr. Regal and Mr. Walkover and Mr. Stetson."
"Yes! I can imagine it. 'This laced boot is one ofthe most vital and gripping and wholesome shoes of the season.' And probably all the young shoemakers would sit around cafés, looking quizzical and artistic. But don't you think your theory is dangerous, Mr. Ericson? You give me an excuse for being content with being a commonplace Upper-West-Sider. And aren't authors better than commonplaceness? You're so serious that I almost suspect you of having started to be an author yourself."
"Really not. As a matter of fact, I'm the kiddy in patched overalls you used to play with when you kept house in the willows."
"Oh, of course! In the Forest of Arden! And you had a toad that you traded for my hair-ribbon."
"And we ate bread and milk out of blue bowls!"
"Oh yes!" she agreed, "blue bowls with bunny-rabbits painted on them."
"And giants and a six-cylinder castle, with warders and a donjon keep. And Jack the Giant-killer. But certainly bunnies."
"Do you really like bunnies?" Her voice caressed the word.
"I like them so much that when I think of them I know that there's one thing worse than having a cut-rate literary salon, and that's to be too respectable——"
"Too Upper-West-Side!"
"——to dare to eat bread and milk out of blue bowls."
"Yes, I think I shall have to admit you to the Blue Bowl League, Mr. Ericson. Speaking of which——Tell me, who did introduce us, you and me? I feel so apologetic for not remembering."
"Mayn't I be a mystery, Miss Winslow? At least as long as I have this new shirt, which you observed with some approval while I was drooling on about authors? It makes me look like a count, you must admit. Or maybe like a Knight of the Order of the Bunny Rabbit. Please let me be a mystery still."
"Yes, you may. Life has no mysteries left exceptOlive's coiffure and your beautiful shirt.... Does one talk about shirts at a second meeting?"
"Apparently one does."
"Yes.... To-night, Imusthave a mystery.... Do you swear, as a man of honor, that you are at this party dishonorably, uninvited?"
"I do, princess."
"Well, so am I! Olive was invited to come, with a man, but he was called away and she dragged me here, promising me I should see——"
"Anarchists?"
"Yes! And the only nice lovable crank I've found—except you, with your vulgar prejudice against the whole race of authors—is a dark-eyed female who sits on a couch out in the big room, like a Mrs. St. Simeon Stylites in a tight skirt, and drags you in by her glittering eye, looking as though she was going to speak about theosophy, and then asks you if you think a highball would help her cold."
"I think I know the one you mean. When I saw her she was talking to a man whose beating whiskers dashed high on a stern and rock-bound face.... Thank you, I like that fairly well, too, but unfortunately I stole it from a chap named Haviland. My own idea of witty conversation: is 'Some car you got. What's your magneto?'"
"Look. Olive Dunleavy seems distressed. The number of questions I shall have to answer about you!... Well, Olive and I felt very low in our minds to-day. We decided that we were tired of select associations, and that we would seek the Primitive, and maybe even Life in the Raw. Olive knows a woman mountain-climber who always says she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We expected to have raw-meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the Savage Woman gave us Suchong and deviled-chicken sandwiches and pink cakes and Nabiscos, and told us how well her sonwas doing in his Old French course at Columbia. So we got lower and lower in our minds, and we decided we had to go down to Chinatown for dinner. We went, too! I've done a little settlement work——Dear me, I'm telling you too much about myself, O Man of Mystery! It isn't quite done, I'm afraid."
"Please, Miss Winslow! In the name of the—what was it—Order of the Blue Bowl?" He was making a mental note that Olive's last name was Dunleavy.
"Well, I've done some settlement work——Did you ever do any, by any chance?"
"I once converted a Chinaman to Lutheranism; I think that was my nearest approach," said Carl.
"My work was the kind where you go in and look at three dirty children and teach them that they'll be happy if they're good, when you know perfectly well that their only chance to be happy is to be bad as anything and sneak off to go swimming in the East River. But it kept me from being very much afraid of the Bowery (we went down on the surface cars), but Olive was scared beautifully. There was the dearest, most inoffensive old man in the most perfect state of intoxication sitting next to us in the car, and when Olive moved away from him he winked over at me and said, 'Honor your shruples, ma'am, ver' good form.' I think Olive thought he was going to murder us—she was sure he was the wild, dying remnant of a noble race or something. But even she was disappointed in Chinatown.
