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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trail of the Hawk, by Sinclair Lewis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Trail of the Hawk
+       A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
+
+Author: Sinclair Lewis
+
+Release Date: September 14, 2008 [EBook #26610]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, K Nordquist, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Transcriber's Note.
+
+       The Table of Contents is not part of the original book.
+
+       In page 212 there is an incomplete sentence "Poor Tad was". This
+       sentence is incomplete in this book as well as the many editions
+       verified.
+
+
+
+   [Illustration: [See page 290
+    THE COLD BREEZE ENLIVENED THEM, THE STERNNESS OF THE SWIFT, CRUEL
+    RIVER AND MILES OF BROWN SHORE MADE THEM GRAVELY HAPPY.]
+
+
+
+                             THE TRAIL OF
+
+                               THE HAWK
+
+
+                               A COMEDY
+
+                          OF THE SERIOUSNESS
+
+                               OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            SINCLAIR LEWIS
+
+                              AUTHOR OF
+
+                            OUR MR. WRENN
+
+
+
+
+                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+
+                         NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+                        THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK
+
+                Copyright, 1915, by Harper & Brothers
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                 PAGE
+
+Part I                   1
+
+CHAPTER I                3
+CHAPTER II              16
+CHAPTER III             26
+CHAPTER IV              35
+CHAPTER V               46
+CHAPTER VI              58
+CHAPTER VII             71
+CHAPTER VIII            78
+CHAPTER IX              86
+CHAPTER X              100
+CHAPTER XI             106
+CHAPTER XII            115
+
+Part II                125
+
+CHAPTER XIII           127
+CHAPTER XIV            135
+CHAPTER XV             146
+CHAPTER XVI            156
+CHAPTER XVII           162
+CHAPTER XVIII          167
+CHAPTER XIX            174
+CHAPTER XX             179
+CHAPTER XXI            187
+CHAPTER XXII           202
+CHAPTER XXIII          210
+
+Part III               223
+
+CHAPTER XXIV           225
+CHAPTER XXV            231
+CHAPTER XXVI           242
+CHAPTER XXVII          248
+CHAPTER XXVIII         261
+CHAPTER XXIX           270
+CHAPTER XXX            282
+CHAPTER XXXI           290
+CHAPTER XXXII          300
+CHAPTER XXXIII         310
+CHAPTER XXXIV          324
+CHAPTER XXXV           333
+CHAPTER XXXVI          342
+CHAPTER XXXVII         352
+CHAPTER XXXVIII        362
+CHAPTER XXXIX          368
+CHAPTER XL             379
+CHAPTER XLI            387
+CHAPTER XLII           400
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TO THE OPTIMISTIC REBELS THROUGH
+WHOSE TALK AT LUNCHEON THE AUTHOR
+WATCHES THE MANY-COLORED SPECTACLE
+OF LIFE--GEORGE SOULE, HARRISON
+SMITH, ALLAN UPDEGRAFF, F. K. NOYES,
+ALFRED HARCOURT, B. W. HUEBSCH.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Part I
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF YOUTH
+
+
+THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Carl Ericson was being naughty. Probably no boy in Joralemon was being
+naughtier that October Saturday afternoon. He had not half finished
+the wood-piling which was his punishment for having chased the family
+rooster thirteen times squawking around the chicken-yard, while
+playing soldiers with Bennie Rusk.
+
+He stood in the middle of the musty woodshed, pessimistically kicking
+at the scattered wood. His face was stern, as became a man of eight
+who was a soldier of fortune famed from the front gate to the
+chicken-yard. An unromantic film of dirt hid the fact that his
+Scandinavian cheeks were like cream-colored silk stained with
+rose-petals. A baby Norseman, with only an average boy's prettiness,
+yet with the whiteness and slenderness of a girl's little finger. A
+back-yard boy, in baggy jacket and pants, gingham blouse, and cap
+whose lining oozed back over his ash-blond hair, which was tangled now
+like trampled grass, with a tiny chip riding grotesquely on one flossy
+lock.
+
+The darkness of the shed displeased Carl. The whole basic conception
+of work bored him. The sticks of wood were personal enemies to which
+he gave insulting names. He had always admired the hard bark and
+metallic resonance of the ironwood, but he hated the poplar--"popple"
+it is called in Joralemon, Minnesota. Poplar becomes dry and dusty,
+and the bark turns to a monstrously mottled and evil greenish-white.
+Carl announced to one poplar stick, "I could lick you! I'm a gen'ral,
+I am." The stick made no reply whatever, and he contemptuously shied
+it out into the chickweed which matted the grubby back yard. This
+necessitated his sneaking out and capturing it by stalking it from the
+rear, lest it rouse the Popple Army.
+
+He loitered outside the shed, sniffing at the smoke from burning
+leaves--the scent of autumn and migration and wanderlust. He glanced
+down between houses to the reedy shore of Joralemon Lake. The surface
+of the water was smooth, and tinted like a bluebell, save for one
+patch in the current where wavelets leaped with October madness in
+sparkles of diamond fire. Across the lake, woods sprinkled with
+gold-dust and paprika broke the sweep of sparse yellow stubble, and a
+red barn was softly brilliant in the caressing sunlight and lively air
+of the Minnesota prairie. Over there was the field of valor, where
+grown-up men with shiny shotguns went hunting prairie-chickens; the
+Great World, leading clear to the Red River Valley and Canada.
+
+Three mallard-ducks, with necks far out and wings beating hurriedly,
+shot over Carl's head. From far off a gun-shot floated echoing through
+forest hollows; in the waiting stillness sounded a rooster's crow,
+distant, magical.
+
+"I want to go hunting!" mourned Carl, as he trailed back into the
+woodshed. It seemed darker than ever and smelled of moldy chips. He
+bounced like an enraged chipmunk. His phlegmatic china-blue eyes
+filmed with tears. "Won't pile no more wood!" he declared.
+
+Naughty he undoubtedly was. But since he knew that his father, Oscar
+Ericson, the carpenter, all knuckles and patched overalls and bad
+temper, would probably whip him for rebellion, he may have acquired
+merit. He did not even look toward the house to see whether his mother
+was watching him--his farm-bred, worried, kindly, small, flat-chested,
+pinch-nosed, bleached, twangy-voiced, plucky Norwegian mother. He
+marched to the workshop and brought a collection of miscellaneous
+nails and screws out to a bare patch of earth in front of the
+chicken-yard. They were the Nail People, the most reckless band of
+mercenaries the world has ever known, led by old General Door-Hinge,
+who was somewhat inclined to collapse in the middle, but possessed of
+the unusual virtue of eyes in both ends of him. He had explored the
+deepest cañons of the woodshed, and victoriously led his ten-penny
+warriors against the sumacs in the vacant lot beyond Irving Lamb's
+house.
+
+Carl marshaled the Nail People, sticking them upright in the ground.
+After reasoning sternly with an intruding sparrow, thus did the
+dauntless General Door-Hinge address them:
+
+"Men, there's a nawful big army against us, but le's die like men, my
+men. Forwards!"
+
+As the veteran finished, a devastating fire of stones enfiladed the
+company, and one by one they fell, save for the commander himself, who
+bowed his grizzled wrought-steel head and sobbed, "The brave boys done
+their duty."
+
+From across the lake rolled another gun-shot.
+
+Carl dug his grimy fingers into the earth. "Jiminy! I wisht I was out
+hunting. Why can't I never go? I guess I'll pile the wood, but I'm
+gonna go seek-my-fortune after that."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Since Carl Ericson (some day to be known as "Hawk" Ericson) was the
+divinely restless seeker of the romance that must--or we die!--lie
+beyond the hills, you first see him in action; find him in the year
+1893, aged eight, leading revolutions in the back yard. But equally,
+since this is a serious study of an average young American, there
+should be an indication of his soil-nourished ancestry.
+
+Carl was second-generation Norwegian; American-born, American in
+speech, American in appearance, save for his flaxen hair and
+china-blue eyes; and, thanks to the flag-decked public school,
+overwhelmingly American in tradition. When he was born the "typical
+Americans" of earlier stocks had moved to city palaces or were
+marooned on run-down farms. It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a
+Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was the "typical American" of his
+period. It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending
+the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the
+exuberant, October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to
+add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for
+beauty.
+
+They are the New Yankees, these Scandinavians of Wisconsin and
+Minnesota and the Dakotas, with a human breed that can grow, and a
+thousand miles to grow in. The foreign-born parents, when they first
+come to the Northern Middlewest, huddle in unpainted farm-houses with
+grassless dooryards and fly-zizzing kitchens and smelly dairies, set
+on treeless, shadeless, unsoftened leagues of prairie or bunched in
+new clearings ragged with small stumps. The first generation are alien
+and forlorn. The echoing fjords of Trondhjem and the moors of Finmark
+have clipped their imaginations, silenced their laughter, hidden with
+ice their real tenderness. In America they go sedulously to the bare
+Lutheran church and frequently drink ninety-per-cent. alcohol. They
+are also heroes, and have been the makers of a new land, from the days
+of Indian raids and ox-teams and hillside dug-outs to now, repeating
+in their patient hewing the history of the Western Reserve.... In one
+generation or even in one decade they emerge from the desolation of
+being foreigners. They, and the Germans, pay Yankee mortgages with
+blood and sweat. They swiftly master politics, voting for honesty
+rather than for hand-shakes; they make keen, scrupulously honest
+business deals; send their children to school; accumulate land--one
+section, two sections--or move to town to keep shop and ply skilled
+tools; become Methodists and Congregationalists; are neighborly with
+Yankee manufacturers and doctors and teachers; and in one generation,
+or less, are completely American.
+
+So was it with Carl Ericson. His carpenter father had come from
+Norway, by way of steerage and a farm in Wisconsin, changing his name
+from Ericsen. Ericson senior owned his cottage and, though he still
+said, "Aye ban going," he talked as naturally of his own American
+tariff and his own Norwegian-American Governor as though he had five
+generations of Connecticut or Virginia ancestry.
+
+Now, it was Carl's to go on, to seek the flowering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unconscious that he was the heir-apparent of the age, but decidedly
+conscious that the woodshed was dark, Carl finished the pile.
+
+From the step of the woodshed he regarded the world with plaintive
+boredom.
+
+"Ir-r-r-r-rving!" he called.
+
+No answer from Irving, the next-door boy.
+
+The village was rustlingly quiet. Carl skipped slowly and unhappily to
+the group of box-elders beside the workshop and stuck his finger-nails
+into the cobwebby crevices of the black bark. He made overtures for
+company on any terms to a hop-robin, a woolly worm, and a large blue
+fly, but they all scorned his advances, and when he yelled an
+ingratiating invitation to a passing dog it seemed to swallow its tail
+and ears as it galloped off. No one else appeared.
+
+Before the kitchen window he quavered:
+
+"Ma-ma!"
+
+In the kitchen, the muffled pounding of a sad-iron upon the padded
+ironing-board.
+
+"Ma!"
+
+Mrs. Ericson's whitey-yellow hair, pale eyes, and small nervous
+features were shadowed behind the cotton fly-screen.
+
+"Vell?" she said.
+
+"I haven't got noth-ing to do-o."
+
+"Go pile the vood."
+
+"I piled piles of it."
+
+"Then you can go and play."
+
+"I _been_ playing."
+
+"Then play some more."
+
+"I ain't got nobody to play with."
+
+"Then find somebody. But don't you step vun step out of this yard."
+
+"I don't see _why_ I can't go outa the yard!"
+
+"Because I said so."
+
+Again the sound of the sad-iron.
+
+Carl invented a game in which he was to run in circles, but not step
+on the grass; he made the tenth inspection that day of the drying
+hazelnuts whose husks were turning to seal-brown on the woodshed roof;
+he hunted for a good new bottle to throw at Irving Lamb's barn; he
+mended his sling-shot; he perched on a sawbuck and watched the street.
+Nothing passed, nothing made an interesting rattling, except one
+democrat wagon.
+
+From over the water another gun-shot murmured of distant hazards.
+
+Carl jumped down from the sawbuck and marched deliberately out of the
+yard, along Oak Street toward The Hill, the smart section of
+Joralemon, where live in exclusive state five large houses that get
+painted nearly every year.
+
+"I'm gonna seek-my-fortune. I'm gonna find Bennie and go swimming," he
+vowed. Calmly as Napoleon defying his marshals, General Carl
+disregarded the sordid facts that it was too late in the year to go
+swimming, and that Benjamin Franklin Rusk couldn't swim, anyway. He
+clumped along, planting his feet with spats of dust, very dignified
+and melancholy but, like all small boys, occasionally going mad and
+running in chase of nothing at all till he found it.
+
+He stopped before the House with Mysterious Shutters.
+
+Carl had never made b'lieve fairies or princes; rather, he was in the
+secret world of boyhood a soldier, a trapper, or a swing-brakeman on
+the M. & D. R.R. But he was bespelled by the suggestion of grandeur in
+the iron fence and gracious trees and dark carriage-shed of the House
+with Shutters. It was a large, square, solid brick structure, set
+among oaks and sinister pines, once the home, or perhaps the mansion,
+of Banker Whiteley, but unoccupied for years. Leaves rotted before the
+deserted carriage-shed. The disregarded steps in front were seamed
+with shallow pools of water for days after a rain. The windows had
+always been darkened, but not by broad-slatted outside shutters,
+smeared with house-paint to which stuck tiny black hairs from the
+paint-brush, like the ordinary frame houses of Joralemon. Instead,
+these windows were masked with inside shutters haughtily varnished to
+a hard refined brown.
+
+To-day the windows were open, the shutters folded; furniture was being
+moved in; and just inside the iron gate a frilly little girl was
+playing with a whitewashed conch-shell.
+
+She must have been about ten at that time, since Carl was eight. She
+was a very dressy and complacent child, possessed not only of a clean
+white muslin with three rows of tucks, immaculate bronze boots, and a
+green tam-o'-shanter, but also of a large hair-ribbon, a ribbon sash,
+and a silver chain with a large, gold-washed, heart-shaped locket. She
+was softly plump, softly gentle of face, softly brown of hair, and
+softly pleasant of speech.
+
+"Hello!" said she.
+
+"H'lo!"
+
+"What's your name, little boy?"
+
+"Ain't a little boy. I'm Carl Ericson."
+
+"Oh, are you? I'm----"
+
+"I'm gonna have a shotgun when I'm fifteen." He shyly hurled a stone
+at a telegraph-pole to prove that he was not shy.
+
+"My name is Gertie Cowles. I came from Minneapolis. My mamma owns part
+of the Joralemon Flour Mill.... Are you a nice boy? We just moved here
+and I don't know anybody. Maybe my mamma will let me play with you if
+you are a nice boy."
+
+"I jus' soon come play with you. If you play soldiers.... My pa 's the
+smartest man in Joralemon. He builded Alex Johnson's house. He's got a
+ten-gauge gun."
+
+"Oh.... My mamma 's a widow."
+
+Carl hung by his arms from the gate-pickets while she breathed,
+"M-m-m-m-m-m-y!" in admiration at the feat.
+
+"That ain't nothing. I can hang by my knees on a trapeze.... What did
+you come from Minneapolis for?"
+
+"We're going to live here," she said.
+
+"Oh."
+
+"I went to the Chicago World's Fair with my mamma this summer."
+
+"Aw, you didn't!"
+
+"I did so. And I saw a teeny engine so small it was in a walnut-shell
+and you had to look at it through a magnifying-glass and it kept on
+running like anything."
+
+"Huh! that's nothing! Ben Rusk, he went to the World's Fair, too, and
+he saw a statchue that was bigger 'n our house and all pure gold. You
+didn't see that."
+
+"I did so! And we got cousins in Chicago and we stayed with them, and
+Cousin Edgar is a very _prominent_ doctor for eyenear and stummick."
+
+"Aw, Ben Rusk's pa is a doctor, too. And he's got a brother what's
+going to be a sturgeon."
+
+"I got a brother. He's a year older than me. His name is Ray....
+There's lots more people in Minneapolis than there is in Joralemon.
+There's a hundred thousand people in Minneapolis."
+
+"That ain't nothing. My pa was born in Christiania, in the Old
+Country, and they's a million million people there."
+
+"Oh, there is not!"
+
+"Honest there is."
+
+"Is there, honest?" Gertie was admiring now.
+
+He looked patronizingly at the red-plush furniture which was being
+splendidly carried into the great house from Jordan's dray--an old
+friend of Carl's, which had often carried him banging through town. He
+condescended:
+
+"Jiminy! You don't know Bennie Rusk nor nobody, do you! I'll bring him
+and we can play soldiers. And we can make tents out of carpets. Did
+you ever run through carpets on the line?"
+
+He pointed to the row of rugs and carpets airing beside the
+carriage-shed.
+
+"No. Is it fun?"
+
+"It's awful scary. But I ain't afraid."
+
+He dashed at the carpets and entered their long narrow tent. To tell
+the truth, when he stepped from the sunshine into the intense darkness
+he was slightly afraid. The Ericsons' one carpet made a short passage,
+but to pass on and on and on through this succession of heavy rug
+mats, where snakes and poisonous bugs might hide, and where the
+rough-threaded, gritty under-surface scratched his pushing hands, was
+fearsome. He emerged with a whoop and encouraged her to try the feat.
+She peeped inside the first carpet, but withdrew her head, giving
+homage:
+
+"Oh, it's so _dark_ in there where you went!"
+
+He promptly performed the feat again.
+
+As they wandered back to the gate to watch the furniture-man Gertie
+tried to regain the superiority due her years by remarking, of a large
+escritoire which was being juggled into the front door, "My papa
+bought that desk in Chicago----"
+
+Carl broke in, "I'll bring Bennie Rusk, and me and him 'll teach you
+to play soldiers."
+
+"My mamma don't think I ought to play games. I've got a lot of dolls,
+but I'm too old for dolls. I play Authors with mamma, sometimes. And
+dominoes. Authors is a very nice game."
+
+"But maybe your ma will let you play Indian squaw, and me and Bennie
+'ll tie you to a stake and scalp you. That won't be rough like
+soldiers. But I'm going to be a really-truly soldier. I'm going to be
+a norficer in the army."
+
+"I got a cousin that's an officer in the army," Gertie said grandly,
+bringing her yellow-ribboned braid round over her shoulder and gently
+brushing her lips with the end.
+
+"Cross-your-heart?"
+
+"Um-huh."
+
+"Cross-your-heart, hope-t'-die if you ain't?"
+
+"Honest he's an officer."
+
+"Jiminy crickets! Say, Gertie, could he make me a norficer? Let's go
+find him. Does he live near here?"
+
+"Oh my, no! He's 'way off in San Francisco."
+
+"Come on. Let's go there. You and me. Gee! I like you! You got a'
+awful pertty dress."
+
+"'Tain't polite to compliment me to my face. Mamma says----"
+
+"Come on! Let's go! We're going!"
+
+"Oh no. I'd like to," she faltered, "but my mamma wouldn't let me. She
+don't let me play around with boys, anyway. She's in the house now.
+And besides, it's 'way far off across the sea, to San Francisco; it's
+beyond the salt sea where the Mormons live, and they all got seven
+wives."
+
+"Beyond the sea like Christiania? Ah, 'tain't! It's in America,
+because Mr. Lamb went there last winter. 'Sides, even if it was across
+the sea, couldn't we go an' be stow'ways, like the Younger Brothers
+and all them? And Little Lord Fauntleroy. He went and was a lord, and
+he wasn't nothing but a' orphing. My ma read me about him, only she
+don't talk English very good, but we'll go stow'ways," he wound up,
+triumphantly.
+
+"Gerrrrrrtrrrrrude!" A high-pitched voice from the stoop.
+
+Gertie glowered at a tall, meager woman with a long green-and-white
+apron over a most respectable black alpaca gown. Her nose was large,
+her complexion dull, but she carried herself so commandingly as to be
+almost handsome and very formidable.
+
+"Oh, dear!" Gertie stamped her foot. "Now I got to go in. I never can
+have any fun. Good-by, Carl----"
+
+He urgently interrupted her tragic farewell. "Say! Gee whillikins! I
+know what we'll do. You sneak out the back door and I'll meet you, and
+we'll run away and go seek-our-fortunes and we'll find your
+cousin----"
+
+"Gerrrtrrrude!" from the stoop.
+
+"Yes, mamma, I'm just coming." To Carl: "'Sides, I'm older 'n you and
+I'm 'most grown-up, and I don't believe in Santy Claus, and onc't I
+taught the infant class at St. Chrysostom's Sunday-school when the
+teacher wasn't there; anyway, I and Miss Bessie did, and I asked them
+'most all the questions about the trumpets and pitchers. So I couldn't
+run away. I'm too old."
+
+"Gerrrtrrrude, come here this _instant_!"
+
+"Come on. I'll be waiting," Carl demanded.
+
+She was gone. She was being ushered into the House of Mysterious
+Shutters by Mrs. Cowles. Carl prowled down the street, a fine, new,
+long stick at his side, like a saber. He rounded the block, and waited
+back of the Cowles carriage-shed, doing sentry-go and planning the
+number of parrots and pieces of eight he would bring back from San
+Francisco. _Then_ his father and mother would be sorry they'd talked
+about him in their Norwegian!
+
+"Carl!" Gertie was running around the corner of the carriage-shed.
+"Oh, Carl, I had to come out and see you again, but I can't go
+seek-our-fortunes with you, 'cause they've got the piano moved in now
+and I got to practise, else I'll grow up just an ignorant common
+person, and, besides, there's going to be tea-biscuits and honey for
+supper. I saw the honey."
+
+He smartly swung his saber to his shoulder, ordering, "Come on!"
+
+Gertie edged forward, perplexedly sucking a finger-joint, and followed
+him along Lake Street toward open country. They took to the Minnesota
+& Dakota railroad track, a natural footpath in a land where the trains
+were few and not fast, as was the condition of the single-tracked M. &
+D. of 1893. In a worried manner Carl inquired whether San Francisco
+was northwest or southeast--the directions in which ran all
+self-respecting railroads. Gertie blandly declared that it lay to the
+northwest; and northwest they started--toward the swamps and the first
+forests of the Big Woods.
+
+He had wonderlands to show her along the track. To him every detail
+was of scientific importance. He knew intimately the topography of the
+fields beside the track; in which corner of Tubbs's pasture, between
+the track and the lake, the scraggly wild clover grew, and down what
+part of the gravel-bank it was most exciting to roll. As far along the
+track as the Arch, each railroad tie (or sleeper) had for him a
+personality: the fat, white tie, which oozed at the end into an
+awkward knob, he had always hated because it resembled a flattened
+grub; a new tamarack tie with a sliver of fresh bark still on it,
+recently put in by the section gang, was an entertaining stranger; and
+he particularly introduced Gertie to his favorite, a wine-colored tie
+which always smiled.
+
+Gertie, though _noblesse oblige_ compelled her to be gracious to the
+imprisoned ties writhing under the steel rails, did not really show
+much enthusiasm till he led her to the justly celebrated Arch. Even
+then she boasted of Minnehaha Falls and Fort Snelling and Lake
+Calhoun; but, upon his grieved solicitation, declared that, after all,
+the Twin Cities had nothing to compare with the Arch--a sandstone
+tunnel full twenty feet high, miraculously boring through the railroad
+embankment, and faced with great stones which you could descend by
+lowering yourself from stone to stone. Through the Arch ran the creek,
+with rare minnows in its pools, while important paths led from the
+creek to a wilderness of hazelnut-bushes. He taught her to tear the
+drying husks from the nuts and crack the nuts with stones. At his
+request Gertie produced two pins from unexpected parts of her small
+frilly dress. He found a piece of string, and they fished for perch in
+the creek. As they had no bait whatever, their success was not large.
+
+A flock of ducks flew low above them, seeking a pond for the night.
+
+"Jiminy!" Carl cried, "it's getting late. We got to hurry. It's awful
+far to San Francisco and--I don't know--gee! where'll we sleep
+to-night?"
+
+"We hadn't ought to go on, had we?"
+
+"Yes! Come on!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+From the creek they tramped nearly two miles, through the dark
+gravel-banks of the railroad cut, across the high trestle over
+Joralemon River where Gertie had to be coaxed from stringer to
+stringer. They stopped only when a gopher in a clearing demanded
+attention. Gertie finally forgot the superiority of age when she saw
+Carl whistle the quivering gopher-cry, while the gopher sat as though
+hypnotized on his pile of fresh black earth. Carl stalked him. As
+always happened, the gopher popped into his hole just before Carl
+reached him; but it certainly did seem that he had nearly been caught;
+and Gertie was jumping with excitement when Carl returned, strutting,
+cocking his saber-stick over his shoulder.
+
+Gertie was tired. She, the Minneapolis girl, had not been much awed by
+the railroad ties nor the Arch, but now she tramped proudly beside the
+man who could catch gophers, till Carl inquired:
+
+"Are you gettin' awful hungry? It's a'most supper-time."
+
+"Yes, I _am_ hungry," trustingly.
+
+"I'm going to go and swipe some 'taters. I guess maybe there's a
+farm-house over there. I see a chimbly beyond the slough. You stay
+here."
+
+"I dassn't stay alone. Oh, I better go home. I'm scared."
+
+"Come on. I won't let nothing hurt you."
+
+They circled a swamp surrounded by woods, Carl's left arm about her,
+his right clutching the saber. Though the sunset was magnificent and a
+gay company of blackbirds swayed on the reeds of the slough, dusk was
+sneaking out from the underbrush that blurred the forest floor, and
+Gertie caught the panic fear. She wished to go home at once. She saw
+darkness reaching for them. Her mother would unquestionably whip her
+for staying out so late. She discovered a mud-smear on the side of her
+skirt, and a shoe-button was gone. She was cold. Finally, if she
+missed supper at home she would get no tea-biscuits and honey.
+Gertie's polite little stomach knew its rights and insisted upon them.
+
+"I wish I hadn't come!" she lamented. "I wish I hadn't. Do you s'pose
+mamma will be dreadfully angry? Won't you 'splain to her? You will,
+won't you?"
+
+It was Carl's duty, as officer commanding, to watch the blackened
+stumps that sprang from the underbrush. And there was Something, 'way
+over in the woods, beyond the trees horribly gashed to whiteness by
+lightning. Perhaps the Something hadn't moved; perhaps it _was_ a
+stump----
+
+But he answered her loudly, so that lurking robbers might overhear: "I
+know a great big man over there, and he's a friend of mine; he's a
+brakie on the M. & D., and he lets me ride in the caboose any time I
+want to, and he's right behind us. (I was just making b'lieve, Gertie;
+I'll 'splain everything to your mother.) He's bigger 'n anybody!" More
+conversationally: "Aw, Jiminy! Gertie, don't cry! Please don't. I'll
+take care of you. And if you ain't going to have any supper we'll
+swipe some 'taters and roast 'em." He gulped. He hated to give up, to
+return to woodshed and chicken-yard, but he conceded: "I guess maybe
+we hadn't better go seek-our-fortunes no more to----"
+
+A long wail tore through the air. The children shrieked together and
+fled, stumbling in dry bog, weeping in terror. Carl's backbone was all
+one prickling bar of ice. But he waved his stick fiercely, and,
+because he had to care for her, was calm enough to realize that the
+wail must have been the cry of the bittern.
+
+"It wasn't nothing but a bird, Gertie; it can't hurt us. Heard 'em
+lots of times."
+
+Nevertheless, he was still trembling when they reached the edge of a
+farm-yard clearing beyond the swamp. It was gray-dark. They could see
+only the mass of a barn and a farmer's cabin, both new to Carl.
+Holding her hand, he whispered:
+
+"They must be some 'taters or 'beggies in the barn. I'll sneak in and
+see. You stand here by the corn-crib and work out some ears between
+the bars. See--like this."
+
+He left her. The sound of her frightened snivel aged him. He tiptoed
+to the barn door, eying a light in the farm-house. He reached far up
+to the latch of the broad door and pulled out the wooden pin. The
+latch slipped noisily from its staple. The door opened with a groaning
+creek and banged against the barn.
+
+Paralyzed, hearing all the silence of the wild clearing, he waited.
+There was a step in the house. The door opened. A huge farmer,
+tousle-haired, black-bearded, held up a lamp and peered out. It was
+the Black Dutchman.
+
+The Black Dutchman was a living legend. He often got drunk and rode
+past Carl's home at night, lashing his horses and cursing in German.
+He had once thrashed the school-teacher for whipping his son. He had
+no friends.
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear, I wisht I was home!" sobbed Carl; but he started to
+run to Gertie's protection.
+
+The Black Dutchman set down the lamp. "_Wer ist da?_ I see you!
+Damnation!" he roared, and lumbered out, seizing a pitchfork from the
+manure-pile.
+
+Carl galloped up to Gertie, panting, "He's after us!" and dragged her
+into the hazel-bushes beyond the corn-crib. As his country-bred feet
+found and followed a path toward deeper woods, he heard the Black
+Dutchman beating the bushes with his pitchfork, shouting:
+
+"Hiding! I know vere you are! _Hah!_"
+
+Carl jerked his companion forward till he lost the path. There was no
+light. They could only crawl on through the bushes, whose malicious
+fingers stung Gertie's face and plucked at her proud frills. He lifted
+her over fallen trees, freed her from branches, and all the time,
+between his own sobs, he encouraged her and tried to pretend that
+their incredible plight was not the end of the world, whimpering:
+
+"We're a'most on the road now, Gertie; honest we are. I can't hear him
+now. I ain't afraid of him--he wouldn't dast hurt us or my pa would
+fix him."
+
+"Oh! I hear him! He's coming! Oh, please save me, Carl!"
+
+"Gee! run fast!... Aw, I don't hear him. I ain't afraid of him!"
+
+They burst out on a grassy woodland road and lay down, panting. They
+could see a strip of stars overhead; and the world was dark, silent,
+in the inscrutable night of autumn. Carl said nothing. He tried to
+make out where they were--where this road would take them. It might
+run deeper into the woods, which he did not know as he did the Arch
+environs; and he had so twisted through the brush that he could not
+tell in what direction lay either the main wagon-road or the M. & D.
+track.
+
+He lifted her up, and they plodded hand in hand till she said:
+
+"I'm awful tired. It's awful cold. My feet hurt awfully. Carl dear,
+oh, pleassssse take me home now. I want my mamma. Maybe she won't whip
+me now. It's so dark and--ohhhhhh----" She muttered, incoherently:
+"There! By the road! He's waiting for us!" She sank down, her arm over
+her face, groaning, "Don't hurt me!"
+
+Carl straddled before her, on guard. There was a distorted mass
+crouched by the road just ahead. He tingled with the chill of fear,
+down through his thighs. He had lost his stick-saber, but he bent,
+felt for, and found another stick, and piped to the shadowy watcher:
+
+"I ain't af-f-fraid of you! You gwan away from here!"
+
+The watcher did not answer.
+
+"I know who you are!" Bellowing with fear, Carl ran forward, furiously
+waving his stick and clamoring: "You better not touch me!" The stick
+came down with a silly, flat clack upon the watcher--a roadside
+boulder. "It's just a rock, Gertie! Jiminy, I'm glad! It's just a
+rock!... Aw, I knew it was a rock all the time! Ben Rusk gets scared
+every time he sees a stump in the woods, and he always thinks it's a
+robber."
+
+Chattily, Carl went back, lifted her again, endured her kissing his
+cheek, and they started on.
+
+"I'm so cold," Gertie moaned from time to time, till he offered:
+
+"I'll try and build a fire. Maybe we better camp. I got a match what I
+swiped from the kitchen. Maybe I can make a fire, so we better camp."
+
+"I don't want to camp. I want to go home."
+
+"I don't know where we are, I told you."
+
+"Can you make a regular camp-fire? Like Indians?"
+
+"Um-huh."
+
+"Let's.... But I rather go home."
+
+"_You_ ain't scared now. _Are_ you, Gertie? Gee! you're a' awful brave
+girl!"
+
+"No, but I'm cold and I wisht we had some tea-biscuits----"
+
+Ever too complacent was Miss Gertrude Cowles, the Good Girl in
+whatever group she joined; but she seemed to trust in Carl's heroism,
+and as she murmured of a certain chilliness she seemed to take it for
+granted that he would immediately bring her some warmth. Carl had
+never heard of the romantic males who, in fiction, so frequently offer
+their coats to ladies fair but chill; yet he stripped off his jacket
+and wrapped it about her, while his gingham-clad shoulders twitched
+with cold.
+
+"I can hear a crick, 'way, 'way over there. Le's camp by it," he
+decided.
+
+They scrambled through the brush, Carl leading her and feeling the
+way. He found a patch of long grass beside the creek; with only his
+tremulous hands for eyes he gathered leaves, twigs, and dead branches,
+and piled them together in a pyramid, as he had been taught to do by
+the older woods-faring boys.
+
+It was still; no wind; but Carl, who had gobbled up every word he had
+heard about deer-hunting in the north woods, got a great deal of
+interesting fear out of dreading what might happen if his one match
+did not light. He made Gertie kneel beside him with the jacket
+outspread, and he hesitated several times before he scratched the
+match. It flared up; the leaves caught; the pile of twigs was
+instantly aflame.
+
+He wept, "Jiminy, if it hadn't lighted!..." By and by he announced,
+loudly, "I wasn't afraid," to convince himself, and sat up, throwing
+twigs on the fire grandly.
+
+Gertie, who didn't really appreciate heroism, sighed, "I'm hungry
+and----"
+
+"My second-grade teacher told us a story how they was a' arctic
+explorer and he was out in a blizzard----"
+
+"----and I wish we had some tea-biscuits," concluded Gertie,
+companionably but firmly.
+
+"I'll go pick some hazelnuts."
+
+He left her feeding the flame. As he crept away, the fire behind him,
+he was dreadfully frightened, now that he had no one to protect. A few
+yards from the fire he stopped in terror. He clutched a branch so
+tightly that it creased his palm. Two hundred yards away, across the
+creek, was the small square of a lighted window hovering detached in
+the darkness.
+
+For a panic-filled second Carl was sure that it must be the Black
+Dutchman's window. His tired child-mind whined. But there was no creek
+near the Black Dutchman's. Though he did not want to venture up to
+the unknown light, he growled, "I will if I want to!" and limped
+forward.
+
+He had to cross the creek, the strange creek whose stepping-stones he
+did not know. Shivering, hesitant, he stripped off his shoes and
+stockings and dabbled the edge of the water with reluctant toes, to
+see if it was cold. It was.
+
+"Dog-gone!" he swore, mightily. He plunged in, waded across.
+
+He found a rock and held it ready to throw at the dog that was certain
+to come snapping at him as he tiptoed through the clearing. His wet
+legs smarted with cold. The fact that he was trespassing made him feel
+more forlornly lost than ever. But he stumbled up to the one-room
+shack that was now shaping itself against the sky. It was a house
+that, he believed, he had never seen before. When he reached it he
+stood for fully a minute, afraid to move. But from across the creek
+whimpered Gertie's call:
+
+"Carl, oh, _Carl_, where are you?"
+
+He had to hurry. He crept along the side of the shack to the window.
+It was too high in the wall for him to peer through. He felt for
+something to stand upon, and found a short board, which he wedged
+against the side of the shack.
+
+He looked through the dusty window for a second. He sprang from the
+board.
+
+Alone in the shack was the one person about Joralemon more feared,
+more fabulous than the Black Dutchman--"Bone" Stillman, the man who
+didn't believe in God.
+
+Bone Stillman read Robert G. Ingersoll, and said what he thought.
+Otherwise he was not dangerous to the public peace; a lone old
+bachelor farmer. It was said that he had been a sailor or a policeman,
+a college professor or a priest, a forger or an embezzler. Nothing
+positive was known except that three years ago he had appeared and
+bought this farm. He was a grizzled man of fifty-five, with a long,
+tobacco-stained, gray mustache and an open-necked blue-flannel shirt.
+To Carl, beside the shack, Bone Stillman was all that was demoniac.
+
+Gertie was calling again. Carl climbed upon his board and resumed his
+inspection, seeking a course of action.
+
+The one-room shack was lined with tar-paper, on which were pinned
+lithographs of Robert G. Ingersoll, Karl Marx, and Napoleon. Under a
+gun-rack made of deer antlers was a cupboard half filled with dingy
+books, shotgun shells, and fishing tackle. Bone was reading by a pine
+table still littered with supper-dishes. Before him lay a clean-limbed
+English setter. The dog was asleep. In the shack was absolute
+stillness and loneliness intimidating.
+
+While Carl watched, Bone dropped his book and said, "Here, Bob, what
+d'you think of single-tax, heh?"
+
+Carl gazed apprehensively.... No one but Bone was in the shack.... It
+was said that the devil himself sometimes visited here.... On Carl was
+the chill of a nightmare.
+
+The dog raised his head, stirred, blinked, pounded his tail on the
+floor, and rose, a gentlemanly, affable chap, to lay his muzzle on
+Bone's knee while the solitary droned:
+
+"This fellow says in this book here that the city 's the natural place
+to live--aboriginal tribes prove man 's naturally gregarious. What
+d'you think about it, heh, Bob?... Bum country, this is. No thinking.
+What in the name of the seven saintly sisters did I ever want to be a
+farmer for, heh?
+
+"Let's skedaddle, Bob.
+
+"I ain't an atheist. I'm an agnostic.
+
+"Lonely, Bob? Go over and talk to his whiskers, Karl Marx. He's
+liberal. He don't care what you say. He---- Oh, shut up! You're damn
+poor company. Say something!"
+
+Carl, still motionless, was the more agonized because there was no
+sound from Gertie, not even a sobbing call. Anything might have
+happened to her. While he was coaxing himself to knock on the pane,
+Stillman puttered about the shack, petting the dog, filling his pipe.
+He passed out of Carl's range of vision toward the side of the room in
+which was the window.
+
+A huge hand jerked the window open and caught Carl by the hair. Two
+wild faces stared at each other, six inches apart.
+
+"I saw you. Came here to plague me!" roared Bone Stillman.
+
+"Oh, mister, oh please, mister, I wasn't. Me and Gertie is lost in the
+woods--we----Ouch! Oh, _please_ lemme go!"
+
+"Why, you're just a brat! Come here."
+
+The lean arm of Bone Stillman dragged Carl through the window by the
+slack of his gingham waist.
+
+"Lost, heh? Where's t'other one--Gertie, was it?"
+
+"She's over in the woods."
+
+"Poor little tyke! Wait 'll I light my lantern."
+
+The swinging lantern made friendly ever-changing circles of light, and
+Carl no longer feared the dangerous territory of the yard. Riding
+pick-a-back on Bone Stillman, he looked down contentedly on the dog's
+deferential tail beside them. They found Gertie asleep by the fire.
+She scarcely awoke as Stillman picked her up and carried her back to
+his shack. She nestled her downy hair beneath his chin and closed her
+eyes.
+
+Stillman said, cheerily, as he ushered them into his mansion: "I'll
+hitch up and take you back to town. You young tropical tramps! First
+you better have a bite to eat, though. What do kids eat, bub?"
+
+The dog was nuzzling Carl's hand, and Carl had almost forgotten his
+fear that the devil might appear. He was flatteringly friendly in his
+answer: "Porritch and meat and potatoes--only I don't like potatoes,
+and--_pie!_"
+
+"'Fraid I haven't any pie, but how'd some bacon and eggs go?" As he
+stoked up his cannon-ball stove and sliced the bacon, Stillman
+continued to the children, who were shyly perched on the buffalo-robe
+cover of his bed, "Were you scared in the woods?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Don't ever for----Da----Blast that egg! Don't forget this, son:
+nothing outside of you can ever hurt you. It can chew up your toes,
+but it can't reach you. Nobody but you can hurt you. Let me try to
+make that clear, old man, if I can....
+
+"There's your fodder. Draw up and set to. Pretty sleepy, are you? I'll
+tell you a story. J' like to hear about how Napoleon smashed the
+theory of divine rule, or about how me and Charlie Weems explored
+Tiburon? Well----"
+
+Though Carl afterward remembered not one word of what Bone Stillman
+said, it is possible that the outcast's treatment of him as a grown-up
+friend was one of the most powerful of the intangible influences which
+were to push him toward the great world outside of Joralemon. The
+school-bound child--taught by young ladies that the worst immorality
+was whispering in school; the chief virtue, a dull quietude--was here
+first given a reasonable basis for supposing that he was not always to
+be a back-yard boy.
+
+The man in the flannel shirt, who chewed tobacco, who wrenched
+infinitives apart and thrust profane words between, was for fifteen
+minutes Carl's Froebel and Montessori.
+
+Carl's recollection of listening to Bone blurs into one of being
+somewhere in the back of a wagon beside Gertie, wrapped in buffalo
+robes, and of being awakened by the stopping of the wagon when Bone
+called to a band of men with lanterns who were searching for the
+missing Gertie. Apparently the next second he was being lifted out
+before his home, and his aproned mother was kissing him and sobbing,
+"Oh, my boy!" He snuggled his head on her shoulder and said:
+
+"I'm cold. But I'm going to San Francisco."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Carl Ericson, grown to sixteen and long trousers, trimmed the
+arc-lights for the Joralemon Power and Lighting Company, after school;
+then at Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor he won two games of Kelly pool,
+smoked a cigarette of flake tobacco and wheat-straw paper, and
+"chipped in" five cents toward a can of beer.
+
+A slender Carl, hesitating in speech, but with plenty to say; rangy as
+a setter pup, silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an
+age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn
+and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black
+four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian
+of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who
+quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even
+Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin
+haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the
+high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked"
+in stores on Saturdays, or tended furnaces. Sometimes he donned the
+virile--and noisy--uniform of an electrician: army gauntlets, a coil
+of wire, pole-climbers strapped to his legs. Crunching his steel spurs
+into the crisp pine wood of the lighting-poles, he carelessly ascended
+to the place of humming wires and red cross-bars and green-glass
+insulators, while crowds of two and three small boys stared in awe
+from below. At such moments Carl did not envy the aristocratic leisure
+of his high-school classmate, Fatty Ben Rusk, who, as son of the
+leading doctor, did not work, but stayed home and read library books.
+
+Carl's own home was not adapted to the enchantments of a boy's
+reading. Perfectly comfortable it was, and clean with the hard
+cleanness that keeps oilcloth looking perpetually unused, but it was
+so airlessly respectable that it doubled Carl's natural restlessness.
+It had been old Oscar Ericson's labor of love, but the carpenter loved
+shininess more than space and leisure. His model for a house would
+have been a pine dry-goods box grained in imitation of oak. Oscar
+Ericson radiated intolerance and a belief in unimaginative, unresting
+labor. Every evening, collarless and carpet-slippered, ruffling his
+broom-colored hair or stroking his large, long chin, while his
+shirt-tab moved ceaselessly in time to his breathing, he read a
+Norwegian paper. Carl's mother darned woolen socks and thought about
+milk-pans and the neighbors and breakfast. The creak of rockers filled
+the unventilated, oilcloth-floored sitting-room. The sound was as
+unchanging as the sacred positions of the crayon enlargement of Mrs.
+Ericson's father, the green-glass top-hat for matches, or the violent
+ingrain rug with its dog's-head pattern.
+
+Carl's own room contained only plaster walls, a narrow wooden bed, a
+bureau, a kitchen chair. Fifteen minutes in this irreproachable home
+sent Carl off to Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor, which was not
+irreproachable.
