T
he 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 the defile. The scowling, slatey river was filled with ice-floes and chunks of floating, water-drenched snow that broke up into bobbing 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 breeze enlivened them, the sternness of the swift, cruel river and miles of brown shore made them gravely happy. As they tramped briskly off, atop the cliffs, toward the ferry 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 Joralemon, 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 defenses of a chaperoned 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 knowexactly what she wanted to do with life. She spoke tentatively of her vague settlement work; in all she said she revealed an honesty as forthright as though she were a gaunt-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 Haviland. He had never really talked of him to any one save Colonel Haviland and Titherington, 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 their 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 sturdy, 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 at Pompton, N. J., and I'm going to ask him to write to the governor about it. The legislature ought to pass a law that dusk sha'n'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 Haviland—and the very bad Carl that lived in Joralemon?"
"It's——I'm glad——Say, gee! 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 husbandat Winklehurst, on the Palisades, not very far from the ferry. I wonder if we couldn't 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 jaunt, 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's told me what kind of a tie her husband had on when he proposed."
"Let's do it!"
"A telephone! There's some shops ahead there, in 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 red cherry in it, she'd better undeceive herself."
They entered a tiny wayside shop for the 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 in little wrinkles as she tried to look wicked, her voice amazingly innocent as she talked, Carl carefully arraying his purchases before her, making the candy kitten pursue the sugar mouse round and round the telephone.
"Hello, hello! Is Mrs. Needham there?... Hello!... Oh, hel-lo, Laura dear. This is Ruth. I.... Fine. I feel fine. But chillery. Listen, Laura; I've been taking a tramp along the Palisades. Am I invited to dinner with a swain?... 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 sha'n't prevent you from having the opportunity to enjoy being hospitable.... I don't know. What ferry do you catch?... The 7.20?... N-no, I don't think we can get there till after that,so you can go right ahead and have the Biddy get ready for us.... All right; thatisgood 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 Biddy if we do come? We're drefful cold, and it's a long crool way to town.... Thank you, dear. It shall be returned unto you—after not too many days.... What?... Who?... Oh, a 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.... Oh, 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 feet tall, and he has a long French shovel beard and a lovely red nose, and he's listening to me describe him!"
Carl made the kitten chase the mouse furiously.
"Perhaps I'll tell you about him some time.... Good-by, Laura dear."
She turned to Carl, rubbing her cold ear where the telephone-receiver had 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 theater. So we'll have the house all to ourselves. Exciting!" She swung round to telephone home that she would not be there for dinner.
As they left the shop, went over a couple of blocks for the Winklehurst 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 lengths he 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 shamefaced erotic curiosity, that now he instantly dismissed the query, "How far could I go? What does she expect?" which, outside ofpure-minded 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 hours of a dead room, been tortured with the unmoral 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-lined gloves, he laughed back, altogether happy, not pretending, as he had pretended with Eve L'Ewysse.
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:
"'Shhhh! 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 pats, 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 Barrel shall make many an one 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 's in the other room."
"No. Because the maid's sniffing around—there, she's reading a post-card some one left on the side-table. Oh yes, and she's chewing gum. Laura has certainly departed. Probably Laura is chewing gum herself at the present moment, now that she's out from under the eye of her maid. Laura always was ree-fined, but I wouldn't trust her to be proof against the feeling of wild dissipationyou can get out of chewing gum, if you live in Winklehurst."
They had rung the door-bell on the porch by now.
"I'm so glad," said Ruth, "that Laura is gone. She is very literal-minded. She might not understand that we could be hastily married and even lease a house, this way, and still be only tea acquaintances."
The maid had not yet answered. Waiting in the still porch, winter everywhere beyond it, Carl was all excited anticipation. He hastily pressed her hand, and she lightly returned the pressure, laughing, breathing quickly. They started like convicted lovers as the maid opened the door. The consciousness of their starting made them the more embarrassed, and they stammered before the maid. Ruth fled up-stairs, while Carl tried to walk up gravely, though he was tingling with the game.
