"----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 except Olive"s coiffure and your beautiful shirt.... Does one talk about shirts at a second meeting?"
"Apparently one does."
"Yes.... To-night, I _must_ have 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 a.s.sociations, 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 son was 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 n.o.ble 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, and it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like ourselves, except for a j.a.p, with his cunnin" Sunday tie, and his little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky.
And he was reading _The 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 Cook _and_ Son 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 merely _go_ without 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 a time, 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.
CHAPTER XXIX
Like 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 chateau, 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 sn.o.bbish. 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 3.30 P.M., Sunday, he was already incased in funereal morning-clothes and warning himself that he must not arrive at Miss Winslow"s before five. His clothes 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-bas.e.m.e.nt gray stone dwelling, with heavy Russian net curtains at the broad, clear-gla.s.sed 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 bal.u.s.trade, 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 cla.s.s"; 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 ap.r.o.n 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-bas.e.m.e.nt house, with the inevitable front and 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 bra.s.s and k.n.o.bby red-and-blue gla.s.s. The floor was of hardwood in squares, dark and richly polished, highly self-respecting--a floor that a.s.sumed civic responsibility from a republican point of view, and a sound conservative business established since 1875 or 1880. By the door was a huge j.a.panese 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.