"We had expected opium-fiends, like the melodramas they used to have on Fourteenth Street, before the movies came. But we had a disgustingly clean table, with a mad, reckless picture worked in silk, showing two doves and a boiled lotos flower, hanging near us, to intimidate us. The waiter was a Harvard graduate, I know—perhaps Oxford—and he said, 'May I sugges' ladies velly nize China dinner?' He suggested chow-main—we thought it would be either birds' nests or rats' tails, andit was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like ourselves, except for a Jap, with his cunnin' Sunday tie, and his little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky. And he was readingThe Presbyterian!... Then we came up here, and it doesn't seem so very primitive here, either. It's most aggravating.... It seems to me I've been telling you an incredible lot about our silly adventures—you're probably the man who won the Indianapolis motor-race or discovered electricity or something."
Through her narrative, her eyes had held his, but now she glanced about, noted Olive, and seemed uneasy.
"I'm afraid I'm nothing so interesting," he said; "but I have wanted to see new places and new things—and I've more or less seen 'em. When I've got tired of one town, I've simply up and beat it, and when I got there—wherever there was—I've looked for a job. And——Well, I haven't lost anything by it."
"Have you really? That's the most wonderful thing to do in the world. My travels have been Cook's tours, with our own little Thomas CookandSon right in the family—I've never even had the mad freedom of choosing between a tour of the Irish bogs and an educational pilgrimage to the shrines of celebrated brewers. My people have always chosen for me. But I've wanted——One doesn't merelygowithout having an objective, or an excuse for going, I suppose."
"I do," declared Carl. "But——May I be honest?"
"Yes."
Intimacy was about them. They were two travelers from a far land, come together in the midst of strangers.
"I speak of myself as globe-trotting," said Carl. "I have been. But for a good many weeks I've been here in New York, knowing scarcely any one, and restless, yet I haven't felt like hiking off, because I was sick for atime, and because a chap that was going to Brazil with me died suddenly."
"To Brazil? Exploring?"
"Yes—just a stab at it, pure amateur.... I'm not at all sure I'm just making-believe when I speak of blue bowls and so on. Tell me. In the West, one would speak of 'seeing the girls home.' How would one say that gracefully in New-Yorkese, so that I might have the chance to beguile Miss Olive Dunleavy and Miss Ruth Winslow into letting me see them home?"
"Really, we're not a bit afraid to go home alone."
"I won't tease, but——May I come to your house for tea, some time?"
She hesitated. It came out with a rush. "Yes. Do come up. N-next Sunday, if you'd like."
She bobbed her head to Olive and rose.
"And the address?" he insisted.
"—— West Ninety-second Street.... Good night. I have enjoyed the blue bowl."
Carl made his decent devoirs to his hostess and tramped up-town through the flying snow, swinging his stick like an orchestra conductor, and whistling a waltz.
As he reached home he thought again of his sordid parting with Gertie in the Park—years ago, that afternoon. But the thought had to wait in the anteroom of his mind while he rejoiced over the fact that he was to see his new playmate the coming Sunday.
L
ike a country small boy waiting for the coming of his city cousin, who will surely have new ways of playing Indians, Carl prepared to see Ruth Winslow and her background. What was she? Who? Where? He pictured her as dwelling in everything from a millionaire's imitation château, with footmen and automatic elevators, to a bachelor girl's flat in an old-fashioned red-brick Harlem tenement. But more than that: What would she herself be like against that background?
Monday he could think of nothing but the joy of having discovered a playmate. The secret popped out from behind everything he did. Tuesday he was worried by finding himself unable to remember whether Ruth's hair was black or dark brown. Yet he could visualize Olive's ash-blond. Why? Wednesday afternoon, when he was sleepy in the office after eating too much beefsteak and kidney pie, drinking too much coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes, at lunch with Mr. VanZile, when he was tortured by the desire to lay his head on his arms and yield to drowsiness, he was suddenly invaded by a fear that Ruth was snobbish. It seemed to him that he ought to do something about it immediately.
The rest of the week he merely waited to see what sort of person the totally unknown Miss Ruth Winslow might be. His most active occupation outside the office was feeling guilty over not telephoning to Gertie.