+
+He rather disliked the bitterness of beer and the acrid specks of
+cigarette tobacco that stuck to his lips, but the "bunch at Eddie's"
+were among the few people in Joralemon who were conscious of life.
+Eddie's establishment was a long, white-plastered room with a
+pressed-steel ceiling and an unswept floor. On the walls were
+billiard-table-makers' calendars and a collection of cigarette-premium
+chromos portraying bathing girls. The girls were of lithographic
+complexions, almost too perfect of feature, and their lips were more
+than ruby. Carl admired them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A September afternoon. The sixteen-year-old Carl was tipped back in a
+chair at Eddie Klemm's, one foot on a rung, while he discussed village
+scandals and told outrageous stories with Eddie Klemm, a brisk
+money-maker and vulgarian aged twenty-three, who wore a "fancy vest"
+and celluloid buttons on his lapels. Ben Rusk hesitatingly poked his
+head through the door.
+
+Eddie Klemm called, with business-like cordiality: "H'lo, Fatty! Come
+in. How's your good health? Haven't reformed, have you? Going to join
+us rough-necks? Come on; I'll teach you to play pool. Won't cost you a
+cent."
+
+"No, I guess I hadn't better. I was just looking for Carl."
+
+"Well, well, Fatty, ain't we ree-fined! Why do we guess we hadn't to
+probably maybe oughtn't to had better?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Some day I'll learn, I guess," sighed Fatty Ben
+Rusk, who knew perfectly that with a doctor father, a religious
+mother, and an effeminate taste for reading he could never be a town
+sport.
+
+"Hey! watch out!" shrieked Eddie.
+
+"Wh-what's the matter?" gasped Fatty.
+
+"The floor 's falling on you!"
+
+"Th--th----Aw, say, you're kidding me," said Fatty, weakly, with a
+propitiating smile.
+
+"Don't worry, son; you're the third guy to-day that I've caught on
+that! Stick around, son, and sit in any time, and I'll learn you some
+pool. You got just the right build for a champ player. Have a
+cigarette?"
+
+The social amenities whereby Joralemon prepares her youth for the
+graces of life having been recognized, Fatty Rusk hitched a chair
+beside Carl, and muttered:
+
+"Say, Carl, here's what I wanted to tell you: I was just up to the
+Cowleses' to take back a French grammar I borrowed to look at----Maybe
+that ain't a hard-looking language! What d'you think? Mrs. Cowles told
+me Gertie is expected back to-morrow."
+
+"Gee whiz! I thought she was going to stay in New York for two years!
+And she's only been gone six months."
+
+"I guess Mrs. Cowles is kind of lonely without her," Ben mooned.
+
+"So now you'll be all nice and in love with Gertie again, heh? It
+certainly gets me why you want to fall in love, Fatty, when you could
+go hunting."
+
+"If you'd read about King Arthur and Galahad and all them instead of
+reading the _Scientific American_, and about these fool horseless
+carriages and stuff----There never will be any practical use for
+horseless carriages, anyway."
+
+"There will----" growled Carl.
+
+"My mother says she don't believe the Lord ever intended us to ride
+without horses, or what did He give us horses for? And the things
+always get stuck in the mud and you have to walk home--mother was
+reading that in a newspaper, just the other day."
+
+"Son, let me tell you, I'll own a horseless carriage some day, and I
+bet I go an average of twenty miles an hour with it, maybe forty."
+
+"Oh, rats! But I was saying, if you'd read some library books you'd
+know about love. Why, what 'd God put love in the world for----"
+
+"Say, will you quit explaining to me about what God did things for?"
+
+"Ouch! Quit! Awwww, quit, Carl.... Say, listen; here's what I wanted
+to tell you: How if you and me and Adelaide Benner and some of us went
+down to the depot to meet Gertie, to-morrow? She comes in on the
+twelve-forty-seven."
+
+"Well, all right. Say, Bennie, you don't want to be worried when I kid
+you about being in love with Gertie. I don't think I'll ever get
+married. But it's all right for you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Saturday morning was so cool, so radiant, that Carl awakened early to
+a conviction that, no matter how important meeting Gertie might be in
+the cosmic scheme, he was going hunting. He was down-stairs by five.
+He fried two eggs, called Dollar Ingersoll, his dog--son of Robert
+Ingersoll Stillman, gentleman dog--then, in canvas hunting-coat and
+slouch-hat, tramped out of town southward, where the woods ended in
+prairie. Gertie's arrival was forgotten.
+
+It was a gipsy day. The sun rolled splendidly through the dry air,
+over miles of wheat stubble, whose gray-yellow prickles were
+transmuted by distance into tawny velvet, seeming only the more
+spacious because of the straight, thin lines of barbed-wire fences
+lined with goldenrod, and solitary houses in willow groves. The dips
+and curves of the rolling plain drew him on; the distances satisfied
+his eyes. A pleasant hum of insects filled the land's wide serenity
+with hidden life.
+
+Carl left a trail of happy, monotonous whistling behind him all day,
+as his dog followed the winding trail of prairie-chickens, as a covey
+of chickens rose with booming wings and he swung his shotgun for a
+bead. He stopped by prairie-sloughs or bright-green bogs to watch for
+a duck. He hailed as equals the occasional groups of hunters in
+two-seated buggies, quartering the fields after circling dogs. He
+lunched contentedly on sandwiches of cold lamb, and lay with his arms
+under his head, gazing at a steeple fully ten miles away.
+
+By six of the afternoon he had seven prairie-chickens tucked inside
+the long pocket that lined the tail of his coat, and he headed for
+home, superior to miles, his quiet eyes missing none of the purple
+asters and goldenrod.
+
+As he began to think he felt a bit guilty. The flowers suggested
+Gertie. He gathered a large bunch, poking stalks of aster among the
+goldenrod, examining the result at arm's-length. Yet when he stopped
+at the Rusks' in town, to bid Bennie take the rustic bouquet to
+Gertie, he replied to reproaches:
+
+"What you making all the fuss about my not being there to meet her
+for? She got here all right, didn't she? What j' expect me to do? Kiss
+her? You ought to known it was too good a day for hunting to miss....
+How's Gert? Have a good time in New York?"
+
+Carl himself took the flowers to her, however, and was so shyly
+attentive to her account of New York that he scarcely stopped to speak
+to the Cowleses' "hired girl," who was his second cousin.... Mrs.
+Cowles overheard him shout, "Hello, Lena! How's it going?" to the
+hired girl with cousinly ease. Mrs. Cowles seemed chilly. Carl
+wondered why.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From month to month of his junior year in high school Carl grew more
+discontented. He let the lines of his Cicero fade into a gray blur
+that confounded Cicero's blatant virtue and Cataline's treachery,
+while he pictured himself tramping with snow-shoes and a mackinaw coat
+into the snowy solemnities of the northern Minnesota tamarack swamps.
+Much of his discontent was caused by his learned preceptors. The
+teachers for this year were almost perfectly calculated to make any
+lad of the slightest independence hate culture for the rest of his
+life. With the earnestness and industry usually ascribed to the devil,
+"Prof" Sybrant E. Larsen (B. A. Platonis), Miss McDonald, and Miss
+Muzzy kept up ninety-five per cent. discipline, and seven per cent.
+instruction in anything in the least worth while.
+
+Miss Muzzy was sarcastic, and proud of it. She was sarcastic to Carl
+when he gruffly asked why he couldn't study French instead of "all
+this Latin stuff." If there be any virtue in the study of Latin (and
+we have all forgotten all our Latin except the fact that "suburb"
+means "under the city"--_i. e._, a subway), Carl was blinded to it for
+ever. Miss Muzzy wore eye-glasses and had no bosom. Carl's father used
+to say approvingly, "Dat Miss Muzzy don't stand for no nonsense," and
+Mrs. Dr. Rusk often had her for dinner.... Miss McDonald, fat and
+slow-spoken and kind, prone to use the word "dearie," to read
+Longfellow, and to have buttons off her shirt-waists, used on Carl a
+feminine weapon more unfair than the robust sarcasm of Miss Muzzy. For
+after irritating a self-respecting boy into rudeness by pawing his
+soul with damp, puffy hands, she would weep. She was a kind, honest,
+and reverent bovine. Carl sat under her supervision in the junior
+room, with its hardwood and blackboards and plaster, high windows and
+portraits of Washington and a President who was either Madison or
+Monroe (no one ever remembered which). He hated the eternal school
+smell of drinking-water pails and chalk and slates and varnish; he
+loathed the blackboard erasers, white with crayon-dust; he found
+inspiration only in the laboratory where "Prof" Larsen mistaught
+physics and rebuked questions about the useless part of
+chemistry--that is, the part that wasn't in their text-books.
+
+As for literature, Ben Rusk persuaded him to try Captain Marryat and
+Conan Doyle. Carl met Sherlock Holmes in a paper-bound book, during a
+wait for flocks of mallards on the duck-pass, which was a little
+temple of silver birches bare with November. He crouched down in his
+canvas coat and rubber boots, gun across knees, and read for an hour
+without moving. As he tramped home, into a vast Minnesota sunset like
+a furnace of fantastic coals, past the garnet-tinged ice of lakes, he
+kept his gun cocked and under his elbow, ready for the royal robber
+who was dogging the personage of Baker Street.
+
+He hunted much; distinguished himself in geometry and chemistry;
+nearly flunked in Cicero and English; learned to play an
+extraordinarily steady game of bottle pool at Eddie Klemm's.
+
+And always Gertie Cowles, gently hesitant toward Ben Rusk's affection,
+kept asking Carl why he didn't come to see her oftener, and play
+tiddledywinks.
+
+On the Friday morning before Christmas vacation, Carl and Ben Rusk
+were cleaning up the chemical laboratory, its pine experiment-bench
+and iron sink and rough floor. Bennie worried a rag in the sink with
+the resigned manner of a man who, having sailed with purple banners
+the sunset sea of tragedy, goes bravely on with a life gray and weary.
+
+The town was excited. Gertie Cowles was giving a party, and she had
+withdrawn her invitation to Eddie Klemm. Gertie was staying away from
+high school, gracefully recovering from a cold. For two weeks the
+junior and senior classes had been furtively exhibiting her
+holly-decked cards of invitation. Eddie had been included, but after
+his quarrel with Howard Griffin, a Plato College freshman who was
+spending the vacation with Ray Cowles, it had been explained to Eddie
+that perhaps he would be more comfortable not to come to the party.
+
+Gertie's brother, Murray, or "Ray," was the town hero. He had
+captained the high-school football team. He was tall and very
+black-haired, and he "jollied" the girls. It was said that twenty
+girls in Joralemon and Wakamin, and a "grass widow" in St. Hilary,
+wrote to him. He was now a freshman in Plato College, Plato,
+Minnesota. He had brought home with him his classmate, Howard Griffin,
+whose people lived in South Dakota and were said to be wealthy.
+Griffin had been very haughty to Eddie Klemm, when introduced to that
+brisk young man at the billiard-parlor, and now, the town eagerly
+learned, Eddie had been rejected of society.
+
+In the laboratory Carl was growling: "Well, say, Fatty, if it was
+right for them to throw Eddie out, where do I come in? His dad 's a
+barber, and mine 's a carpenter, and that's just as bad. Or how about
+you? I was reading that docs used to be just barbers."
+
+"Aw, thunder!" said Ben Rusk, the doctor's scion, uncomfortably,
+"you're just arguing. I don't believe that about doctors being
+barbers. Don't it tell about doctors 'way back in the Bible? Why, of
+course! Luke was a physician! 'Sides, it ain't a question of Eddie's
+being a barber's son. I sh'd think you'd realize that Gertie isn't
+well. She wouldn't want to have to entertain both Eddie and Griffin,
+and Griffin 's her guest; and besides----"
+
+"You're getting all tangled up. If I was to let you go on you'd trip
+over a long word and bust your dome. Come on. We've done enough
+cleaning. Le's hike. Come on up to the house and help me on my bobs. I
+got a new scheme for pivoting the back sled.... You just wait till
+to-night. I'm going to tell Gertie and Mister Howard Griffin just what
+I think of them for being such two-bit snobs. And your future
+ma-in-law. Gee! I'm glad I don't have to be in love with anybody, and
+become a snob! Come on."
+
+Out of this wholesome, democratic, and stuffy village life Carl
+suddenly stepped into the great world. A motor-car, the first he had
+ever seen, was drawn up before the Hennepin House.
+
+He stopped. His china-blue eyes widened. His shoulders shot forward to
+a rigid stoop of astonishment. His mouth opened. He gasped as they ran
+to join the gathering crowd.
+
+"A horseless carriage! Do you get that? There's one _here_!" He
+touched the bonnet of the two-cylinder 1901 car, and worshiped. "Under
+there--the engine! And there's where you steer.... I _will_ own
+one!... Gee! you're right, Fatty; I believe I will go to college. And
+then I'll study mechanical engineering."
+
+"Thought you said you were going to try and go to Annapolis and be a
+sailor."
+
+"No. Rats! I'm going to own a horseless carriage, and I'm going to
+tour every state in the Union.... Think of seeing mountains! And the
+ocean! And going twenty miles an hour, like a train!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+While Carl prepared for Gertie Cowles's party by pressing his trousers
+with his mother's flat-iron, while he blacked his shoes and took his
+weekly sponge-bath, he was perturbed by partisanship with Eddie Klemm,
+and a longing for the world of motors, and some anxiety as to how he
+could dance at the party when he could not dance.
+
+He clumped up the new stone steps of the Cowles house carelessly, not
+unusually shy, ready to tell Gertie what he thought of her treatment
+of Eddie. Then the front door opened and an agonized Carl was
+smothered in politeness. His second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses' "hired
+girl," was opening the door, stiff and uncomfortable in a cap, a black
+dress, and a small frilly apron that dangled on her boniness like a
+lace kerchief pinned on a broom-handle. Murray Cowles rushed up. He
+was in evening clothes!
+
+Behind Murray, Mrs. Cowles greeted Carl with thawed majesty: "We are
+so glad to have you, Carl. Won't you take your things off in the room
+at the head of the stairs?"
+
+An affable introduction to Howard Griffin (also in evening clothes)
+was poured on Carl like soothing balm. Said Griffin: "Mighty glad to
+meet you, Ericson. Ray told me you'd make a ripping sprinter. The
+captain of the track team 'll be on the lookout for you when you get
+to Plato. Course you're going to go there. The U. of Minn. is too
+big.... You'll _do_ something for old Plato. Wish I could. But all I
+can do is warble like a darn' dicky-bird. Have a cigarette?... They're
+just starting to dance. Come on, old man. Come on, Ray."
+
+Carl was drawn down-stairs and instantly precipitated into a dance
+regarding which he was sure only that it was either a waltz, a
+two-step, or something else. It filled with glamour the Cowles
+library--the only parlor in Joralemon that was called a library, and
+the only one with a fireplace or a polished hardwood floor. Grandeur
+was in the red lambrequins over the doors and windows; the bead
+portière; a hand-painted coal-scuttle; small, round paintings of
+flowers set in black velvet; an enormous black-walnut bookcase with
+fully a hundred volumes; and the two lamps of green-mottled shades and
+wrought-iron frames, set on pyrographed leather skins brought from New
+York by Gertie. The light was courtly on the polished floor. Adelaide
+Benner--a new Adelaide, in chiffon over yellow satin, and
+patent-leather slippers--grinned at him and ruthlessly towed him into
+the tide of dancers. In the spell of society no one seemed to remember
+Eddie Klemm. Adelaide did not mention the incident.
+
+Carl found himself bumping into others, continually apologizing to
+Adelaide and the rest--and not caring. For he saw a vision! Each time
+he turned toward the south end of the room he beheld Gertie Cowles
+glorified.
+
+She was out of ankle-length dresses! She looked her impressive
+eighteen, in a foaming long white mull that showed her soft throat. A
+red rose was in her brown hair. She reclined in a big chair of leather
+and oak and smiled her gentlest, especially when Carl bobbed his head
+to her.
+
+He had always taken her as a matter of course; she had no age, no sex,
+no wonder. That afternoon she had been a negligible bit of Joralemon,
+to be accused of snobbery toward Eddie Klemm, and always to be watched
+suspiciously lest she "spring some New York airs on us."... Gertie had
+craftily seemed unchanged after her New York enlightenment till
+now--here she was, suddenly grown-up and beautiful, haloed with a
+peculiar magic, which distinguished her from all the rest of the
+world.
+
+"She's the one that would ride in that horseless carriage when I got
+it!" Carl exulted. "That must be a train, that thing she's got on."
+
+After the dance he disposed of Adelaide Benner as though she were only
+a sister. He hung over the back of Gertie's chair and urged: "I was
+awful sorry to hear you were sick.... Say, you look wonderful,
+to-night."
+
+"I'm so glad you could come to my party. Oh, I must speak to you
+about----Do you suppose you would ever get very, very angry at poor
+me? Me so bad sometimes."
+
+He cut an awkward little caper to show his aplomb, and assured her, "I
+guess probably I'll kill you some time, all right."
+
+"No, listen, Carl; I'm dreadfully serious. I hope you didn't go and
+get dreadfully angry at me about Eddie Klemm. I know Eddie 's good
+friends with you. And I did want to have him come to my party. But you
+see it was this way: Mr. Griffin is our guest (he likes you a _lot_,
+Carl. Isn't he a dandy fellow? I guess Adelaide and Hazel 're just
+crazy about him. I think he's just as swell as the men in New York).
+Eddie and he didn't get along very well together. It isn't anybody's
+fault, I don't guess. I thought Eddie would be lots happier if he
+didn't come, don't you see?"
+
+"Oh no, of course; oh yes, I see. Sure. I can see how----Say, Gertie,
+I never did know you could look so grown-up. I suppose now you'll
+never play with me."
+
+"I want you to be a good friend of mine always. We always have been
+awfully good friends, haven't we?"
+
+"Yes. Do you remember how we ran away?"
+
+"And how the Black Dutchman chassssed us!" Her sweet and complacent
+voice was so cheerful that he lost his awe of her new magic and
+chortled:
+
+"And how we used to play pum-pum-pull-away."
+
+She delicately leaned her cheek on a finger-tip and sighed: "Yes, I
+wonder if we shall ever be so happy as when we were young.... I don't
+believe you care to play with me so much now."
+
+"Oh, gee! Gertie! Like to----!" The shyness was on him again. "Say,
+are you feeling better now? You're all over being sick?"
+
+"Almost, now. I'll be back in school right after vacation."
+
+"It's you that don't want to play, I guess.... I can't get over that
+long white dress. It makes you look so--oh, you know, so, uh----"
+
+"They're going to dance again. I wish I felt able to dance."
+
+"Let me sit and talk to you, Gertie, instead of dancing."
+
+"I suppose you're dreadfully bored, though, when you could be down at
+the billiard-parlor?"
+
+"Yes, I could! Not! Eddie Klemm and his fancy vest wouldn't have much
+chance, alongside of Griffin in his dress-suit! Course I don't want to
+knock Eddie. Him and me are pretty good side-kicks----"
+
+"Oh no; I understand. It's just that people have to go with their own
+class, don't you think?"
+
+"Oh Yes. Sure. I do think so, myself." Carl said it with a spurious
+society manner. In Gertie's aristocratic presence he desired to keep
+aloof from all vulgar persons.
+
+"Of course, I think we ought to make allowances for Eddie's father,
+Carl, but then----"
+
+She sighed with the responsibilities of _noblesse oblige_; and Carl
+gravely sighed with her.
+
+He brought a stool and sat at her feet. Immediately he was afraid that
+every one was watching him. Ray Cowles bawled to them, as he passed in
+the waltz, "Watch out for that Carl, Gert. He's a regular badix."
+
+Carl's scalp tickled, but he tried to be very offhand in remarking:
+"You must have gotten that dress in New York, didn't you? Why haven't
+you ever told me about New York? You've hardly told me anything at
+all."
+
+"Well, I like that! And you never been near me to give me a chance!"
+
+"I guess I was kind of scared you wouldn't care much for Joralemon,
+after New York."
+
+"Why, Carl, you mustn't say that to me!"
+
+"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Gertie, honestly I didn't. I was
+just joking. I didn't think you'd take me seriously."
+
+"As though I could forget my old friends, even in New York!"
+
+"I didn't think that. Straight. Please tell me about New York. That's
+the place, all right. Jiminy! wouldn't I like to go there!"
+
+"I wish you could have been there, Carl. We had such fun in my school.
+There weren't any boys in it, but we----"
+
+"No boys in it? Why, how's that?"
+
+"Why, it was just for girls."
+
+"I see," he said, fatuously, completely satisfied.
+
+"We did have the best times, Carl. I _must_ tell you about one awfully
+naughty thing Carrie--she was my chum in school--and I did. There was
+a stock company on Twenty-third Street, and we were all crazy about
+the actors, especially Clements Devereaux, and one afternoon Carrie
+told the principal she had a headache, and I asked if I could go home
+with her and read her the assignments for next day (they called the
+lessons 'assignments' there), and they thought I was such a meek
+little country mouse that I wouldn't ever fib, and so they let us go,
+and what do you think we did? She had tickets for 'The Two Orphans' at
+the stock company. (You've never seen 'The Two Orphans,' have you?
+It's perfectly splendid. I used to weep my eyes out over it.) And
+afterward we went and waited outside, right near the stage entrance,
+and what do you think? The leading man, Clements Devereaux, went
+right by us as near as I am to you. Oh, _Carl_, I wish you could have
+seen him! Maybe he wasn't the handsomest thing! He had the blackest,
+curliest hair, and he wore a thumb ring."
+
+"I don't think much of all these hamfatters," growled Carl. "Actors
+always go broke and have to walk back to Chicago. Don't you think it
+'d be better to be a civil engineer or something like that, instead of
+having to slick up your hair and carry a cane? They're just dudes."
+
+"Why! of course, Carl, you silly boy! You don't suppose I'd take
+Clements seriously, do you? You silly boy!"
+
+"I'm not a boy."
+
+"I don't mean it that way." She sat up, touched his shoulder, and sank
+back. He blushed with bliss, and the fear that some one had seen, as
+she continued: "I always think of you as just as old as I am. We
+always will be, won't we?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Now you must go and talk to Doris Carson. Poor thing, she always is a
+wall-flower."
+
+However much he thought of common things as he left her, beyond those
+common things was the miracle that Gertie had grown into the one
+perfect, divinely ordained woman, and that he would talk to her again.
+He danced the Virginia reel. Instead of clumping sulkily through the
+steps, as at other parties, he heeded Adelaide Benner's lessons, and
+watched Gertie in the hope that she would see how well he was dancing.
+He shouted a demand that they play "Skip to Maloo," and cried down the
+shy girls who giggled that they were too old for the childish
+party-game. He howled, without prejudice in favor of any particular
+key, the ancient words:
+
+    "Rats in the sugar-bowl, two by two,
+    Bats in the belfry, two by two,
+    Rats in the sugar-bowl, two by two,
+        Skip to Maloo, my darling."
+
+In the nonchalant company of the smarter young bachelors up-stairs he
+smoked a cigarette. But he sneaked away. He paused at the bend in the
+stairs. Below him was Gertie, silver-gowned, wonderful. He wanted to
+go down to her. He would have given up his chance for a motor-car to
+be able to swagger down like an Eddie Klemm. For the Carl Ericson who
+sailed his ice-boat over inch-thick ice was timid now. He poked into
+the library, and in a nausea of discomfort he conversed with Mrs.
+Cowles, Mrs. Cowles doing the conversing.
+
+"Are you going to be a Republican or a Democrat, Carl?" asked the
+forbidding lady.
+
+"Yessum," mumbled Carl, peering over at Gertie's throne, where Ben
+Rusk was being cultured.
+
+"I hope you are having a good time. We always wish our young friends
+to have an especially good time at Gertrude's parties," Mrs. Cowles
+sniffed, and bowed away.
+
+Carl sat beside Adelaide Benner in the decorous and giggling circle
+that ringed the room, waiting for the "refreshments." He was healthily
+interested in devouring maple ice-cream and chocolate layer-cake. But
+all the while he was spying on the group gathering about Gertie--Ben
+Rusk, Howard Griffin, and Joe Jordan. He took the most strategic
+precautions lest some one think that he wanted to look at Gertie; made
+such ponderous efforts to prove he was care-free that every one knew
+something was the matter.
+
+Ben Rusk was taking no part in the gaiety of Howard and Joe. The
+serious man of letters was not easily led into paths of frivolity.
+Carl swore to himself: "Ben 's the only guy I know that's got any
+delicate feelings. He appreciates how Gertie feels when she's sick,
+poor girl. He don't make a goat of himself, like Joe.... Or maybe he's
+got a stomach-ache."
+
+"Post-office!" cried Howard Griffin to the room at large. "Come on!
+We're all of us going to be kids again, and play post-office. Who's
+the first girl wants to be kissed?"
+
+"The idea!" giggled Adelaide Benner.
+
+"Me for Adelaide!" bawled Joe Jordan.
+
+"Oh, Jo-oe, bet I kiss Gertie!" from Irving Lamb.
+
+"The idea!"
+
+"Just as if we were children----"
+
+"He must think we're kids again----"
+
+"Shamey! Winnie wants to be kissed, and Carl won't----"
+
+"I don't, either, so there----"
+
+"I think it's awful."
+
+"Bet I kiss Gertie----"
+
+Carl was furious at all of them as they strained their shoulders
+forward from their chairs and laughed. He asked himself, "Haven't
+these galoots got any sense?"
+
+To speak so lightly of kissing Gertie! He stared at the smooth
+rounding of her left cheek below the cheek-bone till it took a
+separate identity, and its white softness filled the room.
+
+Ten minutes afterward, playing "post-office," he was facing Gertie in
+the semi-darkness of the sitting-room, authorized by the game to kiss
+her; shut in with his divinity.
+
+She took his hand. Her voice was crooning, "Are you going to kiss me
+terribly hard?"
+
+He tried to be gracefully mocking: "Oh yes! Sure! I'm going to eat you
+alive."
+
+She was waiting.
+
+He wished that she would not hold his hand. Within he groaned, "Gee
+whiz! I feel foolish!" He croaked: "Do you feel better, now? You'll
+catch more cold in here, won't you? There's kind of a draught. Lemme
+look at this window."
+
+Crossing to the obviously tight window, he ran his finger along the
+edge of the sash with infinite care. He trembled. In a second, _now_,
+he had to turn and make light of the lips which he would fain have
+approached with ceremony pompous and lingering.
+
+Gertie flopped into a chair, laughing: "I believe you're afraid to
+kiss me! 'Fraid cat! You'll never be a squire of dames, like those
+actors are! All right for you!"
+
+"I am not afraid!" he piped.... Even his prized semi-bass voice had
+deserted him.... He rushed to the back of her chair and leaned over,
+confused, determined. Hastily he kissed her. The kiss landed on the
+tip of her cold nose.
+
+And the whole party was tumbling in, crying:
+
+"Time 's up! You can't hug her all evening!"
+
+"Did you see? He kissed her on the nose!"
+
+"Did he? Ohhhhh!"
+
+"Time 's up. Can't try it again."
+
+Joe Jordan, in the van, was dancing fantastically, scraping his
+forefinger at Carl, in token of disgrace.
+
+The riotous crowd, Gertie and Carl among them, flooded out again. To
+show that he had not minded the incident of the misplaced kiss, Carl
+had to be very loud and merry in the library for a few minutes; but
+when the game of "post-office" was over and Mrs. Cowles asked Ray to
+turn down the lamp in the sitting-room, Carl insisted:
+
+"I'll do it, Mrs. Cowles; I'm nearer 'n Ray," and bolted.
+
+He knew that he was wicked in not staying in the library and
+continuing his duties to the party. He had to crowd into a minute all
+his agonizing and be back at once.
+
+It was beautiful in the stilly sitting-room, away from the noisy
+crowd, to hear love's heart beating. He darted to the chair where
+Gertie had sat and guiltily kissed its arm. He tiptoed to the table,
+blew out the lamp, remembered that he should only have turned down the
+wick, tried to raise the chimney, burnt his fingers, snatched his
+handkerchief, dropped it, groaned, picked up the handkerchief, raised
+the chimney, put it on the table, searched his pockets for a match,
+found it, dropped it, picked it up from the floor, dropped his knife
+from his pocket as he stooped, felt itchy about the scalp, picked up
+the knife, relighted the lamp, exquisitely adjusted the chimney--and
+again blew out the flame. And swore.
+
+As darkness whirled into the room again the vision of Gertie came
+nearer. Then he understood his illness, and gasped: "Great jumping
+Jupiter on a high mountain! I guess--I'm--in--love! _Me!_"
+
+The party was breaking up. Each boy, as he accompanied a girl from the
+yellow lamplight into the below-zero cold, shouted and scuffled the
+snow, to indicate that there was nothing serious in his attentions,
+and immediately tried to manoeuver his girl away from the others.
+Mrs. Cowles was standing in the hall--not hurrying the guests away,
+you understand, but perfectly resigned to accepting any
+farewells--when Gertie, moving gently among them with little sounds of
+pleasure, penned Carl in a corner and demanded:
+
+"Are you going to see some one home? I suppose you'll forget poor me
+completely, now!"
+
+"I will not!"
+
+"I wanted to tell you what Ray and Mr. Griffin said about Plato and
+about being lawyers. Isn't it nice you'll know them when you go to
+Plato?"
+
+"Yes, it 'll be great."
+
+"Mr. Griffin 's going to be a lawyer and maybe Ray will, too, and why don't
+you think about being one? You can get to be a judge and know all the best
+people. It would be lovely.... Refining influences--they--that's----"
+
+"I couldn't ever be a high-class lawyer like Griffin will," said Carl,
+his head on one side, much pleased.
+
+"You silly boy, of course you could. I think you've got just as much
+brains as he has, and Ray says they all look up to him even in Plato.
+And I don't see why Plato isn't just as good--of course it isn't as
+large, but it's so select and the faculty can give you so much more
+individual attention, and I don't see why it isn't every bit as good
+as Yale and Michigan and all those Eastern colleges.... Howard--Mr.
+Griffin--he says that he wouldn't ever have thought of being a lawyer
+only a girl was such a good influence with him, and if you get to be a
+famous man, too, maybe I'll have been just a teeny-weeny bit of an
+influence, too, won't I?"
+
+"Oh _yes_!"
+
+"I must get back now and say good-by to my guests. Good night, Carl."
+
+"I am going to study--you just watch me; and if I do get to go to
+Plato----Oh, gee! you always have been a good influence----" He
+noticed that Doris Carson was watching them. "Well, I gotta be going.
+I've had a peach of a time. Good night."
+
+Doris Carson was expectantly waiting for one of the boys to "see her
+home," but Carl guiltily stole up to Ben Rusk and commanded:
+
+"Le's hike, Fatty. Le's take a walk. Something big to tell you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Carl kicked up the snow in moon-shot veils. The lake boomed. For all
+their woolen mittens, ribbed red-cotton wristlets, and plush caps with
+ear-laps, the cold seared them. Carl encouraged Ben to discourse of
+Gertie and the delights of a long and hopeless love. He discovered
+that, actually, Ben had suddenly fallen in love with Adelaide Benner.
+"Gee!" he exulted. "Maybe that gives me a chance with Gertie, then.
+But I won't let her know Ben ain't in love with her any more. Jiminy!
+ain't it lucky Gertie liked me just when Ben fell in love with
+somebody else! Funny the way things go; and her never knowing about
+Ben." He laid down his cards. While they plowed through the hard
+snow-drifts, swinging their arms against their chests like milkmen, he
+blurted out all his secret: that Gertie was the "slickest girl in
+town"; that no one appreciated her.
+
+"Ho, ho!" jeered Ben.
+
+"I thought you were crazy about her, and then you start kidding about
+her! A swell bunch of chivalry you got, you and your Galahad! You----"
+
+"Don't you go jumping on Galahad, or I'll fight!"
+
+"He was all right, but you ain't," said Carl. "You hadn't ought to
+ever sneer at love."
+
+"Why, you said, just this afternoon----"
+
+"You poor yahoo, I was only teasing you. No; about Gertie. It's like
+this: she was telling me a lot about how Griffin 's going to be a
+lawyer, about how much they make in cities, and I've about decided
+I'll be a lawyer."
+
+"Thought you were going to be a mechanical engineer?"
+
+"Well, can't a fellow change his mind? When you're an engineer you're
+always running around the country, and you never get shaved or
+anything, and there ain't any refining influences----"
+
+The absorbing game of "what we're going to be" made them forget snow
+and cold-squeezed fingers. Ben, it was decided, was to own a newspaper
+and support C. Ericson, Attorney-at-Law, in his dramatic run for state
+senator.
+
+Carl did not mention Gertie again. But it all meant Gertie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carl made his round trimming the arc-lights next day, apparently a
+rudely healthy young person, but really a dreamer love-lorn and
+misunderstood. He had found a good excuse for calling on Gertie, at
+noon, and had been informed that Miss Gertrude was taking a nap. He
+determined to go up the lake for rabbits. He doubted if he would ever
+return, and wondered if he would be missed. Who would care if he froze
+to death? He wouldn't! (Though he did seem to be taking certain
+precautions, by donning a mackinaw coat, two pairs of trousers, two
+pairs of woolen socks, and shoe-packs.)
+
+He was graceful as an Indian when he swept, on skees he had made
+himself, across miles of snow covering the lake and dazzling in the
+diffused light of an even gray sky. The reeds by the marshy shore were
+frost-glittering and clattered faintly. Marshy islands were lost in
+snow. Hummocks and ice-jams and the weaving patterns of mink tracks
+were blended in one white immensity, on which Carl was like a fly on a
+plaster ceiling. The world was deserted. But Carl was not lonely. He
+forgot all about Gertie as he cached his skees by the shore and
+prowled through the woods, leaping on brush-piles and shooting quickly
+when a rabbit ran out.
+
+When he had bagged three rabbits he was besieged by the melancholy of
+loneliness, the perfection of the silver-gowned Gertie. He wanted to
+talk. He thought of Bone Stillman.
+
+It was very likely that Bone was, as usual in winter, up beyond Big
+Bend, fishing for pickerel with tip-ups. A never-stopping dot in the
+dusk, Carl headed for Big Bend, three miles away.
+
+The tip-up fisher watches a dozen tip-ups--short, automatic
+fishing-rods, with lines running through the ice, the pivoted arm
+signaling the presence of a fish at the bait. Sometimes, for warmth,
+he has a tiny shanty, perhaps five feet by six in ground area, heated
+by a powder-can stove. Bone Stillman often spent the night in his
+movable shanty on the lake, which added to his reputation as village
+eccentric. But he was more popular, now, with the local sporting
+gentlemen, who found that he played a divine game of poker.
+
+"Hello, son!" he greeted Carl. "Come in. Leave them long legs of yours
+up on shore if there ain't room."
+
+"Say, Bone, do you think a fellow ever ought to join a church?"
+
+"Depends. Why?"
+
+"Well, suppose he was going to be a lawyer and go in for politics?"
+
+"Look here. What 're you thinking of becoming a lawyer for?"
+
+"Didn't say I was."
+
+"Of course you're thinking of it. Look here. Don't you know you've got a
+chance of seeing the world? You're one of the lucky people that can have a
+touch of the wanderlust without being made useless by it--as I have. You
+may, you _may_ wander in thought as well as on freight-trains, and discover
+something for the world. Whereas a lawyer----They're priests. They decide
+what's holy and punish you if you don't guess right. They set up codes that
+it takes lawyers to interpret, and so they perpetuate themselves. I don't
+mean to say you're extraordinary in having a chance to wander. Don't get
+the big-head over it. You're a pretty average young American. There's
+plenty of the same kind. Only, mostly they get tied up to something before
+they see what a big world there is to hike in, and I want to keep you from
+that. I'm not roasting lawyers----Yes, I am, too. They live in calf-bound
+books. Son, son, for God's sake live in life."
+
+"Yes, but look here, Bone; I was just thinking about it, that's all.
+You're always drumming it into me about not taking anything for
+granted. Anyway, by the time I go to Plato I'll know----"
+
+"D'you mean to say you're going to that back-creek nunnery? That
+Blackhaw University? Are you going to play checkers all through life?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know, now, Bone. Plato ain't so bad. A fellow's got to go
+some place so he can mix with people that know what's the proper thing
+to do. Refining influences and like that."
+
+"Proper! _Refining!_ Son, son, are you going to get Joralemonized? If
+you want what the French folks call the grand manner, if you're going
+to be a tip-top, A Number 1, genuwine grand senyor, or however they
+pronounce it, why, all right, go to it; that's one way of playing a
+big game. But when it comes down to a short-bit, fresh-water
+sewing-circle like Plato College, where an imitation scholar teaches
+you imitation translations of useless classics, and amble-footed girls
+teach you imitation party manners that 'd make you just as plumb
+ridic'lous in a real _salon_ as they would in a lumber-camp,
+why----Oh, sa-a-a-y! I've got it. Girls, eh? What girl 've you been
+falling in love with to get this Plato idea from, eh?"
+
+"Aw, I ain't in love, Bone."
+
+"No, I don't opine you are. At your age you got about as much chance
+of being in love as you have of being a grandfather. But somehow I
+seem to have a little old suspicion that you _think_ you're in love.
+But it's none of my business, and I ain't going to ask questions
+about it." He patted Carl on the shoulder, moving his arm with
+difficulty in their small, dark space. "Son, I've learned this in my
+life--and I've done quite some hiking at that, even if I didn't have
+the book-l'arnin' and the git-up-and-git to make anything out of my
+experience. It's a thing I ain't big enough to follow up, but I know
+it's there. Life is just a little old checker game played by the
+alfalfa contingent at the country store unless you've got an ambition
+that's too big to ever quite lasso it. You want to know that there's
+something ahead that's bigger and more beautiful than anything you've
+ever seen, and never stop till--well, till you can't follow the road
+any more. And anything or anybody that doesn't pack any surprises--get
+that?--_surprises_ for you, is dead, and you want to slough it like a
+snake does its skin. You want to keep on remembering that Chicago's
+beyond Joralemon, and Paris beyond Chicago, and beyond Paris--well,
+maybe there's some big peak of the Himalayas."
+
+For hours they talked, Bone desperately striving to make his dreams
+articulate to Carl--and to himself. They ate fish fried on the
+powder-can stove, with half-warm coffee. They walked a few steps
+outside the shack in the ringing cold, to stretch stiff legs. Carl saw
+a world of unuttered freedom and beauty forthshadowed in Bone's cloudy
+speech. But he was melancholy. For he was going to give up his
+citizenship in wonderland for Gertie Cowles.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gertie continued to enjoy ill health for another week. Every evening
+Carl walked past her house, hoping that he might see her at a window,
+longing to dare to call. Each night he pictured rescuing her from
+things--rescuing her from fire, from drowning, from evil men. He felt
+himself the more bound to her by the social recognition of having his
+name in the _Joralemon Dynamite_, the following Thursday:
+
+     One of the pleasantest affairs of the holiday season among
+     the younger set was held last Friday evening, when Gertrude
+     Cowles entertained a number of her young friends at a party
+     at her mother's handsome residence on Maple Hill. Among
+     those present were Mesdames Benner and Rusk, who came in for
+     a brief time to assist in the jollities of the evening,
+     Misses Benner, Carson, Wesselius, Madlund, Ripka, Smith,
+     Lansing, and Brick; and Messrs. Ray Cowles, his classmate
+     Howard Griffin, who is spending his vacation here from Plato
+     College, Carl Ericson, Joseph Jordan, Irving Lamb, Benjamin
+     Rusk, Nels Thorsten, Peter Schoenhof, and William T. Upham.
+     After dancing and games, which were thoroughly enjoyed by
+     all present, and a social hour spent in discussing the
+     events of the season in J. H. S., a most delicious repast
+     was served and the party adjourned, one and all voting that
+     they had been royally entertained.
+
+The glory was the greater because at least seven names had been
+omitted from the list of guests. Such social recognition satisfied
+Carl--for half an hour. Possibly it nerved him finally to call on
+Gertie.
+
+Since for a week he had been dreading a chilly reception when he
+should call, he was immeasurably surprised when he did call and got
+what he expected. He had not expected the fates to be so treacherous
+as to treat him as he expected, after he had disarmed them by
+expecting it.
+
+When he rang the bell he was an immensely grown-up lawyer (though he
+couldn't get his worn, navy-blue tie to hang exactly right). He turned
+into a crestfallen youth as Mrs. Cowles opened the door and
+waited--waited!--for him to speak, after a crisp:
+
+"Well? What is it, Carl?"
+
+"Why, uh, I just thought I'd come and see how Gertie is."
+
+"Gertrude is much better, thank you. I presume she will return to
+school at the end of vacation."
+
+The hall behind Mrs. Cowles seemed very stately, very long.
+
+"I've heard a lot saying they hoped she was better."
+
+"You may tell them that she is better."
+
+Mrs. Cowles shivered. No one could possibly have looked more like a
+person closing a door without actually closing one. "Lena!" she
+shrieked, "close the kitchen door. There's a draught." She turned back
+to Carl.
+
+The shy lover vanished. An angry young man challenged, "If Gertie 's
+up I think I'll come in a few minutes and see her."
+
+"Why, uh----" hesitated Mrs. Cowles.
+
+He merely walked in past her. His anger kept its own council, for he
+could depend upon Gertie's warm greeting--lonely Gertie, he would
+bring her the cheer of the great open.
+
+The piano sounded in the library, and the voice of the one perfect
+girl mingled with a man's tenor in "Old Black Joe." Carl stalked into
+the library. Gertie was there, much corseted, well powdered, wearing a
+blue foulard frenziedly dotted with white, and being cultured in
+company with Dr. Doyle, the lively young dentist who had recently
+taken an office in the National Bank Block. He was a graduate of the
+University of Minnesota--dental department. He had oily black hair,
+and smiled with gold-filled teeth before one came to the real point of
+a joke. He sang in the Congregational church choir, and played tennis
+in a crimson-and-black blazer--the only one in Joralemon.
+
+To Carl Dr. Doyle was dismayingly mature and smart. He horribly feared
+him as a rival. For the second time that evening he did not balk fate
+by fearing it. The dentist was a rival. After fluttering about the
+mature charms of Miss Dietz, the school drawing-teacher, and taking a
+tentative buggy-ride or two with the miller's daughter, Dr. Doyle was
+bringing all the charm of his professional position and professional
+teeth and patent-leather shoes to bear upon Gertie.
+
+And Gertie was interested. Obviously. She was all of eighteen
+to-night. She frowned slightly as she turned on the piano-stool at
+Carl's entrance, and mechanically: "This is a pleasant surprise."
+Then, enthusiastically: "Isn't it too bad that Dr. Doyle was out of
+town, or I would have invited him to my party, and he would have given
+us some of his lovely songs.... Do try the second verse, doctor. The
+harmony is so lovely."
+
+Carl sat at the other end of the library from Gertie and the piano,
+while Mrs. Cowles entertained him. He obediently said "Yessum" and
+"No, 'm" to the observations which she offered from the fullness of
+her lack of experience of life. He sat straight and still. Behind his
+fixed smile he was simultaneously longing to break into the musical
+fiesta, and envying the dentist's ability to get married without
+having to wait to grow up, and trying to follow what Mrs. Cowles was
+saying.
+
+She droned, while crocheting with high-minded industry a useless
+piano-scarf, "Do you still go hunting, Carl?"
