I am frank with you about how glad I am to have you here. You must be good to me; you will prize my love a little, won"t you?" Before he could answer she had run away.
After half home-comings and false home-comings the adventurer had really come home.
He inspected the gracious room, its chintz hangings, four-poster bed, low wicker chair by the fireplace, fresh Cherokee roses on the mantel; a room of cheerfulness and open s.p.a.ces. He stared into woods where a cool light lay on moss and fern. He did not need to remember Ruth"s kisses. For each breath of hilltop air, each emerald of moss, each shining mahogany surface in the room, repeated to him that he had found the Grail, whose other name is love.
Sat.u.r.day, they loafed over breakfast, the sun licking the tree-tops in the ravine outside the windows; and they motored with the Kerrs to Lenox, returning through the darkness. Till midnight they talked on the terrace. They loafed again, the next morning, and let the fresh air dissolve the office grime which had been coating his spirit. They were so startlingly original as to be simple-hearted country lovers, in the afternoon, declining Kerr"s offer of a car, and rambling off on bicycles.
From a rise they saw water gleaming among the trees. The sullen green of pines set off the silvery green of barley, and an orchard climbed the next rise; the smoky shadow of another hill range promised long, cool forest roads. Crows were flying overhead, going where they would.
The aviator and the girl who read psychology, modern lovers, stood hand in hand, as though the age of machinery were a myth; as though he were a piping minstrel and she a shepherdess. Before them was the open road and all around them the hum of bees.
A close, listless heat held Monday afternoon, even on the hilltop. The clay tennis-court was baking; the worn bricks of the terrace reflected a furnace glow. The Kerrs had disappeared for a nap. Carl, lounging with Ruth on the swinging couch in the shade, thought of the slaves in New York offices and tenements. Then, because he would himself be back in an office next day, he let the glare of the valley soothe him with its wholesome heat.
"Certainly would like a swim," he remarked. "Couldn"t we bike down to Fisher"s Pond, or maybe take the Ford?"
"Let"s. But there"s no bath-house."
"Put a bathing-suit under your dress. Sun "ll dry it in no time, after the swim."
"As you command, my liege." And she ran in to change.
They motored down to Fisher"s Pond, which is a lake, and stopped in a natural woodland-opening like a dim-lighted greenroom. From it stretched the enameled lake, the farther side reflecting unbroken woods. The nearer water-edge was exquisite in its clearness. They saw perch fantastically floating over the pale sand bottom, among scattered reeds whose watery green stalks were like the thin columns of a dancing-hall for small fishes. The surface of the lake, satiny as the palm of a girl"s hand, broke in the tiniest of ripples against white quartz pebbles on the hot sh.o.r.e. Cool, flashing, golden-sanded, the lake coaxed them out of their forest room.
"A lot like the Minnesota lakes, only smaller," said Carl. "I"m going right in. About ready for a swim? Come on."
"I"m af-fraid!" She suddenly plumped on the earth and hugged her skirts about her ankles.
"Why, blessed, what you scared of? No sharks here, and no undertow.
Nice white sand----"
"Oh, Hawk, I was silly. I felt I was such an independent modern woman a-a-and I aren"t! I"ve always said it was silly for girls to swim in a woman"s bathing-suit. Skirts are so c.u.mbersome. So I put on a boy"s bathing-suit under my dress--and--I"m terribly embarra.s.sed."
"Why, blessed----Well, I guess you"ll have to decide." His voice was somewhat shaky. "Awful scared of Carl?"
"Yes! I thought I wouldn"t be, with you, but I"m self-conscious as can be."
"Well, gee! I don"t know. Of course----Well, I"ll jump in, and you can decide."
He peeled off his white flannels and stood in his blue bathing-suit, not statue-like, not very brown now, but trim-waisted, shapely armed, wonderfully clean of neck and jaw. With a "Wheee!" he dashed into the water and swam out, overhand.
As he turned over and glanced back, his heart caught to see her standing on the creamy sand, a shy, elfin figure in a boy"s bathing-suit of black wool, woman and slim boy in one, silken-throated and graceful-limbed, curiously smaller than when dressed. Her white skirt and blouse lay tumbled about her ankles. She raised rosy arms to hide her flushed face and her eyes, as she cried:
"Don"t look!"