When he had washed (discovering, as every one 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 hair-brushes and things in Jack's room, to the right. Oh, I am 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 hair-brush bright against it, her cheeks flushed to an even crimson, her blue corduroy jacket off, and, warmly intimate in its stead, a blouse of blue satin, opening in a shallow triangle at her throat. With a tender big-brotherliness 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. Istra Nash was nearer that. But, golly! she is such a good pal, and she is beautiful if an English lane is. Oh, stop rambling.... If I could kiss that little honey place at the base of her throat...."
"Yes, Miss Winslow. Coming.AmI 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 all ready-made for us, this way!"
Her glance—eyes that always startled him with blue where dark-brown was expected; even teeth showing; head cocked sidelong; 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 forget. So sorry. But you know—get so busy at the office——"
"Why, Ithinkwe 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 the house more than I am.... But, oh, say, speaking of that, that reminds me: Woman, if you think that 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 weh!I knew I should have a cruel husband who——Joy! I think the maid is prowling about and trying to listen. 'Shhh! 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, Leah, will you please tell Mrs. 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 had 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 playcards, and he taught her pinochle, which he had learned from 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 so very many?"
"Practically no one."
"I do——I'm really not fishing for compliments, but I do want to be found understanding——"
"There's never been any one 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 farm-house out in the hills where the snow is deep; and there's logs in the fireplace."
"Yes, and rag carpets."
"And, oh, Ruth, listen, a bob-sled 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. Ericson.' Ooh! It makes me think of Norse galleys and northern seas. Of course—your galley was the aeroplane.... 'Mrs. Eric——'" 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 conventional 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 wintry trees of a wood-lot, Ruth tucked her arm under his, small beside his great ulster, and sighed like a child:
"I am ver-ee cold!"
He rubbed her hand protectingly, her mouselike hand in its fur-lined glove. His canny, self-defensive, Scotchlike Norse soul opened its gates. He knew a longing to give, a passion to protect her, a whelming 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's big gray ghosts hiding there in the trees, with their leathery wings, that were made out of sea-fog by the witches, folded in front of them, and they're glumming at us over the bony, knobly joints on top their wings, with big, round platter eyes. And the wind is calling us—it's trying to snatch us out on the arctic snow-fields, 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 Phil Dunleavy keep you from running away, not for a while yet?"
"M-maybe not."
The sky had 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 worshiping face—her lips a-tremble and 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-incrusted beard to the roar of northern music. To Carl her cry seemed to pledge faith in the starred sky and the long trail and a 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 search-light changed the shadow-haunted woodland to a sad group of scanty trees, huddling in frontof an old bill-board, 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 smell 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 "Wm. P. Smith & Sons, All Northern New Jersey Real Estate, Cheaper Than Rent." So, instantly, the children of the night turned into two 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've found? Will Ninety-second Street be big enough for them?"
F
or 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 Touricar 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 in 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 come tramping, and guiltily he recalled that it was with her that the boy Carl had gone to seek-our-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, dainties 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.
"I'm 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 the winter."
She looked at him heavily. "Why, isn't it pretty cold, don't you think?"
He prepared to argue, but he 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; could find whatever he 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 is pretty cold here. They can say all they want to about the cold and all that out in Minnesota, but, really, the humidity——"
"Rats; it isn't so very cold, not if you walk 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 discerningly 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 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."
"N-n-n-now!" she clucked in a patronizing way. "We mustn't ask New York to give us wilderness, youknow! 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 the morning's lesson of her Sunday-school class, and a mild disbelief in men as anything except relatives, providers, card-players, and nurslings. Carl gave up the silence-cure.
He hummed about the room, running over the advertising pages of magazines, discussing Plato 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—Joralemon, Bennie Rusk, Joe Jordan's engagement, Adelaide Benner, and symphony concerts. Gertie embroidered, patted her hair, smoothed her waist, looked cheerful, rocked, and spoke; embroidered, patted her hair, smoothed her sleeve, looked amiable, rocked, and spoke—embroidered, pat——
At a quarter to ten Carl gave himself permission to go. Said he: "I'll have to get on the job pretty early to-morrow. Not much taking it easy here in New York, the way you can in Joralemon, eh? 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 up the doily meticulously, laid it down on 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 haven't anything better to do. Oh—what about our tramp? If you know some place that is better than Bronx Park, we might try it."