At 3.30p.m., Sunday, he was already incased in funereal morning-clothes and warning himself that he must not arrive at Miss Winslow's before five. Hisclothes were new, stiff as though they belonged to a wax dummy. Their lines were straight and without individuality. He hitched his shoulders about and kept going to the mirror to inspect the fit of the collar. He repeatedly re brushed his hair, regarding the unclean state of his military brushes with disgust. About six times he went to the window to see if it had started to snow.
At ten minutes to four he sternly jerked on his coat and walked far north of Ninety-second Street, then back.
He arrived at a quarter to five, but persuaded himself that this was a smarter hour of arrival than five.
Ruth Winslow's home proved to be a rather ordinary three-story-and-basement gray stone dwelling, with heavy Russian net curtains at the broad, clear-glassed windows of the first floor, and an attempt to escape from the stern drabness of the older type of New York houses by introducing a box-stoop and steps with a carved stone balustrade, at the top of which perched a meek old lion of 1890, with battered ears and a truly sensitive stone nose. A typical house of the very well-to-do yet not wealthy "upper middle class"; a house predicating one motor-car, three not expensive maids, brief European tours, and the best preparatory schools and colleges for the sons.
A maid answered the door and took his card—a maid in a frilly apron and black uniform—neither a butler nor a slatternly Biddy. In the hall, as the maid disappeared up-stairs, Carl had an impression of furnace heat and respectability. Rather shy, uncomfortable, anxious to be acceptable, warning himself that as a famous aviator he need not be in awe of any one, but finding that the warning did not completely take, he drew off his coat and gloves and, after a swift inspection of his tie, gazed about with more curiosity than he had ever given to any other house.
For all the stone lion in front, this was quite the old-line English-basement house, with the inevitable frontand back parlors—though here they were modified into drawing-room and dining-room. The walls of the hall were decked with elaborate, meaningless scrolls in plaster bas-relief, echoed by raised circles on the ceiling just above the hanging chandelier, which was expensive and hideous, a clutter of brass and knobby red-and-blue glass. The floor was of hardwood in squares, dark and richly polished, highly self-respecting—a floor that assumed civic responsibility from a republican point of view, and a sound conservative business established since 1875 or 1880. By the door was a huge Japanese vase, convenient either for depositing umbrellas or falling over in the dark. Then, a long mirror in a dull-red mahogany frame, and a table of mahogany so refined that no one would ever dream of using it for anything more useful than calling-cards. It might have been the table by the king's bed, on which he leaves his crown on a little purple cushion at night. Solid and ostentatious.
The drawing-room, to the left, was dark and still and unsympathetic and expensive; a vista of brocade-covered French-gilt chairs and a marquetry table and a table of onyx top, on which was one book bound in ooze calf, and one vase; cream-colored heavy carpet and a crystal chandelier; fairly meretricious paintings of rocks, and thatched cottages, and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of them in large gilt frames protected by shadow-boxes. In a corner was a cabinet of gilt and glass, filled with Dresden-china figurines and toy tables and a carven Swiss musical powder-box. The fireplace was of smooth, chilly white marble, with an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, and a fire-screen painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses, making silken unreal love and scandalously neglecting silky unreal sheep. By the hearth were shiny fire-irons which looked as though they had never been used. The whole room looked as though it had never been used—except during the formal calls of overdressed matrons with card-cases and prejudices.The one human piece of furniture in the room, a couch soft and slightly worn, on which lovers might have sat and small boys bounced, was trying to appear useless, too, under its row of stiff satin cushions with gold cords.... Well-dusted chairs on which no one wished to sit; expensive fireplace that never shone; prized pictures with less imagination than the engravings on a bond—that drawing-room had the soul of a banker with side-whiskers.
Carl by no means catalogued all the details, but he did get the effect of ingrowing propriety. It is not certain that he thought the room in bad taste. It is not certain that he had any artistic taste whatever; or that his attack upon the pretensions of authors had been based on anything more fundamental than a personal irritation due to having met blatant camp-followers of the arts. And it is certain that one of his reactions as he surveyed the abject respectability of that room was a slight awe of the solidity of social position which it represented, and which he consciously lacked. But, whether from artistic instinct or from ignorance, he was sure that into the room ought to blow a sudden great wind, with the scent of forest and snow. He shook his head when the maid returned, and he followed her up-stairs. Surely a girl reared here would never run away and play with him.
He heard lively voices from the library above. He entered a room to be lived in and be happy in, with a jolly fire on the hearth and friendly people on a big, brown davenport. Ruth Winslow smiled at him from behind the Colonial silver and thin cups on the tea-table, and as he saw her light-filled eyes, saw her cock her head gaily in welcome, he was again convinced that he had found a playmate.