+
+"Yessum. Quite a little rabbit-hunting. Oh, not very much."
+
+(At the distant piano, across the shining acres of floor, the mystical
+woman and a dentist had ceased singing, and were examining a fresh
+sheet of music. The dentist coyly poked his finger at her coiffure,
+and she slapped the finger, gurgling.)
+
+"I hope you don't neglect your school work, though, Carl." Mrs. Cowles
+held the scarf nearer the lamp and squinted at it, deliberately and
+solemnly, through the eye-glasses that lorded it atop her severe nose.
+A headachy scent of moth-balls was in the dull air. She forbiddingly
+moved the shade of the lamp about a tenth of an inch. She removed some
+non-existent dust from the wrought-iron standard. Her gestures said
+that the lamp was decidedly more chic than the pink-shaded hanging
+lamps, raised and lowered on squeaking chains, which characterized
+most Joralemon living-rooms. She glanced at the red lambrequin over
+the nearest window. The moth-ball smell grew more stupifying.
+
+Carl felt stuffy in the top of his nose as he mumbled, "Oh, I work
+pretty hard at chemistry, but, gee! I can't see much to all this
+Latin."
+
+"When you're a little _older_, Carl, you'll _learn_ that the things
+you like now aren't necessarily the things that are _good_ for you. I
+used to say to Gertrude--of course she is older than you, but she
+hasn't been a young lady for so very long, even yet--and I used to say
+to her, 'Gertrude, you will do exactly what I _tell_ you to, and not
+what you _want_ to do, and we shall make--no--more--words--_about_
+it!' And I think she _sees_ now that her mother was right about some
+things! Dr. Doyle said to me, and of course you know, Carl, that he's
+a very fine scholar--our pastor told me that the doctor reads French
+better than _he_ does, and the doctor's told me some things about
+modern French authors that I didn't know, and I used to read French
+almost as well as English, when I was a girl, my teachers all told
+me--and he says that he thinks that Gertrude has a very fine mind, and
+he was _so_ glad that she hasn't been taken in by all this wicked,
+hysterical way girls have to-day of thinking they know more than their
+mothers."
+
+"Yes, she is--Gertie is----I think she's got a very fine mind," Carl
+commented.
+
+(From the other end of the room Gertie could be overheard confiding to
+the dentist in tones of hushed and delicious adult scandal, "They say
+that when she was in St. Paul she----")
+
+"So," Mrs. Cowles serenely sniffed on, while the bridge of Carl's nose
+felt broader and broader, stretching wider and wider, as that stuffy
+feeling increased and the intensive heat stung his eyelids, "you see
+you mustn't think because you'd rather play around with the boys than
+study Latin, Carl, that it's the fault of your Latin-teacher." She
+nodded at him with a condescending smile that was infinitely
+insulting.
+
+He knew it and resented it, but he did not resent it actively, for he
+was busy marveling, "How the dickens is it I never heard Doc Doyle was
+stuck on Gertie? Everybody thought he was going with Bertha. Dang him,
+anyway! The way he snickers, you'd think she was his best girl."
+
+Mrs. Cowles was loftily pursuing her pillared way: "Latin was _known_
+to be the best study for developing the mind a long, long time----"
+And her clicking crochet-needles impishly echoed, "A long, _long_
+time," and the odor of moth-balls got down into Carl's throat, while
+in the golden Olympian atmosphere at the other end of the room Gertie
+coyly pretended to slap the dentist's hand with a series of tittering
+taps. "A long, _long_ time before either you or I were born, Carl, and
+we can't very well set ourselves up to be wiser than the wisest men
+that ever lived, now _can_ we?" Again the patronizing smile. "That
+would scarcely----"
+
+Carl resolved: "This 's got to stop. I got to do something." He felt
+her monologue as a blank steel wall which he could not pierce. Aloud:
+"Yes, that's so, I guess. Say, that's a fine dress Gertie 's got on
+to-night, ain't it.... Say, I been learning to play crokinole at Ben
+Rusk's. You got a board, haven't you? Would you like to play? Does the
+doctor play?"
+
+"Indeed, I haven't the slightest idea, but I have very little doubt
+that he does--he plays tennis so beautifully. He is going to teach
+Gertrude, in the spring." She stopped, and again held the scarf up to
+the light. "I am so glad that my girly, that was so naughty once and
+ran away with you--I don't think I shall _ever_ get over the awful
+fright I had that night!--I am so glad that, now she is growing up,
+clever people like Dr. Doyle appreciate her so much, so very much."
+
+She dropped her crochet to her lap and stared squarely at Carl. Her
+warning that he would do exceedingly well to go home was more than
+plain. He stared back, agitated but not surrendering. Deliberately,
+almost suavely, with ten years of experience added to the sixteen
+years that he had brought into the room, he said:
+
+"I'll see if they'd like to play." He sauntered to the other end of
+the room, abashed before the mystic woman, and ventured: "I saw Ray,
+to-day.... I got to be going, pretty quick, but I was wondering if you
+two felt like playing some crokinole?"
+
+Gertie said, slowly: "I'd like to, Carl, but----Unless you'd like to
+play, doctor?"
+
+"Why of course it's _comme il faut_ to play, Miss Cowles, but I was
+just hoping to have the pleasure of hearing you make some more of your
+delectable music," bowed the dentist, and Gertie bowed back; and their
+smiles joined in a glittery bridge of social aplomb.
+
+"Oh yes," from Carl, "that--yes, do----But you hadn't ought to play
+too much if you haven't been well."
+
+"Oh, Carl!" shrieked Gertie. "'Ought not to,' not 'hadn't ought to'!"
+
+"'Ought not to,'" repeated Mrs. Cowles, icily, while the dentist waved
+his hand in an amused manner and contributed:
+
+"Ought not to say 'hadn't ought to,' as my preceptor used to tell
+me.... I'd like to hear you sing Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life,' Miss
+Cowles."
+
+"Don't you think Longfellow's a bum poet?" growled Carl. "Bone
+Stillman says Longfellow's the grind-organ of poetry. Like this: 'Life
+is re-al, life is ear-nest, tum te diddle dydle dum!'"
+
+"Carl," ordered Mrs. Cowles, "you will please to never mention that
+Stillman person in my house!"
+
+"Oh, Carl!" rebuked Gertie. She rose from the piano-stool. Her essence
+of virginal femininity, its pure and cloistered and white-camisoled
+odor, bespelled Carl to fainting timidity. And while he was thus
+defenseless the dentist thrust:
+
+"Why, they tell me Stillman doesn't even believe the Bible!"
+
+Carl was not to retrieve his credit with Gertie, but he couldn't
+betray Bone Stillman. Hastily: "Yes, maybe, that way----Oh, say,
+doctor, Pete Jordan was telling me" (liar!) "that you were one of the
+best tennis-players at the U."
+
+Gertie sat down again.
+
+The dentist coyly fluffed his hair and deprecated, "Oh no, I wouldn't
+say that!"
+
+Carl had won. Instantly they three became a country club of urban
+aristocrats, who laughed at the poor rustics of Joralemon for knowing
+nothing of golf and polo. Carl was winning their tolerance--though not
+their close attention--by relating certain interesting facts from the
+inside pages of the local paper as to how far the tennis-rackets sold
+in one year would extend, if laid end to end, when he saw Gertie and
+her mother glance at the hall. Gertie giggled. Mrs. Cowles frowned. He
+followed their glance.
+
+Clumping through the hall was his second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses'
+"hired girl." Lena nodded and said, "Hallo, Carl!"
+
+Gertie and the dentist raised their eyebrows at each other.
+
+Carl talked for two minutes about something, he did not know what, and
+took his leave. In the intensity of his effort to be resentfully
+dignified he stumbled over the hall hat-rack. He heard Gertie yelp
+with laughter.
+
+"I _got_ to go to college--be worthy of her!" he groaned, all the way
+home. "And I can't afford to go to the U. of M. I'd like to be free,
+like Bone says, but I've got to go to Plato."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Plato College, Minnesota, is as earnest and undistinguished, as
+provincially dull and pathetically human, as a spinster missionary.
+Its two hundred or two hundred and fifty students come from the
+furrows, asking for spiritual bread, and are given a Greek root.
+Red-brick buildings, designed by the architect of county jails, are
+grouped about that high, bare, cupola-crowned gray-stone barracks, the
+Academic Building, like red and faded blossoms about a tombstone. In
+the air is the scent of crab-apples and meadowy prairies, for a time,
+but soon settles down a winter bitter as the learning of the Rev. S.
+Alcott Wood, D.D., the president. The town and college of Plato
+disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks.
+In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees
+shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on
+a frozen bed-sheet--no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no
+windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time
+individuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the
+prairie itself--far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops
+in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch
+with the fields. From droning class-rooms the victims of education see
+the rippling wheat in summer; and in winter the impenetrable wall of
+sky. Footsteps and quick laughter of men and girls, furtively flirting
+along the brick walls under the beautiful maples, do make Plato dear
+to remember. They do not make it brilliant. They do not explain the
+advantages of leaving the farm for another farm.
+
+To the freshman, Carl Ericson, descending from the dusty smoking-car
+of the M. & D., in company with tumultuous youths in pin-head caps and
+enormous sweaters, the town of Plato was metropolitan. As he walked
+humbly up Main Street and beheld two four-story buildings and a marble
+bank and an interurban trolley-car, he had, at last, an idea of what
+Minneapolis and Chicago must be. Two men in sweaters adorned with a
+large "P," athletes, generals, heroes, walked the streets in the
+flesh, and he saw--it really was there, for him!--the "College Book
+Store," whose windows were filled with leather-backed treatises on
+Greek, logic, and trigonometry; and, finally, he was gaping through a
+sandstone gateway at four buildings, each of them nearly as big as the
+Joralemon High School, surrounding a vast stone castle.
+
+He entered the campus. He passed an old man with white side-whiskers
+and a cord on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses; an aged old man who might
+easily be a professor. A blithe student with "Y. M. C. A. Receptn.
+Com." large on his hat-band, rushed up to Carl, shook his hand busily,
+and inquired:
+
+"Freshman, old man? Got your room yet? There's a list of
+rooming-houses over at the Y. M. Come on, I'll show you the way."
+
+He was received in Academe, in Arcadia, in Elysium; in fact, in Plato
+College.
+
+He was directed to a large but decomposing house conducted by the
+widow of a college janitor, and advised to take a room at $1.75 a week
+for his share of the rent. That implied taking with the room a large,
+solemn room-mate, fresh from teaching country school, a heavy,
+slow-spoken, serious man of thirty-one, named Albert Smith, registered
+as A. Smith, and usually known as "Plain Smith." Plain Smith sat
+studying in his cotton socks, and never emptied the wash-basin. He
+remarked, during the first hour of their discourse in the groves of
+Academe: "I hope you ain't going to bother me by singing and
+skylarking around. I'm here to work, bub." Smith then returned to the
+large books which he was diligently scanning that he might find
+wisdom, while Carl sniffed at the brown-blotched wall-paper, the faded
+grass matting, the shallow, standing wardrobe.... He liked the house,
+however. It had a real bath-room! He could, for the first time in his
+life, splash in a tub. Perhaps it would not be regarded as modern
+to-day; perhaps effete souls would disdain its honest tin tub, smeared
+with a paint that peeled instantly; but it was elegance and the
+Hesperides compared with the sponge and two lard-pails of hot water
+from the Ericson kitchen reservoir, which had for years been his
+conception of luxurious means of bathing.
+
+Also, there were choicer spirits in the house. One man, who pressed
+clothes for a living and carried a large line of cigarettes in his
+room, was second vice-president of the sophomore class. As smoking was
+dourly forbidden to all Platonians, the sophomore's room was a refuge.
+The sophomore encouraged Carl in his natural talent for cheerful
+noises, while Plain Smith objected even to singing while one dressed.
+
+Like four of his classmates, Carl became a waiter at Mrs. Henkel's
+student boarding-house, for his board and two dollars a week. The two
+dollars constituted his pin-money--a really considerable sum for
+Plato, where the young men were pure and smoked not, neither did they
+drink; where evening clothes were snobbish and sweaters thought rather
+well of; where the only theatrical attractions were week-stand
+melodramas playing such attractions as "Poor but True," or the Rev.
+Sam J. Pitkins's celebrated lecture on "The Father of Lies," annually
+delivered at the I.O.O.F. Hall.
+
+Carl's father assured him in every letter that he was extravagant. He
+ran through the two dollars in practically no time at all. He was a
+member in good and regular standing of the informal club that hung
+about the Corner Drug Store, to drink coffee soda and discuss
+athletics and stare at the passing girls. He loved to set off his
+clear skin and shining pale hair with linen collars, though soft
+roll-collar shirts were in vogue. And he was ready for any wild
+expedition, though it should cost fifty or sixty cents. With the
+sophomore second vice-president and John Terry of the freshman class
+(usually known as "the Turk") he often tramped to the large
+neighboring town of Jamaica Mills to play pool, smoke Turkish
+cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused Plato songs, in
+long-drawn close harmony. Once they had imported English ale, out of
+bottles, and carried the bottles back to decorate and distinguish
+their rooms.
+
+Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl
+students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little
+college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it
+never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of
+the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters
+as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she
+did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then
+before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen
+washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they
+discussed the value of the "classical course" _versus_ the "scientific
+course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and
+arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's
+dining-room--a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a
+gilded rope portière, a comfortable rocker with a Plato cushion, a
+Garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-framed
+photograph of the champion Plato football team of 1899.
+
+Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the
+piano in the evening. His graceful-seeming body, his puppyish
+awkwardness, his quietly belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of
+new things, won him respect; though he was too boyish to rouse
+admiration, except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful,
+fuzzy-haired, candy-eating Mae Thurston. Mae so influenced Carl that
+he learned to jest casually; and he practised a new dance, called the
+"Boston," which Mae had brought from Minneapolis, though as a rival to
+the waltz and two-step the new dance was ridiculed by every one. He
+mastered all the _savoir faire_ of the boarding-house. But he was
+always hurrying away from it to practise football, to prowl about the
+Plato power-house, to skim through magazines in the Y. M. C. A.
+reading-room, even to study.
+
+Beyond the dish-washing and furnace-tending set he had no probable
+social future, though everybody knew everybody at Plato. Those
+immaculate upper-classmen, Murray Cowles and Howard Griffin, never
+invited him to their room (in a house on Elm Street with a screened
+porch and piano sounds). He missed Ben Rusk, who had gone to Oberlin
+College, and Joe Jordan, who had gone to work for the Joralemon
+Specialty Manufacturing Company.
+
+Life at Plato was suspicious, prejudiced, provincial, as it affected
+the ambitious students; and for the weaker brethren it was
+philandering and vague. The class work was largely pure rot--arbitrary
+mathematics, antiquated botany, hesitating German, and a veritable
+military drill in the conjunction of Greek verbs conducted by a man
+with a non-com. soul, a pompous, sandy-whiskered manikin with cold
+eyes and a perpetual cold in the nose, who had inflicted upon a
+patient world the four-millionth commentary on Xenophon. Few of the
+students realized the futility of it all; certainly not Carl, who
+slept well and believed in football.
+
+The life habit justifies itself. One comes to take anything as a
+matter of course; to take one's neighbors seriously, whether one lives
+in Plato or Persia, in Mrs. Henkel's kitchen or a fo'c's'le. The
+Platonians raced toward their various goals of high-school teaching,
+or law, or marriage, or permanently escaping their parents; they made
+love, and were lazy, and ate, and swore off bad habits, and had
+religious emotions, all quite naturally; they were not much bored,
+rarely exhilarated, always ready to gossip about their acquaintances;
+precisely like a duke or a delicatessen-keeper. They played out their
+game. But it was so tiny a game, so played to the exclusion of all
+other games, that it tended to dwarf its victims--and the restless
+children, such as Carl, instinctively resent this dwarfing. They seek
+to associate themselves with other rebels. Carl's unconscious rebel
+band was the group of rowdyish freshmen who called themselves "the
+Gang," and loafed about the room of their unofficial captain, John
+Terry, nicknamed "the Turk," a swarthy, large-featured youth with a
+loud laugh, a habit of slapping people upon the shoulder, an ingenious
+mind for deviltry, and considerable promise as a football end.
+
+Most small local colleges, and many good ones, have their "gangs" of
+boys, who presumably become honorable men and fathers, yet who in
+college days regard it as heroic to sneak out and break things, and as
+humorous to lead countryside girls astray in sordid amours. The more
+cloistered the seat of learning, the more vicious are the active boys,
+to keep up with the swiftness of life forces. The Turk's gang painted
+the statues of the Memorial Arch; they stole signs; they were the
+creators of noises unexpected and intolerable, during small, quiet
+hours of moonlight.
+
+As the silkworm draws its exquisite stuff from dowdy leaves, so youth
+finds beauty and mystery in stupid days. Carl went out unreservedly to
+practise with the football squad; he had a joy of martyrdom in
+tackling the dummy and peeling his nose on the frozen ground. He knew
+a sacred aspiration when Mr. Bjorken, the coach, a former University
+of Minnesota star, told him that he might actually "make" the team in
+a year or two; that he had twice as much chance as Ray Cowles,
+who--while Carl was thinking only of helping the scrub team to
+win--was too engrossed in his own dignity as a high-school notable to
+get into the scrimmage.
+
+At the games, among the Gang on the bleachers, Carl went mad with
+fervor. He kept shooting to his feet, and believed that he was saving
+his country every time he yelled in obedience to the St. Vitus
+gestures of the cheer-leader, or sang "On the Goal-line of Plato" to
+the tune of "On the Sidewalks of New York." Tears of a real patriotism
+came when, at the critical moment of a losing game against the
+Minnesota Military Institute, with sunset forlorn behind bare trees,
+the veteran cheer-leader flung the hoarse Plato rooters into another
+defiant yell. It was the never-say-die of men who rose, with clenched
+hands and arms outstretched, to the despairing need of their college,
+and then--Lord! They hurled up to their feet in frenzy as Pete Madlund
+got away with the ball for a long run and victory.... The next week,
+when the University of Keokuk whipped them, 40 to 10, Carl stood
+weeping and cheering the defeated Plato team till his throat burned.
+
+He loved the laughter of the Turk, Mae Thurston's welcome, experiments
+in the physics laboratory. And he was sure that he was progressing
+toward the state of grace in which he might aspire to marry Gertie
+Cowles.
+
+He did not think of her every day, but she was always somewhere in his
+thoughts, and the heroines of magazine stories recalled some of her
+virtues to his mind, invariably. The dentist who had loved her had
+moved away. She was bored. She occasionally wrote to Carl. But she was
+still superior--tried to "influence him for good" and advised him to
+"cultivate nice people."
+
+He was convinced that he was going to become a lawyer, for her sake,
+but he knew that some day he would be tempted by the desire to become
+a civil or a mechanical engineer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A January thaw. Carl was tramping miles out into the hilly country
+north of Plato. He hadn't been able to persuade any of the Gang to
+leave their smoky loafing-place in the Turk's room, but his own lungs
+demanded the open. With his heavy boots swashing through icy pools,
+calling to an imaginary dog and victoriously running Olympic races
+before millions of spectators, he defied the chill of the day and
+reached Hiawatha Mound, a hill eight miles north of Plato.
+
+Toward the top a man was to be seen crouched in a pebbly, sunny
+arroyo, peering across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending,
+Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That
+amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that
+"Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the
+head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek
+books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of
+merit in the three manly arts--athletics, flirting, and breaking rules
+by smoking. Genie was small, anemic, and too well dressed. He
+stuttered slightly and was always peering doubtfully at you with large
+and childish eyes that were made more eerie by his pale, bulbous
+forehead and the penthouse of tangled mouse-brown hair over it.... The
+Gang often stopped him on the campus to ask mock-polite questions
+about his ambition, which was to be a teacher of English at Harvard or
+Yale. Not very consistently, but without ever wearying of the jest,
+they shadowed him to find out if he did not write poetry; and while no
+one had actually caught him, he was still suspect.
+
+Genie said nothing when Carl called, "H'lo, son!" and sat on a
+neighboring rock.
+
+"What's trouble, Genie? You look worried."
+
+"Why don't any of you fellows like me?"
+
+Carl felt like a bug inspected by a German professor. "W-why, how
+d'you mean, Genie?"
+
+"None of you take me seriously. You simply let me hang around. And you
+think I'm a grind. I'm not. I like to read, that's all. Perhaps you
+think I shouldn't like to go out for athletics if I could! I wish I
+could run the way you can, Ericson. Darn it! I was happy out here by
+myself on the Mound, where every prospect pleases, and--'n' now here I
+am again, envying you."
+
+"Why, son, I--I guess--I guess we admire you a whole lot more than we
+let on to. Cheer up, old man! When you're valedictorian and on the
+debating team and wallop Hamlin you'll laugh at the Gang, and we'll be
+proud to write home we know you." Carl was hating himself for ever
+having teased Genie Linderbeck. "You've helped me a thundering lot
+whenever I've asked you about that blame Greek syntax. I guess we're
+jealous of you. You--uh--you don't want to _let_ 'em kid you----"
+
+Carl was embarrassed before Genie's steady, youthful, trusting gaze.
+He stooped for a handful of pebbles, with which he pelted the
+landscape, maundering, "Say, why don't you come around to the Turk's
+room and get better acquainted with the Gang?"
+
+"When shall I come?"
+
+"When? Oh, why, thunder!--you know, Genie--just drop in any time."
+
+"I'll be glad to."
+
+Carl was perspiring at the thought of what the Gang would do to him
+when they discovered that he had invited Genie. But he was game. "Come
+up to my room whenever you can, and help me with my boning," he added.
+"You mustn't ever get the idea that we're conferring any blooming
+favor by having you around. It's you that help us. Our necks are
+pretty well sandpapered, I'm afraid.... Come up to my room any
+time.... I'll have to be hiking on if I'm going to get much of a walk.
+Come over and see me to-night."
+
+"I wish you'd come up to Mr. Frazer's with me some Sunday afternoon
+for tea, Ericson."
+
+Henry Frazer, M.A. (Yale), associate professor of English literature,
+was a college mystery. He was a thin-haired young man, with a
+consuming love of his work, which was the saving of souls by teaching
+Lycidas and Comus. This was his first year out of graduate school, his
+first year at Plato--and possibly his last. It was whispered about
+that he believed in socialism, and the president, the Rev. Dr. S.
+Alcott Wood, had no patience with such silly fads.
+
+Carl marveled, "Do you go to Frazer's?"
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+"Thought everybody was down on him. They say he's an anarchist, and I
+know he gives fierce assignments in English lit.; that's what all the
+fellows in his classes say."
+
+"All the fools are down on him. That's why I go to his house."
+
+"Don't the fellows--uh--kind of----"
+
+"Yes," piped Genie in his most childish tone of anger, his tendency to
+stammer betraying him, "they k-kid me for liking Frazer. He's--he's
+the only t-teacher here that isn't p-p-p----"
+
+"Spit!"
+
+"----provincial!"
+
+"What d'you mean by 'provincial'?"
+
+"Narrow. Villagey. Do you know what Bernard Shaw says----?"
+
+"Never read a word of him, my son. And let me tell you that my idea of
+no kind of conversation is to have a guy spring 'Have you read?' on me
+every few seconds, and me coming back with: 'No, I haven't. Ain't it
+interesting!' If that's the brand of converse at Prof Frazer's you can
+count me out."
+
+Genie laughed. "Think how much more novelty you get out of roasting me
+like that than telling Terry he's got 'bats in his belfry' ten or
+twelve times a day."
+
+"All right, my son; you win. Maybe I'll go to Frazer's with you.
+Sometime."
+
+The Sunday following Carl went to tea at Professor Henry Frazer's.
+
+The house was Platonian without, plain and dumpy, with gingerbread
+Gothic on the porch, blistered paint, and the general lines of a
+prairie barn, but the living-room was more nearly beautiful than any
+room Carl had seen. In accordance with the ideal of that era it had
+Mission furniture with large leather cushions, brown wood-work, and
+tan oatmeal paper scattered with German color prints, instead of the
+patent rockers and carbon prints of Roman monuments which adorned the
+houses of the other professors. While waiting with Genie Linderbeck
+for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table
+such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound
+in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs,
+heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic
+legends and Provençal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters
+of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books
+and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his
+experiences of literature that he suddenly believed in culture.
+
+Professor Frazer appeared, walking into the room _after_ his fragile
+wife and gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon
+instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few
+stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an
+Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor
+Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in
+brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars,
+and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" seniors,
+listened with nodding interest while Carl bashfully analyzed each of
+the nine cars owned in Plato and Jamaica Mills. At dusk the Diana in
+brown played MacDowell, and the light of the silken-shaded lamp was
+on a print of a fairy Swiss village.
+
+That evening Carl wrestled with the Turk for one hour,
+catch-as-catch-can, on the Turk's bed and under it and nearly out of
+the window, to prove the value of Professor Frazer and culture. Next
+morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in
+modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt
+Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt
+Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling
+from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of
+emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes,
+rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair of
+scissors on his knee, and persisted in his violent pursuit of the
+beautiful. Meanwhile his room-mate, Plain Smith, flapped the pages of
+a Latin lexicon or took a little recreation by reading the Rev. Mr.
+Todd's _Students' Manual_, that gem of the alarm-clock and
+water-bucket epoch in American colleges.
+
+Carl never understood Genie Linderbeck's conviction that words are
+living things that dream and sing and battle. But he did learn that
+there was speech transcending the barking of the Gang.
+
+In the spring of his freshman year Carl gave up waiting on table and
+drove a motor-car for a town banker. He learned every screw and spring
+in the car. He also made Genie go out with him for track athletics.
+Carl won his place on the college team as a half-miler, and viciously
+assaulted two freshmen and a junior for laughing at Genie's legs,
+which stuck out of his large running-pants like straws out of a
+lemonade-glass.
+
+In the great meet with Hamlin University, though Plato lost most of
+the events, Carl won the half-mile race. He was elected to the
+exclusive fraternity of Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, Omega Chi
+Delta, just before Commencement. That excited him less than the fact
+that the Turk and he were to spend the summer up north, in the
+hard-wheat country, stringing wire for the telephone company with a
+gang of Minneapolis wiremen.
+
+Oh yes. And he would see Gertie in Joralemon.... She had written to
+him with so much enthusiasm when he had won the half-mile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+He saw Gertie two hours after he had reached Joralemon for a week's
+stay before going north. They sat in rockers on the grass beside her
+stoop. They were embarrassed, and rocked profusely and chattily. Mrs.
+Cowles was surprised and not much pleased to find him, but Gertie
+murmured that she had been lonely, and Carl felt that he must be nobly
+patient under Mrs. Cowles's slight. He got so far as to sigh, "O
+Gertie!" but grew frightened, as though he were binding himself for
+life. He wished that Gertie were not wearing so many combs stuck all
+over her pompadoured hair. He noted that his rocker creaked at the
+joints, and thought out a method of strengthening it by braces. She
+bubbled that he was going to be the Big Man in his class. He said,
+"Aw, rats!" and felt that his collar was too tight.... He went home.
+His father remarked that Carl was late for supper, that he had been
+extravagant in Plato, and that he was unlikely to make money out of
+"all this runnin' races." But his mother stroked his hair and called
+him her big boy.... He tramped out to Bone Stillman's shack, impatient
+for the hand-clasp of the pioneer, and grew eloquent, for the first
+time since his home-coming, as he described Professor Frazer and the
+delights of poesy. A busy week Carl had in Joralemon. Adelaide Benner
+gave a porch-supper for him. They sat under the trees, laughing, while
+in the dimly lighted street bicycles whirred, and box-elders he had
+always known whispered that this guest of honor was Carl Ericson, come
+home a hero.
+
+The cycling craze still existed in Joralemon. Carl rented a wheel for
+a week from the Blue Front Hardware Store. Once he rode with a party
+of boys and girls to Tamarack Lake. Once he rode to Wakamin with Ben
+Rusk, home from Oberlin College. The ride was not entirely enjoyable,
+because Oberlin had nearly two thousand students and Ben was amusedly
+superior about Plato. They did, however, enjoy the stylishness of
+buying bottles of strawberry pop at Wakamin.
+
+Twice Carl rode to Tamarack Lake with Gertie. They sat on the shore,
+and while he shied flat skipping-stones across the water and flapped
+his old cap at the hovering horse-flies he babbled of the Turk's
+"stunts," and the banker's car, and the misty hinterlands of Professor
+Frazer's lectures. Gertie appeared interested, and smiled at regular
+intervals, but so soon as Carl fumbled at one of Frazer's abstract
+theories she interrupted him with highly concrete Joralemon gossip....
+He suspected that she had not kept up with the times. True, she
+referred to New York, but as the reference was one she had been using
+these two years he still identified her with Joralemon.... He did not
+even hold her hand, though he wondered if it might not be possible;
+her hand lay so listlessly by her skirt, on the sand.... They rode
+back in twilight of early June. Carl was cheerful as their wheels
+crunched the dirt roads in a long, crisp hum. The stilly rhythm of
+frogs drowned the clank of their pedals, and the sky was vast and pale
+and wistful.
+
+Gertie, however, seemed less cheerful.
+
+On the last evening of his stay in Joralemon Gertie gave him a
+hay-ride party. They sang "Seeing Nelly Home," and "Merrily We Roll
+Along," and "Suwanee River," and "My Old Kentucky Home," and "My
+Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and "In the Good Old Summertime," under a
+delicate new moon in a sky of apple-green. Carl pressed Gertie's hand;
+she returned the pressure so quickly that he was embarrassed. He
+withdrew his hand as quickly as possible, ostensibly to help in the
+unpacking of the basket of ginger-ale and chicken sandwiches and three
+cakes (white-frosted, chocolate layer, and banana cake).
+
+The same group said good-by to Carl at the M. & D. station. As the
+train started, Carl saw Gertie turn away disconsolately, her shoulders
+so drooping that her blouse was baggy in the back. He mourned that he
+had not been more tender with her that week. He pictured himself
+kissing Gertie on the shore of Tamarack Lake, enfolded by afternoon
+and the mystery of sex and a protecting reverence for Gertie's
+loneliness. He wanted to go back--back for one more day, one more ride
+with Gertie. But he picked up a mechanics magazine, glanced at an
+article on gliders, read in the first paragraph a prophecy about
+aviation, slid down in his seat with his head bent over the
+magazine--and the idyl of Gertie and afternoon was gone.
+
+He was reading the article on gliders in June, 1905, so early in the
+history of air conquest that its suggestions were miraculous to him;
+for it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world
+by his flights at Le Mans; four years before Blériot was to cross the
+Channel--though, indeed, it was a year and a half after the Wrights'
+first secret ascent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kittyhawk, and
+fourteen years after Lilienthal had begun that epochal series of
+glider-flights which was followed by the experiments of Pilcher and
+Chanute, Langley and Montgomery.
+
+The article declared that if gasoline or alcohol engines could be made
+light enough we should all be aviating to the office in ten years;
+that now was the time for youngsters to practise gliding, as pioneers
+of the new age. Carl "guessed" that flying would be even better than
+automobiling. He made designs for three revolutionary new aeroplanes,
+drawing on the margins of the magazine with a tooth-mark-pitted pencil
+stub.
+
+Gertie was miles back, concealed behind piles of triplanes and
+helicopters and following-surface monoplanes which the wizard
+inventor, C. Ericson, was creating and ruthlessly destroying.... A
+small boy was squalling in the seat opposite, and Carl took him from
+his tired mother and lured him into a game of tit-tat-toe.
+
+He joined the Turk and the wire-stringers at a prairie
+hamlet--straggly rows of unpainted frame shanties, the stores with
+tin-corniced false fronts that pretended to be two stories high. There
+were pig-pens in the dooryards, and the single church had a square,
+low, white steeple like the paper cap which Labor wears in the
+posters. Farm-wagons were hitched before a gloomy saloon. Carl was
+exceeding glum. But the Turk introduced him to a University of
+Minnesota Pharmacy School student who was with the crew during
+vacation, and the three went tramping across breezy, flowered
+prairies. So began for Carl a galloping summer.
+
+The crew strung telephone wire from pole to pole all day, playing the
+jokes of hardy men, and on Sunday loafed in haystacks, recalling
+experiences from Winnipeg to El Paso. Carl resolved to come back to
+this life of the open, with Gertie, after graduation. He would buy a
+ranch "on time." Or the Turk and Carl would go exploring in Alaska or
+the Orient. "Law?" he would ask himself in monologues, "law? Me in a
+stuffy office? Not a chance!"
+
+The crew stayed for four weeks in a boom town of nine thousand,
+installing a complete telephone system. South-east of the town lay
+rolling hills. As Carl talked with the Turk and the Pharmacy School
+man on a hilltop, the first evening of their arrival, he told them the
+scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these
+hills were of the sort Lilienthal would probably have chosen for his
+glider-flights.
+
+"Say! by the great Jim Hill, let's make us a glider!" he exulted,
+sitting up, his eyelids flipping rapidly.
+
+"Sure!" said the Pharmacy man. "How would you make one?"
+
+"Why--uh--I guess you could make a frame out of willow--have to; the
+willows along the creeks are the only kind of trees near here. You'd
+cover it with varnished cotton--that's what Lilienthal did, anyway.
+But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved--cambered--like
+he did. You got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays.
+Like a quarter barrel-hoop.... I guess it would be better to try to
+make a Chanute glider--just a plain pair of sup'rimposed planes,
+instead of one all combobulated like a bat's wings, like Lilienthal's
+glider was.... Or we could try some experiments with paper
+models----Oh no! Thunder! Let's make a glider."
+
+They did.
+
+They studied with aching heads the dry-looking tables of lift and
+resistance for which Carl telegraphed to Chicago. Stripped to their
+undershirts, they worked all through the hot prairie evenings in the
+oil-smelling, greasy engine-room of the local power-house, in front of
+the dynamos, which kept evilly throwing out green sparks and rumbling
+the mystic syllable "Om-m-m-m," to greet their modern magic.
+
+They hunted for three-quarter-inch willow rods, but discarded them for
+seasoned ash from the lumber-yard. They coated cotton with thin
+varnish. They stopped to dispute furiously over angles of incidence,
+bellowing, "Well, look here then, you mutton-head; I'll draw it for
+you."
+
+On their last Sunday in the town they assembled the glider,
+single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span, with a
+tail, and with a double bar beneath the plane, by which the pilot was
+to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the
+plane, balancing the glider by movements of his body.
+
+At dawn on Monday they loaded the glider upon a wagon and galloped
+with it out to a forty-foot hill. They stared down the easy slope,
+which grew in steepness and length every second, and thought about
+Lilienthal's death.
+
+"W-w-well," shivered the Turk, "who tries it first?"
+
+All three pretended to be adjusting the lashings, waiting for one
+another, till Carl snarled, "Oh, all _right_! I'll do it if I got to."
+
+"Course it breaks my heart to see you swipe the honor," the Turk said,
+"but I'm unselfish. I'll let you do it. Brrrr! It's as bad as the
+first jump into the swimming-hole in spring."
+
+Carl was smiling at the comparison as they lifted the glider, with him
+holding the bars beneath. The plane was instantly buoyed up like a
+cork on water as the fifteen-mile head-wind poured under it. He
+stopped smiling. This was a dangerous living thing he was going to
+guide. It jerked at him as he slipped his arms over the suspended
+bars. He wanted to stop and think this all over. "Get it done!" he
+snapped at himself, and began to run down-hill, against the wind.
+
+The wind lifted the plane again. With a shock Carl knew that his feet
+had left the ground. He was actually flying! He kicked wildly in air.
+All his body strained to get balance in the air, to control itself, to
+keep from falling, of which he now felt the world-old instinctive
+horror.
+
+The plane began to tip to one side, apparently irresistibly, like a
+sheet of paper turning over in the wind. Carl was sick with fear for a
+tenth of a second. Every cell in his body shrank before coming
+disaster. He flung his legs in the direction opposite to the tipping
+of the plane. With this counter-balancing weight, the glider righted.
+It was running on an even keel, twenty-five feet above the sloping
+ground, while Carl hung easily by the double bar beneath, like a
+circus performer with a trapeze under each arm. He ventured to glance
+down. The turf was flowing beneath him, a green and sunny blur. He
+exulted. Flying!
+
+The glider dipped forward. Carl leaned back, his arms wide-spread. A
+gust struck the plane, head on. Overloaded at the back, it tilted
+back, then soared up to thirty-five or forty feet. Slow-seeming,
+inevitable, the whole structure turned vertically upward.
+
+Carl dangled there against a flimsy sheet of wood and cotton, which
+for part of a second stuck straight up against the wind, like a paper
+on a screen-door.
+
+The plane turned turtle, slithered sidewise through the air, and
+dropped, horizontal now, but upside down, Carl on top.
+
+Thirty-five, forty feet down.
+
+"I'm up against it," was his only thought while he was falling.
+
+The left tip of the plane smashed against the ground, crashing,
+horribly jarring. But it broke the fall. Carl shot forward and landed
+on his shoulder.
+
+He got up, rubbing his shoulder, wondering at the suspended life in
+the faces of the other two as they ran down-hill toward him.
+
+"Jiminy," he said. "Glad the glider broke the fall. Wish we had time
+to make a new glider, with wing-warp. Say, we'll be late on the job.
+Better beat it P. D. Q."
+
+The others stood gaping.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+A pile of shoes and nose-guards and bicycle-pumps and broken
+hockey-sticks; a wall covered with such stolen signs as "East College
+Avenue," and "Pants Presser Ladys Garments Carefully Done," and "Dr.
+Sloats Liniment for Young and Old"; a broken-backed couch with a
+red-and-green afghan of mangy tassels; an ink-spattered wooden table,
+burnt in small black spots along the edges; a plaster bust of Martha
+Washington with a mustache added in ink; a few books; an inundation of
+sweaters and old hats; and a large, expensive mouth-organ--such were a
+few of the interesting characteristics of the room which Carl and the
+Turk were occupying as room-mates for sophomore year at Plato.
+
+Most objectionable sounds came from the room constantly: the Gang's
+songs, suggestive laughter, imitations of cats and fowls and
+fog-horns. These noises were less ingenious, however, than the devices
+of the Gang for getting rid of tobacco-smoke, such as blowing the
+smoke up the stove.
+
+Carl was happy. In this room he encouraged stammering Genie Linderbeck
+to become adaptable. Here he scribbled to Gertie and Ben Rusk little
+notes decorated with badly drawn caricatures of himself loafing. Here,
+with the Turk, he talked out half the night, planning future glory in
+engineering. Carl adored the Turk for his frankness, his lively
+speech, his interest in mechanics--and in Carl.
+
+Carl was still out for football, but he was rather light for a team
+largely composed of one-hundred-and-eighty-pound Norwegians. He had a
+chance, however. He drove the banker's car two or three evenings a
+week and cared for the banker's lawn and furnace and cow. He still
+boarded at Mrs. Henkel's, as did jolly Mae Thurston, whom he took for
+surreptitious rides in the banker's car, after which he wrote
+extra-long and pleasant letters to Gertie. It was becoming harder and
+harder to write to Gertie, because he had, in freshman year, exhausted
+all the things one can say about the weather without being profane.
+When, in October, a new bank clerk stormed, meteor-like, the Joralemon
+social horizon, and became devoted to Gertie, as faithfully reported
+in letters from Joe Jordan, Carl was melancholy over the loss of a
+comrade. But he strictly confined his mourning to leisure hours--and
+with books, football, and chores for the banker, he was a busy young
+man.... After about ten days it was a relief not to have to plan
+letters to Gertie. The emotions that should have gone to her Carl
+devoted to Professor Frazer's new course in modern drama.
+
+This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw,
+Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck,
+D'Annunzio, and Rostand; but unofficially announced by Professor
+Frazer as an attempt to follow the spirit of to-day wherever it should
+be found in contemporary literature. Carl and the Turk were bewildered
+but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course. They made every
+member of the Gang enroll in it, and discouraged inattention in the
+lecture-room by dexterous side-kicks.
+
+Even to his ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, the grim and slovenly
+school-teacher who had called him "bub" and discouraged his
+confidences, Carl presented the attractions of Professor Frazer's
+lectures when he met him on the campus. Smith looked quizzical and
+"guessed" that plays and play-actin' were useless, if not actually
+immoral.
+
+"Yes, but this isn't just plays, my young friend," said Carl, with a
+hauteur new but not exceedingly impressive to Plain Smith. "He takes
+up all these new stunts, all this new philosophy and stuff they have
+in London and Paris. There's something besides Shakespeare and the
+Bible!" he added, intending to be spiteful. It may be stated that he
+did not like Plain Smith.
+
+"What new philosophy?"
+
+"The spirit of brotherhood. I suppose you're too orthodox for that!"
+
+"Oh no, sonny, not for that, not for that. And it ain't so _very_ new.
+That's what Christ taught! No, sonny, I ain't so orthodox but what I'm
+willing to have 'em show me anything that tries to advance
+brotherhood. Not that I think it's very likely to be found in a lot of
+Noo York plays. But I'll look in at one lesson, anyway," and Plain
+Smith clumped away, humming "Greenland's Icy Mountains."
+
+Professor Frazer's modern drama course began with Ibsen. The first
+five lectures were almost conventional; they were an attempt to place
+contemporary dramatists, with reflections on the box-office
+standpoint. But his sixth lecture began rather unusually.
+
+There was an audience of sixty-four in Lecture-room A--earnest girl
+students bringing out note-books and spectacle-cases, frivolous girls
+feeling their back hair, and the men settling down with a "Come, let's
+get it over!" air, or glowing up worshipingly, like Eugene Field
+Linderbeck, or determined not to miss anything, like Carl--the
+captious college audience, credulous as to statements of fact and
+heavily unresponsive to the spirit. Professor Frazer, younger than
+half a dozen of the plow-trained undergraduates, thin of hair and
+sensitive of face, sitting before them, with one hand in his pocket
+and the other nervously tapping the small reading-table, spoke
+quietly:
+
+"I'm not going to be a lecturer to-day. I'm not going to analyze the
+plays of Shaw which I assigned to you. You're supposed to have read
+them yourselves. I am going to imagine that I am at tea in New Haven,
+or down in New York, at dinner in the basement of the old Brevoort,
+talking with a bunch of men who are trying to find out where the world
+is going, and why and when and how, and asking who are the prophets
+who are going to show it the way. We'd be getting excited over Shaw
+and Wells. There's something really worth getting excited over.
+
+"These men have perceived that this world is not a crazy-quilt of
+unrelated races, but a collection of human beings completely related,
+with all our interests--food and ambitions and the desire to
+play--absolutely in common; so that if we would take thought all
+together, and work together, as a football team does, we would start
+making a perfect world.
+
+"That's what socialism--of which you're beginning to hear so much, and
+of which you're going to hear so much more--means. If you feel
+genuinely impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my
+affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist party of this country
+constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do
+demand of you that you try to think for yourselves, if you are going
+to have the nerve to vote at all--think of it--to vote how this whole
+nation is to be conducted! Doesn't that tremendous responsibility
+demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting?
+that you really think, think hard, why you vote as you do?... Pardon
+me for getting away from the subject proper--yet am I, actually? For
+just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells.
+
+"The great vision of the glory that shall be, not in one sudden
+millennium, but slowly advancing toward joys of life which we can no
+more prevision than the aboriginal medicine-man could imagine the
+X-ray! I wish that this were the time and the place to rhapsodize
+about that vision, as William Morris has done, in _News from Nowhere_.