He obediently swam on, with a tenderness more poignant than longing.
He heard her splashing behind him, and turned again, to see her racing through the water. Those soft yet not narrow shoulders rose and fell st.u.r.dily under the wet black wool, her eyes shone, and she was all comradely boy save for her dripping, splendid hair. Singing, "Come on, lazy!" she headed across the pond. He swam beside her, reveling in the well-being of cool water and warm air, till they reached the solemn shade beneath the trees on the other side, and floated in the dark, still water, splashing idle hands, gazing into forest hollows, spying upon the brisk business of squirrels among the acorns.
Back at their greenwood room, Ruth wrapped her sailor blouse about her, and they squatted like un-self-conscious children on the beach, while from a field a distant locust fiddled his August fandango and in flame-colored pride an oriole went by. Fresh sky, sunfish like tropic sh.e.l.ls in the translucent water, arching reeds dipping their olive-green points in the water, wavelets rustling against a gray neglected rowboat, and beside him Ruth.
Musingly they built a castle of sand. An hour of understanding so complete that it made the heart melancholy. When he sighed, "Getting late; come on, blessed; we"re dry now," it seemed that they could never again know such rapt tranquillity.
Yet they did. For that evening when they stood on the terrace, trying to forget that he must leave her and go back to the lonely city in the morning, when the mist reached chilly tentacles up from the valley, they kissed a shy good-by, and Carl knew that life"s real adventure is not adventuring, but finding the playmate with whom to quest life"s meaning.
CHAPTER XL
After six festival months of married life--in April or May, 1914--the happy Mrs. Carl Ericson did not have many "modern theories of marriage in general," though it was her theory that she had such theories. Like a majority of intelligent men and women, Ruth was, in her rebellion against the canonical marriage of slipper-warming and obedience, emphatic but vague. She was of precise opinion regarding certain details of marriage, but in general as inconsistent as her library. It is a human characteristic to be belligerently sure as to whether one prefers plush or rattan upholstery on car seats--but not to consider whether government ownership of railroads will improve upholstering; to know with certainty of perception that it is a bore to have one"s husband laugh at one"s pet economy, of matches or string or ice--but to be blandly willing to leave all theories of polygamy and polyandry, monogamy and varietism, to the clever Russian Jews.
As regards details Ruth definitely did want a bedroom of her own; a desire which her mother would have regarded as somehow immodest. She definitely did want shaving and hair-brushing kept in the background.
She did not want Carl the lover to drift into Carl the husband. She did not want them to lose touch with other people. And she wanted to keep the spice of madness which from the first had seasoned their comradeship.
These things she delightfully had, in May, 1914.
They were largely due to her own initiative. Carl"s drifting theories of social structure concerned for the most part the wages of workmen and the ridiculousness of cla.s.s distinctions. Reared in the farming district, the amateur college, the garage, and the hangar, he had not, despite imagination, devoted two seconds to such details as the question of whether there was freedom and repose--not to speak of a variety of taste as regards opening windows and sleeping diagonally across a bed--in having separate bedrooms. Much though he had been persuaded to read of modern fiction, his race still believed that marriage bells and roses were the proper portions of marriage to think about.
It was due to Ruth, too, that they had so amiable a flat. Carl had been made careless of surroundings by years of hotels and furnished rooms. There was less real significance for him in the beauty of his first home than in the fact that they two had a bath-room of their own; that he no longer had to go, clad in a drab bath-robe, laden with shaving materials and a towel and talc.u.m powder and a broken hand-mirror and a tooth-brush, like a perambulating drug-store toilet-counter, down a boarding-house hall to that modified hall bedroom with a tin tub which his doctor-landlord had called a bath-room. Pictures, it must be admitted, give a room an air; pleasant it is to sit in large chairs by fireplaces and feel yourself a landed gentleman. But nothing filled Carl with a more delicate--and truly spiritual--satisfaction than having a porcelain tub, plenty of hot water, and the privilege of leaving his shaving-brush in the Ericson bath-room with a fair certainty of finding it there when he wanted to shave in a hurry.