"Why—uh—yes—why, sure; we'll have to, some time."
"And, Carl, you're coming up to have your Christmas turkey with us, aren't you?"
"I'd like to, a lot, but darn it, I've accepted 'nother invitation."
That was absolutely untrue, and Carl was wondering why he had lied, when the storm broke.
Gertie's right arm, affectedly held out from the elbow, the hand drooping, in the attitude of a refined hostess saying good-by, dropped stiffly to her side. Slowly she thrust out both arms, shoulder-high on either side, with her fists 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 shriek in her hopeless gesture, and her silence was a wail muffled and despairing.
Carl stared, twisting his watch-chain with nervous fingers, wanting to flee.
It was raw woman, with all the proprieties of Joralemon and St. Orgul's cut away, who spoke, her voice constantly rising:
"Oh, Carl—Carl! Oh, why, why, why! Oh, 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—gee!—thunder!" whimpered a dismayed youth. A more mature Hawk Ericson struggled to life and soothed 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 the city we could be such good friends, with all the different newthings 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—oh! 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 andmoreI'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 to-night, 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 'Eltruda'—oh, Carl dear, indeed you needn'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, and you didn't even 'phone—and I waited up till after midnight, hoping you would '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 that Gertie, easy-going Gertie Cowles, had any passion at all; and indignant that it was visited upon himself.
But he had to help. He moved to her chair and, squatting boyishly 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? Why, blessed, I wouldn't hurt you for anything! Just to-night—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. Why, Gertie,anybodywould be proud to play with you. You know so much about concerts and all sorts of stuff. Anybody'd be proud to!" He wound up with a fictitious cheerfulness. "We'll have some good long hikes together, heh?... It's better now, isn't it, kiddy? You're just tired to-night. Has something been worrying you? Tell old Carl all about—-"
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 use to have some dear times, didn't we! Do you remember how we found some fool's 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, I do care! You're one of the bulliest pals I have, you and Ray."
"And Ray!"
She flung his hand away and sat bolt up, 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 haughtily 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 air 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 hauteur of being one of the élite of Joralemon again flashed out. "Maybe if you'll think real hard you'll remember I used to could get you to be so kind and talk to me without having to beg you so hard. Why, I'd been to New York and known thenicestpeople before you'd ever stirred a foot out of Joralemon! 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 toward his, and took his hand, touching it, finding its hard, bony places and the delicate white hollows 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 disconcerted. 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, uninteresting age. Gertie's solid flesh, the monotony of her voice, the unimaginative fixity 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 crystallizedin his mind as a good friend with a plain soul and sisterly tendencies. Awkwardly he said:
"You mustn't talk like that.... Gee! 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?"
He wanted to be rude, but he was patient. Mechanically stroking her hair again, leaning forward most uncomfortably from his chair, he stammered: "Oh, 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! Gertie, you'd think I was pretty sentimental if I told you what I think of her. God! I want to see 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——Oh, please go now."
He sprang up, only too 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 to-night, won't we? We'll just be the old Carl and Gertie again. Tell me to come when——"
"Yes. I will. Goodnight."
"Good night, Gertie. God bless you."
He never remembered where he walked that night when he had left Gertie. The exercise, the chill of the night, gradually set his numbed mind working again. But it dwelt with Ruth, not with Gertie. 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 cartographers have variously described as a fruitful tract of comfortable harvests, as a labyrinth with walls of rose and silver, and as a tenebrous realm of unhappy ghosts.
He stopped at 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 Tammany saloon! Chin high, yearning toward a girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had worshiped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic, standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and a cigars-and-stationery shop round the corner, was one with the young priest saying mass, one with the suffragist woman defying a jeering 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 for ever.