A sensation of being pleasantly accepted warmed him as she cried, "So glad——" and introduced him, gave him tea and a cake with nuts in it. From a wing-chairCarl searched the room and the people. There were two paintings—a pale night sea and an arching Japanese bridge under slanting rain, both imaginative and well-done. There was a mahogany escritoire, which might have been stiff but was made human by scattered papers on the great blotter and books crammed into the shelves. Other books were heaped on a table as though people had been reading them. Later he found how amazingly they were assorted—the latest novel of Robert Chambers beside H. G. Wells'sFirst and Last Things; a dusty expensive book on Italian sculpture near a cheap reprint ofDodo.
The chairs were capacious, the piano a workmanlike upright, not dominating the room, but ready for music; and in front of the fire was an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering in his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the room. They were New-Yorkers and, unlike over half of the population, born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody and remembers when Fourteenth Street was the shopping-center. Olive Dunleavy was shinily present, her ash-blond hair in a new coiffure. She was arguing with a man of tight morning-clothes and a high-bred face about the merits of "Parsifal," which, Olive declared, no one ever attended except as a matter of conscience.
"Now, Georgie," she said, "issa Georgie, you shall have your opera—and you shall jolly well have it alone, too!" Olive was vivid about it all, but Carl saw that she was watching him, and he was shy as he wondered what Ruth had told her.
Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, a clear-faced, slender, well-bathed boy of twenty-six, with too high a forehead, with discontent in his face and in his thin voice, carelessly well-dressed in a soft-gray suit and an impressionistic tie, was also inspecting Carl, while talking to a pretty, commonplace, finishing-school-finished girl. Carl instantlydisliked Philip Dunleavy, and was afraid of his latent sarcasm.
Indeed, Carl felt more and more that beneath the friendliness with which he was greeted there was no real welcome as yet, save possibly on the part of Ruth. He was taken on trial. He was a Mr. Ericson, not any Mr. Ericson in particular.
Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl himself was part of a hash-group—an older woman who seemed to know Rome and Paris better than New York, and might be anything from a milliner to a mondaine; a keen-looking youngster with tortoise-shell spectacles; finally, Ruth's elder brother, Mason J. Winslow, Jr., a tall, thin, solemn, intensely well-intentioned man of thirty-seven, with a long, clean-shaven face, and a long, narrow head whose growing baldness was always spoken of as a result of his hard work. Mason J. Winslow, Jr., spoke hesitatingly, worried over everything, and stood for morality and good business. He was rather dull in conversation, rather kind in manner, and accomplished solid things by unimaginatively sticking at them. He didn't understand people who did not belong to a good club.
Carl contributed a few careful platitudes to a frivolous discussion of whether it would not be advisable to solve the woman-suffrage question by taking the vote away from men and women both and conferring it on children. Mason Winslow ambled to the big table for a cigarette, and Carl pursued him. While they stood talking about "the times are bad," Carl was spying upon Ruth, and the minute her current group wandered off to the davenport he made a dash at the tea-table and got there before Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, who was obviously manœuvering like himself. Philip gave him a covert "Who are you, fellow?" glance, took a cake, and retired.
From his wicker chair facing Ruth's, Carl said, gloomily, "It isn't done."
"Yes," said Ruth, "I know it, but still some very smart people are doing it this season."
"But do you think the woman that writes 'What the man will wear' in the theater programs would stand for it?"
"Not," gravely considered Ruth, "if there were black stitching on the dress-glove. Yet there is some authority for frilled shirts."
"You think it might be considered then?"
"I will not come between you and your haberdasher, Mr. Ericson."
"This is a foolish conversation. But since you think the better classes do it—gee! it's getting hard for me to keep up this kind of 'Dolly Dialogue.' What I wanted to do was to request you to give me concisely but fully a sketch of 'Who is Miss Ruth Winslow?' and save me from making any pet particular breaks. And hereafter, I warn you, I'm going to talk like my cousin, the carpet-slipper model."