But, careless of surroundings or not, Carl was stirred when on their return from honeymooning in the Adirondacks he carried Ruth over the threshold and they stood together in the living-room of their home.
It was a room to live in and laugh in. The wood-work was white-enameled; the walls covered with gray j.a.panese paper. There were no portieres between living-room and dining-room and small hall, so that the three rooms, with their light-reflecting walls, gave an effect of s.p.a.ciousness to rather a cramped and old-fashioned apartment. There were not many pictures and no bric-a-brac, yet the rooms were not bare, but clean and trim and distinguished, with the large davenport and the wing-chair, chintz-cushioned brown willow chairs, and Ruth"s upright piano, excellent mahogany, and a few good rugs. There were only two or three vases, and they genuinely intended for holding flowers, and there was a bare mantelpiece that rested the eyes, over the fuzzily clean gas-log. The pictures were chosen because they led the imagination on--etchings and color prints, largely by unknown artists, like windows looking on delightful country. The chairs a.s.sembled naturally in groups. The whole unit of three rooms suggested people talking.... It was home, first and last, though it was one cell in one layer of a seven-story building, on a street walled in with such buildings, in a city which lined up more than three hundred of such streets from its southern tip to its northern limit along the Hudson, and threw in a couple of million people in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
They lived in the Nineties, between Broadway and Riverside Drive; a few blocks from the Winslow house in distance, but one generation away in the matter of decoration. The apartment-house itself was comparatively old-fashioned, with an intermittent elevator run by an intermittent negro youth who gave most of his time to the telephone switchboard and mysterious duties in the bas.e.m.e.nt; also with a down-stairs hall that was narrow and carpeted and lined with offensively dark wood. But they could see the Hudson from their living-room on the sixth floor at the back of the house (the agent a.s.sured them that probably not till the end of time would there be anything but low, private houses between them and the river); they were not haunted by Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow; and Ruth, who had long been oppressed by late-Victorian bric-a-brac and American Louis XVth furniture, so successfully adopted Elimination as the key-note that there was not one piece of furniture bought for the purpose of indicating that Mr. and Mrs. Carl Ericson were well-to-do.
She dared to tell friends who before the wedding inquired what she wanted, that checks were welcome, and need not be monogrammed. Even Aunt Emma had been willing to send a check, provided they were properly married in St. George"s Church. Consequently their six rooms showed a remarkable absence of such usual wedding presents as prints of the smugly smiling and eupeptic Mona Lisa, three m.u.f.fin-stands in three degrees of marquetry, three electroliers, four punch-bowls, three sets of almond-dishes, a pair of bird-carvers that did not carve, a bust of Dante in New Art marble, or a de luxe set of De Maupa.s.sant translated by a worthy lady with a French lexicon. Instead, they bought what they wanted--rather an impertinent thing to do, but, like most impertinences, thoroughly worth while. Their living-room was their own. Carl"s bedroom was white and simple, though spotty with aviation medals and silver cups and monoplanes sketchily rendered in gold, and signed photographs of aviators. Ruth"s bedroom was also plain and white and dull j.a.panese gray, a simple room with that simplicity of hand-embroidery, real lace, and fine linen appreciated by exclamatory women friends.
She taught Carl to say "dahg" instead of "dawg" for "dog"; "wawta"
instead of "wotter" for "water." Whether she was more correct in her p.r.o.nunciation or not does not matter; New York said "dahg," and it amused him just then to be very Eastern. She taught him the theory of house-lighting. Carl had no fanatical objection to unshaded incandescent bulbs glaring from the ceiling. But he came to like the shaded electric lamps which Ruth installed in the living-room. When she introduced four candles as sole lighting of the dining-room table, however, he grumbled loudly at his inability to see what he was eating. She retired to her bedroom, and he huffily went out to get a cigar. At the cigar-counter he repented of all the unkind things he had ever done or could possibly do, and returned to eat humble pie--and eat it by candle-light. Inside of two weeks one of the things which Carl Ericson had always known was that the harmonious candle-light brought them close together at dinner.