+You tell me that the various brands of socialists differ so much in
+their beliefs about this future that the bewildered layman can make
+nothing at all of their theories. Very well. They differ so much
+because there are so many different things we _can_ do with this human
+race.... The defeat of death; the life period advancing to ten-score
+years all crowded with happy activity. The solution of labor's
+problem; increasing safety and decreasing hours of toil, and a way out
+for the unhappy consumer who is ground between labor and capital. A
+real democracy and the love of work that shall come when work is not
+relegated to wage-slaves, but joyously shared in a community inclusive
+of the living beings of all nations. France and Germany uniting
+precisely as Saxony and Prussia and Bavaria have united. And, most of
+all, a general realization that the fact that we cannot accomplish all
+these things at once does not indicate that they are hopeless; an
+understanding that one of the wonders of the future is the fact that
+we shall _always_, in all ages, have improvements to look forward to.
+
+"Fellow-students, object as strongly as you wish to the petty
+narrowness and vituperation of certain street-corner ranters, but do
+not be petty and narrow and vituperative in doing it!
+
+"Now, to relate all this to the plays of Bernard Shaw. When he
+says----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Professor Frazer's utterances seem tamely conservative nowadays; but
+this was in 1905, in a small, intensely religious college among the
+furrows. Imagine a devout pastor when his son kicks the family Bible
+and you have the mental state of half the students of Plato upon
+hearing a defense of socialism. Carl, catching echoes of his own talks
+with Bone Stillman in the lecture, exultantly glanced about, and found
+the class staring at one another with frightened anxiety. He saw the
+grim Plain Smith, not so much angry as ill. He saw two class clowns
+snickering at the ecstasy in the eyes of Genie Linderbeck.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the corner drug-store, popularly known as "The Club," where all
+the college bloods gather to drink lemon phosphate, an excited old
+man, whose tieless collar was almost concealed by his tobacco-stained
+beard, pushed back his black slouch-hat with the G. A. R. cord, and
+banged his fist on the prescription-counter, shouting, half at the
+clerk and half at the students matching pennies on the soda-counter,
+"I've lived in Plato, man and boy, for forty-seven years--ever since
+it wa'n't nothing but a frontier trading-post. I packed logs on my
+back and I tramped fifty-three miles to get me a yoke of oxen. I
+remember when the Indians went raiding during the war and the cavalry
+rode here from St. Paul. And this town has always stood for decency
+and law and order. But when things come to such a pass that this
+fellow Frazer or any of the rest of these infidels from one of these
+here Eastern colleges is allowed to stand up on his hind legs in a
+college building and bray about anarchism and tell us to trample on
+the old flag that we fought for, and none of these professors that
+call themselves 'reverends' step in and stop him, then let me tell you
+I'm about ready to pull up stakes and go out West, where there's
+patriotism and decency still, and where they'd hang one of these
+foreign anarchists to the nearest lamp-post, yes, sir, and this fellow
+Frazer, too, if he encouraged them in their crank notions. Got no
+right in the country, anyway. Better deport 'em if they ain't
+satisfied with the way we run things. I won't stand for preaching
+anarchism, and never knew any decent place that would, never since I
+was a baby in Canada. Yes, sir, I mean it; I'm an old man, but I'd
+pull up stakes and go plugging down the Santa Fe trail first, and I
+mean it."
+
+"Here's your Bog Bitters, Mr. Goff," said the clerk, hastily, as a
+passer-by was drawn into the store by the old man's tirade.
+
+Mr. Goff stalked out, muttering, and the college sports at the
+soda-counter grinned at one another. But Gus Osberg, of the junior
+class, remarked to Carl Ericson: "At that, though, there's a good
+deal to what old Goff says. Bet a hat Prexy won't stand for Prof
+Frazer's talking anarchy. Fellow in the class told me it was fierce
+stuff he was talking. Reg'lar anarchy."
+
+"Rats! It wasn't anything of the kind," protested Carl. "I was there
+and I heard the whole thing. He just explained what this Bernard Shaw
+that writes plays meant by socialism."
+
+"Well, even so, don't you think it's kind of unnecessary to talk
+publicly, right out in a college lecture-room, about socialism?"
+inquired a senior who was high up in the debating society.
+
+"Well, thunder----!" was all Carl said, as the whole group stared at
+him. He felt ridiculous; he was afraid of seeming to be a "crank." He
+escaped from the drug-store.
+
+When he arrived at Mrs. Henkel's boarding-house for supper the next
+evening he found the students passing from hand to hand a copy of the
+town paper, the _Plato Weekly Times_, which bore on the front page
+what the town regarded as a red-hot news story:
+
+PLATO PROFESSOR
+
+TALKS SEDITIOUSLY
+
+     As we go to press we learn that rumors are flying about the
+     campus that the "powers that be" are highly incensed by the
+     remarks of a well-known member of the local faculty praising
+     Socialism and other form of anarchy. It is said that one of
+     the older members of the faculty will demand from the erring
+     teacher an explanation of his remarks which are alleged to
+     have taken the form of a defense of the English anarchist
+     Bernhard Shaw. Those on the que vive are expecting
+     sensational developments and campus talk is so extensively
+     occupied with discussions of the affair that the important
+     coming game with St. John's college is almost forgotten.
+
+     While the TIMES has always supported Plato College as one of
+     the chief glories in the proud crown of Minnesota learning,
+     we can but illy stomach such news. It goes without saying
+     that we cannot too strongly disapprove express our
+     disapproval of such incendiary utterances and we shall
+     fearlessly report the whole of this fair let the chips fall
+     where they may.
+
+"There, Mr. Ericson," said Mrs. Henkel, a plump, decent, disapproving
+person, who had known too many generations of great Platonians to be
+impressed by anything, "you see what the public thinks of your
+Professor Frazer. I told you people wouldn't stomach such news, and I
+wouldn't wonder if they strongly disapproved."
+
+"This ain't anything but gossip," said Carl, feebly; but as he read
+the account in the _Weekly Times_ he was sick and frightened, such was
+his youthful awe of print. He wanted to beat the mossy-whiskered
+editor of the _Times_, who always had white food-stains on his lapels.
+When he raised his eyes the coquette Mae Thurston tried to cheer him:
+"It 'll all come out in the wash, Eric; don't worry. These editors
+have to have something to write about or they couldn't fill up the
+paper."
+
+He pressed her foot under the table. He was chatty, and helped to keep
+the general conversation away from the Frazer affair; but he was
+growing more and more angry, with a desire for effective action which
+expressed itself within him only by, "I'll show 'em! Makes me so
+_sore_!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everywhere they discussed and rediscussed Professor Frazer: in the
+dressing-room of the gymnasium, where the football squad dressed in
+the sweat-reeking air and shouted at one another, balancing each on
+one leg before small lockers, and rubbing themselves with brown,
+unclean Turkish towels; in the neat rooms of girl co-eds with their
+banners and cushions and pink comforters and chafing-dishes of nut
+fudge and photographic postal-cards showing the folks at home; in the
+close, horse-smelling, lap-robe and whip scattered office of the town
+livery-stable, where Mr. Goff droned with the editor of the _Times_.
+
+Everywhere Carl heard the echoes, and resolved, "I've got to _do_
+something!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The day of Professor Frazer's next lecture, a rain-sodden day at the
+end of October, with the stubble-fields bleakly shelterless beyond the
+campus. The rain splashed up from pools on the worn brick walks and
+dripped from trees and whipped about buildings, soaking the legs and
+leaving them itchingly wet and the feet sloshily uncomfortable. Carl
+returned to his room at one; talked to the Turk, his feet thrust
+against the side of their rusty stove. He wanted to keep three
+o'clock, the hour of Frazer's lecture, from coming. "I feel as if I
+was in for a fight and scared to death about it. Listen to that rain
+outside. Gee! but the old dame keeps these windows dirty. I hope
+Frazer will give it to them good and hard. I wish we could applaud
+him. I do feel funny, like something tragic was going to happen."
+
+"Oh, tie that dog outside," yawned the Turk, stanch adherent of Carl,
+and therefore of Professor Frazer, but not imaginative. "Come on,
+young Kerl; I'll play you a slick little piece on the mouth-organ.
+Heh?"
+
+"Oh, thunder! I'm too restless to listen to anything except a cannon."
+Carl stumped to the window and pondered on the pool of water flooding
+the graying grass stems in the shabby yard.
+
+When it was time to start for Professor Frazer's lecture the Turk
+blurted: "Why don't we stay away and forget about it? Get her off your
+nerves. Let's go down to the bowling-alley and work up a sweat."
+
+"Not a chance, Turk. He'll want all the supporters he's got. And you'd
+hate to stay away as much as I would. I feel cheered up now; all
+ready for the scrap. Yip! Come on!"
+
+"All right, governor. I like the scrap, all right, but I don't want to
+see you get all worked up."
+
+Through the rain, across the campus, an unusual number of students in
+shining, cheap, black raincoats were hastening to the three o'clock
+classes, clattering up the stone steps of the Academic Building,
+talking excitedly, glancing up at the arched door as though they
+expected to see something startling. Dozens stared at Carl. He felt
+rather important. It was plain that he was known as a belligerent, a
+supporter of Professor Frazer. As he came to the door of Lecture-room
+A he found that many of the crowd were deserting their proper classes
+to attend the Frazer event. He bumped down into his own seat, gazing
+back superciliously at the outsiders who were edging into unclaimed
+seats at the back of the room or standing about the door--students
+from other classes, town girls, the young instructor in French,
+German, and music; a couple of town club-women in glasses and galoshes
+and woolen stockings bunchy at the ankles. Every one was rapidly
+whispering, watching every one else, peeping often at the platform and
+the small door beside it through which Professor Frazer would enter.
+Carl had a smile ready for him. But there was no chance that the smile
+would be seen. There must have been a hundred and fifty in the room,
+seated and standing, though there were but seventy in the course, and
+but two hundred and fifty-six students in the whole college that year.
+
+Carl looked back. He clenched his fist and pounded the soft side of it
+on his thigh, drawing in his breath, puffing it out with a long
+exasperated "Hellll!" For the Greek professor, the comma-sized,
+sandy-whiskered martinet, to whom nothing that was new was moral and
+nothing that was old was to be questioned by any undergraduate,
+stalked into the room like indignant Napoleon posing before two guards
+and a penguin at St. Helena. A student in the back row thriftily gave
+the Greek god his seat. The god sat down, with a precise nod.
+Instantly a straggly man with a celluloid collar left the group by the
+door, whisked over to the Greek professor, and fawned upon him. It was
+the fearless editor and owner (also part-time type-setter) of the
+_Plato Weekly Times_, who dated back to the days of Washington
+flat-bed hand-presses and pure Jeffersonian politics, and feared
+neither man nor devil, though he was uneasy in the presence of his
+landlady. He ostentatiously flapped a wad of copy-paper in his left
+hand, and shook a spatter of ink-drops from a fountain-pen as he
+interviewed the Greek professor, who could be seen answering
+pompously. Carl was hating them both, fearing the Greek as a faculty
+spy on Frazer, picturing himself kicking the editor, when he was aware
+of a rustling all over the room, of a general turning of heads toward
+the platform.
+
+He turned. He was smiling like a shy child in his hero-worship.
+Professor Frazer was inconspicuously walking through the low door
+beside the platform. Frazer's lips were together. He was obviously
+self-conscious. His motions were jerky. He elaborately did not look at
+the audience. He nearly stumbled on the steps up to the platform. His
+hand shook as he drew papers from a leather portfolio and arranged
+them on the small reading-table. One of the papers escaped and sailed
+off the platform, nearly to the front row. Nearly every one in the
+room snickered. Frazer flushed. A girl student in the front row
+nervously bounded out of her seat, picked up the paper, and handed it
+up to Frazer. They both fumbled it, and their heads nearly touched.
+Most of the crowd laughed audibly.
+
+Professor Frazer sat down in his low chair, took out his watch with a
+twitching hand, and compared his time with the clock at the back of
+the room--and so closely were the amateur executioners observing their
+victim that every eye went back to the clock as well. Even Carl was
+guilty of that imitation. Consequently he saw the editor, standing at
+the back, make notes on his copy-paper and smirk like an ill-bred
+hound stealing a bone. And the Greek professor stared at Frazer's
+gauche movements with a grim smugness that indicated, "Quite the sort
+of thing I expected." The Greek's elbows were on the arm of the seat,
+and he held up before his breast a small red-leather-covered note-book
+which he superciliously tapped with a thin pencil. He was waiting.
+Like a judge of the Inquisition....
+
+"Old Greek 's going to take notes and make a report to the faculty
+about what Frazer says," reflected Carl. "If I could only get hold of
+his notes and destroy them!"
+
+Carl turned again. It was just three. Professor Frazer had risen.
+Usually he sat while lecturing. Fifty whispers commented on that fact;
+fifty regular members of the course became self-important through
+knowing it. Frazer was leaning slightly against the table. It moved an
+inch or two with his weight, but by this time every one was too
+high-strung to laugh. He was pale. He re-arranged his papers. He had
+to clear his throat twice before he could speak, in the now silent,
+vulturishly attentive room, smelling of wet second-rate clothes.
+
+The gusty rain could be heard. They all hitched in their seats.
+
+"Oh, Frazer _can't_ be going to retract," groaned Carl; "but he's
+scared."
+
+Carl suddenly wished himself away from all this useless conflict; out
+tramping the wet roads with the Turk, or slashing through the puddles
+at thirty-five miles an hour in the banker's car. He noted stupidly
+that Genie Linderbeck's hair was scarcely combed. He found he was
+saying, "Frazer 'll flunk, flunk, flunk; he's going to flunk, flunk,
+flunk."
+
+Then Frazer spoke. His voice sounded harsh and un-rhythmical, but soon
+swung into the natural periods of a public speaker as he got into his
+lecture:
+
+"My friends," said he, "a part of you have come here legitimately, to hear
+a lecture; a part to satisfy the curiosity aroused by rumors to the effect
+that I am likely to make indecorous and indecent remarks, which your
+decorum and decency make you wish to hear, and of which you will carry away
+evil and twisted reports, to gain the reputation of being fearless
+defenders of the truth. It is a temptation to gratify your desire and shock
+you--a far greater temptation than to be repentant and reactionary. Only,
+it occurs to me that this place and time are supposed to be devoted to a
+lecture by Henry Frazer on his opinions about contemporary drama. It is in
+no sense to be given to the puling defense of a martyr, nor to the
+sensational self-advertisement of either myself or any of you. I have no
+intention of devoting any part of my lecture, aside from these introductory
+adumbrations, to the astonishing number of new friends whose bright and
+morning faces I see before me. I shall neither be so insincerely tactful as
+to welcome you, nor so frightened as to ignore you. Nor shall I invite you
+to come to me with any complaints you have about me. I am far too busy with
+my real work!
+
+"I am not speaking patiently. I am not patient with you! I am not
+speaking politely. Truly, I do not think that I shall much longer be
+polite!
+
+"Wait. That sounds now in my ears as rhetorical! Forgive me, and
+translate my indiscretions into more colloquial language.
+
+"Though from rumors I have overheard, I fancy some of you will do
+that, anyway.... And now, I think, you see where I stand.
+
+"Now then. For such of you as have a genuine interest in the brilliant
+work of Bernard Shaw I shall first continue the animadversions on the
+importance of his social thought, endeavor to link it with the great
+and growing vision of H. G. Wells (novelist and not dramatist though
+he is, because of the significance of his new books, _Kips_ and
+_Mankind in the Making_), and point out the serious purpose that seems
+to me to underlie Shaw's sarcastic pictures of life's shams.
+
+"In my last lecture I endeavored to present the destructive side of
+present social theories as little as possible; to dwell more on the
+keen desire of the modern thinkers for constructive imagination. But I
+judge that I was regarded as too destructive, which amuses me, and to
+which I shall apply the antidote of showing how destructive modern
+thought is and must be--whether running with sootily smoking torch of
+individuality in Bakunin, or hissing in Nietzsche, or laughing at
+Olympus in Bernard Shaw. My 'radicalism' has been spoken of. Radical!
+Do you realize that I am not suggesting that there might possibly some
+day be a revolution in America, but rather that now I am stating that
+there is, this minute, and for some years has been, an actual state of
+warfare between capital and labor? Do you know that daily more people
+are saying openly and violently that we starve our poor, we stuff our
+own children with useless bookishness, and work the children of others
+in mills and let them sell papers on the streets in red-light
+districts at night, and thereby prove our state nothing short of
+insane? If you tell me that there is no revolution because there are
+no barricades, I point to actual battles at Homestead, Pullman, and
+the rest. If you say that there has been no declaration of war, open
+war, I shall read you editorials from _The Appeal to Reason_.
+
+"Mind you, I shall not say whether I am enlisted for or against the
+revolutionary army. But I demand that you look about you and
+understand the significance of the industrial disturbances and
+religious unrest of the time. Never till then will you understand
+anything--certainly not that Shaw is something more than an _enfant
+terrible_; Ibsen something more than an ill-natured old man with
+dyspepsia and a silly lack of interest in skating. Then you will
+realize that in the most extravagant utterances of a red-shirted
+strike-leader there may be more fervent faith and honor, oftentimes,
+than in the virgin prayers of a girl who devoutly attends Christian
+Endeavor, but presumes to call Emma Goldman 'that dreadful woman.'
+Follow the labor-leader. Or fight him, good and hard. But do not
+overlook him.
+
+"But I must be more systematic. When John Tanner's independent
+chauffeur, of whom you have--I hope you have--read in _Man and
+Superman_----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carl looked about. Many were frowning; a few leaning sidewise to
+whisper to neighbors, with a perplexed head-shake that plainly meant,
+"I don't quite get that." Wet feet were shifted carefully; breaths
+caught quickly; hands nervously played with lower lips. The Greek
+professor was writing something. Carl's ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, was
+rigid, staring unyieldingly at the platform. Carl hated Smith's
+sinister stillness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Professor Frazer was finishing his lecture:
+
+"If it please you, flunk this course, don't read a single play I
+assign to you, be disrespectful, disbelieve all my contentions. And I
+shall still be content. But do not, as you are living souls, blind
+yourself to the fact that there is a world-wide movement to build a
+wider new world--and that the world needs it--and that in Jamaica
+Mills, on land owned by a director of Plato College, there are two
+particularly vile saloons which you must wipe out before you disprove
+me!" Silence for ten seconds. Then, "That is all."
+
+The crowd began to move hesitatingly, while Professor Frazer hastily
+picked up his papers and raincoat and hurried out through the door
+beside the platform. Voices immediately rose in a web of talk,
+many-colored, hot-colored.
+
+Carl babbled to the man next him, "He sure is broad. He doesn't care
+whether they're conservative or not. And some sensation at the end!"
+
+"Heh? What? Him?" The sophomore was staring.
+
+"Yes. Why, sure! Whadya mean?" demanded Carl.
+
+"Well, and wha' do _you_ mean by 'broad'? Sure! He's broad just like a
+razor edge."
+
+"Heh?" echoed the next man down the row, a Y. M. C. A. senior. "Do you
+mean to say you liked it?"
+
+"Why, sure! Why not? Didn't you?"
+
+"Oh yes. Yes indeed! All he said was that scarlet women like Emma
+Goldman were better than a C. E. girl, and that he hoped his students
+would bluff the course and flunk it, and that we could find booze at
+Jamaica Mills, and a few little things like that. That's all. Sure!
+That's the sort of thing we came here to study." The senior was
+buttoning his raincoat with angry fingers. "That's----Why, the man was
+insane! And the way he denounced decency and----Oh, I can't talk about
+it!"
+
+"W-w-w-well by gosh, of all the--the----" spluttered Carl. "You and
+your Y. M. C. A.--calling yourself religious, and misrepresenting like
+that--you and your----Why, you ain't worth arguing with. I don't
+believe you 'came to study' anything. You know it all already."
+Passionate but bewildered, trying not to injure the cause of Frazer by
+being nasty, he begged: "Straight, didn't you like his spiel? Didn't
+it give you some new ideas?"
+
+The senior vouchsafed: "No, 'me and my Y. M.' didn't like it. Now
+don't let me keep you, Ericson. I suppose you'll be wanting to join
+dear Mr. Frazer in a highball; you're such a pet of his. Did he teach
+you to booze? I understand you're good at it."
+
+"You apologize or I'll punch your face off," said Carl. "I don't
+understand Professor Frazer's principles like I ought to. I'm not
+fighting for them. Prob'ly would if I knew enough. But I don't like
+your face. It's too long. It's like a horse's face. It's an insult to
+Frazer to have a horse-faced guy listen to him. You apologize for
+having a horse face, see?"
+
+"You're bluffing. You wouldn't start anything here, anyway."
+
+"Apologize!" Carl's fist was clenched. People were staring.
+
+"Cut it out, will you! I didn't mean anything."
+
+"You wouldn't," snapped Carl, and rammed his way out, making wistful
+boyish plans to go to Frazer with devotion and offers of service in a
+fight whose causes grew more confused to him every moment. Beside him,
+as he hurried off to football practice, strode a big lineman of the
+junior class, cajoling:
+
+"Calm down, son. You can't lick the whole college."
+
+"But it makes me so sore----"
+
+"Oh, I know, but it strikes me that no matter how much you like
+Frazer, he was going pretty far when he said that anarchists had more
+sense than decent folks."
+
+"He didn't! You didn't get him. He meant----O Lord, what's the use!"
+
+He did not say another word as they hastened to the gymnasium for
+indoor practice.
+
+He was sure that they who knew of his partisanship would try to make
+him lose his temper. "Dear Lord, please just let me take out just one
+bonehead and beat him to a pulp, and then I'll be good and not open my
+head again," was his perfectly reverent prayer as he stripped before
+his locker.
+
+Carl and most of the other substitutes had to wait, and most of them
+gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazer's charge
+that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots, and tried to
+decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazer credit. Twenty
+times Carl wanted to deny; twenty times speech rose in him so hotly
+that he drew a breath and opened his mouth; but each time he muttered
+to himself: "Oh, shut up! You'll only make 'em worse." Students who
+had attended the lecture declared that Professor Frazer had advocated
+bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believed, marveling,
+"Well, well, well, well!" with unctuous appreciation of the scandal.
+
+Still Carl sat aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs
+with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him--slim,
+wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin
+glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight football jersey; a
+clean-carved boy.
+
+The rubber band of his nose-guard snapped harshly as he plucked at it,
+playing a song of hatred on that hard little harp.
+
+An insignificant thing made him burst out. Tommy La Croix, the French
+Canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken, tobacco-chewing, rather
+likeable young thug, stared directly at Carl and said, loudly:
+"'Nother thing I noticed was that Frazer didn't have his pants
+pressed. Funny, ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to
+be cranks they're short on baths and tailors?"
+
+Carl slid from the parallel bars. He walked up to the line of
+substitutes, glanced sneeringly along them, dramatized himself as a
+fighting rebel, remarked, "Half of you are too dumm to get Frazer, and
+the other half are old-woman gossips and ought to be drinking tea,"
+and gloomed away to the dressing-room, while behind him the
+substitutes laughed, and some one called: "Sorry you don't like us,
+but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericson?"
+
+His ears burned, in the dressing-room. He did not feel that they had
+been much impressed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To tell the next day or two in detail would be to make many books
+about the mixed childishness and heroic fineness of Carl's
+partisanship; to repeat a thousand rumors running about the campus to
+the effect that the faculty would demand Frazer's resignation; to
+explain the reason why Frazer's charge that a Plato director owned
+land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then
+quite forgotten, while Frazer's reputation as a "crank" was never
+forgotten, so much does muck resent the muck-raker; to describe Carl's
+brief call on Frazer and his confusing discovery that he had nothing
+to say; to repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazer
+affair, Turk's great oath to support Frazer "through hell and high
+water," Turk's repeated defiance: "Well, by golly! we'll show the
+mutts, but I wish we could _do_ something"; to chronicle dreary
+classes whose dullness was evident to Carl, now, after his interest in
+Frazer's lectures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Returning from Genie Linderbeck's room, Carl found a letter from
+Gertie Cowles on the black-walnut hat-rack. Without reading it, but
+successfully befooling himself into the belief that he was glad to
+have it, he went whistling up to his room.
+
+Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, those great seniors, sat tilted back in
+wooden chairs, and between them was the lord of the world, Mr.
+Bjorken, the football coach, a large, amiable, rather religious young
+man, who believed in football, foreign missions, and the Democratic
+party.
+
+"Hello! Waiting for me or the Turk?" faltered Carl, gravely shaking
+hands all round.
+
+"Just dropped up to see you for a second," said Mr. Bjorken.
+
+"Sorry the Turk wasn't here." Carl had an ill-defined feeling that he
+wanted to keep them from becoming serious as long as he could.
+
+Ray Cowles cleared his throat. Never again would the black-haired
+Adonis, blossom of the flower of Joralemon, be so old and sadly sage
+as then. "We want to talk to you seriously about something--for your
+own sake. You know I've always been interested in you, and Howard, and
+course we're interested in you as frat brothers, too. For old
+Joralemon and Plato, eh? Mr. Bjorken believes--might as well tell him
+now, don't you think, Mr. Bjorken?"
+
+The coach gave a regally gracious nod. Hitching about on the wood-box,
+Carl felt the bottom drop out of his anxious stomach.
+
+"Well, Mr. Bjorken thinks you're practically certain to make the team
+next year, and maybe you may even get put in the Hamlin game for a few
+minutes this year, and get your P."
+
+"Honest?"
+
+"Yes, if you do something for old Plato, same 's you expect her to do
+something for you." Ray was quite sincere. "But not if you put the
+team discipline on the bum and disgrace Omega Chi. Of course I can't
+speak as an actual member of the team, but still, as a senior, I hear
+things----"
+
+"How d'you mean 'disgrace'?"
+
+"Don't you know that because you've been getting so savage about
+Frazer the whole team 's getting mad?" said the coach. "Cowles and
+Griffin and I have been talking over the whole proposition. Your
+boosting Frazer----"
+
+"Look here," from Carl, "I won't crawl down on my opinion about
+Frazer. Folks haven't understood him."
+
+"Lord love you, son," soothed Howard Griffin, "we aren't trying to
+change your opinion of Frazer. We're, your friends, you know. We're
+proud of you for standing up for him. Only thing is, now that he's
+practically fired, just tell me how it's going to help him or you or
+anybody else, now, to make everybody sore by roasting them because
+they can't agree with you. Boost; don't knock! Don't make everybody
+think you're a crank."
+
+"To be frank," added Mr. Bjorken, "you're just as likely to hurt
+Frazer as to help him by stirring up all this bad blood. Look here. I
+suppose that if the faculty had already fired Frazer you'd still go
+ahead trying to buck them."
+
+"Hadn't thought about it, but suppose I would."
+
+"Afraid it might be that way. But haven't you seen by this time about
+how much good it does for one lone sophomore to try and run the
+faculty?" It was the coach talking again, but the gravely nodding
+mandarin-like heads of Howard and Ray accompanied him. "Mind you, I
+don't mean to disparage you personally, but you must admit that you
+can't hardly expect to boss everything. Just what good 'll it do to go
+on shouting for Frazer? Quite aside from the question of whether he is
+likely to get fired or not."
+
+"Well," grunted Carl, nervously massaging his chin, "I don't know as
+it will do any direct good--except maybe waking this darn conservative
+college up a little; but it does make me so dog-gone sore----"
+
+"Yes, yes, we understand, old man," the coach said, "but on the other
+hand here's the direct good of sitting tight and playing the game.
+I've heard you speak about Kipling. Well, you're like a young
+officer--a subaltern they call it, don't they?--in a Kipling story, a
+fellow that's under orders, and it's part of his game to play hard and
+keep his mouth shut and to not criticize his superior officers, ain't
+it?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose so, but----"
+
+"Well, it's just the same with you. Can't you see that? Think it over.
+What would you think of a lieutenant that tried to boss all the
+generals? Just same thing.... Besides, if you sit tight, you can make
+the team this year, I can practically promise you that. Do understand
+this now; it isn't a bribe; we want you to be able to play and _do_
+something for old Plato in a _real_ way--in athletics. But you most
+certainly can't make the team if you're going to be a disorganizer."
+
+"All we want you to do," put in Ray Cowles, "is not to make a public
+spectacle of yourself--as I'm afraid you've been doing. Admire Frazer
+all you want to, and talk about him to your own bunch, and don't back
+down on your own opinions, only don't think you've got to go round
+yelling about him. People get a false idea of you. I hate to have to
+tell you this, but several of the fellows, even in Omega Chi, have
+spoken about you, and wondered if you really were a regular crank. 'Of
+course he isn't, you poor cheese,' I tell 'em, but I can't be around
+to answer every one all the time, and you can't lick the whole
+college; that ain't the way the world does things. You don't know what
+a bad impression you make when you're too brash. See how I mean?"
+
+As the council of seers rose, Carl timidly said to Ray, "Straight,
+now, have quite a lot of the fellows been saying I was a goat?"
+
+"Good many, I'm afraid. All talking about you.... It's up to you. All
+you got to do is not think you know it all, and keep still. Keep still
+till you understand the faculty's difficulties just a little better.
+Savvy? Don't that sound fairly reasonable?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+They were gone. Carl was full of the nauseating shame which a
+matter-of-fact man, who supposes that he is never pilloried, knows
+when a conscientious friend informs him that he has been observed,
+criticized; that his enthusiasms have been regarded as eccentricities;
+his affectionate approaches toward friendship as impertinence.
+
+There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room, nudging one
+another, waiting agape for him to do something idiotic; a
+well-advertised fool on parade. He stalked about, now shamefaced, now
+bursting out with a belligerent, "Aw, rats! I'll show 'em!" now
+plaintively beseeching, "I don't suppose I am helping Frazer, but it
+makes me so darn sore when nobody stands up for him--and he teaches
+stuff they need so much here. Gee! I'm coming to think this is a
+pretty rough-neck college. He's the first teacher I ever got anything
+out of--and----Oh, hang it! what 'd I have to get mixed up in all this
+for, when I was getting along so good? And if it isn't going to help
+him----"
+
+His right hand became conscious of Gertie's letter crumpled in his
+pocket. As turning the letter over and over gave him surprisingly
+small knowledge of its contents, he opened it:
+
+     DEAR CARL,--You are just _silly_ to tease me about any bank
+     clerk. I don't like him any more at all and he can go with
+     Linda all he likes, much I care!
+
+     We are enjoying good health, though it is getting quite cold
+     now and we have the furnace running now and it feels pretty
+     good to have it. We had _such_ a good time at Adelaide's
+     party she wore such a pretty dress. She flirted terribly
+     with Joe Jordan though of course you'll call me a cat for
+     telling you because you like her so much better than me &
+     all.
+
+     Oh I haven't told you the news yet Joe has accepted a
+     position at St. Hilary in the mill there.
+
+     I have some pretty new things for my room, a beautiful
+     hand-painted picture. Before Joe goes there is going to be a
+     party for him at Semina's. I wish you could come I suppose
+     you have learned to dance well, of course you go to lots of
+     parties at Plato with all the pretty girls & forget all
+     about _me_.
+
+     I wish I was in Minneapolis it is pretty dull here, & such
+     good talks you and me had _didn't_ we!
+
+     Oh Carl dear Ray writes us you are sticking up for that
+     crazy Professor Frazer. I know it must take lots of courage
+     & I admire you _lots_ for it even if Ray doesn't but oh Carl
+     dear if you can't do any _good_ by it I hope you won't get
+     everybody talking about you without its doing any good, will
+     you, Carl?
+
+     I do so expect you to succeed wonderfully & I hope you won't
+     blast your career even to stand up for folks when it's too
+     late & won't do any good.
+
+     We all expect so much of you--we are waiting! You are our
+     knight & you aren't going to forget to keep your armor
+     bright, nor forget,
+
+Yours as ever,
+
+GERTIE.
+
+"Mmm!" remarked Carl. "Dun'no' about this knight-and-armor business.
+I'd look swell, I would, with a wash-boiler and a few more tons of
+junk on. Mmm! 'Expect you to succeed wonderfully----' Oh, I don't
+suppose I had ought to disappoint 'em. Don't see where I can help
+Frazer, anyway. Not a bit."
+
+The Frazer affair seemed very far from him; very hysterical.
+
+Two of the Gang ambled in with noisy proposals in regard to a game of
+poker, penny ante, but the thought of cards bored him. Leaving them in
+possession, one of them smoking the Turk's best pipe, which the Turk
+had been so careless as to leave in sight, he strolled out on the
+street and over to the campus.
+
+There was a light in the faculty-room in the Academic Building, yet it
+was not a "first and third Thursday," dates on which the faculty
+regularly met. Therefore, it was a special meeting; therefore----
+
+Promptly, without making any plans, Carl ran to the back of the
+building, shinned up a water-spout (humming "Just Before the Battle,
+Mother"), pried open a class-room window with his large jack-knife, of
+the variety technically known as a "toad-stabber" (changing his tune
+to "Onward, Christian Soldiers"), climbed in, tiptoed through the
+room, stopping often to listen, felt along the plaster walls to find
+the door, eased the door open, calmly sat down in the corridor, pulled
+off his shoes, said, "Ouch, it's cold on the feets!" slipped into
+another class-room in the front of the building, put on his shoes,
+crawled out of the window, walked along a limestone ledge one foot
+wide to a window of the faculty-room, and peeped in.
+
+All of the eleven assistant professors and full professors, except
+Frazer, were assembled, with President S. Alcott Wood in the chair,
+and the Greek professor addressing them, referring often to a
+red-leather-covered note-book.
+
+"Um! Making a report on Frazer's lecture," said Carl, clinging
+precariously to the rough faces of the stones. A gust swooped around
+the corner of the building. He swayed, gripped the stones more
+tightly, and looked down. He could not see the ground. It was
+thirty-five or forty feet down. "Almost fell," he observed. "Gosh! my
+hands are chilly!" As he peered in the window again he saw the Greek
+professor point directly at the window, while the whole gathering
+startled, turned, stared. A young assistant professor ran toward the
+door of the room.
+
+"Going to cut me off. Dog-gone it," said Carl. "They'll wait for me at
+the math.-room window. Hooray! I've started something."
+
+He carefully moved along the ledge to a point half-way between windows
+and waited, flat against the wall.
+
+Again he glanced down from the high, windy, narrow ledge. "It 'd be a
+long drop.... My hands are cold.... I could slip. Funny, I ain't
+really much scared, though.... Say! Where'd I do just this before? Oh
+yes!" He saw himself as little Carl, lost with Gertie in the woods,
+caught by Bone Stillman at the window. He laughed out as he compared
+the bristly virile face of Bone with the pasty face of the young
+professor. "Seems almost as though I was back there doing the same
+thing right over. Funny. But I'm not quite as scared as I was then.
+Guess I'm growing up. Hel-lo! here's our cunning Spanish Inquisition
+rubbering out of the next window."
+
+The window of the mathematics class-room, next to the faculty-room,
+had opened. The young professor who was pursuing Carl peppered the
+night with violent words delivered in a rather pedagogic voice. "Well,
+sir! We have you! You might as well come and give yourself up."
+
+Carl was silent.
+
+The voice said, conversationally: "He's staying out there. I'll see
+who it is." Carl half made out a head thrusting itself from the
+window, then heard, in _sotto voce_, "I can't see him." Loudly again,
+the pursuing professor yapped: "Ah, I see you. You're merely wasting
+time, sir. You might just as well come here now. I shall let you stay
+there till you do." Softly: "Hurry back into the faculty-room and see
+if you can get him from that side. Bet it's one of the sneaking Frazer
+faction."
+
+Carl said nothing; did not budge. He peeped at the ledge above him. It
+was too far for him to reach it. He tried to discern the mass of the
+ground in the confusing darkness below. It seemed miles down. He did
+not know what to do. He was lone as a mateless hawk, there on the
+ledge, against the wall whose stones were pinchingly cold to the small
+of his back and his spread-eagled arms. He swayed slightly; realized
+with trembling nausea what would happen if he swayed too much.... He
+remembered that there was pavement below him. But he did not think
+about giving himself up.
+
+From the mathematics-room window came: "Watch him. I'm going out after
+him."
+
+The young professor's shoulders slid out of the window. Carl carefully
+turned his head and found that now a form was leaning from the
+faculty-room window as well.
+
+"Got me on both sides. Darn it! Well, when they haul me up on the
+carpet I'll have the pleasure of telling them what I think of them."
+
+The young professor had started to edge along the ledge. He was coming
+very slowly. He stopped and complained to some one back in the
+mathematics-room, "This beastly ledge is icy, I'm afraid."
+
+Carl piped: "Look out! Y're slipping!"
+
+In a panic the professor slid back into the window. As his heels
+disappeared through it, Carl dashed by the window, running sidewise
+along the ledge. While the professor was cautiously risking his head
+in the night air outside the window again, gazing to the left, where,
+he had reason to suppose, Carl would have the decency to remain, Carl
+was rapidly worming to the right. He reached the corner of the
+building, felt for the tin water-pipe, and slid down it, with his
+coat-tail protecting his hands. Half-way down, the cloth slipped and
+his hand was burnt against the corrugated tin. "Consid'able slide," he
+murmured as he struck the ground and blew softly on his raw palm.
+
+He walked away--not at all like a melodramatic hero of a
+slide-by-night, but like a matter-of-fact young man going to see some
+one about business of no great importance. He abstractedly brushed his
+left sleeve or his waistcoat, now and then, as though he wanted to
+appear neat.
+
+He tramped into the telephone-booth of the corner drug-store, called
+up Professor Frazer:
+
+"Hello? Professor Frazer?... This is one of your students in modern
+drama. I've just learned--I happened to be up in the Academic Building
+and I happened to find out that Professor Drood is making a report to
+the faculty--special meeting!--about your last lecture. I've got a
+hunch he's going to slam you. I don't want to butt in, but I'm awfully
+worried; I thought perhaps you ought to know.... Who? Oh, I'm just one
+of your students.... You're welcome. Oh, say, Professor, g-good luck.
+G'-by."
+
+Immediately, without even the excuse that some evil mind in the Gang
+had suggested it, he prowled out to the Greek professor's house and
+tied both the front and back gates. Now the fence of that yard was
+high and strong and provided with sharp pickets; and the professor was
+short and dignified. Carl regretted that he could not wait for the
+pleasure of seeing the professor fumble with the knots and climb the
+fence. But he had another errand.
+
+He walked to the house of Professor Frazer. He stood on the walk
+before it. His shoulders straightened, his heels snapped together, and
+he raised his arm in a formal salute.
+
+He had saluted the gentleness of Henry Frazer. He had saluted his own
+soul. He cried: "I will stick by him, as long as the Turk or any of
+'em. I won't let Omega Chi and the coach scare me--not the whole
+caboodle of them. I----Oh, I don't _think_ they can scare me...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+The students of Plato were required to attend chapel every morning.
+President S. Alcott Wood earnestly gave out two hymns, and between
+them informed the Almighty of the more important news events of the
+past twenty-four hours, with a worried advisory manner which indicated
+that he felt something should be done about them at once.
+
+President Wood was an honest, anxious body, something like a small,
+learned, Scotch linen-draper. He was given to being worried and
+advisory and to sitting up till midnight in his unventilated library,
+grinding at the task of putting new wrong meanings into perfectly
+obvious statements in the Bible. He was a series of circles--round
+head with smooth gray hair that hung in a bang over his round
+forehead; round face with round red cheeks; absurdly heavy gray
+mustache that almost made a circle about his puerile mouth; round
+button of a nose; round heavy shoulders; round little stomach in a
+gray sack-suit; round dumplings of feet in congress shoes that were
+never quite fresh-blacked or quite dusty. A harassed, honorable,
+studious, ignorant, humorless, joke-popping, genuinely conscientious
+thumb of a man. His prayers were long and intimate.
+
+After the second hymn he would announce the coming social
+events--class prayer-meetings and lantern-slide lectures by
+missionaries. During the prayer and hymns most of the students hastily
+prepared for first-hour classes, with lists of dates inside their
+hymn-books; or they read tight-folded copies of the Minneapolis
+_Journal_ or _Tribune_. But when the announcements began all Plato
+College sat up to attention, for Prexy Wood was very likely to comment
+with pedantic sarcasm on student peccadillos, on cards and V-neck
+gowns and the unforgivable crime of smoking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As he crawled to the bare, unsympathetic chapel, the morning after
+spying on the faculty-room, Carl looked restlessly to the open fields,
+sniffed at the scent of burning leaves, watched a thin stream of
+blackbirds in the windy sky. He sat on the edge of a pew, nervously
+jiggling his crossed legs.
+
+During the prayer and hymns a spontaneously born rumor that there
+would be something sensational in President Wood's announcements went
+through the student body. The president, as he gave out the hymns, did
+not look at the students, but sadly smoothed the neat green cloth on
+the reading-stand. His prayer, timid, sincere, was for guidance to
+comprehend the will of the Lord.
+
+Carl felt sorry for him. "Poor man 's fussed. Ought to be! I'd be,
+too, if I tried to stop a ten-inch gun like Frazer.... He's singing
+hard.... Announcements, now.... What's he waiting for? Jiminy! I wish
+he'd spring it and get it over.... Suppose he said something about
+last night--me----"
+
+President Wood stood silent. His glance drifted from row to row of
+students. They moved uneasily. Then his dry, precise voice declaimed:
+
+"My friends, I have an unpleasant duty to perform this morning, but I
+have sought guidance in prayer, and I hope----"
+
+Carl was agonizing: "He does know it's me! He'll ball me out and fire
+me publicly!... Sit tight, Ericson; hold y' nerve; think of good old
+Turk." Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the
+eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He hated this
+place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In
+the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazer sat
+(infrequently). He could fancy Frazer there, pale and stern. "I'm glad
+I spied on 'em. Might have been able to put Frazer wise to something
+definite if I could just have overheard 'em."
+
+President Wood was mincing on:
+
+"----and so, my friends, I hope that in devotion to the ideals of the
+Baptist Church we shall strive ever onward and upward in even our
+smallest daily concerns, _per aspera ad astra_, not in a spirit of
+materialism and modern unrest, but in a spirit of duty.
+
+"I need not tell you that there has been a great deal of rumor about
+the so-called 'faculty dissensions.' But let me earnestly beseech you
+to give me your closest attention when I assure you that there have
+been _no_ faculty dissensions. It is true that we have found certain
+teachings rather out of harmony with the ideals of Plato College. The
+Word of God in the Bible was good enough for our fathers who fought to
+defend this great land, and the Bible is still good enough for us, I
+guess--and I cannot find anything in the Bible about such doctrines as
+socialism and anarchism and evolution. Probably most of you have been
+fortunate enough to not have wasted any time on this theory called
+'evolution.' If you don't know anything about it you have not lost
+anything. Absurd as it may seem, evolution says that we are all
+descended from monkeys! In spite of the fact that the Bible teaches us
+that we are the children of God. If you prefer to be the children of
+monkeys rather than of God, well, all I can say is, I don't!
+[Laughter.]