"Name, Ruth Winslow. Age, between twenty and thirty. Father, Mason Winslow, manufacturing contractor for concrete. Brothers, Mason Winslow, Jr., whose poor dear head is getting somewhat bald, as you observe, and Bobby Winslow, ne'er-do-weel, who is engaged in subverting discipline at medical school, and who dances divinely. My mother died three years ago. I do nothing useful, but I play a good game of bridge and possess a voice that those as know pronounce passable. I have a speaking knowledge of French, a reading knowledge of German, and a singing knowledge of Italian. I am wearing an imported gown, for which the House of Winslow will probably never pay. I live in this house, and am Episcopalian—not so much High Church as highly infrequent church. I regard the drawing-room down-stairs as the worst example of late-Victorian abominations in my knowledge, but I shall probably never persuade father to change it because Mason thinks it issacred to the past. My ambition in life is to be catty to the Newport set after I've married an English diplomat with a divine mustache. Never having met such a personage outside ofTatlerandVogue, I can't give you very many details regarding him. Oh yes, of course, he'll have to play a marvelous game of polo and have a château in Provençe and also a ranch in Texas, where I shall wear riding-breeches and live next to Nature and have a Chinese cook in blue silk. I think that's my whole history. Oh, I forgot. I play at the piano and am very ignorant, and completely immersed in the worst traditions of the wealthy Micks of the Upper West Side, and I always pretend that I live here instead of on the Upper East Side because 'the air is better.'"
"What is this Upper West Side? Is it a state of mind?"
"Indeed it is not. It's a state of pocketbook. The Upper West Side is composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue. You know everybody and went to school with everybody and played in the Park with everybody, and mostly your papa is in wholesale trade and haughty about people in retail. You go to Europe one summer and to the Jersey coast the next. All your clothes and parties and weddings and funerals might be described as 'elegant.' That's the Upper West Side. Now the dread truth about you.... Do you know, after the unscrupulous way in which you followed up a mere chance introduction at a tea somewhere, I suspect you to be a well-behaved young man who leads an entirely blameless life. Or else you'd never dare to jump the fence and come and play in my back yard when all the other boys politely knock at the front door and get sent home."
"Me—well, I'm a wage-slave of the VanZile Motor people, in charge of the Touricar department. Age, twenty-eight—almost. Habits, all bad.... No, I'll tell you. I'mone of those stern, silent men of granite you read about, and only my man knows the human side of me, because all the guys on Wall Street tremble in me presence."
"Yes, but then how can you belong to the Blue Bowl Sodality?"
"Um, Yes——I've got it. You must have read novels in which the stern, silent man of granite has a secret tenderness in his heart, and he keeps the band of the first cigar he ever smoked in a little safe in the wall, and the first dollar he ever made in a frame—that's me."
"Of course! The cigar was given him by his flaxen-haired sweetheart back in Jenkins Corners, and in the last chapter he goes back and marries her."
"Not always, I hope!" Of what Carl was thinking is not recorded. "Well, as a matter of fact, I've been a fairly industrious young man of granite the last few months, getting out the Touricar."
"What is a Touricar? It sounds like an island inhabited by cannibals, exports hemp and cocoanut, see pink dot on the map, nor' by nor'east of Mogador."
Carl explained.
"I'm terribly interested," said Ruth. (But she made it sound as though she really was.) "I think it's so wonderful.... I want to go off tramping through the Berkshires. I'm so tired of going to the same old places."
"Some time, when you're quite sure I'm an estimable young Y. M. C. A. man, I'm going to try to persuade you to come out for a real tramp."
She seemed to be considering the idea, not seriously, but——
Philip Dunleavy eventuated.
For some time Philip had been showing signs of interest in Ruth and Carl. Now he sauntered to the table, begged for another cup of tea, said agreeable things in regard to putting orange marmalade in tea, and calmly established himself. Ruth turned toward him.
Carl had fancied that there was, for himself, in Ruth'svoice, something more friendly, in her infectious smile something more intimate than she had given the others, but when she turned precisely the same cheery expression upon Philip, Carl seemed to have lost something which he had trustingly treasured for years. He was the more forlorn as Olive Dunleavy joined them, and Ruth, Philip, and Olive discussed the engagement of one Mary Meldon. Olive recalled Miss Meldon as she had been in school days at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Philip told of her flirtations at the old Long Beach Hotel.
The names of New York people whom they had always known; the names of country clubs—Baltusrol and Meadow Brook and Peace Waters; the names of streets, with a sharp differentiation between Seventy-fourth Street and Seventy-fifth Street; Durland's Riding Academy, the Rink of a Monday morning, and other souvenirs of a New York childhood; the score of the last American polo team and the coming dances—these things shut Carl out as definitely as though he were a foreigner. He was lonely. He disliked Phil Dunleavy's sarcastic references. He wanted to run away.