The teaching, in this Period of Adjustments, was not all on Ruth"s part. It was due to Carl"s insistence that she tried to discover what her theological beliefs really were. She admitted that only at twilight vespers, with a gale of violins in an arched roof, did she really worship in church. She did not believe that priests and ministers, who seemed to be ordinary men as regards earthly things, had any extraordinary knowledge of the mysteries of heaven. Yet she took it for granted that she was a good Christian. She rarely disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic.
Of the four it was Carl who seemed to have the greatest interest in religions. He blurted out such monologues as, "I wonder if it isn"t pure egotism that makes a person believe that the religion he is born to is the best? _My_ country, _my_ religion, _my_ wife, _my_ business--we think that whatever is ours is necessarily sacred, or, in other words, that we are G.o.ds--and then we call it faith and patriotism! The Hindu or the Christian is equally ready to prove to you--and mind you, he may be a wise old man with a beard--that his national religion is obviously the only one. Find out what you yourself really do think, and if you turn out a Sun-worshiper or a Hard-sh.e.l.l Baptist, why, good luck. If you don"t think for yourself, then you"re admitting that your theory of happiness is the old dog asleep in the sun. And maybe he is happier than the student. But I think you like to experiment with life."
His arguments were neither original nor especially logical; they were largely given to him by Bone Stillman, Professor Frazer, and chance paragraphs in stray radical magazines. But to Ruth, politely reared in a house with three maids, where it was as tactless to discuss G.o.d as to discuss s.e.x, his defiances seemed terrifyingly new.... She was not the first who had complacently gone to church after reading Bernard Shaw.... But she did try to follow Carl"s loose reasoning; to find out what she thought and what the spiritual fashions of her neighborhood made her think she thought.
The process gave her many anxious hours of alternating impatience with fixed religious dogmas, and loneliness for the comfortable refuge of a personal G.o.d, whose yearning had spoken to her in the Gregorian chant.
She could never get herself to read more than two chapters of any book on the subject, nor did she get much light from conversation. One set of people supposed that Christianity had so entirely disappeared from intelligent circles that it was not worth discussion; another set supposed that no one but cranks ever thought of doubting the essentials of Christianity, and that, therefore, it was not worth discussion; and to a few superb women whom she knew, their religion was too sweet a reality to be subjected to the noisy chatter of discussion. Gradually Ruth forgot to think often of the matter, but it was always back in her mind.
They were happy, Carl and Ruth. To their flat came such of Ruth"s friends as she kept because she liked them for themselves, with a fantastic a.s.sortment of personages and awkward rovers whom the ex-aviator knew. The Ericsons made an inst.i.tution of "bruncheon"--breakfast-luncheon--at which coffee and eggs and deviled kidneys, a table of auction bridge and a davenport of talk and a wing-chair of Sunday papers, were to be had on Sunday morning from ten to one. At bruncheon Walter MacMonnies told to Florence Crewden his experiences in exploring Southern Greenland by aeroplane with the Schliess-Banning expedition. At bruncheon Bobby Winslow, now an interne, talked baseball with Carl. At bruncheon Phil Dunleavy regarded cynically all the people he did not know and played piquet in a corner with Ruth"s father.
Carl and Ruth joined the Peace Waters Country Club, and in the spring of 1914 went there nearly every Sat.u.r.day afternoon for tennis and a dance. Carl refused golf, however; he always repeated a shabby joke about the shame of taking advantage of such a tiny ball.
He seemed content to stick to office, home, and tennis-court. It was Ruth who planned their week-end trips, proposed at 8 A.M. Sat.u.r.day, and begun at two that afternoon. They explored the tangled rocks and woods of Lloyd"s Neck, on Long Island, sleeping in an abandoned shack, curled together like kittens. They swooped on a Dutch village in New Jersey, spent the night with an old farmer, and attended the Dutch Reformed church. They tramped from New Haven to Hartford, over Easter.
Carl was always ready for their gipsy journeys; he responded to Ruth"s visions of foaming South Sea isles; but he rarely sketched such pictures himself. He had given all of himself to joy in Ruth. Like many men called "adventurers," he was ready for anything but content with anything.
It was Ruth who was finding new voyages. She kept up her settlement work and progressed to an active interest in the Women"s Trade Union League and took part in picketing during a Panama Hat-Workers" strike.