Changed. True that when he got home, half an hour later, and in the dark ran his nose against an opened door, he said, "Damn it!" very naturally. True that on Monday, back in the office that awaits its victims equally after Sundays golden or dreary, he forgot Ruth's existence for hours at a time. True that at lunch with two VanZile automobile salesmen he ateWiener Schnitzeland shotdice for cigars, with no signs of a mystic change. It is even true that, dining at the Brevoort with Charley Forbes, he though of Istra Nash, and for a minute was lonely for Istra's artistic dissipation. Yet the change was there.
F
rom Titherington, the aviator, in his Devonshire home, from a millionaire amateur flier among the orange-groves at Pasadena, from his carpenter father in Joralemon, and from Gertie in New York, Carl had invitations for Christmas, but none that he could accept. VanZile had said, pleasantly, "Going out to the country for Christmas?"
"Yes," Cal 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 on shipboard, while Martin Dockerill, his 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 Ericson, 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 hydroaeroplanes and with bomb-dropping devices at 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 tempter vision was: "Rats! I can't very well leave the Touricar 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 fordays: 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, and a German voice as rich as milk chocolate was caressing, "Oh Tannenbaum, oh Tannenbaum, wie grün sind deine Blätter."... Then slept for nine hours, woke with rapturous remembrance that he didn't have to go to the office, and sang "The Banks of the Saskatchewan" in his bath. When he returned to the house, after breakfast, he found a letter from Ruth:
The Day before Xmas & all thru the MansionThe Maids with Turkey are Stirring—Please Pardon the Scansion.
The Day before Xmas & all thru the MansionThe Maids with Turkey are Stirring—Please Pardon the Scansion.
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 gloriously merry Xmas & 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 Xmas day itself if that means that you are off at some charming country house having a most katische (is that the way it is spelled, probably not) time. But if by any chance youarein town, won't you make your playmate's shout to you from her back yard a part of your Xmas? She feels shy about sending this effusive greeting with all its characteristic sloppiness of writing, but she does want you to have a welcome to Xmas fun, & won't you please give the Touricar a pair of warm little slippers from
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 gloriously merry Xmas & 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 Xmas day itself if that means that you are off at some charming country house having a most katische (is that the way it is spelled, probably not) time. But if by any chance youarein town, won't you make your playmate's shout to you from her back yard a part of your Xmas? She feels shy about sending this effusive greeting with all its characteristic sloppiness of writing, but she does want you to have a welcome to Xmas fun, & won't you please give the Touricar a pair of warm little slippers from
Ruth Gaylord Winslow.
P.S. Mrs. Tirrell has sent me an angel miniature Jap garden, with a tiny pergola & real dwarf trees & a bridge that you expect an Alfred Noyes lantern on, & Oh Carl, an issa goldfish in a pool!
P.S. Mrs. Tirrell has sent me an angel miniature Jap garden, with a tiny pergola & real dwarf trees & a bridge that you expect an Alfred Noyes lantern on, & Oh Carl, an issa goldfish in a pool!
Miss R. Winslow.
"'——all the dear things I want'!" Carl repeated, standing tranced in the hall, oblivious of the doctor-landlord snooping at the back. "Ruth blessed, do youknow the thing I want most?... Say! Great! I'll hustle out and send her all the flowers in the world. Or, no. I've got it." He was already out of the house, hastening toward the subway. "I'll send her one of these lingerie tea-baskets with all kinds of baby pots of preserves and tea-balls and stuff.... Wonder what Dunleavy sent her?... Rats! I don't care. Jiminy! I'm happy! Me to 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 dress-clothes.
Twice Carl called at Ruth's 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 Barclay—needed hair-cloth as a scourge for white tango-dancing backs. 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-gilt chair in the drawing-room and asserted that Phil Dunleavy, 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-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered her poise of a vicarage, remarking, "I have been subject to very careless influenceslately." She called him neither "Carl" nor "Mr. Ericson" nor anything else, and he dared not venture on Ruth.
He went home in 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 applauding 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 Leacock'sNonsense Novels; turned companionably 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 Débussy and ragtime. At ten-thirty, the hour at which he had vehemently resolved to go, they were curled in two big chairs eating chocolate peppermints and talking of themselves apropos of astronomy and the Touricar and Lincoln Beachey's daring and Mason Winslow and patriotism and Joralemon. 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-stomached, bald, sober, friendly man, with a Gladstone 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's suitors.