+
+"But the old fellow Satan is always busy going to and fro even in
+colleges, and in the unrestrained, overgrown, secularized colleges of
+the East they have actually been teaching this doctrine openly for
+many years. Indeed, I am told that right at the University of Chicago,
+though it is a Baptist institution, they teach this same silly
+twaddle of evolution, and I cannot advise any of you to go there for
+graduate work. But these scientific fellows that are too wise for the
+Bible fall into the pits they themselves have digged, sooner or later,
+and they have been so smart in discovering new things about evolution
+that they have contradicted almost everything that Darwin, who was the
+high priest of this abominable cult, first taught, and they have
+turned the whole theory into a hodge-podge of contradictions from
+which even they themselves are now turning in disgust. Indeed, I am
+told that Darwin's own son has come out and admitted that there is
+nothing to this evolution. Well, we could have told him that all
+along, and told his father, and saved all their time, for now they are
+all coming right back to the Bible. We could have told them in the
+first place that the Word of God definitely explains the origin of
+man, and that anybody who tried to find out whether we were descended
+from monkeys was just about as wise as the man who tried to make a
+silk purse out of a sow's ear."
+
+Carl was settled down in his pew, safe.
+
+President Wood was in his stride. "All this evolutionary fad becomes
+ridiculous, of course, when a mind that is properly trained in clear
+thinking by the diligent perusal of the classics strips it of its
+pseudo-scientific rags and shows it straight out from the shoulder, in
+the fire of common sense and sound religion. And here is the point of
+my disquisition:
+
+"On this selfsame evolution, this bombast of the self-pushing
+scientists, are founded _all_ such un-Christian and un-American
+doctrines as socialism and anarchism and the lusts of feminism, with
+all their followers, such as Shaw and the fellow who tried to shoot
+Mr. Frick, and all the other atheists of the stripe that think so well
+of themselves that they are quite willing to overthrow the grand old
+institutions that our forefathers founded on the Constitution; and
+they want to set up instead--oh, they're quite willing to tell us how
+to run the government! They want to set up a state in which all of us
+who are honest enough to do a day's work shall support the lazy
+rascals who aren't. Yet they are very clever men. They can pull the
+wool over your eyes and persuade you--if you let them--that a
+universal willingness to let the other fellow do the work while you
+paint pictures of flowers and write novels about the abominations of
+Babylon is going to evolute a superior race! Well, when you think they
+are clever, this Shaw and this fellow Wells and all of them that copy
+Robert G. Ingersoll, just remember that the cleverest fellow of them
+all is the old Satan, and that he's been advocating just such lazy
+doctrines ever since he stirred up rebellion and discontent in the
+Garden of Eden!
+
+"If these things are so, then the teachings of Professor Henry Frazer,
+however sincere he is, are not in accordance with the stand which we
+have taken here at Plato. My friends, I want you all to understand me.
+Certain young students of Plato appear to have felt that the faculty
+have not appreciated Professor Frazer. One of these students, I
+presume it was one of them, went so far as to attempt to spy on
+faculty meeting last night. Who that man is I have means of finding
+out at any time. But I do not wish to. For I cannot believe that he
+realized how dishonest was such sneaking.
+
+"I wish to assure the malcontents that I yield to no one in my
+admiration of Professor Frazer's eloquence and learning in certain
+subjects. Only, we have not found his doctrines quite consistent with
+what we are trying to do. They may be a lot more smart and new-fangled
+than what we have out here in Minnesota, and we may be a lot of old
+fogies, but we are not narrow, and we wish to give him just as much
+right of free speech--we wish--there is--uh--no slightest--uh--desire,
+in fact, to impose any authority on any one. But against any
+perversive doctrine we must in all honesty take a firm stand.
+
+"We carefully explained this to Professor Frazer, and permit me to
+inform those young men who have taken it upon themselves to be his
+champions, that they would do well to follow his example! For he quite
+agrees with us as to the need of keeping the Plato College doctrine
+consistent. In fact, he offered his resignation, which we reluctantly
+accepted, very, very reluctantly. It will take effect the first of the
+month, and, owing to illness in his family, he will not be giving any
+lectures before then. Students in his classes, by the way, are
+requested to report to the dean for other assignments.... And so you
+see how little there is to the cowardly rumors about 'faculty
+dissensions'!"
+
+"Liar, liar! Dear God, they've smothered that kind, straight Frazer,"
+Carl was groaning.
+
+"Now, my friends, I trust you understand our position, and--uh----"
+
+President Wood drew a breath, slapped the reading-stand, and piped,
+angrily:
+
+"We have every desire to permit complete freedom of thought and speech
+among the students of Plato, but on my _word_, when it comes to a pass
+where a few students can cause this whole great institution to forget
+its real tasks and devote all its time to quarreling about a fad like
+socialism, then it's time to call a halt!
+
+"If there are any students here who, now that I have explained that
+Professor Frazer leaves us of his own free will, still persist in
+their stubborn desire to create trouble, and still feel that the
+faculty have not treated Professor Frazer properly, or that we have
+endeavored to coerce him, then let them stand up, right here and now,
+in chapel. I mean it! Let them stop this cowardly running to and fro
+and secret gossip. Let them stand right up before us, in token of
+protest, here--and--now! or otherwise hold their peace!"
+
+So well trained to the authority of schoolmasters were the students of
+Plato, including Carl Ericson, that they sat as uncomfortable as
+though they were individually accused by the plump pedant who was
+weakly glaring at them, his round, childish hand clutching the sloping
+edge of the oak reading-stand, his sack-coat wrinkled at the shoulders
+and sagging back from his low linen collar. Carl sighted back at
+Frazer's pew, hoping that he would miraculously be there to confront
+the dictator. The pew was empty as before. There was no one to protest
+against the ousting of Frazer for saying what he believed true.
+
+Then Carl was agitated to find that Carl Ericson, a back-yard boy, was
+going to rise and disturb all these learned people. He was frightened
+again. But he stood up, faced the president, affectedly folded his
+arms, hastily unfolded them and put his hands in his pockets, one foot
+before the other, one shoulder humped a little higher than the other.
+
+The whole audience was staring at him. He did not dare peep at them,
+but he could hear their murmur of amazement. Now that he was up he
+rather enjoyed defying them.
+
+"Well, young man, so you are going to let us know how to run Plato,"
+teetered the president. "I'm sure everybody will feel much obliged to
+you."
+
+Carl did not move. He was aware of Genie Linderbeck rising, to his
+left. No one else was up, but, with Genie's frail adherence, Carl
+suddenly desired to rouse every one to stand for Frazer and freedom.
+He glanced over at the one man whom he could always trust to follow
+him--the Turk. A tiny movement of Carl's lips, a covert up-toss of his
+head, warned the Turk to rise now.
+
+The Turk moved, started to rise, slowly, as though under force. He
+looked rather shamefaced. He uncrossed his legs and put his hands on
+the pew, on either side of his legs.
+
+"Shame!" trembled a girl's voice in the junior section.
+
+"Sit down!" two or three voices of men softly snarled, with a rustle
+of mob-muttering.
+
+The Turk hastily crossed his legs and slumped down in his seat. Carl
+frowned at him imploringly, then angrily. He felt spiritually naked to
+ask support so publicly, but he _had_ to get the Turk up. The Turk
+shook his head beseechingly. Carl could fancy him grunting, "Aw,
+thunder! I'd like to stand up, but I don't want to be a goat."
+
+Another man rose. "I'll be darned!" thought Carl. It was the one man
+who would be expected not to support the heretic Frazer--it was Carl's
+rustic ex-room-mate, Plain Smith. Genie was leaning against the pew in
+front of him, but Plain Smith bulked more immovable than Carl.
+
+No one joined the three. All through the chapel was an undertone of
+amazed comment and a constant low hissing of, "Sssssit down!"
+
+The president, facing them, looked strained. It occurred to Carl that
+S. Alcott Wood had his side of the question. He argued about the
+matter, feeling detached from his stolidly defiant body. Then he
+cursed the president for keeping them there. He wanted to sit down. He
+wanted to cry out....
+
+President Wood was speaking. "Is there any one else? Stand up, if
+there is. No one else? Very well, young men, I trust that you are now
+satisfied with your heroism, which we have all greatly appreciated, I
+am sure. [Laughter.] Chapel dismissed."
+
+Instantly a swirl of men surrounded Carl, questioning: "What j' do it
+for? Why didn't you keep still?"
+
+He pushed out through them. He sat blind through the first-hour quiz
+in physics, with the whole class watching him. The thought of the
+Turk's failure to rise kept unhappy vigil in his mind. The same
+sequence of reflections ran around like midnight mice in the wall:
+
+"Just when I needed him.... After all his talk.... And us so chummy,
+sitting up all hours last night. And then the Turk throws me down....
+When he'd said so many times he just wanted the chance to show how
+strong he was for Frazer.... Damn coward! I'll go room with Genie. By
+gosh----Oh, I got to be fair to the Turk. I don't suppose he could
+have done much real good standing up. Course it does make you feel
+kind of a poor nut, doing it. Genie looked----Yes, by the Jim Hill!
+there you are. Poor little scrawny Genie--oh yes, sure, it was up to
+_him_ to stand up. He wasn't afraid. And the Turk, the big stiff, he
+was afraid to.... Just when I needed him. After all our talk about
+Frazer, sitting up all hours----"
+
+Through the black whirlpool in his head pierced an irritated, "Mr.
+Ericson, I said! Have you gone to sleep? I understood you were
+excellent at standing up! What is your explanation of the phenomenon?"
+The professor of physics and mathematics--the same who had pursued
+Carl on the ledge--was speaking to him.
+
+Carl mumbled, sullenly, "Not prepared." The class sniggered. He
+devoted a moment to hating them, as pariahs hate, then through his
+mind went whirling again, "Just wait till I see the Turk!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+A notice from the president's office, commanding Carl's instant
+presence, was in his post-office box. He slouched into the
+waiting-room of the offices of the president and dean. He was an
+incarnate desire to say exactly what he thought to the round, woolly
+President Wood.
+
+Plain Albert Smith was leaving the waiting-room. He seized Carl's hand
+with his plowman's paw, and, "Good-by, boy," he growled. There was
+nothing gallant about his appearance--his blue-flannel shirt dusty
+with white fuzz, his wrinkled brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at
+which he kept fumbling with a seamy finger-nail of his left hand. But
+Carl's salute was a salute to the new king.
+
+"How d'you mean 'good-by,' Al?"
+
+"I've just resigned from Plato, Carl."
+
+"How'd you happen to do that? Did they summon you here?"
+
+"No. Just resigned," said Plain Smith. "One time when I was
+school-teaching I had a set-to with a school committee of farmers
+about teaching the kids a little botany. They said the three R's were
+enough. I won out, but I swore I'd stand up for any teacher that tried
+to be honest the way he seen it. I don't agree with Frazer about these
+socialists and all--fellow that's worked at the plow like I have knows
+a man wants to get ahead for his woman and himself, first of all, and
+let the walking-delegates go to work, too. But I think he's honest,
+all right, and, well, I stood up, and that means losing my
+scholarship. They won't try to fire me. Guess I'll mosey on to the U.
+of M. Can't probably live there as cheap as here, but a cousin of mine
+owns a big shoe-store and maybe I can get a job with him.... Boy, you
+were plucky to get up.... Glad we've got each other, finally. I feel
+as though you'd freed me from something. God bless you."
+
+To the dean's assistant, in the waiting-room, Carl grandly stated:
+"Ericson, 1908. I'm to see the president."
+
+"It's been arranged you're to see the dean instead. Sit down. Dean's
+engaged just now."
+
+Carl was kept waiting for a half-hour. He did not like the
+transference to the dean, who was no anxious old lamb like S. Alcott
+Wood, but a young collegiate climber, with a clipped mustache, a gold
+eye-glass chain over one ear, a curt voice, many facts, a spurious
+appreciation of music, and no mellowness. He was a graduate of the
+University of Chicago, and aggressively proud of it. He had "earned
+his way through college," which all tradition and all fiction
+pronounce the perfect manner of acquiring a noble independence and
+financial ability. Indeed, the blessing of early poverty is in general
+praised as the perfect training for acquiring enough wealth to save
+one's own children from the curse of early poverty. It would be safer
+to malign George Washington and the Boy Scouts, professional baseball
+and the Y. M. C. A., than to suggest that working one's way through
+college is not necessarily manlier than playing and dreaming and
+reading one's way through.
+
+Diffidently, without generalizing, the historian reports this fact
+about the dean; he had lost the graciousness of his rustic clergyman
+father and developed an itchingly bustling manner, a tremendous
+readiness for taking charge of everything in sight, by acquiring
+during his undergraduate days a mastery of all the petty ways of
+earning money, such as charging meek and stupid wealthy students too
+much for private tutoring, and bullying his classmates into
+patronizing the laundry whose agent he was.... The dean stuck his
+little finger far out into the air when drinking from a cup, and liked
+to be taken for a well-dressed man of the world.
+
+The half-hour of waiting gave Carl a feeling of the power of the
+authorities. And he kept seeing Plain Smith in his cousin's
+shoe-store, trying to "fit" women's shoes with his large red hands.
+When he was ordered to "step into the dean's office, now," he stumbled
+in, pulling at his soft felt hat.
+
+With his back to Carl, the dean was writing at a roll-top desk. The
+burnished top of his narrow, slightly bald head seemed efficient and
+formidable. Not glancing up, the dean snapped, "Sit down, young man."
+
+Carl sat down. He crumpled his hat again. He stared at a framed
+photograph, and moved his feet about, trying to keep them quiet.
+
+More waiting.
+
+The dean inspected Carl, over his shoulder. He still held his pen. The
+fingers of his left hand tapped his desk-tablet. He turned in his
+swivel-chair deliberately, as though he was now ready to settle
+everything permanently.
+
+"Well, young man, are you prepared to apologize to the president and
+faculty?"
+
+"Apologize? What for? The president said those that wanted to
+protest----"
+
+"Now we won't have any blustering, if you please, Ericson. I haven't
+the slightest doubt that you are prepared to give an exhibition of
+martyrdom. That is why I asked the privilege of taking care of you,
+instead of permitting you to distress President Wood any further. We
+will drop all this posing, if you don't mind. I assure you that it
+doesn't make----"
+
+"I----"
+
+"----the slightest impression on me, Ericson. Let's get right down to
+business. You know perfectly well that you have stirred up all the
+trouble you----"
+
+"I----"
+
+"----could in regard to Mr. Frazer. And I think, I really think, that
+we shall either have to have your written apology and your promise to
+think a little more before you talk, hereafter, or else we shall have
+to request your resignation from college. I am sorry that we
+apparently can't run this college to suit you, Ericson, but as we
+can't, why, I'm afraid we shall have to ask you not to increase our
+inefficiency by making all the trouble you can. Wait now; let's not
+have any melodrama! You may as well pick up that hat again. It doesn't
+seem to impress me much when you throw it down, though doubtless it
+was ver-ee dramatically done, oh yes, indeed, ver-ee dramatic. See
+here. I know you, and I know your type, my young friend, and I
+haven't----"
+
+"Look here. Why do I get picked out as the goat, the one to apologize?
+Because I stood up first? When Prexy said to?"
+
+"Oh, not at all. Say it's because you quite shamelessly made motions
+at others while you stood there, and did your best to disaffect men
+who hadn't the least desire to join in your trouble-making.... Now I'm
+very busy, young man, and I think this is all the time I shall waste
+on you. I shall expect to find your written----"
+
+"Say, honest, dean," Carl suddenly laughed, "may I say just one thing
+before I get thrown out?"
+
+"Certainly. We have every desire to deal justly with you, and to
+always give--always to give you every opportunity----"
+
+"Well, I just wanted to say, in case I resign and don't see you again,
+that I admire you for your nerve. I wish I could get over feeling like
+a sophomore talking to a dean, and then I could tell you I hadn't
+supposed there was anybody could talk to me the way you have and get
+away with it. I'd always thought I'd punch their head off, and here
+you've had me completely buffaloed. It's wonderful! Honestly, it never
+struck me till just this second that there isn't any law that compels
+me to sit here and take all this. You had me completely hypnotized."
+
+"You know I might retort truthfully and say I am not accustomed to
+have students address me in quite this manner. I'm glad, however, to
+find that you are sensible enough not to make an amusing show of
+yourself by imagining that you are making a noble fight for freedom.
+By decision of the president and myself I am compelled to give you
+this one chance only. Unless I find your apology in my letter-box here
+by five this evening I shall have to suspend you or bring you up
+before the faculty for dismissal. But, my boy, I feel that perhaps,
+for all your mistaken notions, you do have a certain amount of
+courage, and I want to say a word----"
+
+The dean did say a word; in fact he said a large number of admirable
+words, regarding the effect of Carl's possible dismissal on his
+friends, his family, and, with an almost tearful climax, on his
+mother.
+
+"Now go and think it over; pray over it, unselfishly, my boy, and let
+me hear from you before five."
+
+Only----
+
+The reason why Carl _did_ visualize his mother, the reason why the
+Ericson kitchen became so clear to him that he saw his tired-faced
+mother reaching up to wind the alarm-clock that stood beside the ball
+of odd string on the shelf above the water-pail, the reason why he
+felt caved-in at the stomach, was that he knew he was going to leave
+Plato, and did not know where in the world he was going.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A time of quick action; of bursting the bonds even of friendship. He
+walked quietly into Genie Linderbeck's neat room, with its rose-hued
+comforter on a narrow brass bed, passe-partouted Copley prints, and a
+small oak table with immaculate green desk-blotter, and said
+good-by.... His hidden apprehension, the cold, empty feeling of his
+stomach, the nervous intensity of his motions, told him that he was
+already on the long trail that leads to fortune and Bowery
+lodging-houses and death and happiness. Even while he was warning
+himself that he must not go, that he owed it to his "folks" to
+apologize and stay, he was stumbling into the bank and drawing out his
+ninety-two dollars. It seemed a great sum. While waiting for it he did
+sums on the back of a deposit-slip:
+
+                  92.00 out of bank
+                   2.27 in pocket
+            about   .10 at room
+             -----------------------
+            tot.  94.37
+
+        Owe Tailor      1.45
+         "  Turk         .25
+        To  Mpls.       3.05
+To Chi. probably 15 to 18.00
+        To N. Y. 20 to 30.00
+To Europe (steerage)   40.00
+----------------------------
+        Total (about)  92.75----would take me to Europe!
+
+"Golly! I could go to Europe, to Europe! now, if I wanted to, and have
+maybe two plunks over, for grub on the railroad. But I'd have to allow
+something for tips, I guess. Maybe it wouldn't be as much as forty
+dollars for steerage. Ought to allow----Oh, thunder! I've got enough
+to make a mighty good start seeing the world, anyway."
+
+On the street a boy was selling extras of the _Plato Weekly Times_,
+with the heading:
+
+PRESIDENT CRUSHES STUDENT
+REBELLION
+
+Plato Demonstration for Anarchist Handled
+Without Gloves
+
+Carl read that he and two other students, "who are alleged to have
+been concerned in several student pranks," had attempted to break up a
+chapel meeting, but had been put to shame by the famous administrator,
+S. Alcott Wood. He had never seen his name in the press, except some
+three times in the local items of the _Joralemon Dynamite_. It looked
+so intimidatingly public that he tried to forget it was there. He
+chuckled when he thought of Plain Smith and Genie Linderbeck as
+"concerned in student pranks." But he was growing angry. He considered
+staying and fighting his opponents to the end. Then he told himself
+that he must leave Plato, after having announced to Genie that he was
+going.... He had made all of his decision except the actual deciding.
+
+He omitted his noonday dinner and tramped into the country, trying to
+plan how and where he would go. As evening came, cloudy and chill in a
+low wooded tract miles north of Plato, with dead boughs keening and
+the uneasy air threatening a rain that never quite came, the
+loneliness of the land seemed to befog all the possibilities of the
+future.... He wanted the lamp-lit security of his room, with the Turk
+and the Gang in red sweaters, singing ragtime; with the Frazer affair
+a bad dream that was forgotten. The world outside Plato would all be
+like these lowering woods and dreary swamps.
+
+He turned. He could find solace only in making his mind a blank.
+Sullen, dull, he watched the sunset, watched the bellying cumulus
+clouds mimic the Grand Cañon. He had to see the Grand Cañon! He
+would!... He had turned the corner. His clammy heart was warming. He
+was slowly coming to understand that he was actually free to take
+youth's freedom.
+
+He saw the vision of the America through which he might follow the
+trail like the pioneers whose spiritual descendant he was. How noble
+was the panorama that thrilled this one-generation American can be
+understood only by those who have smelled our brown soil; not by the
+condescending gods from abroad who come hither to gather money by
+lecturing on our evil habit of money-gathering, and return to Europe
+to report that America is a land of Irish politicians, Jewish
+theatrical managers, and mining millionaires who invariably say, "I
+swan to calculate"; all of them huddled in unfriendly hotels or in
+hovels set on hopeless prairie. Not such the America that lifted
+Carl's chin in wonder----
+
+Cities of tall towers; tawny deserts of the Southwest and the flawless
+sky of cornflower blue over sage-brush and painted butte; silent
+forests of the Northwest; golden China dragons of San Francisco; old
+orchards of New England; the oily Gulf of Mexico where tramp steamers
+puff down to Rio; a snow-piled cabin among somber pines of northern
+mountains. Elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere, beyond the sky-line, under
+larger stars, where men ride jesting and women smile. Names alluring
+to the American he repeated--Shenandoah, Santa Ynez, the Little Big
+Horn, Baton Rouge, the Great Smokies, Rappahannock, Arizona, Cheyenne,
+Monongahela, Androscoggin; cañon and bayou; sycamore and mesquite;
+Broadway and El Camino Real....
+
+He hurled along into Plato. He went to Mrs. Henkel's for supper. He
+smiled at the questions dumped upon him, and evaded answering. He took
+Mae Thurston aside and told her that he was leaving Plato. He wanted
+to call on Professor Frazer. He did not dare. From a pleasant
+gentleman drinking tea Frazer had changed to a prophet whom he
+revered.
+
+Carl darted into his room. The Turk was waiting for him. Carl cut
+short the Turk's apologies for not having supported Frazer, with the
+dreadful curt pleasantness of an alienated friend, and, as he began
+packing his clothes in two old suit-cases, insisted, "It's all
+right--was your biz whether you stood up in chapel or not." He hunted
+diligently through the back of the closet for a non-existent shoe, in
+order to get away from the shamefaced melancholy which covered the
+Turk when Carl presented him with all his books, his skees, and his
+pet hockey-stick. He prolonged the search because it had occurred to
+him that, as it was now eleven o'clock, and the train north left at
+midnight, the Minneapolis train at 2 A.M., it might be well to decide
+where he was going when he went away. Well, Minneapolis and Chicago.
+Beyond that--he'd wait and see. Anywhere--he could go anywhere in all
+the world, now....
+
+He popped out of the closet cheerfully.
+
+While the Turk mooned, Carl wrote short honest notes to Gertie, to his
+banker employer, to Bennie Rusk, whom he addressed as "Friend Ben." He
+found himself writing a long and spirited letter to Bone Stillman, who
+came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared.
+Frankly he wrote to his mother--his mammy he wistfully called her. To
+his father he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he
+stamped the letters, then glanced at the Turk. He was gay, mature,
+business-like, ready for anything. "I'll pull out in half an hour
+now," he chuckled.
+
+"Gosh!" sighed the Turk. "I feel as if I was responsible for
+everything. Oh, say, here's a letter I forgot to give you. Came this
+afternoon."
+
+The letter was from Gertie.
+
+     DEAR CARL,--I hear that you _are_ standing for that Frazer
+     just as much as ever and really Carl I think you might
+     consider other people's feelings a little and not be so  selfish----
+
+Without finishing it, Carl tore up the letter in a fury. Then, "Poor
+kid; guess she means well," he thought, and made an imaginary bow to
+her in farewell.
+
+There was a certain amount of the milk of human-kindness in the frozen
+husk he had for a time become. But he must be blamed for icily
+rejecting the Turk's blundering attempts to make peace. He
+courteously--courtesy, between these two!--declined the Turk's offer
+to help him carry his suit-cases to the station. That was like a slap.
+
+"Good-by. Hang on tight," he said, as he stooped to the heavy
+suit-cases and marched out of the door without looking back.
+
+By some providence he was saved from the crime of chilly
+self-righteousness. On the darkness of the stairs he felt all at once
+how responsive a chum the Turk had been. He dropped the suit-cases,
+not caring how they fell, rushed back into the room, and found the
+Turk still staring at the door. He cried:
+
+"Old man, I was----Say, you yahoo, are you going to make me carry both
+my valises to the depot?"
+
+They rushed off together, laughing, promising to write to each other.
+
+The Minneapolis train pulled out, with Carl trying to appear
+commonplace. None of the sleepy passengers saw that the Golden Fleece
+was draped about him or that under his arm he bore the harp of
+Ulysses. He was merely a young man taking a train at a way-station.
+
+
+
+
+Part II
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF ADVENTURING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+There are to-day in the mind of Carl Ericson many confused
+recollections of the purposeless wanderings which followed his leaving
+Plato College. For more than a year he went down, down in the social
+scale, down to dirt and poverty and association with the utterly tough
+and reckless. But day by day his young joy of wandering matured into
+an ease in dealing with whatever man or situation he might meet. He
+had missed the opportunity of becoming a respectable citizen which
+Plato offered. Now he did all the grubby things which Plato obviated
+that her sons might rise to a place in society, to eighteen hundred
+dollars a year and the possession of evening clothes and a knowledge
+of Greek. But the light danced more perversely in his eyes every day
+of his roving.
+
+The following are the several jobs for which Carl first applied in
+Chicago, all the while frightened by the roar and creeping shadows of
+the city:
+
+Tutoring the children of a millionaire brewer; keeping time on the
+Italian and Polack washers of a window-cleaning company; reporting on
+an Evanston newspaper; driving a taxicab, a motor-truck; keeping books
+for a suburban real-estate firm. He had it ground into him, as grit is
+ground into your face when you fall from a bicycle, that every one in
+a city of millions is too busy to talk to a stranger unless he sees a
+sound reason for talking. He changed the _Joralemon Dynamite's_
+phrase, "accept a position" to "get a job"--and he got a job, as
+packer in a department store big as the whole of Joralemon. Since the
+street throngs had already come to seem no more personal and
+separable than the bricks in the buildings, he was not so much
+impressed by the crowds in the store as by the number of things for
+women to hang upon themselves. He would ramble in at lunch-time to
+stare at them and marvel, "You can't beat it!"
+
+From eight till twelve-thirty and from one till six or seven, during
+nearly two months, Carl stood in a long, brick-walled, stuffy room,
+inundated by floods of things to pack, wondering why he had ever left
+Plato to become the slave of a Swede foreman. The Great World, as he
+saw it through a tiny hole in one of the opaque wire-glass windows,
+consisted of three bars of a rusty fire-escape-landing against a
+yellow brick wall, with a smudge of black on the wall below the
+landing.
+
+Within two days he was calling the packing-room a prison. The
+ceaseless rattle of speckled gray wrapping-paper, the stamp of feet on
+the gray cement floor, the greasy gray hair of the packer next to him,
+the yellow-stained, cracked, gray wash-bowl that served for thirty
+men, such was his food for dreams.
+
+Because his muscles were made of country earth and air he distanced
+the packers from the slums, however. He became incredibly swift at
+nailing boxes and crates and smashing the heavy wrapping-paper into
+shape about odd bundles. The foreman promised to make Carl his
+assistant. But on the cold December Saturday when his elevation was
+due he glanced out of a window, and farewell all ambition as a packer.
+
+The window belonged to the Florida Bakery and Lunch Room, where Carl
+was chastely lunching. There was dirty sawdust on the floor, six pine
+tables painted red and adorned with catsup-bottles whose mouths were
+clotted with dried catsup, and a long counter scattered with bread and
+white cakes and petrified rolls. Behind the counter a snuffling,
+ill-natured fat woman in slippers handed bags of crullers to
+shrill-voiced children who came in with pennies. The tables were
+packed with over-worked and underpaid men, to whom lunch was merely a
+means of keeping themselves from feeling inconveniently empty--a state
+to which the leadlike viands of the Florida Lunch Room were a certain
+prevention.
+
+Carl was gulping down salty beef stew and bitter coffee served in
+handleless cups half an inch thick. Beside him, elbow jogging elbow,
+was a surly-faced man in overalls. The old German waiters shuffled
+about and bawled, "_Zwei_ bif stew, _ein_ cheese-cake." Dishes
+clattered incessantly. The sicky-sweet scent of old pastry, of
+coffee-rings with stony raisins and buns smeared with dried cocoanut
+fibers, seemed to permeate even the bitter coffee.
+
+Carl got down most of his beef stew, attacked and gave up a chunk of
+hard boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced
+out of the dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big,
+leisurely policeman, was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty,
+rosy-cheeked, smart of hat, impeccable of gloves, with fluffy white
+furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of a
+life bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman,
+she shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of winter, and
+skipped away.
+
+"Bet she'd be a peach to know.... Fat chance I'd have to meet her,
+wrapping up baby-carriages for the North Shore commuters all day! All
+day!... Well, guess I'm going to honorably discharge myself!"
+
+He left the job that afternoon.
+
+His satiny Norse cheeks shone as he raced home through a rising
+blizzard, after dinner at the Florida Lunch Room, where he had allowed
+himself a ten-cent dessert for celebration.
+
+But when he lolled in his hall bedroom, with his eyes attracted, as
+usual, to the three cracks in the blue-painted ceiling which made a
+rough map of Africa, when he visioned lands where there were lions and
+desert instead of department-store packages, his happiness wilted in
+face of the fact that he had only $10.42, with $8.00 due him from the
+store the following Tuesday. Several times he subtracted the $3.00 he
+owed the landlady from $18.42, but the result persisted in being only
+$15.42. He could not make $15.42 appear a reasonable sum with which to
+start life anew.
+
+He had to search for a new job that evening. Only--he was so tired; it
+was so pleasant to lie there with his sore feet cooling against the
+wall, picturing a hunt in Africa, with native servants bringing him
+things to eat: juicy steaks and French-fried potatoes and gallons of
+ale (a repast which he may have been ignorant in assigning to the
+African jungles, but which seemed peculiarly well chosen, after a
+lunch-room dinner of watery corned-beef hash, burnt German-fried
+potatoes, and indigestible hot mince-pie). His thoughts drifted off to
+Plato. But Carl had a certain resoluteness even in these loose days.
+He considered the manoeuvers for a new job. He desired one which
+would permit him to go to theaters with the girl in white furs whom he
+had seen that noon--the unknown fairy of his discontent.
+
+It may be noted that he took this life quite seriously. Though he did
+not suppose that he was going to continue dwelling in a hall bedroom,
+yet never did he regard himself as a collegian Haroun-al-Raschid on an
+amusing masquerade, pretending to be no better than the men with whom
+he worked. Carl was no romantic hero incog. He was a workman, and he
+knew it. Was not his father a carpenter? his father's best friend a
+tailor? Had he not been a waiter at Plato?
+
+But not always a workman. Carl had no conception of world-wide
+class-consciousness; he had no pride in being a proletarian. Though
+from Bone's musings and Frazer's lectures he had drawn a vague
+optimism about a world-syndicate of nations, he took it for granted
+that he was going to be rich as soon as he could.
+
+Job. He had to have a job. He got stiffly up from the iron bed,
+painfully drew on his shoes, after inspecting the hole in the sole of
+the left shoe and the ripped seam at the back of the right. He pulled
+tight the paper-thin overcoat which he had bought at a second-hand
+dealer's shop, and dared a Chicago blizzard, with needles of snow
+thundering by on a sixty-mile gale. Through a street of unutterably
+drab stores and saloons he plowed to the Unallied Taxicab Company's
+garage. He felt lonely, cold, but he observed with ceaseless interest
+the new people, different people, who sloped by him in the dun web of
+the blizzard. The American marveled at a recently immigrated Slav's
+astrachan cap.
+
+He had hung about the Unallied garage on evenings when he was too poor
+to go to vaudeville. He had become decidedly friendly with the night
+washer, a youngster from Minneapolis. Trotting up to the washer, who
+was digging caked snow from the shoes of a car, he blurted:
+
+"Say, Coogan, I've beat my job at ----'s. How's chances for getting a
+taxi to drive? You know I know the game."
+
+"You? Driving a taxi?" stammered the washer. "Why, say, there was a
+guy that was a road-tester for the Blix Company and he's got a cousin
+that knows Bathhouse John, and that guy with all his pull has been
+trying to get on drivin' here for the last six months and ain't landed
+it, so you see about how much chance you got!"
+
+"Gosh! it don't look much like I had much chance, for a fact."
+
+"Tell you what I'll do, though. Why don't you get on at some
+automobile factory, and then you could ring in as a chauffeur, soon 's
+you got some recommends you could take to the Y. M. C. A. employment
+bureau." The washer gouged at a clot of ice with his heel, swore
+profusely, and went on: "Here. You go over to the Lodestar Motor
+Company's office, over on La Salle, Monday, and ask for Bill Coogan,
+on the sales end. He's me cousin, and you tell him to give you a card
+to the foreman out at the works, and I guess maybe you'll get a job,
+all right."
+
+Tuesday morning, after a severe questioning by the foreman, Carl was
+given a week's try-out without pay at the Lodestar factory. He proved
+to be one of those much-sought freaks in the world of mechanics, a
+natural filer. The uninspired filer, unaware of the niceties of the
+art, saws up and down, whereas the instinctive filer, like Carl, draws
+his file evenly across the metal, and the result fits its socket
+truly. So he was given welcome, paid twenty-five cents an hour, and
+made full member of exactly such a gang as he had known at Plato,
+after he had laughed away the straw boss who tried to make him go ask
+for a left-handed monkey-wrench. He roomed at a machinists'
+boarding-house, and enjoyed the furious discussions over religion and
+the question of air _versus_ water cooling far more than he had ever
+enjoyed the polite jesting at Mrs. Henkel's.
+
+He became friendly with the foreman of the repair-shop, and was
+promised a "chance." While the driver who made the road-tests of the
+cars was ill Carl was called on as a substitute. The older workmen
+warned him that no one could begin road-testing so early and hold the
+job. But Carl happened to drive the vice-president of the firm. He
+discussed bass-fishing in Minnesota with the vice-president, and he
+was retained as road-tester, getting his chauffeur's license. Two
+months later, when he was helping in the overhauling of a car in the
+repair-shop, he heard a full-bodied man with a smart English overcoat
+and a supercilious red face ask curtly of the shop foreman where he
+could get a "crack shuffer, right away, one that can give the traffic
+cops something to do for their money."
+
+The foreman always stopped to scratch his chin when he had to think.
+This process gave Carl time to look up from his repairs and blandly
+remark: "That's me. Want to try me?"
+
+Half an hour later Carl was engaged at twenty-five dollars a week as
+the Ruddy One's driver. Before Monday noon he had convinced the Ruddy
+One that he was no servant, but a mechanical expert. He drove the
+Ruddy One to his Investments and Securities office in the morning, and
+back at five; to restaurants in the evening. Not infrequently, with
+the wind whooping about corners, he slept peacefully in the car till
+two in the morning, outside a café. And he was perfectly happy. He was
+at last seeing the Great World. As he manoeuvered along State Street
+he rejoiced in the complications of the traffic and tooted his horn
+unnecessarily. As he waited before tall buildings, at noon, he gazed
+up at them with a superior air of boredom--because he was so boyishly
+proud of being a part of all this titanic life that he was afraid he
+might show it. He gloried in every new road, in driving along the Lake
+Shore, where the horizon was bounded not by unimaginative land, but by
+restless water.
+
+Then the Ruddy One's favorite roads began to be familiar to Carl, too
+familiar, and he so hated his sot of an employer that he caught
+himself muttering, while driving, "Thank the Lord I sit in front and
+don't have to see that chunk of raw beefsteak he calls a neck."
+
+While he waited for the fifth time before a certain expensive but not
+exclusive roadhouse, with the bouncing giggles of girls inside
+spoiling the spring night, he studied the background as once he had
+studied his father's woodshed. He was not, unfortunately, shocked by
+wine and women. But he was bored by box-trees. There was a smugly
+clipped box-tree on either side of the carriage entrance, the leaves
+like cheap green lacquer in the glare of the arc-light, which brought
+out all the artificiality of the gray-and-black cinder drive. He felt
+that five pilgrimages to even the best of box-trees were enough. It
+would be perfectly unreasonable for a free man to come here to stare
+at box-trees a sixth time. "All right," he growled. "I guess
+my-wandering-boy-to-night is going to beat it again."
+
+While he drove to the garage he pondered: "Is it worth twenty-five
+plunks to me to be able to beat it to-night instead of waiting four
+days till pay-day? Nope. I'm a poor man."
+
+But at 5 A.M. he was hanging about the railroad-yards at Hammond,
+recalling the lessons of youth in "flipping trains"; and at seven he
+was standing on the bumpers between two freight-cars, clinging to the
+brake-rod, looking out to the open meadows of Indiana, laughing to see
+farm-houses ringed with apple-blossoms and sweet with April morning.
+The cinders stormed by him. As he swung with the cars, on curves, he
+saw the treacherous wheels grinding beneath him. But to the
+chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck of the trucks he hummed,
+"Never turn back, never tur' back, never tur' back."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+A young hobo named Carl Ericson crawled from the rods of an N. & W.
+freight-car at Roanoke, Virginia, on a May day, with spring at full
+tide and the Judas-trees a singing pink on the slopes of the Blue
+Ridge.
+
+"Hm!" grunted the young hobo. "I like these mountains. Guess I'll stay
+here awhile.... Virginia! Plantations and Civil War history and
+Richmond and everything, and me here!"
+
+A frowzy old hobo poked a somnolent head up from a pile of lumber near
+the tracks and yawned welcome to the recruit. "Hello, Slim. How's
+tricks?"
+
+"Pretty good. What's the best section to batter for a poke-out,
+Billy?"
+
+"To the right, over that way, and straight out."
+
+"Much 'bliged," said Slim--erstwhile Ericson. "Say, j' know of any
+jobs in this----"
+
+"Any _whats_?"
+
+"Jobs."
+
+"Jobs? You looking for----Say, you beat it. Gwan. Chase yourself. Gwan
+now; don't stand there. You ain't no decent 'bo. You're another of
+those Unfortunate Workmen that's spoiling the profesh." The veteran
+stared at Carl reprovingly, yet with a little sadness, too, at the
+thought of how bitterly he had been deceived in this young comrade,
+and his uncombed head slowly vanished amid the lumber.
+
+Carl grinned and started up-town. He walked into four restaurants. At
+noon, in white jacket, he was bustling about as waiter in the
+dining-room of the Waskahominie Hotel, which had "white service" as a
+feature.
+
+Within two days he was boon companion of a guest of the
+Waskahominie--Parker Heye, an actor famous from Cape Charles to
+Shockeysville, now playing heavies at Roanoke in the Great Riley Tent
+Show, Presenting a Popular Repertoire of Famous Melodramas under
+Canvas, Rain or Shine, Admittance Twenty-five Cents, Section Reserved
+for Colored People, the Best Show under Canvas, This Week Only.
+
+When Parker Heye returned from the theater Carl sat with him in a room
+which had calico-like wall-paper, a sunken bed with a comforter out of
+which oozed a bit of its soiled cotton entrails, a cracked
+water-pitcher on a staggering wash-stand, and a beautiful new cuspidor
+of white china hand-painted with pink moss-roses tied with narrow blue
+ribbon.
+
+Carl listened credulously to Heye's confidences as to how jealous was
+Riley, the actor-manager, of Heye's art, how Heye had "knocked them
+all down" in a stock company at Newport News, and what E. H. Sothern
+had said to him when they met in Richmond as guests of the Seven Pines
+Club.
+
+"Say," rasped Heye, "you're a smart young fellow, good-looking,
+ejucated. Why don't you try to get an engagement? I'll knock you down
+to Riley. The second juvenile 's going to leave on Saturday, and there
+ain't hardly time to get anybody from Norfolk."
+
+"Golly! that 'd be great!" cried Carl, who, like every human being
+since Eden, with the possible exceptions of Calvin and Richard
+Mansfield, had a secret belief that he could be a powerful actor.
+
+"Well, I'll see what I can do for you," said Heye, at parting,
+alternately snapping his suspenders and scratching his head. Though he
+was in his stocking-feet and coat-less, though the back of his neck
+was a scraggle of hair, Parker Heye was preferable to the three Swiss
+waiters snoring in the hot room under the eaves, with its door half
+open, opposite the half-open door of the room where negro chambermaids
+tumbled and snorted in uncouth slumber. Carl's nose wrinkled with
+bitter fastidiousness as he pulled off his clothes, sticky with heat,
+and glared at the swathed forms of the waiters. He was the aristocrat
+among proletarians, going back to His Own People--of the Great Riley
+Tent Show.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As second juvenile of the Tent Show, Carl received only twelve dollars
+a week, but Mr. Riley made him promises rich as the Orient beryl, and
+permitted him to follow the example of two of the bandsmen and pitch a
+cot on the trampled hay flooring of the dressing-room tent, behind the
+stage. There also Carl prepared breakfast on an alcohol-stove. The
+canvas creaked all night; negroes and small boys stuck inquisitive
+heads under the edge of the canvas. But it was worth it--to travel on
+again; to have his mornings free except for an hour's rehearsal; to
+climb to upland meadows of Virginia and Kentucky, among the pines and
+laurel and rhododendron; tramping up past the log cabins plastered
+with mud, where pickaninnies stared shyly, past glens shining with
+dogwood, and friendly streams. Once he sat for an hour on Easter Knob,
+gazing through a distant pass whose misty blue he pretended was the
+ocean. Once he heard there were moonshiners back in the hills. He
+talked to bearded Dunkards and their sunbonneted wives; and when he
+found a Confederate veteran he listened to the tale of the defense of
+Richmond, delighted to find that the Boys in Gray were not merely
+names in the history-books.
+
+Of all these discoveries he wrote to his mother, wishing that her
+weary snow-bleached life might know the Southern sun. And the first
+five dollars he saved he sent to her.
+
+But as soon as Carl became an actor Parker Heye grew jealous of him,
+and was gratingly contemptuous when he showed him how to make up,
+among the cheap actors jammed in the men's dressing-room, before a
+pine board set on two saw-horses, under the light of a flaring
+kerosene-torch. Carl came to hate Heye and his splotched face, his
+pale, large eyes and yellow teeth and the bang on his forehead, his
+black string tie that was invariably askew, his slovenly blue suit,
+his foppishly shaped tan button shoes with "bulldog" toes. Heye
+invariably jeered: "Don't make up so heavy.... Well, put a _little_
+rouge on your lips. What d'you think you are? A blooming red-lipped
+Venus?... Try to learn to walk across the stage as if you had _one_
+leg that wasn't wood, anyway.... It's customary to go to sleep when
+you're playing a listening rôle, but don't snore!... Oh, you're a
+swell actor! Think of me swallering your story about having been t'
+college!... Don't make up your eyebrows so heavy, you fool.... Why you
+ever wanted to be an actor----!"
+
+The Great Riley agreed with all that Heye said, and marveled with Heye
+that he had ever tried an amateur. Carl found the dressing-room a
+hay-dusty hell. But he enjoyed acting in "The Widow's Penny," "Alabama
+Nell," "The Moonshiner's Daughter," and "The Crook's Revenge" far more
+than he had enjoyed picking phrases out of Shakespeare at a vaguely
+remembered Plato. Since, in Joralemon and Plato, he had been brought
+up on melodrama, he believed as much as did the audience in the plays.