Ruth seemed to realize that Carl was shut out. Said she to Phil Dunleavy: "I wish you could have seen Mr. Ericson save my life last Sunday. I had an experience."
"What was that?" asked the man whom Olive called "Georgie," joining the tea-table set.
The whole room listened as Ruth recounted the trip to Chinatown, Mrs. Salisbury's party, and the hero who had once been a passenger in an aeroplane.
Throughout she kept turning toward Carl. It seemed to reunite him to the company. As she closed, he said:
"The thing that amused me about the parlor aviator was his laying down the law that the Atlantic will be crossed before the end of 1913, and his assumption that we'll all have aeroplanes in five years. I know from my own business, the automobile business, about how much such prophecies are worth."
"Don't you think the Atlantic will be crossed soon?" asked the keen-looking man with the tortoise-shell spectacles.
Phil Dunleavy broke in with an air of amused sophistication: "I think the parlor aviator was right. Really, you know, aviation is too difficult a subject for the layman to make any predictions about—either what it can or can't do."
"Oh yes," admitted Carl; and the whole room breathed. "Oh yes."
Dunleavy went on in his thin, overbred, insolent voice, "Now I have it on good authority, from a man who's a member of the Aero Club, that next year will be the greatest year aviation has ever known, and that the Wrights have an aeroplane up their sleeve with which they'll cross the Atlantic without a stop, during the spring of 1914 at the very latest."
"That's unfortunate, because the aviation game has gone up completely in this country, except for hydro-aeroplaning and military aviation, and possibly it never will come back," said Carl, a hint of pique in his voice.
"What is your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring round on his slender left little finger and the whole room waited, testing this positive-spoken outsider.
"Well," drawled Carl, "I have fairly good authority. Walter MacMonnies, for instance, and he is probably the best flier in the country to-day, except for Lincoln Beachey."
"Oh yes, he's a good flier," said Phil, contemptuously, with a shadowy smile for Ruth. "Still, he's no better than Aaron Solomons, and he isn't half so great a flier as that chap with the same surname as your own, Hawk Ericson, whom I myself saw coming up the Jersey coast when he won that big race to New York.... You see, I've been following this aviation pretty closely."
Carl saw Ruth's head drop an inch, and her eyes closeto a slit as she inspected him with sudden surprise. He knew that it had just occurred to her who he was. Their eyes exchanged understanding. "She does get things," he thought, and said, lightly:
"Well, I honestly hate to take the money, Mr. Dunleavy, but I'm in a position to know that MacMonnies is a better flier to-day than Ericson is, be——"
"But see here——"
"——because I happen tobeHawk Ericson."
"What a chump I am!" groaned the man in tortoise-shell spectacles. "Of course! I remember your picture, now."
Phil was open-mouthed. Ruth laughed. The rest of the room gasped. Mason Winslow, long and bald, was worrying over the question of How to Receive Aviators at Tea.
And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing the jam.
A
t home, early that evening, Carl's doctor-landlord gave him the message that a Miss Gertrude Cowles had called him up, but had declined to leave a number. The landlord's look indicated that it was no fault of his if Carl had friends who were such fools that they didn't leave their numbers. Carl got even with him by going out to the corner drug-store to telephone Gertie, instead of giving him a chance to listen.
"Hello?" said Gertie over the telephone. "Oh, hello, Carl; I just called up to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I thought perhaps you might like to come up if you haven't anything better to do."
Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Dunleavy and English-basement houses with cream-colored drawing-rooms. But he went up to Gertie's.
They were all there—Gertie and Adelaide, Ray and his mother, and Miss Greene, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis; all playing parcheesi, explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on Sunday, but that parcheesi was "different." Ray winked at Carl as they said it.
The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a cockroach with a ruler.
As the others began to disappear, Gertie said to Carl: "Don't go till I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday. Lots of news from home. Joe Jordan is engaged!"
They were left alone. Gertie glanced at him intimately. He stiffened. He knew that Gertie was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would be the inevitable sequence of a friendship which Ruth or Olive could take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man just starting in business, was un-heroically afraid of matrimony.