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 Browne's dinner-dance at Delmonico's, as Phil wished, or go skeeing in the WestchesterHills, as Carl wished, the coming Saturday—the first Saturday in February, 1913. Carl won.
They arrived at a station in the Bedford Hills, bearing long, carved-prowed Norwegian skees, 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 mysterious pack which, he informed the excited Ruth, contained Roland's sword and the magic rug of Bagdad. Together they were apple-cheeked, chattering children of outdoors.
For all the horizon's weight of dark clouds, clear sunshine lay on clear snow as they left the train and trotted along the road, carrying their skees beyond the outskirts of the town. Country sleigh-bells chinkled down a hill; children shouted and made snow houses; elders stamped their feet and clucked, "Fine day!" New York was far off and ridiculously unimportant. Carl and Ruth reached an open sloping field, where the snow that partly covered a large rock was melting at its lacy, crystaled 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 bread-crumb line and the better day that was coming for all proletarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out against a red barn. The litter of corn-stalks and straw in a barn-yard was transformed from disordered muck to a tessellation of warm silver and old gold. Not the delicate red and browns and grays alone, but everywhere the light, as well, caressed the senses. A distant dog barked good-natured greeting to all the world. The thawing land stirred with a promise that spring might in time return to lovers.
"Oh, to-day is beautiful as—as—it's beautiful as frosting on a birthday-cake!" cried Ruth, as she slipped her feet into the straps of her skees, preparing for her first lesson. "These skees seem so dreadfully long and unmanageable, now I get them on. Like seven-foot table-knives, and my silly feet like orange seeds in the middle of the knives!"
The skeeswereunmanageable.
One climbed up on the other, and Ruth tried to lift her own weight. When she was sliding down 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-crust. Carl, speeding beside her, his obedient skees 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 shelves in 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 Lilliputian submarines in a fairy sea.
A rabbit hopped away among the trees beyond them, and Carl, following its trail, read to her the forest hieroglyphics—tracks of rabbit and chipmunk and crow, of field-mouse and house-cat, in the snow-paved city of night animals with its edifices of twiggy underbrush.
The setting sun was overclouded, now; the air sharp;the grove 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 sneaking along in there," she whispered, "and wolves and outlaws; and maybe a Hudson Bay factor coming, in a red Mackinaw coat."
"And maybe a mounted 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 she had been covertly eying 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 tale:
"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!" Ruth concluded the narration.... "Don't be frivolous about food. Just one hard-boiled egg and you perish! None of these gentle 'convenient' shoe-box picnics 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, four kidneys, and two hot sausages, and then some plum-pudding and 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 Joralemon would now remind the city gal that 'tis only among God's free hills that you can get an appetite, and thenthe 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 skilfully frying the flapjacks, and contrasted him with the effeminate fops she had met on Fifth Avenue.'... But meanwhile, squaw, you'd better tear some good dry twigs off this bush for kindling."
Gathering twigs while Carl scrabbled among the roots for dry leaves, Ruth went on again with their story: "'Yes,' said the fair maid o' the wilds, obediently, bending her poor, patient back at the 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 this heavenly snow-place in contrast to the beastly city, even though she is so abominably treated?"
"Yes, but as I warned you, nothing about the effect of out-o'-doors on the appetite. All you've got to do is to watch a 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 the thing—you know that no one ever admits to a 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: 'Es war Weinachtsabend. Tiefer Schnee lag am Boden. Durch das Wald kam ein armes Mädchen das weinte bitterlich.' The reason why she weinted bitterlich 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 Nijinsky and the musical asses till you are ready——"
"All ready now!" he proclaimed, kneeling by the pyramid of leaves, twigs, and sticks he had been erecting. He lit a match and kindled a leaf. Fire ran through themass 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'sla 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, granite-ware plates and cups, a stew-pan and a coffee-pot, a ruddied 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 the covered stew-pan, loudly broiled in their own fat, and to them the peas, heated in their can, were added when the coffee began to foam. He dragged a large log to the side of the fire, and Ruth, there sitting, gorged shamelessly. Carl himself did not eat reticently.