+It was a real mountain cabin from which he fired wonderfully loud guns
+in "The Moonshiner's Daughter"; and when the old mountaineer cried,
+"They ain't going to steal mah gal!" Carl was damp at the eyes, and
+swore with real fervor the oath to protect the girl, sure that in the
+ravine behind the back-drop his bearded foe-men were lurking.
+
+"The Crook's Revenge" was his favorite, for he was cast as a young
+millionaire and wore evening clothes (second-hand). He held off a mob
+of shrieking gangsters, crouched behind an overturned table in a
+gambling-den. He coolly stroked the lovely hair of the ingénue, Miss
+Evelyn L'Ewysse, with one hand, leveled a revolver with the other, and
+made fearless jests the while, to the infinite excitement of the
+audience, especially of the hyah-hyah-hyahing negroes, whose faces,
+under the flicker of lowered calcium-carbide lights, made a segregated
+strip of yellow-black polka-dotted with white eye-balls.
+
+When the people were before him, respectful to art under canvas, Carl
+could love them; but even the tiniest ragged-breeched darky was bold
+in his curiosity about the strolling players when they appeared
+outside, and Carl was self-conscious about the giggles and stares that
+surrounded him when he stopped on the street or went into a drug-store
+for the comfortable solace of a banana split. He was in a rage
+whenever a well-dressed girl peeped at him amusedly from a one-lunged
+runabout. The staring so flustered him that even the pride of coming
+from Chicago and knowing about motors did not prevent his feeling
+feeble at the knees as he tried to stalk by the grinning motored
+aristocracy. He would return to the show-tent, to hate the few tawdry
+drops and flats--the patch of green spattered with dirty white which
+variously simulated a daisy-field, a mountainside, and that part of
+Central Park directly opposite the Fifth Avenue residence of the
+millionaire counterfeiter, who, you remember, always comes out into
+the street to plot with his confederates. Carl hated with peculiar
+heartiness the anemic, palely varnished, folding garden bench, which
+figured now as a seat in the moonshiner's den, and now, with a cotton
+leopard-skin draped over it, as a fauteuil in the luxurious
+drawing-room of Mrs. Van Antwerp. The garden bench was, however,
+associated with his learning to make stage love to Miss Evelyn
+L'Ewysse.
+
+It was difficult to appear unconscious of fifty small boys all
+smacking their lips in unison, while he kissed the air one centimeter
+in front of Miss L'Ewysse's lips. But he learned the art. Indeed, he
+began to lessen that centimeter of safety.
+
+Miss Evelyn L'Ewysse (christened Lena Ludwig, and heir presumptive to
+one of the best delicatessens in Newport News) reveled in love-making
+on and off. Carl was attracted by her constantly, uncomfortably. She
+smiled at him in the wings, smoothed her fluffy blond hair at him, and
+told him in confidence that she was a high-school graduate, that she
+was used to much, oh, _much_ better companies, and was playing under
+canvas for a lark. She bubbled: "_Ach_, Louie, say, ain't it hot!
+Honest, Mr. Ericson, I don't see how you stand it like you do.... Say,
+honest, that was swell business you pulled in the third act last
+night.... Say, I know what let's do--let's get up a swell act and get
+on the Peanut Circuit. We'd hit Broadway with a noise like seventeen
+marine bands.... Say, honest, Mr. Ericson, you do awful well for----I
+bet you ain't no amachoor. I bet you been on before."
+
+He devoured it.
+
+One night, finding that Miss Evelyn made no comment on his holding her
+hand, he lured her out of the tent during a long wait, trembled, and
+kissed her. Her fingers gripped his shoulders agitatedly, plucked at
+his sleeve as she kissed him back. She murmured, "Oh, you hadn't ought
+to do that." But afterward she would kiss him every time they were
+alone, and she told him with confidential giggles of Parker Heye's
+awkward attempts to win her. Heye's most secret notes she read, till
+Carl seriously informed her that she was violating a trust. Miss
+Evelyn immediately saw the light and promised she would "never, never,
+never do anythin' like that again, and, honest, she hadn't realized
+she was doing anythin' dishon'able, but Heye is such an old pest";
+which was an excuse for her weeping on his shoulder and his kissing
+the tears away.
+
+All day he looked forward to their meetings. Yet constantly the law of
+the adventurer, which means the instinct of practical decency, warned
+him that this was no amour for him; that he must not make love where
+he did not love; that this good-hearted vulgarian was too kindly to
+tamper with and too absurd to love. Only----And again his breath would
+draw in with swift exultation as he recalled how elastic were her
+shoulders to stroke.
+
+It was summer now, and they were back in Virginia, touring the Eastern
+Shore. Carl, the prairie-born, had been within five miles of the open
+Atlantic, though he had not seen it. Along the endless flat
+potato-fields, broken by pine-groves under whose sultry shadow negro
+cabins sweltered, the heat clung persistently. The show-tent was
+always filled with a stale scent of people.
+
+At the town of Nankiwoc the hotel was not all it might have been.
+Evelyn L'Ewysse announced that she was "good and sick of eating a
+vaudeville dinner with the grub acts stuck around your plate in a lot
+of birds' bath-tubs--little mess of turnips and a dab of spinach and a
+fried cockroach. And when it comes to sleeping another night on a bed
+like a gridiron, no--thank--_you_! And believe me, if I see that old
+rube hotel-keeper comb his whiskers at the hall hat-rack again--he
+keeps a baby comb in his vest pocket with a lead-pencil and a cigar
+some drummer gave him--if I have to watch him comb that alfalfa again
+I'll bite his ears off and get pinched by the S. P. C. A.!"
+
+With Mrs. Lubley, the old lady and complacent unofficial chaperon of
+the show, Eve was going to imitate Carl and the two bandsmen, and
+sleep in the dressing-room tent, over half of which was devoted to the
+women of the company.
+
+Every day Carl warned himself that he must go no farther, but every
+night as Eve and he parted, to sleep with only a canvas partition
+between them, he cursed the presence of the show chaperon, and of the
+two bandsmen, always distressingly awake and talking till after
+midnight.
+
+A hot June night. The whole company had been invited to a dance at the
+U. C. V. Hall; the two bandsmen were going; the chaperon--lively old
+lady with experience on the burlesque circuit--was gaily going. Carl
+and Eve were not. It had taken but one glance between them to decide
+that.
+
+They sat outside the silent tent, on a wardrobe trunk. What manner of
+night it was, whether starlit or sullen, Carl did not know; he was
+aware only that it was oppressive, and that Eve was in his arms in the
+darkness. He kissed her moist, hot neck. He babbled incoherently of
+the show people, but every word he said meant that he was palpitating
+because her soft body was against his. He knew--and he was sure that
+she knew--that when they discussed Heye's string tie and pretended to
+laugh, they were agitatedly voicing their intoxication.
+
+His voice unsteady, Carl said: "Jiminy! it's so hot, Eve! I'm going to
+take off this darn shirt and collar and put on a soft shirt. S-say,
+w-why don't you put on a kimono or something? Be so much cooler."
+
+"Oh, I don't know as I ought to----" She was frightened, awed at
+Bacchic madness. "D-do you think it would be all right?"
+
+"Why not? Guess anybody's got a right to get cool--night like this.
+Besides, they won't be back till 4 P.M. And you got to get cool. Come
+on."
+
+And he knew--and he was sure that she knew--that all he said was
+pretense. But she rose and said, nebulously, as she stood before him,
+ruffling his hair: "Well, I would like to get cool. If you think it's
+all right----I'll put on something cooler, anyway."
+
+She went. Carl could hear a rustling in the women's end of the
+dressing-room tent. Fevered, he listened to it. Fevered, he changed to
+an outing-shirt, open at the throat. He ran out, not to miss a moment
+with her.... She had not yet come. He was too overwrought to heed a
+small voice in him, a voice born of snow-fields colored with sunset
+and trained in the quietudes of Henry Frazer's house, which insisted:
+"Go slow! Stop!" A louder voice throbbed like the pulsing of the
+artery in his neck, "She's coming!"
+
+Through the darkness her light garment swished against the long grass.
+He sprang up. Then he was holding her, bending her head back. He
+exulted to find that his gripping hand was barred from the smoothness
+of her side only by thin silk that glided and warmed under his
+fingers. She sat on his knees and snuggled her loosened hair
+tinglingly against his bare chest. He felt that she was waiting for
+him to go on.
+
+Suddenly he could not, would not, go on.
+
+"Dearest, we mustn't!" he mourned.
+
+"O Carl!" she sobbed, and stopped his words with clinging lips.
+
+He found himself waiting till she should finish the kiss that he might
+put an end to this.
+
+Perhaps he was checked by provincial prejudices about chivalry. But
+perhaps he had learned a little self-control. In any case, he had
+stopped for a second to think, and the wine of love was gone flat. He
+wished she would release him. Also, her hair was tickling his ear. He
+waited, patiently, till she should finish the kiss.
+
+Her lips drew violently from his, and she accused, "You don't want to
+kiss me!"
+
+"Look here; I want to kiss you, all right--Lord----" For a second his
+arms tightened; then he went on, cold: "But we'll both be good and
+sorry if we go too far. It isn't just a cowardly caution. It's----Oh,
+you know."
+
+"Oh yes, yes, yes, we mustn't go too far, Carl. But can't we just sit
+like this? O sweetheart, I am so tired! I want somebody to care for me
+a little. That isn't wicked, is it? I want you to take me in your arms
+and hold me close, close, and comfort me. I want so much to be
+comforted. We needn't go any further, need we?"
+
+"Oh now, good Lord! Eve, look here: don't you know we can't go on and
+not go farther? I'm having a hard enough time----" He sprang up,
+shakily lighting a cigarette. He stroked her hair and begged: "Please
+go, Eve. I guess I haven't got very good control over myself. Please.
+You make me----"
+
+"Oh yes, yes, sure! Blame it on me! Sure! I made you let me put on a
+kimono! I'm leading your pure white shriveled peanut of a soul into
+temptation!... Don't you ever dare speak to me again! Oh,
+you--you----"
+
+She flounced away.
+
+Carl caught her, in two steps. "See here, child," he said, gravely,
+"if you go off like this we'll both be miserable.... You remember how
+happy we were driving out to the old plantation at Powhasset?"
+
+"O Gawd! won't you men never say anything original? Remember it? Of
+course I remember it! What do you suppose I wore that little branch of
+laurel you picked for me, wore it here, here, at my breast, and I
+thought you'd _care_ if I hid it here where there wasn't any grease
+paint, and you don't--you don't care--and we picnicked, and I sang all
+the time I put up those sandwiches and hid the grape-fruit in the
+basket to surprise you----"
+
+"O darling Eve, I don't know how to say how sorry I am, so terribly
+sorry I've started things going! It is my fault. But can't you see
+I've got to stop it before it's too late, just for that reason? Let's
+be chums again."
+
+She shook her head. Her hand crept to his, slid over it, drew it up to
+her breast. She was swaying nearer to him. He pulled his hand free and
+fled to his tent.
+
+Perhaps his fiercest gibe at himself was that he had had to play the
+rôle of virgin Galahad rejecting love, which is praised in books and
+ridiculed in clubs. He mocked at his sincere desire to be fair to Eve.
+And between mockeries he strained to hear her moving beyond the
+canvas partition. He was glad when the bandsmen came larruping home
+from the dance.
+
+Next day she went out of her way to be chilly to him. He did not woo
+her friendship. He had resigned from the Great Riley Show, and he was
+going--going anywhere, so long as he kept going.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+He had been a jolly mechanic again, in denim overalls and jumper and a
+defiant black skull-cap with long, shiny vizor; the tender of the
+motor-boat fleet at an Ontario summer hotel. One day he had looked up,
+sweating and greasy, to see Howard Griffin, of Plato, parading past in
+white flannels. He had muttered: "I don't want Them to know I've just
+been bumming around. I'll go some place else. And I'll do something
+worth while." Now he was on the train for New York, meditating
+impersonally on his uselessness, considering how free of moss his
+rolling had kept him. He could think of no particularly masterful plan
+for accumulating moss. If he had not bought a ticket through to New
+York he would have turned back, to seek a position in one of the great
+automobile factories that now, this early autumn of 1906, were
+beginning to distinguish Detroit. Well, he had enough money to last
+for one week in New York. He would work in an automobile agency there;
+later he would go to Detroit, and within a few years be president of a
+motor company, rich enough to experiment with motor-boats and to laugh
+at Howard Griffin or any other Platonian.
+
+So he sketched his conquering entrance into New York. Unfortunately it
+was in the evening, and, having fallen asleep at Poughkeepsie, he did
+not awake till a brakeman shook his shoulder at the Grand Central
+Station. He had heard of the old Grand Union Hotel, and drowsily, with
+the stuffy nose and sandy eyes and unclean feeling about the teeth
+that overpower one who sleeps in a smoking-car, he staggered across
+to the hotel and spent his first conquering night in filling a dollar
+room with vulgar sounds of over-weary slumber.
+
+But in the morning, when he stared along Forty-second Street; when he
+breakfasted at a Childs' restaurant, like a gigantic tiled bath-room,
+and realized that the buckwheat cakes were New York buckwheats; when
+he sighted the noble _Times_ Building and struck out for Broadway (the
+magic name that promised marble palaces, even if it provided two-story
+shacks); when he bustled into a carburetor agency and demanded a
+job--then he found the gateway of wonder.
+
+But he did not find a job.
+
+Eight nights after his arrival he quietly paid his bill at the hotel;
+tipped a curly-headed bell-boy; checked his baggage, which consisted
+of a shirt, a razor, and an illustrated catalogue of automobile
+accessories; put his tooth-brush in his pocket; bought an evening
+paper in order to feel luxurious; and walked down to the Charity
+Organization Society, with ten cents in his pocket.
+
+In the Joint Application Bureau, filled with desks and
+filing-cabinets, where poor men cease to be men and become Cases, Carl
+waited on a long bench till it was his turn to tell his troubles to a
+keen, kindly, gray-bearded man behind a roll-top desk. He asked for
+work. Work was, it seemed, the one thing the society could not give.
+He received a ticket to the Municipal Lodging House.
+
+This was not the hygienic hostelry of to-day, but a barracks on First
+Avenue. Carl had a chunk of bread with too much soda in it, and coffee
+with too little coffee in it, from a contemptuous personage in a white
+jacket, who, though his cuffs were grimy, showed plainly that he was
+too good to wait on bums. Carl leaned his elbows on the long scrubbed
+table and chewed the bread of charity sullenly, resolving to catch a
+freight next day and get out of town.
+
+He slept in a narrow bunk near a man with consumption. The room reeked
+of disinfectants and charity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The East Side of New York. A whirlwind of noise and smell and hovering
+shadows. The jargon of Jewish matrons in brown shawls and orthodox
+wigs, chaffering for cabbages and black cotton stockings and gray
+woolen undershirts with excitable push-cart proprietors who had beards
+so prophetic that it was startling to see a frivolous cigarette amid
+the reverend mane. The scent of fried fish and decaying bits of kosher
+meat, and hallways as damnably rotten of floor as they were profitable
+to New York's nicest circles. The tall gloom of six-story tenements
+that made a prison wall of dulled yellow, bristling with bedding-piled
+fire-escapes and the curious heads of frowzy women. A potpourri of
+Russian signs, Yiddish newspapers, synagogues with six-pointed gilt
+stars, bakeries with piles of rye bread crawling with caraway-seeds,
+shops for renting wedding finery that looked as if it could never fit
+any one, second-hand furniture-shops with folding iron beds, a filthy
+baby holding a baby slightly younger and filthier, mangy cats slinking
+from pile to pile of rubbish, and a withered geranium in a tin can
+whose label was hanging loose and showed rust-stains amid the dry
+paste on its back. Everywhere crowds of voluble Jews in dark clothes,
+and noisily playing children that catapulted into your legs. The
+lunger-blocks in which we train the victims of Russian tyranny to
+appreciate our freedom. A whirlwind of alien ugliness and foul smells
+and incessant roar and the deathless ambition of young Jews to know
+Ibsen and syndicalism. It swamped the courage of hungry Carl as he
+roamed through Rivington Street and Essex and Hester, vainly seeking
+jobs from shopkeepers too poor to be able to bathe.
+
+He felt that he, not these matter-of-fact crowds, was alien. He was
+hungry and tired. There was nothing heroic to do--just go hungry.
+There was no place where he could sit down. The benches of the tiny
+hard-trodden parks were full.... If he could sit down, if he could
+rest one little hour, he would be able to go and find freight-yards,
+where there would be the clean clang of bells and rattle of trucks
+instead of gabbled Yiddish. Then he would ride out into the country,
+away from the brooding shadows of this town, where there were no
+separable faces, but only a fog of ceaselessly moving crowds....
+
+Late that night he stood aimlessly talking to a hobo on a dirty corner
+of the Bowery, where the early September rain drizzled through the
+gaunt structure of the Elevated. He did not feel the hunger so much
+now, but he was meekly glad to learn from his new friend, the hobo,
+that in one more hour he could get food in the bread-line. He felt
+very boyish, and would have confided the fact that he was starving to
+any woman, to any one but this transcontinental hobo, the tramp royal,
+trained to scorn hunger. Because he was one of them he watched
+incuriously the procession of vagrants, in coats whose collars were
+turned up and fastened with safety-pins against the rain. The vagrants
+shuffled rapidly by, their shoulders hunched, their hands always in
+their trousers pockets, their shoe-heels always ground down and muddy.
+
+And incuriously he watched a saloon-keeper, whose face was plastered
+over with a huge mustache, come out and hang a sign, "Porter wanted in
+A.M.," on the saloon door.
+
+As he slouched away to join the bread-line, a black deuce in the
+world's discard, Carl was wondering how he could get that imperial
+appointment as porter in a Bowery saloon. He almost forgot it while
+waiting in the bread-line, so occupied was he in hating two collegians
+who watched the line with that open curiosity which nice, clean,
+respectable young men suppose the poor never notice. He restrained his
+desire to go over and quote Greek at them, because they were ignorant
+and not to blame for being sure that they were of clay superior to
+any one in a bread-line. And partly because he had forgotten his
+Greek.
+
+He came back to the Bowery briskly, alone, with the manhood of a loaf
+of bread in him. He was going to get that job as porter. He planned
+his campaign as a politician plans to become a statesman. He slipped
+the sign, "Porter wanted in A.M.," from its nail and hid it beneath
+his coat. He tramped the block all night and, as suspicious characters
+always do to avoid seeming suspicious, he begged a match from a
+policeman who was keeping an eye on him. The policeman chatted with
+him about baseball and advised him to keep away from liquor and
+missions.
+
+At 5 A.M. Carl was standing at the saloon door. When the bartender
+opened it Carl bounced in, slightly dizzy, conscious of the slime of
+mud on his fraying trouser-ends.
+
+The saloon had an air of cheap crime and a floor covered with clotted
+sawdust. The bar was a slab of dark-brown wood, so worn that
+semicircles of slivers were showing. The nasty gutter was still filled
+with cigar-ends and puddles of beer and bits of free-lunch cheese.
+
+"I want that job as porter," said Carl.
+
+"Oh, you do, do you? Well, you wait and see who else comes to get it."
+
+"Nobody else is going to come."
+
+"How do you know they ain't?"
+
+Carl drew the sign from beneath his coat and carefully laid it on the
+bar. "That's why."
+
+"Well, you got nerve. You got the nerve of a Republican on Fourteenth
+Street, like the fellow says. You must want it. Well, all right, I
+guess you can have it if the boss don't kick."
+
+Carl was accepted by the "boss," who gave him a quarter and told him
+to go out and get a "regular feed." He hummed over breakfast. He had
+been accepted again by all men when he had been accepted by the
+proprietor of a Bowery saloon. He was going to hold this job, no
+matter what happened. The rolling stone was going to gather moss.
+
+For three months Carl took seriously the dirtiest things in the world.
+He worked sixteen hours a day for eight dollars a week, cleaning
+cuspidors, scrubbing the floor, scattering clean sawdust, cutting the
+more rotten portions off the free-lunch meat. As he slopped about with
+half-frozen, brittle rags, hoboes pushed him aside and spat on the
+floor he had just cleaned.
+
+Of his eight dollars a week he saved four. He rented an airshaft
+bedroom in the flat of a Jewish sweatshop worker for one dollar and
+seventy-five cents a week. It was occupied daytimes by a cook in an
+all-night restaurant, who had taken a bath in 1900 when at Coney
+Island on an excursion of the Pip O'Gilligan Association. The room was
+unheated, and every night during January Carl debated whether to go to
+bed with his shoes on or off.
+
+The sub-landlord's daughter was a dwarfish, blotched-faced, passionate
+child of fifteen, with moist eyes and very low-cut waists of coarse
+voile (which she pronounced "voyle"). She would stop Carl in the dark
+"railroad" hallway and, chewing gum rapidly, chatter about the
+aisleman at Wanamacy's, and what a swell time there would be at the
+coming ball of the Thomas J. Monahan Literary and Social Club, tickets
+twenty-five cents for lady and gent, including hat-check. She let Carl
+know that she considered him close-fisted for never taking her to the
+movies on Sunday afternoons, but he patted her head and talked to her
+like a big brother and kept himself from noticing that she had
+clinging hands and would be rather pretty, and he bought her a
+wholesome woman's magazine to read--not an entirely complete solution
+to the problem of what to do with the girl whom organized society is
+too busy to nourish, but the best he could contrive just then.
+
+Sundays, when he was free for part of the day, he took his book of
+recipes for mixed drinks to the reading-room of the Tompkins Square
+library and gravely studied them, for he was going to be a bartender.
+
+Every night when he staggered from the comparatively clean air of the
+street into the fetid chill of his room he asked himself why he--son
+of Northern tamaracks and quiet books--went on with this horrible
+imitation of living; and each time answered himself that, whether
+there was any real reason or not, he was going to make good on one job
+at least, and that the one he held. And admonished himself that he was
+very well paid for a saloon porter.
+
+If Carl had never stood in the bread-line, if he had never been
+compelled to clean a saloon gutter artistically, in order to keep from
+standing in that bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the
+commonplaceness for which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry
+Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know
+how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did
+not at the time feel that he was debased. He lived twenty-four hours a
+day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by
+the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to
+learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself was so
+much less desirable than driving a car or wandering through the
+moonlight with Eve L'Ewysse in days wonderful and lost that, to endure
+it, to conquer it, he had to develop a control over temper and speech
+and body which was to stay with him in windy mornings of daring.
+
+Within three months Carl had become assistant bar-keeper, and now he
+could save eight dollars a week. He bought a couple of motor magazines
+and went to one vaudeville show and kept his sub-landlord's daughter
+from running off with a cadet, wondering how soon she would do it in
+any case, and receiving a depressing insight into the efficiency of
+society for keeping in the mire most of the people born there.
+
+Three months later, at the end of winter, he was ready to start for
+Panama.
+
+He was going to Panama because he had read in a Sunday newspaper of
+the Canal's marvels of engineering and jungle.
+
+He had avoided making friends. There was no one to give him farewell
+when he emerged from the muck. But he had one task to perform--to
+settle with the Saloon Snob.
+
+Petey McGuff was the name of this creature. He was an oldish and
+wicked man, born on the Bowery. He had been a heavy-weight
+prize-fighter in the days of John L. Sullivan; then he had met John,
+and been, ever since, an honest crook who made an excellent living by
+conducting a boxing-school in which the real work was done by
+assistants. He resembled a hound with a neat black bow tie, and he
+drooled tobacco-juice down his big, raw-looking, moist, bristly,
+too-masculine chin. Every evening from eleven to midnight Petey McGuff
+sat at the round table in the mildewed corner at the end of the bar,
+drinking old-fashioned whisky cocktails made with Bourbon, playing
+Canfield, staring at the nude models pasted on the milky surface of an
+old mirror, and teasing Carl.
+
+"Here, boy, come 'ere an' wipe off de whisky you spilled.... Come on,
+you tissy-cat. Get on de job.... You look like Sunday-school Harry.
+Mamma's little rosy-cheeked boy.... Some day I'm going to bust your
+beezer. Gawd! it makes me sick to sit here and look at dose
+goily-goily cheeks.... Come 'ere, Lizzie, an' wipe dis table again. On
+de jump, daughter."
+
+Carl held himself in. Hundreds of times he snarled to himself: "I
+_won't_ hit him! I will make good on _this_ job, anyway." He created a
+grin which he could affix easily.
+
+Now he was leaving. He had proven that he could hold a job; had
+answered the unspoken criticisms from Plato, from Chicago garages,
+from the Great Riley Show. For the first time since he had deserted
+college he had been able to write to his father, to answer the grim
+carpenter's unspoken criticisms of the son who had given up his chance
+for an "education." And proudly he had sent to his father a little
+check. He had a beautiful new fifteen-dollar suit of blue serge at
+home. In his pocket was his ticket--steerage by the P. R. R. line to
+Colon--and he would be off for bluewater next noon. His feet danced
+behind the bar as he filled schooners of beer and scraped off their
+foam with a celluloid ruler. He saw himself in Panama, with a clean
+man's job, talking to cosmopolitan engineers against a background of
+green-and-scarlet jungle. And, oh yes, he was going to beat Petey
+McGuff that evening, and get back much of the belligerent self-respect
+which he had been drawing off into schooners with the beer.
+
+Old Petey rolled in at two minutes past eleven, warmed his hands at
+the gas-stove, poked disapprovingly at the pretzels on the free-lunch
+counter, and bawled at Carl: "Hey, keep away from dat cash-register!
+Wipe dem goilish tears away, will yuh, Agnes, and bring us a little
+health-destroyer and a couple matches."
+
+Carl brought a whisky cocktail.
+
+"Where's de matches, you tissy-cat?"
+
+Carl wiped his hands on his apron and beamed: "Well, so the old soak
+is getting too fat and lazy to reach over on the bar and get his own!
+You'll last quick now!"
+
+"Aw, is dat so!... For de love of Mike, d'yuh mean to tell me Lizzie
+is talking back? Whadda yuh know about dat! Whadda yuh know about dat!
+You'll get sick on us here, foist t'ing we know. Where was yuh
+hoited?"
+
+Petey McGuff's smile was absolutely friendly. It made Carl hesitate,
+but it had become one of the principles of cosmic ethics that he had
+to thump Petey, and he growled: "I'll give you all the talking back
+you want, you big stiff. I'm getting through to-night. I'm going to
+Panama."
+
+"No, straight, is dat straight?"
+
+"That's what I said."
+
+"Well, dat's fine, boy. I been watching yuh, and I sees y' wasn't cut
+out to be no saloon porter. I made a little bet with meself you was
+ejucated. Why, y'r cuffs ain't even doity--not very doity. Course you
+kinda need a shave, but dem little blond hairs don't show much. I seen
+you was a gentleman, even if de bums didn't. You're too good t' be a
+rum-peddler. Glad y're going, boy, mighty glad. Sit down. Tell us
+about it. We'll miss yuh here. I was just saying th' other night to
+Mike here dere ain't one feller in a hundred could 'a' stood de
+kiddin' from an old he-one like me and kep' his mout' shut and grinned
+and said nawthin' to nobody. Dat's w'at wins fights. But, say, boy,
+I'll miss yuh, I sure will. I get to be kind of lonely as de boys drop
+off--like boozers always does. Oh, hell, I won't spill me troubles
+like an old tissy-cat.... So you're going to Panama? I want yuh to sit
+down and tell me about it. Whachu taking, boy?"
+
+"Just a cigar.... I'll miss you, too, Petey. Tell you what I'll do.
+I'll send you some post-cards from Panama."
+
+Next noon as the S.S. _Panama_ pulled out of her ice-lined dock Carl
+saw an old man shivering on the wharf and frantically waving
+good-by--Petey McGuff.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+The S.S. _Panama_ had passed Watling's Island and steamed into
+story-land. On the white-scrubbed deck aft of the wheel-house Carl sat
+with his friends of the steerage--sturdy men all, used to open places;
+old Ed, the rock-driller, long, Irish, huge-handed, irate, kindly;
+Harry, the young mechanic from Cleveland. Ed and an oiler were
+furiously debating about the food aboard:
+
+"Aw, it's rotten, all of it."
+
+"Look here, Ed, how about the chicken they give the steerage on
+Sunday?"
+
+"Chicken? I didn't see no chicken. I see some sea-gull, though. No
+wonder they ain't no more sea-gulls following us. They shot 'em and
+cooked 'em on us."
+
+"Say," mused Harry, "makes me think of when I was ship-building in
+Philly--no, it was when I was broke in K. C.--and a guy----"
+
+Carl smiled in content, exulting in the talk of the men of the road,
+exulting in his new blue serge suit, his new silver-gray tie with no
+smell of the saloon about it, finger-nails that were growing pink
+again--and the sunset that made glorious his petty prides. A vast
+plane of unrippling plum-colored sea was set with mirror-like pools
+where floated tree-branches so suffused with light that the glad heart
+blessed them. His first flying-fish leaped silvery from silver sea,
+and Carl cried, almost aloud, "This is what I've been wanting all my
+life!"
+
+Aloud, to Harry: "Say, what's it like in Kansas? I'm going down
+through there some day." He spoke harshly. But the real Carl was
+robed in light and the murmurous wake of evening, with the tropics
+down the sky-line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lying in his hot steerage bunk, stripped to his under-shirt, Carl
+peered through the "state-room" window to the swishing night sea,
+conscious of the rolling of the boat, of the engines shaking her, of
+bolts studding the white iron wall, of life-preservers over his head,
+of stokers singing in the gangway as they dumped the clinkers
+overboard. The _Panama_ was pounding on, on, on, and he rejoiced,
+"This is just what I've wanted, always."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They are creeping in toward the wharf at Colon. He is seeing Panama!
+First a point of palms, then the hospital, the red roofs of the I. C.
+C. quarters at Cristobal, and negroes on the sun-blistered wharf.
+
+At last he is free to go ashore in wonderland--a medley of Colon and
+Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like
+monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen
+in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads
+and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in
+lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of
+their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with
+silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched
+pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island
+pineapples. Carl gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French
+peasant laborers and indignant Irish foremen and German
+concessionaries with dueling scars and high collars. Gold Spanish
+signs and Spiggoty money and hotels with American cuspidors and
+job-hunters; tin roofs and arcades; shops open to the street in front,
+but mysterious within, giving glimpses of the canny Chinese
+proprietors smoking tiny pipes. Trains from towns along the Canal, and
+sometimes the black funeral-car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery.
+Gambling-houses where it is considered humorous to play "Where Is My
+Wandering Boy To-night?" on the phonograph while wandering boys sit at
+poker; and less cleanly places, named after the various states. Negro
+wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddled tunes older than voodoo;
+Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green bananas; memories
+of the Spanish Main and Morgan's raid, of pieces of eight and
+cutlasses ho! Capes of cocoanut palms running into a welter of surf;
+huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases land-crabs scuttle
+with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist, still air, and
+suggests the corpses of disappeared men found half devoured.
+
+Then, for contrast, the transplanted North, with its seriousness about
+the Service; the American avenues and cool breezes of Cristobal, where
+fat, bald chiefs of the I. C. C. drive pompously with political guests
+who, in 1907, are still incredulous about the success of the military
+socialism of the Canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston,
+seated in Grand Rapids golden-oak rockers on the screened porches of
+bungalows, talk of hats, and children, and mail-orders, and cards, and
+The Colonel, and malarial fever, and Chautauqua, and the Culebra
+slide.
+
+Colon! A kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white,
+warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high
+endeavor of the Canal and whispers from the unknown Bush; drenched
+with sudden rain like escaping steam, or languid under the desert
+glare of the sky, where hangs a gyre of buzzards whose slow circles
+are stiller than death and calmer than wisdom.
+
+"Lord!" sighs Carl Ericson from Joralemon, "this is what I've wanted
+ever since I was a kid."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Pedro Miguel, which the Canal employees always called "Peter
+McGill," he found work, first as an unofficial time-keeper; presently,
+after examinations, as a stationery engineer on the roll of the I. C.
+C. Within a month he showed no signs of his Bowery experiences beyond
+a shallow hollow in his smooth cheeks. He lived in quarters like a
+college dormitory, communistic and jolly, littered with shoes and
+cube-cut tobacco and college banners; clean youngsters dropping in for
+an easy chat--and behind it all, the mystery of the Bush. His
+room-mate, a conductor on the P. R. R., was a globe-trotter, and
+through him Carl met the Adventurers, whom he had been questing ever
+since he had run away from Oscar Ericson's woodshed. There was a young
+engineer from Boston Tech., who swore every morning at 7.07 (when it
+rained boiling water as enthusiastically as though it had never done
+such a thing before) that he was going to Chihuahua, mining. There was
+Cock-eye Corbett, an ex-sailor, who was immoral and a Lancashireman,
+and knew more about blackbirding and copra and Kanakas, and the
+rum-holes from Nagasaki to Mombasa, than it is healthy for a civil
+servant to know.
+
+Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers,
+who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St.
+John's College, China, and a sub-contractor for railroad construction
+in Montana, and who was now a minor clerk in the cool, lofty offices
+of the Materials and Supplies Department, came over from Colon,
+relaxed in a tilted-back chair, and fingered the Masonic charm on his
+horsehair watch-guard, while he talked with the P. R. R. conductor and
+the others about ruby-hunting and the Relief of Peking, and Where is
+Hector Macdonald? and Is John Orth dead? and Shall we try to climb
+Chimborazo? and Creussot guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal
+lore. These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside
+information. The others drawled about various strange things which
+make a man discontented and bring him no good.
+
+Carl was full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery
+and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an
+authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in
+_Aeronautics_ at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this
+time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown
+even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful
+machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a
+motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim
+had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines;
+lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his
+dirigible, and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous
+aeroplane; and in May, 1907, a sculptor named Delagrange flew over six
+hundred feet in France. Various crank inventors were "solving the
+problem of flight" every day. Man was fluttering on the edge of his
+earthy nest, ready to plunge into the air. Carl was able to make
+technical-sounding predictions which caught the imaginations of the
+restless children.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The adventurers kept moving. The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he
+was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed in
+Tahiti, whence he sent Carl one post-card, worded, "What price T. T.?"
+The engineer from Boston Tech. kept his oath about mining in
+Chihuahua. He got the appointment as assistant superintendent of the
+Tres Reyes mine--and he took Carl with him.
+
+Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and
+hill. He found rare days, purposeless and wonderful as the voyages of
+ancient Norse Ericsens; days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly
+balancing a .32-20 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack; the joy of
+repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons
+with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at
+night under an exhilarating splendor of stars. It never seemed to him
+that the machinery desecrated the mountains' stern grandeur.
+
+Stolen hours he gave to the building of box-kites with cambered
+wings, after rapturously learning, in the autumn of 1908, that in
+August a lanky American mechanic named Wilbur Wright had startled the
+world by flying an aeroplane many miles publicly in France; that
+before this, on July 4, 1908, another Yankee mechanic, Glenn Curtiss,
+had covered nearly a mile, for the _Scientific American_ trophy, after
+a series of trials made in company with Alexander Graham Bell, J. A.
+D. McCurdy, "Casey" Baldwin, and Augustus Post.
+
+He might have gone on until death, dealing with excitable greasers and
+hysterical machinery, but for the coming of a new mine superintendent--one
+of those Englishmen, stolid, red-mustached, pipe-smoking, eye-brow-lifting,
+who at first seem beefily dull, but prove to have known every one from
+George Moore to Marconi. He inspected Carl hundreds of times, then told him
+that the period had come when he ought to attack a city, conquer it, build
+up a reputation cumulatively; that he needed a contrast to Platonians and
+Bowery bums and tropical tramps, and even to his beloved engineers.
+
+"You can do everything but order a _petit dîner à deux_, but you must
+learn to do that, too. Go make ten thousand pounds and study Pall Mall
+and the boulevards, and then come back to us in Mexico. I'll be sorry
+to have you go--with your damned old silky hair like a woman's and
+your wink when Guittrez comes up here to threaten us--but don't let
+the hinterland enslave you too early."
+
+A month later, in January, 1909, aged twenty-three and a half, Carl
+was steaming out of El Paso for California, with one thousand dollars
+in savings, a beautiful new Stetson hat, and an ambition to build up a
+motor business in San Francisco. As the desert sky swam with orange
+light and a white-browed woman in the seat behind him hummed Musetta's
+song from "La Bohème" he was homesick for the outlanders, whom he was
+deserting that he might stick for twenty years in one street and grub
+out a hundred thousand dollars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+On a grassy side-street of Oakland, California, was "Jones & Ericson's
+Garage: Gasoline and Repairs: Motor Cycles and Bicycles for Rent:
+Oakland Agents for Bristow Magnetos."
+
+It was perhaps the cleverest garage in Oakland and Berkeley for the
+quick repairing of motor-cycles; and newly wed owners of family
+runabouts swore that Carl Ericson could make a carburetor out of a
+tomato-can, and even be agreeable when called on for repairs at 2 A.M.
+He had doubled old Jones's business during the nine months--February
+to November, 1909--that they had been associated.
+
+Carl believed that he thought of nothing but work and the restaurants
+and theaters of civilization. No more rolling for him until he had
+gathered moss! He played that he was a confirmed business man. The
+game had hypnotized him for nearly a year. He whistled as he cleaned
+plugs, and glanced out at the eucalyptus-trees and the sunny road,
+without wanting to run away. But just to-day, just this glorious
+rain-cleansed November day, with high blue skies and sunlight on the
+feathery pepper-trees, he was going to sneak away from work and have a
+celebration all by himself.
+
+He was going down to San Mateo to see his first flying-machine!
+
+November, 1909. Blériot had crossed the English Channel; McCurdy had,
+in March, 1909, calmly pegged off sixteen miles in the "Silver Dart"
+biplane; Paulhan had gone eighty-one miles, and had risen to the
+incredible height of five hundred feet, to be overshadowed by Orville
+Wright's sixteen hundred feet; Glenn Curtiss had won the Gordon
+Bennett cup at Rheims.
+
+California was promising to be in the van of aviation. She was
+remembering that her own Montgomery had been one of the pioneers. Los
+Angeles was planning a giant meet for January. A dozen cow-pasture
+aviators were taking credulous young reporters aside and confiding
+that next day, or next week, or at latest next month, they would
+startle the world by ascending in machines "on entirely new and
+revolutionary principles, on which they had been working for ten
+years." Sometimes it was for eight years they had been working. But
+always they remarked that "the model from which the machine will be
+built has flown perfectly in the presence of some of the most
+prominent men in the locality." These machines had a great deal to do
+with the mysterious qualities of gyroscopes and helicopters.
+
+Now, Dr. Josiah Bagby, the San Francisco physician and
+oil-burning-marine-engine magnate, had really brought three genuine
+Blériot monoplanes from France, with Carmeau, graduate of the Blériot
+school and licensed French aviator, for working pilot; and was
+experimenting with them at San Mateo, near San Francisco, where the
+grandsons of the Forty-niners play polo. It had been rumored that he
+would open a school for pilots and build Blériot-type monoplanes for
+the American market.
+
+Carl had lain awake for an hour the night before, picturing the wonder
+of flight that he hoped to see. He rose early, put on his politest
+garments, and informed grumpy old Jones that he was off for a
+frolic--he wasn't sure, he said, whether he would get drunk or get
+married. He crossed the bay, glad of the sea-gulls, the glory of Mt.
+Tamalpais, and San Francisco's hill behind fairy hill. He consumed a
+Pacific sundæ, with a feeling of holiday, and hummed "Mandalay." On
+the trolley to San Mateo he read over and over the newspaper accounts
+of Bagby's monoplanes.
+
+Walking through San Mateo, Carl swung his cocky green hat and scanned
+the sky for aircraft. He saw none. But as he tramped out on the
+flying-field he began to run at the sight of two wide, cambered wings,
+rounded at the ends like the end of one's thumb, attached to a fragile
+long body of open framework. Men were gathered about it. A man with a
+short, crisp beard and a tight woolen toboggan-cap was seated in the
+body, the wings stretching on either side of him. He scratched his
+beard and gesticulated. A mechanic revolved the propeller, and the
+unmuffled motor burst out with a trrrrrrrr whose music rocked Carl's
+heart. Black smoke hurled back along the machine. The draught tore at
+the hair of two men crouched on the ground holding the tail. They let
+go. The monoplane ran forward along the ground, and suddenly was off
+it, a foot up, ten feet up--really flying. Carl could see the aviator
+calmly staring ahead, working his arms, as the machine turned and
+slipped away over distant trees.
+
+His first impression of an aeroplane in the air had nothing to do with
+birds or dragon-flies or the miracle of it, because he was completely
+absorbed in an impression of Carl Ericson, which he expressed after
+this wise:
+
+"I--am--going--to--be--an--aviator!"
+
+And later, "Yes, _that's_ what I've always wanted."
+
+He joined the group in front of the hangar-tent. Workmen were
+hammering on wooden sheds back of it. He recognized the owner, Dr.
+Bagby, from his pictures: a lean man of sixty with a sallow
+complexion, a gray mustache like a rat-tail, a broad, black
+countrified slouch-hat on the back of his head, a gray sack-suit which
+would have been respectable but unfashionable at any period
+whatsoever. He looked like a country lawyer who had served two terms
+in the state legislature. His shoes were black, but not blackened, and
+had no toe-caps--the comfortable shoes of an oldish man. He was
+tapping his teeth with a thin corded forefinger and remarking in a
+monotonous voice to a Mexican youth plump and polite and well dressed,
+"Wel-l-l-l, Tony, I guess those plugs were better; I guess those plugs
+were better. Heh?" Bagby turned to the others, marveled at them as if
+trying to remember who they were, and said, slowly, "I guess those
+plugs were all right. Heh?"
+
+The monoplane was returning, for a time apparently not moving, like a
+black mark painted on the great blue sky; then soaring overhead, the
+sharply cut outlines clear as a pen-and-ink drawing; then landing,
+bouncing on the slightly uneven ground.
+
+As the French aviator climbed out, Dr. Bagby's sad face brightened and
+he suggested: "Those plugs went better, Munseer. Heh? I've been
+thinking. Maybe you been giving her too rich a mixture."
+
+While they were wiping the Gnôme engine Carl shyly approached Dr.
+Bagby. He felt frightfully an outsider; wondered if he could ever be
+intimate with the magician as was the plump Mexican youth they called
+"Tony." He said "Uh" once or twice, and blurted, "I want to be an
+aviator."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Dr. Bagby, gently, glancing away from Carl to the machine.
+He went over, twanged a supporting-wire, and seemed to remember that some
+one had spoken to him. He returned to the fevered Carl, walking sidewise,
+staring all the while at the resting monoplane, so efficient, yet so quiet
+now and slender and feminine. "Yes, yes. So you'd like to be an aviator. So
+you'd like--like----(Hey, boy, don't touch that!)----to be an aviator. Yes,
+yes. They all would, m' boy. They all would. Well, maybe you can be, some
+day. Maybe you can be.... Some day."
+
+"I mean now. Right away. Heard you were going t' start a school. Want
+to join."
+
+"Hm, hm," sighed Dr. Bagby, tapping his teeth, jingling his heavy
+gold watch-chain, brushing a trail of cigar-ashes from a lapel, then
+staring abstractedly at Carl, who was turning his hat swiftly round
+and round, so flushed of cheek, so excited of eye, that he seemed
+twenty instead of twenty-four. "Yes, yes, so you'd like to join. Tst.