Yet his stiffness of attitude disappeared when Gertie had read the letter from Joralemon and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy: "I can just see them out sleighing. Sometimes I wish I was out there. Honest, Carl, for all the sea and the hills here, don't you wish sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooded bluff over a lake?"
"Yes!" he cried. "I've been away so long now that I don't ever feel homesick for any particular part of the country; but just the same I would like to see the lakes. And I do miss the prairies sometimes. Oh, I was reading something the other day—fellow was trying to define the different sorts of terrain—here it is, cut it out of the paper." He produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a clipping hacked from a newspaper with a nail-file, and read:
"'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long grasses shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral to grave saints of the open; all these Ilove, but nowhere do I find content save on the mid-western prairie, where the light of sky and plain drugs the senses, where the sound of meadow-larks at dawn fulfils my desire for companionship, and the easy creak of the buggy, as we top rise after rise, bespells me into an afternoon slumber which the nervous town shall never know.'
"I cut the thing out because I was thinking that the prairies, stretching out the way they do, make me want to go on and on, in an aeroplane or any old thing. Lord, Lord! I guess before long I'll have to be beating it again—like the guy in Kipling that always got sick of reading the same page too long."
"Oh, but Carl, you don't mean to say you're going to give up your business, when you're doing so well? And aviation shows what you can do if you stick to a thing, Carl, and not just wander around like you used to do. We do want to see you succeed."
His reply was rather weak: "Well, gee! I guess I'll succeed, all right, but I don't see much use of succeeding if you have to be stuck down in a greasy city street all your life."
"That's very true, Carl, but do you appreciate the city? Have you ever been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or gone to a single symphony concert at Carnegie Hall?"
Carl was convinced that Gertie was a highly superior person; that she was getting far more of the good of New York than he.... He would take her to a concert, have her explain the significance of the music.
It was never to occur sharply to him that, though Gertie referred frequently to concerts and pictures, she showed no vast amount of knowledge about them. She was a fixed fact in his mind; had been for twenty years. He could have a surface quarrel with her because he knew the fundamental things in her, and with these, he was sure, no one could quarrel. His thoughts of Ruth and Olivewere delightful surprises; his impression of Gertie was stable as the Rockies.
Carl wasn't sure whether Upper West Side young ladies could be persuaded to attend a theater party upon short acquaintance, but he tried, and arranged a party of Ruth and Olive and himself, Walter MacMonnies (in town on his way from Africa to San Diego), Charley Forbes of theChronicleand, for chaperon, the cosmopolitan woman whom he had met at Ruth's, and who proved to be a Mrs. Tirrell, a dismayingly smart dressmaker.
When he called for Ruth he expected such a gay girl as had poured tea. He was awed to find her agrande damein black velvet, more dignified, apparently inches taller, and in a vice-regally bad temper. As they drove off she declared:
"Sorry I'm in such a villainous temper. I hadn't a single pair of decent white gloves, and I tore some old black Spanish lace on the gown I was going to wear, and my entire family, whom God unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, clustered about my door while I was dressing and bawled in queries about laundry and other horribly vulgar things."
Carl did not see much of the play. He was watching Ruth's eyes, listening to her whispered comments. She declared that she was awed by the presence of two aviators and a newspaper man. Actually, she was working, working at bringing out MacMonnies, a shy, broad-shouldered, inarticulate youth who supposed that he never had to talk.
Carl had planned to go to the Ritz for after-theater supper, but Ruth and Olive persuaded him to take them to the café of the Rector's of that time; for, they said, they had never been in a Broadway café, and they wanted to see the famous actors with their make-ups off.
At the table Carl carried Ruth off in talk, like a young Lochinvar out of the Middle West. Around them wasthe storm of highballs and brandy and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar-smoke, shirt-fronts, white shoulders, and drab waiters; yet here was a quiet refuge for the eternal force of life....
Carl was asking: "Would you rather be a perfect lady and have blue bowls with bunnies on them for your very worst dissipation, or be like your mountain-climbing woman and have anarchists for friends one day and be off hiking through the clouds the next?"
"Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the 'nice things of life,' but I do get tired of being nice. Especially when I have a bad temper, as I had to-night. I'm not at all imprisoned in a harem, and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been brought up to look at things that aren't 'like the home life of our dear Queen' as impossible, and I'm quite sure that father believes that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be rich. But I've been reading; and I've made—to you it may seem silly to call it a discovery, but to me it's the greatest discovery I've ever made: that people are just people, all of them—that the little mousey clerk may be a hero, and the hero may be a nobody—that the motorman that lets his beastly car spatter mud on my nice new velvet skirt may be exactly the same sort of person as the swain who commiserates with me in his cunnin' Harvard accent. Do you think that?"