Light 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 farm-house," he remarked, while she snuggled before the fire, her back against a log, her round knees up under her 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, exclaiming: "Here is my room, with low ceiling and exposed rafters and a big open fireplace. Not a single touch of pale pink or rosebuds!"
"Then here's my room, with a work-bench and a bed nine feet long that I can lose myself in."
"Then here outside my room," said Ruth, "I'm going to have a brick terrace, and all around it heliotrope growing in pots on the brick wall."
"I'm sorry, 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, if necessary."
"Well, I'll think it over, but——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 outdoor cots with olive-gray army 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 w'eedled 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 never saw another aigrette or a fat Rhine maiden singing in thirty sharps."
"Listen, how would this be for a site? (Let me stick some more wood there on your side of the fire.) Once when I was up in the high Sierras, in California, I found a wooded bluff—you looked a thousand feet straight down to a clear lake, green as mint-sauce pretty nearly, not a wrinkle on it. There wasn't a sound anywhere except when the leaves rustled. Then on the other side you looked way up to a peak covered with snow, and a big eagle sailing overhead—sailing and sailing, hour afterhour. 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 VanZile Company you must give me a Touricar 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'm a poor little street waif. 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 stolid dubs."
"Gee! it'd be natural enough if I did like to talk. Imagine the training in being with the English superintendent at the mine, that I was telling you about, and hearing Frazer lecture, and knowing Tony Bean with his South-American interests, and most of all, of course, knowing Forrest Haviland. If I had any pep in me——Course I'm terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help wading right in and wanting to talk to everybody about everything."
"Yes. Yes. Of course I'm abominably slangy, too. I wonder if every one isn't, except in books.... We've left our house a little unfinished, Carl."
"I'm afraid we'll have to, blessed. We'll have to be going. It's past seven, now; and we must be sure to catch the 8.09 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 thelast of the dishes with snow, and packing them away. "Do 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 Touricar. 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 fifteen thousand dollars 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 tactlessness of the thing—by quite plainly suggesting that I'm 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 the girls and the men. They never seem to realize that if they were just human beings, as you and I have been to-day, and not hide-bound members of the dance-and-tea league, they could beat that beastly artificial old city.... Phil once told me thatnoman—mind you, no one at all—could possibly marry on less than fifteen thousand dollars 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 four thousand dollars 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. Fawncy! Only three maids. Might as well be dead."
The pack was ready, now; he was swinging it to his back and preparing to stamp out the fire. But he droppedhis burden and faced her in the low firelight. "Ruth, you won't make up your mind to marry Phil till you'resure, will you? You'll play with me awhile, won't you? Can't we explore a few more——"
She laughed nervously, trying to look at him. "As I said, Phil won't condescend to consider poor me till he has his fifteen thousand dollars 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——Oh, 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've never played as much with any one 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."
"Youwon'tlet Phil lock you up for a while?"
"No.... Mustn't we be going?"
"Thank you for letting the outlaw come to your party. The fire's out. Come."
With the quenching of the fire they were left in smothering darkness. "Where do we go?" she worried. "I feel completely lost. I can't make out 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: "Sit tight! 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 the tree now."
"Right. Now for it."
"Let me carry my skees."
"No, you just watch your feet." His voice was pleasant, quiet, not too intimate. "Don't try to guide yourselfby 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 pairs of skees, 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 leaped at them. Once Ruth slipped, on a rock or a chunk of ice, and came down with an infuriating jolt. Before he could drop the skees 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 skees, 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 the radiance of an incandescent light.
"Road's right up there, blessed," he cried, cheerily.
"Oh, I can't——Yes, I will——"
He dropped the skees, put one arm about her shoulders and one about her knees, and almost before she had finished crying, "Oh no,pleasedon't carry me!" he was half-way up the slope. He set her down safe by the road.
They caught the 8.09 train with two minutes to spare. Its warmth and the dingy softness of the plush seats seemed palatial.
Ruth rubbed her cold hands with a smile deprecating, 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 their two hands. "A little brown house!" she said.