+But that would cost you five hundred dollars, you know."
+
+"Right!"
+
+"Well, you go talk to Munseer about it; Munseer Carmeau. He is a very
+good aviator. He is a licensed aviator. He knows Henry Farman. He
+studied under Blériot. He is the boss here. I'm just the poor old
+fellow that stands around. Sometimes Munseer takes me up for a little
+ride in our machine; sometimes he takes me up; but he is the boss. He
+is the boss, my friend; you'll have to see him." And Dr. Bagby walked
+away, apparently much discouraged about life.
+
+Carl was not discouraged about life. He swore that now he would be an
+aviator even if he had to go to Dayton or Hammondsport or France.
+
+He returned to Oakland. He sold his share in the garage for $1,150.
+
+Before the end of January he was enrolled as a student in the Bagby
+School of Aviation and Monoplane Building.
+
+On an impulse he wrote of his wondrous happiness to Gertie Cowles, but
+he tore up the letter. Then proudly he wrote to his father that the
+lost boy had found himself. For the first time in all his desultory
+writing of home-letters he did not feel impelled to defend himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Crude were the surroundings where Carmeau turned out some of the best
+monoplane pilots America will ever see. There were two rude shed-hangars in
+which they kept the three imported Blériots--a single-seat racer of the
+latest type, a Blériot XII. passenger-carrying machine with the seat under
+the plane, and "P'tite Marie," the school machine, which they usually kept
+throttled down to four hundred or five hundred, but in which Carmeau made
+such spirited flights as the one Carl had first witnessed. Back of the
+hangars was the workshop, which had little architecture, but much
+machinery. Here the pupils were building two Blériot-type machines, and
+trying to build an eight-cylinder V motor. All these things had Bagby given
+for the good of the game, expecting no profit in return. He was one of the
+real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy
+of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings
+and become superman.
+
+His generosity did not extend to living-quarters. Most of the students
+lived at the hangars and dined on Hamburg sandwiches, fried eggs, and
+Mexican _enchiladas_, served at a lunch-wagon anchored near the field.
+That lunch-wagon was their club. Here, squatted on high stools,
+treating one another to ginger-ale, they argued over torque and angles
+of incidence and monoplanes _vs._ biplanes. Except for two unpopular
+aristocrats who found boarding-houses in San Mateo, they slept in the
+hangars, in their overalls, sprawled on mattresses covered with
+horse-blankets. It was bed at eight-thirty. At four or five Carmeau
+would crawl out, scratch his beard, start a motor, and set every
+neighborhood dog howling. The students would gloomily clump over to
+the lunch-wagon for a ham-and-egg breakfast. The first flights began
+at dawn, if the day was clear. At eight, when the wind was coming up,
+they would be heard in the workshop, adjusting and readjusting,
+machining down bearings, testing wing strength, humming and laughing
+and busy; a life of gasoline and hammers and straining attempts to get
+balance exactly right; a happy life of good fellows and the
+achievements of machinery and preparation for daring the upper air; a
+life of very ordinary mechanics and of sheer romance!
+
+It is a grievous heresy that aviation is most romantic when the
+aviator is portrayed as a young god of noble rank and a collar high
+and spotless, carelessly driving a transatlantic machine of perfect
+efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man,
+the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically
+real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his
+infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ingénue,
+should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar
+miles in the air and fulfil the dream of all the creeping ages.
+
+In English and American fiction there are now nearly as many
+aeroplanes as rapiers or roses. The fictional aviators are society
+amateurs, wearers of evening clothes, frequenters of The Club,
+journalists and civil engineers and lordlings and international agents
+and gentlemen detectives, who drawl, "Oh yes, I fly a bit--new
+sensation, y' know--tired of polo"; and immediately thereafter use the
+aeroplane to raid arsenals, rescue a maiden from robbers or a large
+ruby from its lawful but heathenish possessors, or prevent a Zeppelin
+from raiding the coast. But they never by any chance fly these
+machines before gum-chewing thousands for hire. In England they
+absolutely must motor from The Club to the flying-field in a "powerful
+Rolls-Royce car." The British aviators of fiction are usually from
+Oxford and Eton. They are splendidly languid and modest and smartly
+dressed in society, but when they condescend to an adventure or to a
+coincidence, they are very devils, six feet of steel and sinew, boys
+of the bulldog breed with a strong trace of humming-bird. Like their
+English kindred, the Americans take up aviation only for gentlemanly
+sport. And they do go about rescuing things. Nothing is safe from
+their rescuing. But they do not have Rolls-Royce cars.
+
+Carl and his class at Bagby's were not of this gilded race. Carl's
+flying was as sordidly real as laying brick for a one-story laundry in
+a mill-town. Therefore, being real, it was romantic and miraculous.
+
+Among Carl's class was Hank Odell, the senior student, tall, thin,
+hopelessly plain of face; a drawling, rough-haired, eagle-nosed
+Yankee, who grinned shyly and whose Adam's apple worked slowly up and
+down when you spoke to him; an unimaginative lover of dogs and
+machinery; the descendant of Lexington and Gettysburg and a flinty
+Vermont farm; an ex-fireman, ex-sergeant of the army, and ex-teamster.
+He always wore a khaki shirt--the wrinkles of which caught the grease
+in black lines, like veins--with black trousers, blunt-toed shoes, and
+a pipe, the most important part of his costume.
+
+There was the round, anxious, polite Mexican, Tony Beanno, called
+"Tony Bean"--wealthy, simple, fond of the violin and of fast motoring.
+There was the "school grouch," surly Jack Ryan, the chunky
+ex-chauffeur. There were seven nondescripts--a clever Jew from
+Seattle, two college youngsters, an apricot-rancher's son, a circus
+acrobat who wanted a new line of tricks, a dull ensign detailed by the
+navy, and an earnest student of aerodynamics, aged forty, who had
+written marvelously dull books on air-currents and had shrinkingly
+made himself a fair balloon pilot. The navy ensign and the student
+were the snobs who lived away from the hangars, in boarding-houses.
+
+There was Lieutenant Forrest Haviland, detailed by the army--Haviland
+the perfect gentle knight, the well-beloved, the nearest approach to
+the gracious fiction aviator of them all, yet never drawling in
+affected modesty, never afraid of grease; smiling and industrious and
+reticent; smooth of hair and cameo of face; wearing khaki
+riding-breeches and tan puttees instead of overalls; always a
+gentleman, even when he tried to appear a workman. He pretended to be
+enthusiastic about the lunch-wagon, and never referred to his three
+generations of army officers. But most of the others were shy of him,
+and Jack Ryan, the "school grouch," was always trying to get him into
+a fight.
+
+Finally, there was Carl Ericson, who slowly emerged as star of them
+all. He knew less of aerodynamics than the timid specialist, less of
+practical mechanics than Hank Odell; but he loved the fun of daring
+more. He was less ferocious in competition than was Jack Ryan, but he
+wasted less of his nerve. He was less agile than the circus acrobat,
+but knew more of motors. He was less compactly easy than Lieutenant
+Haviland, but he took better to overalls and sleeping in hangars and
+mucking in grease--he whistled ragtime while Forrest Haviland hummed
+MacDowell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carl's earliest flights were in the school machine, "P'tite Marie,"
+behind Carmeau, the instructor. Reporters were always about, talking
+of "impressions," and Carl felt that he ought to note his impressions
+on his first ascent, but all that he actually did notice was that it
+was hard to tell at what instant they left the ground; that when they
+were up, the wind threatened to crush his ribs and burst his nostrils;
+that there must be something perilously wrong, because the machine
+climbed so swiftly; and, when they were down, that it had been worth
+waiting a whole lifetime for the flight.
+
+For days he merely flew with the instructor, till he was himself
+managing the controls. At last, his first flight by himself.
+
+He had been ordered to try a flight three times about the aerodrome at
+a height of sixty feet, and to land carefully, without pancaking--"and
+be sure, Monsieur, be veree sure you do not cut off too high from the
+ground," said Carmeau.
+
+It was a day when five reporters had gathered, and Carl felt very much
+in the limelight, waiting in the nacelle of the machine for the time
+to start. The propeller was revolved, Carl drew a long breath and
+stuck up his hand--and the engine stopped. He was relieved. It had
+seemed a terrific responsibility to go up alone. He wouldn't, now, not
+for a minute or two. He knew that he had been afraid. The engine was
+turned over once more--and once more stopped. Carl raged, and never
+again, in all his flying, did real fear return to him. "What the deuce
+is the matter?" he snarled. Again the propeller was revolved, and this
+time the engine hummed sweet. The monoplane ran along the ground, its
+tail lifting in the blast, till the whole machine seemed delicately
+poised on its tiptoes. He was off the ground, his rage leaving him as
+his fear had left him.
+
+He exulted at the swiftness with which a distant group of trees shot
+at him, under him. He turned, and the machine mounted a little on the
+turn, which was against the rules. But he brought her to even keel so
+easily that he felt all the mastery of the man who has finally learned
+to be natural on a bicycle. He tilted up the elevator slightly and
+shot across a series of fields, climbing. It was perfectly easy. He
+would go up--up. It was all automatic now--cloche toward him for
+climbing; away from him for descent; toward the wing that tipped up,
+in order to bring it down to level. The machine obeyed perfectly. And
+the foot-bar, for steering to right and left, responded to such light
+motions of his foot. He grinned exultantly. He wanted to shout.
+
+He glanced at the barometer and discovered that he was up to two
+hundred feet. Why not go on?
+
+He sailed out across San Mateo, and the sense of people below, running
+and waving their hands, increased his exultation. He curved about at
+the end, somewhat afraid of his ability to turn, but having all the
+air there was to make the turn in, and headed back toward the
+aerodrome. Already he had flown five miles.
+
+Half a mile from the aerodrome he realized that his motor was
+slackening, missing fire; that he did not know what was the matter;
+that his knowledge had left him stranded there, two hundred feet above
+ground; that he had to come down at once, with no chance to choose a
+landing-place and no experience in gliding. The motor stopped
+altogether.
+
+The ground was coming up at him too quickly.
+
+He tilted the elevator, and rose. But, as he was volplaning, this cut
+down the speed, and from a height of ten feet above a field the
+machine dropped to the ground with a flat plop. Something gave
+way--but Carl sat safe, with the machine canted to one side.
+
+He climbed out, cold about the spine, and discovered that he had
+broken one wheel of the landing-chassis.
+
+All the crowd from the flying-field were running toward him, yelling.
+He grinned at the foolish sight they made with their legs and arms
+strewn about in the air as they galloped over the rough ground.
+Lieutenant Haviland came up, panting: "All right, o' man? Good!" He
+seized Carl's hand and wrung it. Carl knew that he had a new friend.
+
+Three reporters poured questions on him. How far had he flown? Was
+this really his first ascent by himself? What were his sensations? How
+had his motor stopped? Was it true he was a mining engineer, a wealthy
+motorist?
+
+Hank Odell, the shy, eagle-nosed Yankee, running up as jerkily as a
+cow in a plowed field, silently patted Carl on the shoulder and began
+to examine the fractured landing-wheel. At last the instructor, M.
+Carmeau.
+
+Carl had awaited M. Carmeau's praise as the crown of his long flight.
+But Carmeau pulled his beard, opened his mouth once or twice, then
+shrieked: "What the davil you t'ink you are? A millionaire that we
+build machines for you to smash them? I tole you to fly t'ree time
+around--you fly to Algiers an' back--you t'ink you are another Farman
+brother--you are a damn fool! Suppose your motor he stop while you fly
+over San Mateo? Where you land? In a well? In a chimney? _Hein?_ You
+know naut'ing yet. Next time you do what I tal' you. _Zut!_ That was a
+flight, a flight, you make a flight, that was fine, fine, you make the
+heart to swell. But nex' time you break the chassis and keel yourself,
+_nom d'un tonnerre_, I scol' you!"
+
+Carl was humble. But the _Courier_ reporter spread upon the front page
+the story of "Marvelous first flight by Bagby student," and predicted
+that a new Curtiss was coming out of California. Under a half-tone ran
+the caption, "Ericson, the New Hawk of the Birdmen."
+
+The camp promptly nicknamed him "Hawk." They used it for plaguing him
+at first, but it survived as an expression of fondness--Hawk Ericson,
+the cheeriest man in the school, and the coolest flier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Not all their days were spent in work. There were mornings when the
+wind would not permit an ascent and when there was nothing to do in
+the workshop. They sat about the lunch-wagon wrangling endlessly, or,
+like Carl and Forrest Haviland, wandered through fields which were all
+one flame with poppies.
+
+Lieutenant Haviland had given up trying to feel comfortable with the
+naval ensign student, who was one of the solemn worthies who clear
+their throats before speaking, and then speak in measured terms of
+brands of cigars and weather. Gradually, working side by side with
+Carl, Haviland seemed to find him a friend in whom to confide. Once or
+twice they went by trolley to San Francisco, to explore Chinatown or
+drop in on soldier friends of Haviland at the Presidio.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the porch of a studio on Telegraph Hill, in San Francisco, they
+were looking down on the islands of the bay, waiting for the return of
+an artist whom Haviland knew. Inarticulate dreamers both, they
+expressed in monosyllables the glory of bluewater before them, the
+tradition of R. L. S. and Frank Norris, the future of aviation. They
+gave up the attempt to explain the magic of San Francisco--that
+city-personality which transcends the opal hills and rare amber
+sunlight, festivals, and the transplanted Italian hill-town of
+Telegraph Hill, liners sailing out for Japan, and memories of the
+Forty-niners. It was too subtle a spirit, too much of it lay in human
+life with the passion of the Riviera linked to the strength of the
+North, for them to be able to comprehend its spell.... But regarding
+their own ambitions to do, they became eloquent.
+
+"I say," hesitated Haviland, "why is it I can't get in with most of
+the fellows at the camp the way you can? I've always been chummy
+enough with the fellows at the Point and at posts."
+
+"Because you've been brought up to be afraid to be anything but a
+gentleman."
+
+"Oh, I don't think it's that. I can get fond as the deuce of some of
+the commonest common soldiers--and, Lord! some of them come from the
+Bowery and all sorts of impossible places."
+
+"Yes, but you always think of them as 'common.' They don't think of
+each other that way. Suppose I'd worked----Well, just suppose I'd been
+a Bowery bartender. Could you be loafing around here with me? Could
+you go off on a bat with Jack Ryan?"
+
+"Well, maybe not. Maybe working with Jack Ryan is a good thing for me.
+I'm getting now so I can almost stand his stories! I envy you,
+knocking around with all sorts of people. Oh, I _wish_ I could call
+Ryan 'Jack' and feel easy about it. I can't. Perhaps I've got a little
+of the subaltern snob some place in me."
+
+"You? You're a prince."
+
+"If you've elevated me to a princedom, the least I can do is to invite
+you down home for a week-end--down to the San Spirito Presidio. My
+father's commandant there."
+
+"Oh, I'd like to, but----I haven't got a dress-suit."
+
+"Buy one."
+
+"Yes, I could do that, but----Oh, rats! Forrest, I've been knocking
+around so long I feel shy about my table manners and everything. I'd
+probably eat pie with my fingers."
+
+"You make me so darn tired, Hawk. You talk about my having to learn to
+chum with people in overalls. You've got to learn not to let people in
+evening clothes put anything over on you. That's your difficulty from
+having lived in the back-country these last two or three years. You
+have an instinct for manners. But I did notice that as soon as you
+found out I was in the army you spent half the time disliking me as a
+militarist, and the other half expecting me to be haughty--Lord knows
+what over. It took you two weeks to think of me as Forrest Haviland.
+I'm ashamed of you! If you're a socialist you ought to think that
+anything you like belongs to you."
+
+"That's a new kind of socialism."
+
+"So much the better. Me and Karl Marx, the economic inventors.... But
+I was saying: if you act as though things belong to you people will
+apologize to you for having borrowed them from you. And you've _got_
+to do that, Hawk. You're going to be one of the best-known fliers in
+the country, and you'll have to meet all sorts of big guns--generals
+and Senators and female climbers that work the peace societies for
+social position, and so on, and you've got to know how to meet
+them.... Anyway, I want you to come to San Spirito."
+
+To San Spirito they went. During the three days preceding, Carl was
+agonized at the thought of having to be polite in the presence of
+ladies. No matter how brusquely he told himself, "I'm as good as
+anybody," he was uneasy about forks and slang and finger-nails, and
+looked forward to the ordeal with as much pleasure as a man about to
+be hanged, hanged in a good cause, but thoroughly.
+
+Yet when Colonel Haviland met them at San Spirito station, and Carl
+heard the kindly salutation of the gracious, fat, old Indian-fighter,
+he knew that he had at last come home to his own people--an impression
+that was the stronger because the house of Oscar Ericson had been so
+much house and so little home. The colonel was a widower, and for his
+only son he showed a proud affection which included Carl. The three of
+them sat in state, after dinner, on the porch of Quarters No. 1,
+smoking cigars and looking down to a spur of the Santa Lucia
+Mountains, where it plunged into the foam of the Pacific. They talked
+of aviation and eugenics and the Benét-Mercier gun, of the post
+doctor's sister who had come from the East on a visit, and of a
+riding-test, but their hearts spoke of affection.... Usually it is a
+man and a woman that make home; but three men, a stranger one of them,
+talking of motors on a porch in the enveloping dusk, made for one
+another a home to remember always.
+
+They stayed over Monday night, for a hop, and Carl found that the
+officers and their wives were as approachable as Hank Odell. They did
+not seem to be waiting for young Ericson to make social errors. When
+he confessed that he had forgotten what little dancing he knew, the
+sister of the post doctor took him in hand, retaught him the waltz,
+and asked with patent admiration: "How does it feel to fly? Don't you
+get frightened? I'm terribly in awe of you and Mr. Haviland. I know I
+should be frightened to death, because it always makes me dizzy just
+to look down from a high building."
+
+Carl slipped away, to be happy by himself, and hid in the shadow of
+palms on the porch, lapped in the flutter of pepper-trees. The
+orchestra began a waltz that set his heart singing. He heard a girl
+cry: "Oh, goody! the 'Blue Danube'! We must go in and dance that."
+
+"The Blue Danube." The name brought back the novels of General Charles
+King, as he had read them in high-school days; flashed the picture of
+a lonely post, yellow-lighted, like a topaz on the night-swathed
+desert; a rude ball-room, a young officer dancing to the "Blue
+Danube's" intoxication; a hot-riding, dusty courier, hurling in with
+news of an Apache outbreak; a few minutes later a troop of cavalry
+slanting out through the gate on horseback, with a farewell burning
+the young officer's lips.... He was in just such an army story, now!
+
+The scent of royal climbing-roses enveloped Carl as that picture
+changed into others. San Spirito Presidio became a vast military
+encampment over which Hawk Ericson was flying.... From his monoplane
+he saw a fairy town, with red roofs rising to a tower of fantastic
+turrets. (That was doubtless the memory of a magazine-cover painted by
+Maxfield Parrish.)... He was wandering through a poppy-field with a
+girl dusky of eyes, soft black of hair, ready for any jaunt....
+Pictures bright and various as tropic shells, born of music and peace
+and his affection for the Havilands; pictures which promised him the
+world. For the first time Hawk Ericson realized that he might be a
+Personage instead of a back-yard boy.... The girl with twilight eyes
+was smiling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Bagby camp broke up on the first of May, with all of them, except
+one of the nondescript collegians and the air-current student, more or
+less trained aviators. Carl was going out to tour small cities, for
+the George Flying Corporation. Lieutenant Haviland was detailed to the
+army flying-camp.
+
+Parting with Haviland and kindly Hank Odell, with Carmeau and
+anxiously polite Tony Bean, was as wistful as the last night of senior
+year. Till the old moon rose, sad behind tulip-trees, they sat on
+packing-boxes by the larger hangar, singing in close harmony "Sweet
+Adeline," "Teasing," "I've Been Working on the Railroad."... "Hay-ride
+classics, with barber-shop chords," the songs are called, but tears
+were in Carl's eyes as the minors sobbed from the group of comrades
+who made fun of one another and were prosaic and pounded their heels
+on the packing-boxes--and knew that they were parting to face death.
+Carl felt Forrest Haviland's hand on one shoulder, then an awkward pat
+from tough Jack Ryan's paw, as Tony Bean's violin turned the plaintive
+half-light into music, and broke its heart in the "Moonlight Sonata."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+"Yuh, piston-ring burnt off and put the exhaust-valve on the blink.
+That means one cylinder out of business," growled Hawk Ericson. "I
+could fly, maybe, but I don't like to risk it in this wind. It was bad
+enough this morning when I tried it."
+
+"Oh, this hick town 's going to be the death of us, all right--and
+Riverport to-morrow, with a contract nice as pie, if we can only get
+there," groaned his manager, Dick George, a fat man with much muscle
+and more diamonds. "Listen to that crowd. Yelling for blood. Sounds
+like a bunch of lumber-jacks with the circus slow in starting."
+
+The head-line feature of the Onamwaska County spring fair was "Hawk
+Ericson, showing the most marvelous aerial feats of the ages with the
+scientific marvels of aviation, in his famous French Blériot
+flying-machine, the first flying-machine ever seen in this state, no
+balloon or fake, come to Onamwaska by the St. L. & N." The spring fair
+was usually a small gathering of farmers to witness races and new
+agricultural implements, but this time every road for thirty-five
+miles was dust-fogged with buggies and democrat wagons and small
+motor-cars. Ten thousand people were packed about the race-track.
+
+It was Carl's third aviation event. A neat, though not imposing
+figure, in a snug blue flannel suit, with his cap turned round on his
+head, he went to the flap of the rickety tent which served as his
+hangar. A fierce cry of "Fly! Fly! Why don't he fly?" was coming from
+the long black lines edging the track, and from the mound of people on
+the small grand stand; the pink blur of their faces turned toward
+him--him, Carl Ericson; all of them demanding _him_! The five meek
+police of Onamwaska were trotting back and forth, keeping them behind
+the barriers. Carl was apprehensive lest this ten-thousandfold demand
+drag him out, make him fly, despite a wind that was blowing the flags
+out straight, and whisking up the litter of newspapers and
+cracker-jack boxes and pink programs. While he stared out, an official
+crossing the track fairly leaned up against the wind, which seized his
+hat and sailed it to the end of the track.
+
+"Some wind!" Carl grunted, stolidly, and went to the back of the
+silent tent, to reread the local papers' accounts of his arrival at
+Onamwaska. It was a picturesque narrative of the cheering mob
+following him down the street ("Gee! that was _me_ they followed!"),
+crowding into the office of the Astor House and making him autograph
+hundreds of cards; of girls throwing roses ("Humph! geraniums is more
+like it!") from the windows.
+
+"A young man," wrote an enthusiastic female reporter, "handsome as a
+Greek god, but honestly I believe he is still in his twenties; and he
+is as slim and straight as a soldier, flaxen-haired and
+rosy-cheeked--the birdman, the god of the air."
+
+"Handsome as a Greek----" Carl commented. "I look like a Minnesota
+Norwegian, and that ain't so bad, but handsome----Urrrrrg!... Sure
+they love me, all right. Hear 'em yell. Oh, they love me like a dog
+does a bone.... Saint Jemima! talk about football rooting.... Come on,
+Greek god, buck up."
+
+He glanced wearily about the tent, its flooring of long, dry grass
+stained with ugly dark-blue lubricating-oil, under the tan light
+coming through the canvas. His manager was sitting on a suit-case,
+pretending to read a newspaper, but pinching his lower lip and
+consulting his watch, jogging his foot ceaselessly. Their temporary
+mechanic, who had given up trying to repair the lame valve, squatted
+with bent head, biting his lip, harkening to the blood-hungry mob.
+Carl's own nerves grew tauter and tauter as he saw the manager's
+restless foot and the mechanic's tension. He strolled to the
+monoplane, his back to the tent-opening.
+
+He started as the manager exclaimed: "Here they come! After us!"
+
+Outside the tent a sound of running.
+
+The secretary of the fair, a German hardware-dealer with an
+automobile-cap like a yachting-cap, panted in, gasping: "Come quick!
+They won't wait any longer! I been trying to calm 'em down, but they
+say you got to fly. They're breaking over the barriers into the track.
+The p'lice can't keep 'em back."
+
+Behind the secretary came the chairman of the entertainment committee,
+a popular dairyman, who was pale as he demanded: "You got to play
+ball, Mr. Ericson. I won't guarantee what 'll happen if you don't play
+ball, Mr. Ericson. You got to make him fly, Mr. George. The crowd 's
+breaking----"
+
+Behind him charged a black press of people. They packed before the
+tent, trying to peer in through the half-closed tent-opening, like a
+crowd about a house where a policeman is making an arrest. Furiously:
+
+"Where's the coward? Fake! Bring 'im out! Why don't he fly? He's a
+fake! His flying-machine's never been off the ground! He's a
+four-flusher! Run 'im out of town! Fake! Fake! Fake!"
+
+The secretary and chairman stuck out deprecatory heads and coaxed the
+mob. Carl's manager was an old circus-man. He had removed his collar,
+tie, and flashy diamond pin, and was diligently wrapping the thong of
+a black-jack about his wrist. Their mechanic was crawling under the
+side of the tent. Carl caught him by the seat of his overalls and
+jerked him back.
+
+As Carl turned to face the tent door again the manager ranged up
+beside him, trying to conceal the black-jack in his hand, and casually
+murmuring, "Scared, Hawk?"
+
+"Nope. Too mad to be scared."
+
+The tent-flap was pulled back. Tossing hands came through. The
+secretary and chairman were brushed aside. The mob-leader, a
+red-faced, loud-voiced town sport, very drunk, shouted, "Come out and
+fly or we'll tar and feather you!"
+
+"Yuh, come on, you fake, you four-flusher!" echoed the voices.
+
+The secretary and chairman were edging back into the tent, beside
+Carl's cowering mechanic.
+
+Something broke in Carl's hold on himself. With his arm drawn back,
+his fist aimed at the point of the mob-leader's jaw, he snarled: "You
+can't make me fly. You stick that ugly mug of yours any farther in and
+I'll bust it. I'll fly when the wind goes down----You would, would
+you?"
+
+As the mob-leader started to advance, Carl jabbed at him. It was not a
+very good jab. But the leader stopped. The manager, black-jack in
+hand, caught Carl's arm, and ordered: "Don't start anything! They can
+lick us. Just look ready. Don't say anything. We'll hold 'em till the
+cops come. But nix on the punch."
+
+"Right, Cap'n," said Carl.
+
+It was a strain to stand motionless, facing the crowd, not answering
+their taunts, but he held himself in, and in two minutes the yell
+came: "Cheese it! The cops!" The mob unwillingly swayed back as
+Onamwaska's heroic little band of five policemen wriggled through it,
+requesting their neighbors to desist.... They entered the tent and,
+after accepting cigars from Carl's manager, coldly told him that Carl
+was a fake, and lucky to escape; that Carl would better "jump right
+out and fly if he knew what was good for him." Also, they nearly
+arrested the manager for possessing a black-jack, and warned him that
+he'd better not assault any of the peaceable citizens of beautiful
+Onamwaska....
+
+When they had coaxed the mob behind the barriers, by announcing that
+Ericson would now go up, Carl swore: "I won't move! They can't make
+me!"
+
+The secretary of the fair, who had regained most of his courage, spoke
+up, pertly, "Then you better return the five hundred advance, pretty
+quick sudden, or I'll get an attachment on your fake flying-machine!"
+
+"You go----Nix, nix, Hawk, don't hit him; he ain't worth it. You go to
+hell, brother," said the manager, mechanically. But he took Carl
+aside, and groaned: "Gosh! we got to do something! It's worth two
+thousand dollars to us, you know. Besides, we haven't got enough cash
+in our jeans to get out of town, and we'll miss the big Riverport
+purse.... Still, suit yourself, old man. Maybe I can get some money by
+wiring to Chicago."
+
+"Oh, let's get it over!" Carl sighed. "I'd love to disappoint
+Onamwaska. We'll make fifteen thousand dollars this month and next,
+anyway, and we can afford to spit 'em in the eye. But I don't want to
+leave you in a hole.... Here you, mechanic, open up that tent-flap.
+All the way across.... No, not like _that_, you boob!... So.... Come
+on, now, help me push out the machine. Here you, Mr. Secretary, hustle
+me a couple of men to hold her tail."
+
+The crowd rose, the fickle crowd, scenting the promised blood, and
+applauded as the monoplane was wheeled upon the track and turned to
+face the wind. The mechanic and two assistants had to hold it as a
+dust-filled gust caught it beneath the wings. As Carl climbed into the
+seat and the mechanic went forward to start the engine, another squall
+hit the machine and she almost turned over sidewise.
+
+As the machine righted, the manager ran up and begged: "You never in
+the world can make it in this wind, Hawk. Better not try it. I'll wire
+for some money to get out of town with, and Onamwaska can go soak its
+head."
+
+"Nope. I'm gettin' sore now, Dick.... Hey you, mechanic: hurt that
+wing when she tipped?... All right. Start her. Quick. While it's
+calm."
+
+The engine whirred. The assistants let go the tail. The machine
+labored forward, but once it left the ground it shot up quickly. The
+head-wind came in a terrific gust. The machine hung poised in air for
+a moment, driven back by the gale nearly as fast as it was urged
+forward by its frantically revolving propeller.
+
+Carl was as yet too doubtful of his skill to try to climb above the
+worst of the wind. If he could only keep a level course----
+
+He fought his way up one side of the race-track. He crouched in his
+seat, meeting the sandy blast with bent head. The parted lips which
+permitted him to catch his breath were stubborn and hard about his
+teeth. His hands played swiftly, incessantly, over the control as he
+brought her back to even keel. He warped the wings so quickly that he
+balanced like an acrobat sitting rockingly on a tight-wire. He was too
+busy to be afraid or to remember that there was a throng of people
+below him. But he was conscious that the grand stand, at the side of
+the track, half-way down, was creeping toward him.
+
+More every instant did he hate the clamor of the gale and the stream
+of minute drops of oil, blown back from the engine, that spattered his
+face. His ears strained for misfire of the engine, if it stopped he
+would be hurled to earth. And one cylinder was not working. He forgot
+that; kept the cloche moving; fought the wind with his will as with
+his body.
+
+Now, he was aware of the grand stand below him. Now, of the people at
+the end of the track. He flew beyond the track, and turned. The whole
+force of the gale was thrown behind him, and he shot back along the
+other side of the race-track at eighty or ninety miles an hour.
+Instantly he was at the end; then a quarter of a mile beyond the
+track, over plowed fields, where upward currents of warm air
+increased the pitching of the machine as he struggled to turn her
+again and face the wind.
+
+The following breeze was suddenly retarded and he dropped forty feet,
+tail down.
+
+He was only forty feet from the ground, falling straight, when he got
+back to even keel and shot ahead. How safe the nest of the nacelle
+where he sat seemed then! Almost gaily he swung her in a great
+wavering circle--and the wind was again in his face, hating him,
+pounding him, trying to get under the wings and turn the machine
+turtle.
+
+Twice more he worked his way about the track. The conscience of the
+beginner made him perform a diffident Dutch roll before the grand
+stand, but he was growling, "And that's all they're going to get.
+See?"
+
+As he soared to earth he looked at the crowd for the first time. His
+vision was so blurred with oil and wind-soreness that he saw the
+people only as a mass and he fancied that the stretch of slouch-hats
+and derbies was a field of mushrooms swaying and tilted back. He was
+curiously unconscious of the presence of women; he felt all the
+spectators as men who had bawled for his death and whom he wanted to
+hammer as he had hammered the wind.
+
+He was almost down. He cut off his motor, glided horizontally three
+feet above the ground, and landed, while the cheers cloaked even the
+honking of the parked automobiles.
+
+Carl's manager, fatly galloping up, shrilled, "How was it, old man?"
+
+"Oh, it was pretty windy," said Carl, crawling down and rubbing the
+kinks out of his arms. "But I think the wind 's going down. Tell the
+announcer to tell our dear neighbors that I'll fly again at five."
+
+"But weren't you scared when she dropped? You went down so far that
+the fence plumb hid you. Couldn't see you at all. Ugh! Sure thought
+the wind had you. Weren't you scared then? You don't look it."
+
+"Then? Oh! Then. Oh yes, sure, I guess I was scared, all right!...
+Say, we got that seat padded so she's darn comfortable now."
+
+The crowd was collecting. Carl's manager chuckled to the president of
+the fair association, "Well, that was some flight, eh?"
+
+"Oh, he went down the opposite side of the track pretty fast, but why
+the dickens was he so slow going up my side? My eyes ain't so good now
+that it does me any good if a fellow speeds up when he's a thousand
+miles away. And where's all these tricks in the air----"
+
+"That," murmured Carl to his manager, "is the i-den-ti-cal man that
+stole the blind cripple's crutch to make himself a toothpick."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+The great Belmont Park Aero Meet, which woke New York to aviation, in
+October, 1910, was coming to an end. That clever new American flier,
+Hawk Ericson, had won only sixth place in speed, but he had won first
+prize in duration, by a flight of nearly six hours, driving round and
+round and round the pylons, hour on hour, safe and steady as a train,
+never taking the risk of sensational banking, nor spiraling like
+Johnstone, but amusing himself and breaking the tedium by keeping an
+eye out on each circuit for a fat woman in a bright lavender top-coat,
+who stood out in the dark line of people that flowed beneath. When he
+had descended--acclaimed the winner--thousands of heads turned his way
+as though on one lever; the pink faces flashing in such October
+sunshine as had filled the back yard of Oscar Ericson, in Joralemon,
+when a lonely Carl had performed duration feats for a sparrow. That
+same shy Carl wanted to escape from the newspaper-men who came running
+toward him. He hated their incessant questions--always the same: "Were
+you cold? Could you have stayed up longer?"
+
+Yet he had seen all New York go mad over aviation--rather, over news
+about aviation. The newspapers had spread over front pages his name
+and the names of the other fliers. Carl chuckled to himself, with
+bashful awe, "Gee! can you beat it?--that's _me_!" when he beheld
+himself referred to in editorial and interview and picture-caption as
+a superman, a god. He heard crowds rustle, "Look, there's Hawk
+Ericson!" as he walked along the barriers. He heard cautious
+predictions from fellow-fliers, and loud declarations from outsiders,
+that he was the coming cross-country champion. He was introduced to
+the mayor of New York, two Cabinet members, an assortment of Senators,
+authors, bank presidents, generals, and society rail-birds. He
+regularly escaped from them--and their questions--to help the
+brick-necked Hank Odell, from the Bagby School, who had entered for
+the meet, but smashed up on the first day, and ever since had been
+whistling and working over his machine and encouraging Carl, "Good
+work, bud; you've got 'em all going."
+
+With vast secrecy and a perception that this was twice as stirring as
+steadily buzzing about in his Blériot, he went down to the Bowery and,
+in front of the saloon where he had worked as a porter four years
+before, he bought a copy of the _Evening World_ because he knew that
+on the third page of it was a large picture of him and a signed
+interview by a special-writer. He peered into the saloon windows to
+see if Petey McGuff was there, but did not find him. He went to the
+street on which he had boarded in the hope that he might do something
+for the girl who had been going wrong. The tenement had been torn
+down, with blocks of others, to make way for a bridge-terminal, and he
+saw the vision of the city's pitiless progress. This quest of old
+acquaintances made him think of Joralemon. He informed Gertie Cowles
+that he was now "in the aviation game, and everything is going very
+well." He sent his mother a check for five hundred dollars, with
+awkward words of affection.
+
+A greater spiritual adventure was talking for hours, over a small
+table in the basement of the Brevoort, to Lieutenant Forrest Haviland,
+who was attending the Belmont Park Meet as spectator. Theirs was the
+talk of tried friends; droning on for a time in amused comment, rising
+to sudden table-pounding enthusiasms over aviators or explorers, with
+exclamations of, "Is that the way it struck you, too? I'm awfully glad
+to hear you say that, because that's just the way I felt about it."
+They leaned back in their chairs and played with spoons and
+reflectively broke up matches and volubly sketched plans of controls,
+drawing on the table-cloth.
+
+Carl took the sophisticated atmosphere of the Brevoort quite for
+granted. Why _shouldn't_ he be there! And after the interest in him at
+the meet it did not hugely abash him to hear a group at a table behind
+him ejaculate: "I think that's Hawk Ericson, the aviator! Yes, sir,
+that's--who--it--is!"
+
+Finally the gods gave to Carl a new mechanic, a prince of mechanics,
+Martin Dockerill. Martin was a tall, thin, hatchet-faced,
+tousle-headed, slow-spoken, irreverent Irish-Yankee from Fall River;
+the perfect type of American aviators; for while England sends out its
+stately soldiers of the air, and France its short, excitable geniuses,
+practically all American aviators and aviation mechanics are either
+long-faced and lanky, like Martin Dockerill and Hank Odell, or slim,
+good-looking youngsters of the college track-team type, like Carl and
+Forrest Haviland.
+
+Martin Dockerill ate pun'kin pie with his fingers, played "Marching
+through Georgia" on the mouth-organ, admired burlesque-show women in
+sausage-shaped pink tights, and wore balbriggan socks that always
+reposed in wrinkles over the tops of his black shoes with frayed
+laces. But he probably could build a very decent motor in the dark,
+out of four tin cans and a crowbar. In A.D. 1910 he still believed in
+hell and plush albums. But he dreamed of wireless power-transmission.
+He was a Free and Independent American Citizen who called the Count de
+Lesseps, "Hey, Lessup." But he would have gone with Carl aeroplaning
+to the South Pole upon five minutes' notice--four minutes to devote to
+the motor, and one minute to write, with purple indelible pencil, a
+post-card to his aunt in Fall River. He was precise about only two
+things--motor-timing and calling himself a "mechanician," not a
+"mechanic." He became very friendly with Hank Odell; helped him
+repair his broken machine, went with him to vaudeville, or stood with
+him before the hangar, watching the automobile parties of pretty girls
+with lordly chaperons that came to call on Grahame-White and Drexel.
+"Some heart-winners, them guys, but I back my boss against them and
+ev'body else, Hank," Martin would say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The meet was over; the aviators were leaving. Carl had said farewell
+to his new and well-loved friends, the pioneers of aviation--Latham,
+Moisant, Leblanc, McCurdy, Ely, de Lesseps, Mars, Willard, Drexel,
+Grahame-White, Hoxsey, and the rest. He was in the afterglow of the
+meet, for with Titherington, the Englishman, and Tad Warren, the
+Wright flier, he was going to race from Belmont Park to New Haven for
+a ten-thousand-dollar prize jointly offered by a New Haven millionaire
+and a New York newspaper. At New Haven the three competitors were to
+join with Tony Bean (of the Bagby School) and Walter MacMonnies
+(flying a Curtiss) in an exhibition meet.
+
+Enveloped in baggy overalls over the blue flannel suit which he still
+wore when flying, Carl was directing Martin Dockerill in changing his
+spark-plugs, which were fouled. About him, the aviators were having
+their machines packed, laughing, playing tricks on one another--boys
+who were virile men; mechanics in denim who stammered to the
+reporters, "Oh, well, I don't know----" yet who were for the time more
+celebrated than Roosevelt or Harry Thaw or Bernard Shaw or Champion
+Jack Johnson.
+
+Before 9.45 A.M., when the race to New Haven was scheduled to start,
+the newspaper-men gathered; but there were not many outsiders. Carl
+felt the lack of the stimulus of thronging devotees. He worked
+silently and sullenly. It was "the morning after." He missed Forrest
+Haviland.
+
+He began to be anxious. Could he get off on time?
+
+Exactly at 9.45 Titherington made a magnificent start in his Henry
+Farman biplane. Carl stared till the machine was a dot in the clouds,
+then worked feverishly. Tad Warren, the second contestant, was testing
+out his motor, ready to go. At that moment Martin Dockerill suggested
+that the carburetor was dirty.
+
+"I'll fly with her the way she is," Carl snapped, shivering with the
+race-fever.
+
+A cub reporter from the City News Association piped, like a
+fox-terrier, "What time 'll you get off, Hawk?"
+
+"Ten sharp."
+
+"No, I mean what time will you really get off!"
+
+Carl did not answer. He understood that the reporters were doubtful
+about him, the youngster from the West who had been flying for only
+six months. At last came the inevitable pest, the familiarly
+suggestive outsider. A well-dressed, well-meaning old bore he was; a
+complete stranger. He put his podgy hand on Carl's arm and puffed:
+"Well, Hawk, my boy, give us a good flight to-day; not but what you're
+going to have trouble. There's something I want to suggest to you. If
+you'd use a gyroscope----"
+
+"Oh, beat it!" snarled Carl. He was ashamed of himself--but more angry
+than ashamed. He demanded of Martin, aside: "All right, heh? Can I fly
+with the carburetor as she is? Heh?"
+
+"All right, boss. Calm down, boss, calm down."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Look here, Hawk, I don't want to butt in. You can have old Martin for
+a chopping-block any time you want to cut wood. But if you don't calm
+down you'll get so screwed up mit nerves that you won't have any
+control. Aw, come on, boss, speak pretty! Just keep your shirt on and
+I'll hustle like a steam-engine."
+
+"Well, maybe you're right. But these assistant aviators in the crowd
+get me wild.... All right? Hoorray. Here goes.... Say, don't stop for
+anything after I get off. Leave the boys to pack up, and you hustle
+over to Sea Cliff for the speed-boat. You ought to be in New Haven
+almost as soon as I am."
+
+Calmer now, he peeled off his overalls, drew a wool-lined leather
+jacket over his coat, climbed into the cockpit, and inspected the
+indicators. As he was testing the spark Tad Warren got away.
+
+Third and last was Carl. The race-fever shook him.
+
+He would try to save time. Like the others, he had planned to fly from
+Belmont Park across Long Island to Great Neck, and cross Long Island
+Sound where it was very narrow. He studied his map. By flying across
+to the vicinity of Hempstead Harbor and making a long diagonal flight
+over water, straight over to Stamford, he would increase the factor of
+danger, but save many miles; and the specifications of the race
+permitted him to choose any course to New Haven. Thinking only of the
+new route, taking time only to nod good-by to Martin Dockerill and
+Hank Odell, he was off, into the air.
+
+As the ground dropped beneath him and the green clean spaces and
+innumerous towns of Long Island spread themselves out he listened to
+the motor. Its music was clear and strong. Here, at least, the wind
+was light.
+
+He would risk the long over-water flight--very long they thought it in
+1910.
+
+In a few minutes he sighted the hills about Roslyn and began to climb,
+up to three thousand feet. It was very cold. His hands were almost
+numb on the control. He descended to a thousand feet, but the machine
+jerked like a canoe shooting rapids, in the gust that swept up from
+among the hills. The landscape rose swiftly at him over the ends of
+the wings, now on one side, now on the other, as the machine rolled.
+
+His arms were tired with the quick, incessant wing-warping. He rose
+again. Then he looked at the Sound, and came down to three hundred
+feet, lest he lose his way. For the Sound was white with fog.... No
+wind out there!... Water and cloud blurred together, and the sky-line
+was lost in a mass of somber mist, which ranged from filmy white to
+the cold dead gray of old cigar-ashes. He wanted to hold back, not
+dash out into that danger-filled twilight. But already he was roaring
+over gray-green marshes, then was above fishing-boats that were slowly
+rocking in water dully opaque as a dim old mirror. He noted two men on
+a sloop, staring up at him with foolish, gaping, mist-wet faces.