"I know it. Most of my life I've been working with men with dirty finger-nails, and the only difference between them and the men with clean nails is a nail-cleaner, and that costs just ten cents at the corner drug-store. Seriously—I remember a cook I used to talk to on my way down to Panama once——"
("Panama! How I'd like to go there!")
"——and he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met."
"Yes, but generally do you find very much—oh, courtesyand that sort of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself 'the better class'?"
"No, I don't."
"You don't? Why, I thought—the way you spoke——"
"Why, blessed, what in the world would be the use of their trying to climb if they already had all the rich have? You can't be as gracious as the man that's got nothing else to do, when you're about one jump ahead of the steam-roller every second. That's why they ought totakethings. If I were a union man, I wouldn't trust all these writers and college men and so on, that try to be sympathetic. Not for one minute. They mean well, but they can't get what it means to a real workman to have to be up at five every winter morning, with no heat in the furnished housekeeping room; or to have to see his Woman sick because he can't afford a doctor."
So they talked, boy and girl, wondering together what the world really is like.
"I want to find out what we can do with life!" she said. "Surely it's something more than working to get tired, and then resting to go back to work. But I'm confused about things." She sighed. "My settlement work—I went into it because I was bored. But it did make me realize how many people are hungry. And yet we just talk and talk and talk—Olive and I sit up half the night when she comes to my house, and when we're not talking about the new negligées we're making and the gorgeous tea-gowns we're going to have when we're married, we rescue the poor and think we're dreadfully advanced, but does it do any good to just talk?—Dear me, I split that poor infinitive right down his middle."
"I don't know. But I do know I don't want to be just stupidly satisfied, and talking does keep me from that, anyway. See here, Miss Winslow, suppose some time I suggested that we become nice and earnest and take up socialism and single tax and this—what is it?—oh,syndicalism—and really studied them, would you do it? Make each other study?"
"Love to."
"Does Dunleavy think much?"
She raised her eyebrows a bit, but hesitated. "Oh yes—no, I don't suppose he does. Or anyway, mostly about the violin. He played a lot when he was in Yale."
Thus was Carl encouraged to be fatuous, and he said, in a manner which quite dismissed Phil Dunleavy: "I don't believe he's very deep. Ra-ther light, I'd say."
Her eyebrows had ascended farther. "Do you think so? I'm sorry."
"Why sorry?"
"Oh, he's always been rather a friend of mine. Olive and Phil and I roller-skated together at the age of eight."
"But——"
"And I shall probably—marry—Phil—some day before long." She turned abruptly to Charley Forbes with a question.
Lost, already lost, was the playmate; a loss that disgusted him with life. He beat his spirit, cursed himself as a clumsy mechanic. He listened to Olive only by self-compulsion. It was minutes before he had the ability and the chance to say to Ruth:
"Forgive me—in the name of the Blue Bowl. Mr. Dunleavy was rather rude to me, and I've been just as rude—and to you! And without his excuse. For he naturally would want to protect you from a wild aviator coming from Lord knows where."
"You are forgiven. And Philwasrude. And you're not a Lord-knows-where, I'm sure."
Almost brusquely Carl demanded: "Come for a long tramp with me, on the Palisades. Next Saturday, if you can and if it's a decent day.... You said you liked to run away.... And we can be back before dinner, if you like."
"Why—let me think it over. Oh, Iwouldlike to. I've always wanted to do just that—think of it, thePalisades just opposite, and I never see them except for a walk of half a mile or so when I stay with a friend of mine, Laura Needham, at Winklehurst, up on the Palisades. My mother never approved of a wilder wilderness than Central Park and the habit——I've never been able to get Olive to explore. But it isn't conventional to go on long tramps with even the nicest new Johnnies, is it?"
"No, but——"
"I know. You'll say, 'Who makes the convention?' and of course there's no answer but 'They.' But They are so all-present. They——Oh yes, yes, yes, I will go! But you will let me get back by dinner-time, won't you? Will you call for me about two?... And can you——I wonder if a hawk out of the windy skies can understand how daring a dove out of Ninety-second Street feels at going walking on the Palisades?"