"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 close to 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 to _be_ Hawk Ericson."
"What a chump I am!" groaned the man in tortoise-sh.e.l.l 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.
CHAPTER x.x.x
At 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.
"h.e.l.lo?" said Gertie over the telephone. "Oh, h.e.l.lo, 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-bas.e.m.e.nt 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 c.o.c.kroach 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 att.i.tude 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 gra.s.ses 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 gla.s.s of a cathedral to grave saints of the open; all these I love, 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 Olive were 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 the _Chronicle_ and, 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 a _grande dame_ in 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 G.o.d unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, cl.u.s.tered 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 cafe of the Rector"s of that time; for, they said, they had never been in a Broadway cafe, 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 was the storm of highb.a.l.l.s and brandy and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused ma.s.s 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 n.o.body. 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 n.o.body--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, courtesy and that sort of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself "the better cla.s.s"?"
"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 to _take_ things. 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 negligees 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."