+Instantly they were left behind him. He rose, to get above the fog.
+Even the milky, sulky water was lost to sight.
+
+He was horribly lonely, abominably lonely.
+
+At five hundred feet altitude he was not yet entirely above the fog.
+Land was blotted out. Above him, gray sky and thin writhing filaments
+of vapor. Beneath him, only the fog-bank, erupting here and there like
+the unfolding of great white flowers as warm currents of air burst up
+through the mist-blanket.
+
+Completely solitary. All his friends were somewhere far distant, in a
+place of solid earth and sun-warmed hangars. The whole knowable earth
+had ceased to exist. There was only slatey void, through which he was
+going on for ever. Or perhaps he was not moving. Always the same coil
+of mist about him. He was horribly lonely.
+
+He feared that the fog was growing thicker. He studied his compass
+with straining eyes. He was startled by a gull's plunging up through
+the mist ahead of him, and disappearing. He was the more lonely when
+it was gone. His eyebrows and cheeks were wet with the steam. Drops of
+moisture shone desolately on the planes. It was an unhealthy shine. He
+was horribly lonely.
+
+He pictured what would happen if the motor should stop and he should
+plunge down through that flimsy vapor. His pontoonless frail monoplane
+would sink almost at once.... It would be cold, swimming. How long
+could he keep up? What chance of being found? He didn't want to fall.
+The cockpit seemed so safe, with its familiar watch and map-stand and
+supporting-wires. It was home. The wings stretching out on either side
+of him seemed comfortingly solid, adequate to hold him up. But the
+body of the machine behind him was only a framework, not even
+inclosed. And cut in the bottom of the cockpit was a small hole for
+observing the earth. He could see fog through it, in unpleasant
+contrast to the dull yellow of the cloth sides and bottom. Not before
+had it daunted him to look down through that hole. Now, however, he
+kept his eyes away from it, and, while he watched the compass and
+oil-gauge, and kept a straight course, he was thinking of how nasty it
+would be to drop, drop down _there_, and have to swim. It would be
+horribly lonely, swimming about a wrecked monoplane, hearing steamers'
+fog-horns, hopeless and afar.
+
+As he thought that, he actually did hear a steamer hoarsely whistling,
+and swept above it, irresistibly. He started; his shoulders drooped.
+
+More than once he wished that he could have seen Forrest Haviland
+again before he started. He wished with all the poignancy of man's
+affection for a real man that he had told Forrest, when they were
+dining at the Brevoort, how happy he was to be with him. He was
+horribly lonely.
+
+He cursed himself for letting his thoughts become thin and damp as the
+vapor about him. He shrugged his shoulders. He listened thankfully to
+the steady purr of the engine and the whir of the propeller. He
+_would_ get across! He ascended, hoping for a glimpse of the shore.
+The fog-smothered horizon stretched farther and farther away. He was
+unspeakably lonely.
+
+Through a tear in the mist he saw sunshine reflected from houses on a
+hill, directly before him, perhaps one mile distant. He shouted. He
+was nearly across. Safe. And the sun was coming out.
+
+Two minutes later he was turning north, between the water and a town
+which his map indicated as Stamford. The houses beneath him seemed
+companionable; friendly were the hand-waving crowds, and
+factory-whistles gave him raucous greeting.
+
+Instantly, now that he knew where he was, the race-fever caught him
+again. Despite the strain of crossing the Sound, he would not for
+anything have come down to rest. He began to wonder how afar ahead of
+him were Titherington and Tad Warren.
+
+He spied a train running north out of Stamford, swung over above it,
+and raced with it. The passengers leaned out of the windows, trainmen
+hung perilously from the opened doors of vestibuled platforms, the
+engineer tooted his frantic greetings to a fellow-mechanic who, above
+him in the glorious bird, sent telepathic greetings which the engineer
+probably never got. The engineer speeded up; the engine puffed out
+vast feathery plumes of dull black smoke. But he drew away from the
+train as he neared South Norwalk.
+
+He was ascending again when he noted something that seemed to be a
+biplane standing in a field a mile away. He came down and circled the
+field. It was Titherington's Farman biplane. He hoped that the kindly
+Englishman had not been injured. He made out Titherington, talking to
+a group about the machine. Relieved, he rose again, amused by the
+ant-hill appearance as hundreds of people, like black bugs, ran toward
+the stalled biplane, from neighboring farms and from a trolley-car
+standing in the road.
+
+He should not have been amused just then. He was too low. Directly
+before him was a hillside crowned with trees. He shot above the trees,
+cold in the stomach, muttering, "Gee! that was careless!"
+
+He sped forward. The race-fever again. Could he pass Tad Warren as he
+had passed Titherington? He whirled over the towns, shivering but
+happy in the mellow, cool October air, far enough from the water to be
+out of what fog the brightening sun had left. The fields rolled
+beneath him, so far down that they were turned into continuous and
+wonderful masses of brown and gold. He sang to himself. He liked
+Titherington; he was glad that the Englishman had not been injured;
+but it was good to be second in the race; to have a chance to win a
+contest which the whole country was watching; to be dashing into a
+rosy dawn of fame. But while he sang he was keeping a tense lookout
+for Tad Warren. He had to pass him!
+
+With the caution of the Scotchlike Norwegian, he had the cloche
+constantly on the jiggle, with ceaseless adjustments to the wind,
+which varied constantly as he passed over different sorts of terrain.
+Once the breeze dropped him sidewise. He shot down to gain momentum,
+brought her to even keel, and, as he set her nose up again, laughed
+boisterously.
+
+Never again would he be so splendidly young, never again so splendidly
+sure of himself and of his medium of expression. He was to gain
+wisdom, but never to have more joy of the race.
+
+He was sure now that he was destined to pass Tad Warren.
+
+The sun was ever brighter; the horizon ever wider, rimming the
+saucer-shaped earth. When he flew near the Sound he saw that the fog
+had almost passed. The water was gentle and colored like pearl,
+lapping the sands, smoking toward the radiant sky. He passed over
+summer cottages, vacant and asleep, with fantastic holiday roofs of
+red and green. Gulls soared like flying sickles of silver over the
+opal sea. Even for the racer there was peace.
+
+He made out a mass of rock covered with autumn-hued trees to the left,
+then a like rock to the right. "West and East Rock--New Haven!" he
+cried.
+
+The city mapped itself before him like square building-blocks on a
+dark carpet, with railroad and trolley tracks like flashing
+spider-webs under the October noon.
+
+So he had arrived, then--and he had not caught Tad Warren. He was
+furious.
+
+He circled the city, looking for the Green, where (in this day before
+the Aero Club of America battled against over-city flying) he was to
+land. He saw the Yale campus, lazy beneath its elms, its towers and
+turrets dreaming of Oxford. His anger left him.
+
+He plunged down toward the Green--and his heart nearly stopped. The
+spectators were scattered everywhere. How could he land without
+crushing some one? With trees to each side and a church in front, he
+was too far down to rise again. His back pressed against the back of
+the little seat, and seemed automatically to be trying to restrain him
+from this tragic landing.
+
+The people were fleeing. In front there was a tiny space. But there
+was no room to sail horizontally and come down lightly. He shut off
+his motor and turned the monoplane's nose directly at the earth. She
+struck hard, bounced a second. Her tail rose, and she started, with
+dreadful deliberateness, to turn turtle. With a vault Carl was out of
+the cockpit and clear of the machine as she turned over.
+
+Oblivious of the clamorous crowd which was pressing in about him,
+cutting off the light, replacing the clean smell of gasoline and the
+upper air by the hot odor of many bodies, he examined the monoplane
+and found that she had merely fractured the propeller and smashed the
+rudder.
+
+Some one was fighting through the crowd to his side--Tony Bean--Tony
+the round, polite Mexican from the Bagby School. He was crying:
+"_Hombre_, what a landing! You have saved lives.... Get out of the
+way, all you people!"
+
+Carl grinned and said: "Good to see you, Tony. What time did Tad
+Warren get here? Where's----"
+
+"He ees not here yet."
+
+"What? Huh? How's that? Do I win? That----Say, gosh! I hope he hasn't
+been hurt."
+
+"Yes, you win."
+
+A newspaper-man standing beside Tony said: "Warren had to come down at
+Great Neck. He sprained his shoulder, but that's all."
+
+"That's good."
+
+"But you," insisted Tony, "aren't you badly jarred, Hawk?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+The gaping crowd, hanging its large collective ear toward the two
+aviators, was shouting: "Hoorray! He's all right!"--As their voices
+rose Carl became aware that all over the city hundreds of
+factory-whistles and bells were howling their welcome to him--the
+victor.
+
+The police were clearing a way for him. As a police captain touched a
+gold-flashing cap to him, Carl remembered how afraid of the police
+that hobo Slim Ericson had been.
+
+Tony and he completed examination of the machine, with Tony's
+mechanician, and sent it off to a shop, to await Martin Dockerill's
+arrival by speed-boat and racing-automobile. Carl went to receive
+congratulations--and a check--from the prize-giver, and a reception by
+Yale officials on the campus. Before him, along his lane of passage,
+was a kaleidoscope of hands sticking out from the wall of
+people--hands that reached out and shook his own till they were sore,
+hands that held out pencil and paper to beg for an autograph, hands of
+girls with golden flowers of autumn, hands of dirty, eager, small
+boys--weaving, interminable hands. Dizzy with a world peopled only by
+writhing hands, yet moved by their greeting, he made his way across
+the Green, through Phelps Gateway, and upon the campus. Twisting his
+cap and wishing that he had taken off his leather flying-coat, he
+stood upon a platform and heard officials congratulating him.
+
+The reception was over. But the people did not move. And he was very
+tired. He whispered to a professor: "Is that a dormitory, there
+behind us? Can I get into it and get away?"
+
+The professor beckoned to one of the collegians, and replied, "I
+think, Mr. Ericson, if you will step down they will pass you into
+Vanderbilt Courtyard--by the gate back of us--and you will be able to
+escape."
+
+Carl trusted himself to the bunch of boys forming behind him, and
+found himself rushed into the comparative quiet of a Tudor courtyard.
+A charming youngster, hatless and sleek of hair, cried, "Right this
+way, Mr. Ericson--up this staircase in the tower--and we'll give 'em
+the slip."
+
+From the roar of voices to the dusky quietude of the hallway was a
+joyous escape. Suddenly Carl was a youngster, permitted to see Yale, a
+university so great that, from Plato College, it had seemed an
+imperial myth. He stared at the list of room-occupants framed and hung
+on the first floor. He peeped reverently through an open door at a
+suite of rooms.
+
+He was taken to a room with a large collection of pillows, fire-irons,
+Morris chairs, sets of books in crushed levant, tobacco-jars and
+pipes--a restless and boyish room, but a real haven. He stared out
+upon the campus, and saw the crowd stolidly waiting for him. He
+glanced round at his host and waved his hand deprecatingly, then tried
+to seem really grown up, really like the famous Hawk Ericson. But he
+wished that Forrest Haviland were there so that he might marvel: "Look
+at 'em, will you! Waiting for _me!_ Can you beat it? Some start for my
+Yale course!"
+
+In a big chair, with a pipe supplied by the youngster, he shyly tried
+to talk to a senior in the great world of Yale (he himself had not
+been able to climb to seniorhood even in Plato), while the awed
+youngster shyly tried to talk to the great aviator.
+
+He had picked up a Yale catalogue and he vaguely ruffled its pages,
+thinking of the difference between its range of courses and the petty
+inflexible curriculum of Plato. Out of the pages leaped the name
+"Frazer." He hastily turned back. There it was: "Henry Frazer, A.M.,
+Ph.D., Assistant Professor in English Literature."
+
+Carl rejoiced boyishly that, after his defeat at Plato, Professor
+Frazer had won to victory. He forgot his own triumph. For a second he
+longed to call on Frazer and pay his respects. "No," he growled to
+himself, "I've been so busy hiking that I've forgotten what little
+book-learnin' I ever had. I'd like to see him, but----By gum! I'm
+going to begin studying again."
+
+Hidden away in the youngster's bedroom for a nap, he dreamed
+uncomfortably of Frazer and books. That did not keep him from making a
+good altitude flight at the New Haven Meet that afternoon, with his
+hastily repaired machine and a new propeller. But he thought of new
+roads for wandering in the land of books, as he sat, tired and sleepy,
+but trying to appear bright and appreciative, at the big dinner in his
+honor--the first sacrificial banquet to which he had been
+subjected--with earnest gentlemen in evening clothes, glad for an
+excuse to drink just a little too much champagne; with mayors and
+councilmen and bankers; with the inevitable stories about the man who
+was accused of stealing umbrellas and about the two skunks on a fence
+enviously watching a motor-car.
+
+Equally inevitable were the speeches praising Carl's flight as a
+"remarkable achievement, destined to live forever in the annals of
+sport and heroism, and to bring one more glory to the name of our fair
+city."
+
+Carl tried to appear honored, but he was thinking: "Rats! I'll live in
+the annals of nothin'! Curtiss and Brookins and Hoxsey have all made
+longer flights than mine, in this country alone, and they're aviators
+I'm not worthy to fill the gas-tanks of.... Gee! I'm sleepy! Got to
+look polite, but I wish I could beat it.... Let's see. Now look here,
+young Carl; starting in to-morrow, you begin to read oodles of books.
+Let's see. I'll start out with Forrest's favorites. There's _David
+Copperfield_, and that book by Wells, _Tono-Bungay_, that's got aerial
+experiments in it, and _Jude the Ob--, Obscure_, I guess it is, and
+_The Damnation of Theron Ware_ (wonder what he damned), and
+_McTeague_, and _Walden_, and _War and Peace_, and _Madame Bovary_,
+and some Turgenev and some Balzac. And something more serious. Guess
+I'll try William James's book on psychology."
+
+He bought them all next morning. His other belongings had been suited
+to rapid transportation, and Martin Dockerill grumbled, "That's a
+swell line of baggage, all right--one tooth-brush, a change of socks,
+and ninety-seven thousand books."
+
+Two nights later, in a hotel at Portland, Maine, Carl was plowing
+through the Psychology. He hated study. He flipped the pages angrily,
+and ran his fingers through his corn-colored hair. But he sped on,
+concentrated, stopping only to picture a day when the people who
+honored him publicly would also know him in private. Somewhere among
+them, he believed, was the girl with whom he could play. He would meet
+her at some aero race, and she would welcome him as eagerly as he
+welcomed her.... Had he, perhaps, already met her? He walked over to
+the writing-table and scrawled a note to Gertie Cowles--regarding the
+beauty of the Yale campus.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+(_Editor's Note_: The following pages are extracts from a diary kept
+by Mr. C. O. Ericson in a desultory fashion from January, 1911, to the
+end of April, 1912. They are reprinted quite literally. Apparently Mr.
+Ericson had no very precise purpose in keeping his journal. At times
+it seems intended as _materia_ for future literary use; at others, as
+comments for his own future amusement; at still others, as a sort of
+long letter to be later sent to his friend, Lieut. Forrest Haviland,
+U.S.A. I have already referred to them in my _Psycho-Analysis of the
+Subconscious with Reference to Active Temperaments_, but here reprint
+them less for their appeal to us as a scientific study of reactions
+than as possessing, doubtless, for those interested in pure narrative,
+a certain curt expression of somewhat unusual exploits, however
+inferior is their style to a more critical thesis on the adventurous.)
+
+
+_May 9_, (_1911_). Arrived at Mineola flying field, N. Y. to try out
+new Bagby monoplane I have bought. Not much accomodation here yet.
+Many of us housed in tents. Not enough hangars. We sit around and tell
+lies in the long grass at night, like a bunch of kids out camping.
+Went over and had a beer at Peter McLoughlin's today, that's where
+Glenn Curtiss started out from to make his first flight for Sci. Amer.
+cup.
+
+Like my new Bagby machine better than Blériot in many respects, has
+non-lifting tail, as should all modern machines. Rudder and elevator a
+good deal like the Nieuport. One passenger. Roomy cockpit and enclosed
+fuselage. Blériot control. Nearer streamline than any American plane
+yet. Span, 33.6 ft., length 24, chord of wing at fuselage 6´ 5´´.
+Chauviere propeller, 6´ 6´´, pitch 4´ 5´´. Dandy new Gnôme engine, 70
+h.p., should develop 60 to 80 m.p.h.
+
+Martin Dockerill my mechanician is pretty cute. He said to me to-day
+when we were getting work-bench up, "I bet a hat the spectators all
+flock here, now. Not that you're any better flier than some of the
+other boys, but you got the newest plane for them to write their names
+on."
+
+Certainly a scad of people butting in. Come in autos and motor cycles
+and on foot, and stand around watching everything you do till you want
+to fire a monkey wrench at them.
+
+Hank Odell has joined the Associated Order of the Pyramid and just now
+he is sitting out in front of his tent talking to some of the Grand
+Worthy High Mighties of it I guess--fat old boy with a yachting cap
+and a big brass watch chain and an Order of Pyramid charm big as your
+thumb, and a tough young fellow with a black sateen shirt and his hat
+on sideways with a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth.
+
+Since I wrote the above a party of sports, the women in fade-away
+gowns made to show their streamline forms came butting in, poking
+their fingers at everything, while the slob that owned their car
+explained everything wrong. "This is a biplane," he says, "you can see
+there's a plane sticking out on each side of the place where the
+aviator sits, it's a new areoplane (that's the way he pronounced it),
+and that dingus in front is a whirling motor." I was sitting here at
+the work-bench, writing, hot as hell and sweaty and in khaki pants and
+soft shirt and black sneakers, and the Big Boss comes over to me and
+says, "Where is Hawk Ericson, my man." "How do I know," I says. "When
+will he be back," says he, as though he was thinking of getting me
+fired p. d. q. for being fresh. "Next week. He ain't come yet."
+
+He gets sore and says, "See here, my man, I read in the papers to-day
+that he has just joined the flying colony. Permit me to inform you
+that he is a very good friend of mine. If you will ask him, I am quite
+sure that he will remember Mr. Porter Carruthers, who was introduced
+to him at the Belmont Park Meet. Now if you will be so good as to show
+the ladies and myself about----" Well, I asked Hawk, and Hawk seemed
+to be unable to remember his friend Mr. Carruthers, who was one of the
+thousand or so people recently introduced to him, but he told me to
+show them about, which I did, and told them the Gnôme was built radial
+to save room, and the wires overhead were a frame for a little roof
+for bad weather, and they gasped and nodded to every fool thing I
+said, swallowed it hook line and sinker till one of the females showed
+her interest by saying "How fascinating, let's go over to the Garden
+City Hotel, Porter, I'm dying for a drink." I hope she died for it.
+
+_May 10_: Up at three, trying out machine. Smashed landing chassis in
+coming down, shook me up a little. Interesting how when I rose it was
+dark on the ground but once up was a little red in the east like smoke
+from a regular fairy city.
+
+Another author out to-day bothering me for what he called "copy."
+
+Must say I've met some darn decent people in this game though. To-day
+there was a girl came out with Billy Morrison of the N. Y. Courier,
+she is an artist but crazy about outdoor life, etc. Named Istra Nash,
+a red haired girl, slim as a match but the strangest face, pale but it
+lights up when she's talking to you. Took her up and she was not
+scared, most are.
+
+_May 11_: Miss Istra Nash came out by herself. She's thinking quite
+seriously about learning to fly. She sat around and watched me work,
+and when nobody was looking smoked a cigarette. Has recently been in
+Europe, Paris, London, etc.
+
+Somehow when I'm talking to a woman like her I realize how little I
+see of women with whom I can be really chummy, tho I meet so many
+people at receptions etc. sometimes just after I have been flying
+before thousands of people I beat it to my hotel and would be glad for
+a good chat with the night clerk, of course I can bank on Martin
+Dockerill to the limit but when I talk to a person like Miss Nash I
+realize I need some one who knows good art from bad. Though Miss Nash
+doesn't insist on talking like a high-brow, indeed is picking up
+aviation technologies very quickly. She talks German like a native.
+
+Think Miss Nash is perhaps older than I am, perhaps couple of years,
+but doesn't make any difference.
+
+Reading a little German to-night, almost forgot what I learned of it
+in Plato.
+
+_May 14, Sunday_: Went into town this afternoon and went with Istra to
+dinner at the Lafayette. She told me all about her experiences in
+Paris and studying art. She is quite discontented here in N. Y. I
+don't blame her much, it must have been bully over in Paree. We sat
+talking till ten. Like to see Vedrines fly, and the Louvre and the gay
+grisettes too by heck! Istra ought not to drink so many cordials, nix
+on the booze you learn when you try to keep in shape for flying,
+though Tad Warren doesn't seem to learn it. After ten we went to
+studio where Istra is staying on Washington Sq. several of her friends
+there and usual excitement and fool questions about being an aviator,
+it always makes me feel like a boob. But they saw Istra and I wanted
+to be alone and they beat it.
+
+This is really dawn but I'll date it May 14, which is yesterday. No
+sleep for me to-night, I'm afraid. Going to fly around NY in aerial
+derby this afternoon. Must get plenty sleep now.
+
+_May 15_: Won derby, not much of an event though. Struck rotten
+currents over Harlem River, machine rolled like a whale-back.
+
+Istra out here to-morrow. Glad. But after last night afraid I'll get
+so I depend on her, and the aviator that keeps his nerve has to be
+sort of a friendless cuss some ways.
+
+_May 16_: Istra came out here. Seems very discontented. I'm afraid
+she's the kind to want novelty and attention incessantly, she seems to
+forget that I'm pretty busy.
+
+_May 17_: Saw Istra in town, she forgot all her discontent and her
+everlasting dignity and danced for me then came over and kissed me,
+she is truly a wonder, can hum a French song so you think you're among
+the peasants, but she expects absolute devotion and constant amusing
+and I must stick to my last if a mechanic like me is to amount to
+anything.
+
+_May 18_: Istra out here, she sat around and looked bored, wanted to
+make me sore, I think. When I told her I had to leave to-morrow
+morning for Rochester and couldn't come to town for dinner etc. she
+flounced home. I'm sorry, I'm mighty sorry; poor kid she's always
+going to be discontented wherever she is, and always getting some one
+and herself all wrought up. She always wants new sensations yet
+doesn't want to work, and the combination isn't very good. It'd be
+great if she really worked at her painting, but she usually stops her
+art just this side of the handle of a paint-brush.
+
+Curious thing is that when she'd gone and I sat thinking about her I
+didn't miss her so much as Gertie Cowles. I hope I see Gertie again
+some day, she is a good pal.
+
+Istra wanted me to name my new monoplane Babette, because she says it
+looks "cunning" which the Lord knows it don't, it may look efficient
+but not cunning. But I don't think I'll name it anything, tho she says
+that shows lack of imagination.
+
+People especially reporters are always asking me this question, do
+aviators have imagination? I'm not sure I know what imagination is.
+It's like this stuff about "sense of humor." Both phrases are pretty
+bankrupt now. A few years ago when I was running a car I would make
+believe I was different people, like a king driving through his
+kingdom, but when I'm warping and banking I don't have time to think
+about making believe. Of course I do notice sunsets and so on a good
+deal but that is not imagination. And I do like to go different
+places; possibly I take the imagination out that way--I guess
+imagination is partly wanting to be places where you aren't--well, I
+go when I want to, and I like that better.
+
+Anyway darned if I'll give my monoplane a name. Tad Warren has been
+married to a musical comedy soubrette with ringlets of red-brown hair
+(Istra's hair is quite bright red, but this woman has dark red hair,
+like the color of California redwood chips, no maybe darker) and she
+wears a slimpsy bright blue dress with the waist-line nearly down to
+her knees, and skirt pretty short, showing a lot of ankle, and a kind
+of hat I never noticed before, must be getting stylish now I guess,
+flops down so it almost hides her face like a basket. She's a typical
+wife for a 10 h.p. aviator with exhibition fever. She and Tad go joy
+riding almost every night with a bunch of gasoline and alcohol sports
+and all have about five cocktails and dance a new Calif. dance called
+the Turkey Trot. This bunch have named Tad's new Wright "Sammy," and
+they think it's quite funny to yell "Hello Sammy, how are you, come
+have a drink."
+
+I guess I'll call mine a monoplane and let it go at that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_July 14_: Quebec. Lost race Toronto to Quebec. Had fair chance to win
+but motor kept misfiring, couldn't seem to get plugs that would work,
+and smashed hell out of elevator coming down on tail when landing
+here. Glad Hank Odell won, since I lost. Hank has designed new
+rocker-arm for Severn motor valves. All of us invited to usual big
+dinner, never did see so many uniforms, also members of Canadian
+parliament. I don't like to lose a race, but thunder it doesn't bother
+me long. Good filet of sole at dinner. Sat near a young lieutenant,
+leftenant I suppose it is, who made me think of Forrest Haviland. I
+miss Forrest a lot. He's doing some good flying for the army, flying
+Curtiss hydro now, and trying out muffler for military scouting. What
+I like as much as anything about him is his ease, I hope I'm learning
+a little of it anyway. This stuff is all confused but must hustle off
+to reception at summer school of Royal College for Females. Must send
+all this to old Forrest to read some day--if you ever see this,
+Forrest, hello, dear old man, I thought about you when I flew over
+military post.
+
+_Later_: Big reception, felt like an awful nut, so shy I didn't hardly
+dare look up off the ground. After the formal reception I was taken
+around the campus by the Lady President, nice old lady with white hair
+and diamond combs in it. What seemed more than a million pretty girls
+kept dodging out of doorways and making snapshots of me. Good thing
+I've been reading quite a little lately, as the Lady Principal (that
+was it, not Lady President) talked very high brow. She asked me what I
+thought of this "terrible lower class unrest." Told her I was a
+socialist and she never batted an eye--of course an aviator is
+permitted to be a nut. Wonder if I am a good socialist as a matter of
+fact, I do know that most governments, maybe all, permit most children
+to never have a chance, start them out by choking them with dirt and
+T.B. germs, but how can we make international solidarity seem
+practical to the dub average voters, _how_!
+
+Letter from Gertie to-night, forwarded here. She seems sort of bored
+in Joralemon, but is working hard with Village Improvement Committee
+of woman's club for rest room for farmers' wives, also getting up P.E.
+Sunday school picnic. Be good for Istra if she did common nice things
+like that, since she won't really get busy with her painting, but how
+she'd hate me for suggesting that she be what she calls "burjoice."
+Guess Gertie is finding herself. Hope yours truly but sleepy is
+finding himself too. How I love my little bed!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+(THE DIARY OF MR. ERICSON, CONTINUED.--EDITOR)
+
+
+_AUGUST 20_, (_1911, as before_): Big Chicago meet over. They sure did
+show us a good time. Never saw better meet. Won finals in duration
+to-day. Also am second in altitude, but nix on the altitude again, I'm
+pretty poor at it. I'm no Lincoln Beachey! Don't see how he breathes.
+His 11,578 ft. was _some_ climb.
+
+Tomorrow starts my biggest attempt, by far; biggest distance flight
+ever tried in America, and rather niftier than even the European
+Circuit and British Circuit that Beaumont has won.
+
+To fly as follows: Chicago to St. Louis to Indianapolis to Columbus to
+Washington to Baltimore to Philadelphia to Atlantic City to New York.
+The New York Chronicle in company with papers along line gives prize
+of $40,000. Ought to help bank account if win, in spite of big
+expenses to undergo. Now have $30,000 stowed away, and have sent
+mother $3,000.
+
+To fly against my good old teacher M. Carmeau, and Tony Bean, Walter
+MacMonnies, M. Beaufort the Frenchman, Tad Warren, Billy Witzer, Chick
+Bannard, Aaron Solomons and other good men. Special NY Chronicle
+reporter, fellow named Forbes, assigned to me, and he hangs around all
+the time, sort of embarrassing (hurray, spelled it right, I guess) but
+I'm getting used to the reporters.
+
+Martin Dockerill has an ambition! He said to me to-day, "Say, Hawk, if
+you win the big race you got to give me five plunks for my share and
+then by gum I'm going to buy two razor-strops." "What for?" I said.
+"Oh I bet there ain't anybody else in the world that owns _two_
+razor-strops!"
+
+Not much to say about banquet, lots of speeches, good grub.
+
+What tickles me more than anything is my new flying garments--not
+clothes but _garments_, by heck! I'm going to be a regular little old
+aviator in a melodrama. I've been wearing plain suits and a cap, same
+good old cap, always squeegee on my head. But for the big race I've
+got riding breeches and puttees and a silk shirt and a tweed Norfolk
+jacket and new leather coat and French helmet with both felt and
+springs inside the leather--this last really valuable. The real stage
+aviator, that's me. Watch the photographers fall for it. I bet Tad
+Warren's Norfolk jacket is worth $10,000 a year to him!
+
+I pretended to Martin that I was quite serious about the clothes, the
+garments I mean. I dolled myself all up last night and went swelling
+into my hangar and anxiously asked Martin if he didn't like the
+get-up, and he nearly threw a fit. "Good Lord," he groans, "you look
+like an aviator on a Ladies Home Journal cover, guaranteed not to
+curse, swear or chaw tobacco. What's become of that girl you was
+kissing, last time I seen you on the cover?"
+
+_August 25_: Not much time to write diary on race like this, it's just
+saw wood all the time or lose.
+
+Bad wind to-day. Sometimes the wind don't bother me when I am flying,
+and sometimes, like to-day, it seems as though the one thing in the
+whole confounded world is the confounded wind that roars in your ears
+and makes your eyes water and sneaks down your collar to chill your
+spine and goes scooting up your sleeves, unless you have gauntlets,
+and makes your ears sting. Roar, roar, roar, the wind's worse than the
+noisiest old cast-iron tin-can Vrenskoy motor. You want to duck your
+head and get down out of it, and Lord it tires you so--aviation isn't
+all "brilliant risks" and "daring dives" and that kind of
+blankety-blank circus business, not by a long shot it ain't, lots of
+it is just sticking there and bucking the wind like a taxi driver
+speeding for a train in a storm. Tired to-night and mad.
+
+_September 5_: New York! I win! Plenty smashes but only got jarred. I
+beat out Beaufort by eight hours, and Aaron Solomons by nearly a day.
+Carmeau's machine hopelessly smashed in Columbus, but he was not hurt,
+but poor Tad Warren _killed_ crossing Illinois.
+
+_September 8_: Had no time to write about my reception here in New
+York till now.
+
+I've been worrying about poor Tad Warren's wife, bunch of us got
+together and made up a purse for her. Nothing more pathetic than these
+poor little women that poke down the cocktails to keep excited and
+then go to pieces.
+
+I don't believe I was very decent to Tad. Sitting here alone in a
+hotel room, it seems twice as lonely after the fuss and feathers these
+last few days, a fellow thinks of all the rotten things he ever did.
+Poor old Tad. Too late now to cheer him up. Too late. Wonder if they
+shouldn't have called off race when he was killed.
+
+Wish Istra wouldn't keep calling me up. Have I _got_ to be rude to
+her? I'd like to be decent to her, but I can't stand the cocktail
+life. Lord, that time she danced, though.
+
+Poor Tad was [See Transcriber's note.]
+
+Oh hell, to get back to the reception. It was pretty big. Parade of
+the Aero Club and Squadron A, me in an open-face hack, feeling like a
+boob while sixty leven billion people cheered. Then reception by
+mayor, me delivering letter from mayor of Chicago which I had cutely
+sneaked out in Chicago and mailed to myself here, N. Y. general
+delivery, so I wouldn't lose it on the way. Then biggest dinner I've
+ever seen, must have been a thousand there, at the Astor, me very
+natty in a new dress suit (hey bo, I fooled them, it was ready-made
+and cost me just $37.50 and fitted like my skin.)
+
+Mayor, presidents of boroughs of NY, district attorney, vice president
+of U.S., lieut. governor of NY, five or six senators, chief of
+ordnance, U.S.A., arctic explorers and hundreds like that, but most of
+all Forrest Haviland whom I got them to stick right up near me.
+Speeches mostly about me, I nearly rubbed the silver off my flossy new
+cigarette case keeping from looking foolish while they were telling
+about me and the future of aviation and all them interesting subjects.
+
+Forrest and I sneaked off from the reporters next afternoon, had quiet
+dinner down in Chinatown.
+
+We have a bully plan. If we can make it and if he can get leave we
+will explore the headwaters of the Amazon with a two-passenger Curtiss
+flying boat, maybe next year.
+
+Now the reception fans have done their darndest and all the excitement
+is over including the shouting and I'm starting for Newport to hold a
+little private meet of my own, backed by Thomas J. Watersell, the
+steel magnate, and by to-morrow night NY will forget me. I realized
+that after the big dinner. I got on the subway at Times Square, jumped
+quick into the car just as the doors were closing, and the guard
+yapped at me, "What are you trying to do, Billy, kill yourself?" He
+wasn't spending much time thinking about famous Hawk Ericson, and I
+got to thinking how comfortable NY will manage to go on being when
+they no longer read in the morning paper whether I dined with the
+governor, or with Martin Dockerill at Bazoo Junction Depot Lunch
+Counter.
+
+They forget us quick. And already there's a new generation of
+aviators. Some of the old giants are gone, poor Moisant and Hoxsey and
+Johnstone and the rest killed, and there's coming along a bunch of
+youngsters that can fly enough to grab the glory, and they spread out
+the glory pretty thin. They go us old fellows except Beachey a few
+better on aerial acrobatics, and that's what the dear pee-pul like.
+(For a socialist I certainly do despise the pee-pul's _taste_!) I
+won't do any flipflops in the air no matter what the county fair
+managers write me. Somehow I'd just as soon be alive and exploring the
+Amazon with old Forrest as dead after "brilliant feats of fearless
+daring." Go to it, kids, good luck, only test your supporting wires,
+and don't try to rival Lincoln Beachey, he's a genius.
+
+Glad got a secretary for a couple days to handle all this mail.
+Hundreds of begging letters and mash notes from girls since I won the
+big prize. Makes me feel funny! One nice thing out of the mail--letter
+from the Turk, Jack Terry, that I haven't seen since Plato. He didn't
+graduate, his old man died and he is assistant manager of quite a good
+sized fisheries out in Oregon, glad to hear from him again. Funny, I
+haven't thought of him for a year.
+
+I feel lonely and melancholy to-night in spite of all I do to cheer
+up. Let up after reception etc. I suppose. I feel like calling up
+Istra, after all, but mustn't. I ought to hit the hay, but I couldn't
+sleep. Poor Tad Warren.
+
+(_The following words appear at the bottom of a page, in a faint, fine
+handwriting unlike Mr. Ericson's usual scrawl.--The Editor_):
+
+Whatever spirits there be, of the present world or the future, take
+this prayer from a plain man who knows little of monism or trinity or
+logos, and give to Tad another chance, as a child who never grew up.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_September 11_: Off to Kokomo, to fly for Farmers' Alliance.
+
+Easy meet here (Newport, R.I.) yesterday, just straight flying and
+passenger carrying. Dandy party given for me after it, by Thomas J.
+Watersell, the steel man. Have read of such parties. Bird party, in a
+garden, Watersell has many acres in his place and big house with a
+wonderful brick terrace and more darn convenient things than I ever
+saw before, breakfast room out on the terrace and swimming pool and
+little gardens one outside of each guest room, rooms all have private
+doors, house is mission style built around patio. All the Newport
+swells came to party dressed as birds, and I had to dress as a hawk,
+they had the costume all ready, wonder how they got my measurements.
+Girls in the dance of the birds. Much silk stockings, very pretty. At
+end of dance they were all surrounding me in semi-circle I stood out
+on lawn beside Mrs. Watersell, and they bowed low to me, fluttering
+their silk wings and flashing out many colored electric globes
+concealed in wings and looked like hundreds of rainbow colored
+fireflies in the darkness. Just then the big lights were turned on
+again and they let loose hundreds of all kinds of birds, and they flew
+up all around me, surprised me to death. Then for grub, best
+sandwiches I ever ate.
+
+Felt much flattered by it all, somehow did not feel so foolish as at
+banquets with speeches.
+
+After the party was all over, quite late, I went with Watersell for a
+swim in his private pool. Most remarkable thing I ever saw. He said
+everybody has Roman baths and Pompei baths and he was going to go them
+one better, so he has an Egyptian bath, the pool itself like the
+inside of an ancient temple, long vista of great big green columns and
+a big idol at the end, and the pool all in green marble with lights
+underneath the water and among the columns, and the water itself just
+heat of air, so you can't tell where the water leaves off and the air
+above it begins, hardly, and feel as though you were swimming in air
+through a green twilight. Darndest sensation I ever felt, and the idol
+and columns sort of awe you.
+
+I enjoyed the swim and the room they gave me, but I had lost my
+tooth-brush and that kind of spoiled the end of the party.
+
+I noticed Watersell only half introduced his pretty daughter to me,
+they like me as a lion but----And yet they seem to like me personally
+well enough, too. If I didn't have old Martin trailing along, smoking
+his corn-cob pipe and saying what he thinks, I'd die of loneliness
+sometimes on the hike from meet to meet. Other times have jolly
+parties, but I'd like to sit down with the Cowleses and play poker and
+not have to explain who I am.
+
+Funny--never used to feel lonely when I was bumming around on freights
+and so on, not paying any special attention to anybody.
+
+_October 23_: I wonder how far I'll ever get as an aviator? The
+newspapers all praise me as a hero. Hero, hell! I'm a pretty steady
+flier but so would plenty of chauffeurs be. This hero business is
+mostly bunk, it was mostly chance my starting to fly at all. Don't
+suppose it is all accident to become as great a flier as Garros or
+Vedrines or Beachey, but I'm never going to be a Garros, I guess. Like
+the man that can jump twelve feet but never can get himself to go any
+farther.
+
+_December 1_: Carmeau killed yesterday, flying at San Antone. Motor
+backfire, machine caught fire, burned him to death in the air. He was
+the best teacher I could have had, patient and wise. I can't write
+about him. And I can't get this insane question out of my mind: Was
+his beard burned? I remember just how it looked, and think of that
+when all the time I ought to remember how clever and darn decent he
+was. Carmeau will never show me new stunts again.
+
+And Ely killed in October, Cromwell Dixon gone--the plucky youngster,
+Professor Montgomery, Nieuport, Todd Shriver whom Martin Dockerill and
+Hank Odell liked so much, and many others, all dead, like Moisant. I
+don't think I take any undue risks, but it makes me stop and think.
+And Hank Odell with a busted shoulder. Captain Paul Beck once told me
+he believed it was mostly carelessness, these accidents, and he
+certainly is a good observer, but when I think of a careful
+constructor like Nieuport----
+
+Punk money I'm making. Thank heaven there will be one more good year
+of the game, 1912, but I don't know about 1913. Looks like the
+exhibition game would blow up then--nearly everybody that wants to has
+seen an aeroplane fly once, now, and that's about all they want, so
+good bye aviation, except for military use and flying boats for
+sportsmen. At least good bye during a slump of several years.
+
+Hope to thunder Forrest and I will be able to make our South American
+hike, even if it costs every cent I have. That will be something like
+it, seeing new country instead of scrapping with fair managers about
+money.
+
+_December 22_: Hoorray! Christmas time at sea! Quite excite to smell
+the ocean again and go rolling down the narrow gangways between the
+white state-room doors. Off for a month's flying in Brazil and
+Argentine, with Tony Bean. Will look up data for coming exploration of
+Amazon headwaters. Martin Dockerill like a regular Beau Brummel in new
+white flannels, parading the deck, making eyes at pretty Greaser
+girls. It's good to be _going_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Feb. 22, 1912_: Geo. W's birthday. He'd have busted that no-lie
+proviso if he'd ever advertised an aero meet.
+
+Start of flight New Orleans to St. Louis. Looks like really big times,
+old fashioned jubilee all along the road and lots of prizes, though
+take a chance. Only measly little $2,500 prize guaranteed, but vague
+promises of winnings at towns all along, where stop for short
+exhibitions. Each of contestants has to fly at scheduled towns for
+percentage of gate receipts.
+
+_Feb. 23_: What a rotten flight to-day. Small crowd out to see me off.
+No sooner up than trouble with plugs. Wanted to land, but nothing but
+bayous, rice fields, cane breaks, and marshes. Farmer shot at my
+machine. Soon motor stopped on me and had to come down awhooping on a
+small plowed field. Smashed landing gear and got an awful jar. Nothing
+serious though. It was two hours before a local blacksmith and I
+repaired chassis and cleaned plugs. I started off after coaching three
+scared darkies to hold the tail, while the blacksmith spun the
+propeller. He would give it a couple of bats, then dodge out of the
+way too soon, while I sat there and tried not to look mad, which by
+gum I was plenty mad. Landed in this bum town, called ----, fourth in
+the race, and found sweet (?) refuge in this chills and fever hotel.
+Wish I was back in New Orleans. Cheer up, having others ahead of me in
+the race just adds a little zip to it. Watch me to-morrow. And I'm not
+the only hard luck artist. Aaron Solomons busted propeller and nearly
+got killed.
+
+_Later._ Cable. Tony Bean is dead. Killed flying. My god, Tony,
+impossible to think of him as dead, just a few days ago we were flying
+together and calling on senoritas and he playing the fiddle and
+laughing, always so polite, like he used to fiddle us into good nature
+when we got discouraged at Bagby's school. Seems like it was just
+couple minutes ago we drove in his big car through Avenida de Mayo and
+everybody cheered him, he was hero of Buenos Aires, yet he treated me
+as the Big Chief. Cablegram forwarded from New Orleans, dated
+yesterday, "Beanno killed fell 200 feet."
+
+And to-morrow I'll have to be out and jolly the rustic meet managers
+again. Want to go off some place and be quiet and think. Wish I could
+get away, be off to South America with Forrest.
+
+_February 24_: Rotten luck continues. Back in same town again! Got up
+yesterday and motor misfired, had to make quick landing in a bayou and
+haul out machine myself aided by scared kids. Got back here and found
+gasoline pipe fouled, small piece of tin stuck in it.
+
+Martin feels as bad as I do at Tony's death, tho he doesn't say much
+of anything. "Gosh, and Tony such a nice little cuss," was about all
+he said, but he looked white around the gills.
+
+_Feb. 25_: Another man has dropped out, I am third but still last in
+the race. Race fever got me to-day, didn't care for anything but
+winning, got off to a good start, then took chances, machine wobbled
+like a board in the surf. Am having some funny kind of chicken creole
+I guess it is for lunch, writing this in hotel dining room.
+
+_Later_: Passed Aaron Solomons, am now second in the race, landed here
+just three hours behind Walter MacMonnies. Three letters forwarded
+here, from Forrest, he is flying daily at army aviation camp, also
+from Gertie Cowles, she and her mother are in Minneapolis, attending a
+week of grand opera, also to my surprise short note from Jack Ryan,
+the grouch, saying he has given up flying and gone back into motor
+business.
+
+There won't be much more than money to pay expenses on this trip.
+
+Tomorrow I'll show them some real flying.
+
+_Later_: Telegram from a St. L. newspaper. Sweet business. Says that
+promoters of race have not kept promise to remove time limit as they
+promised. Doubt if either Walter MacMonnies or I can finish in time
+set.
+
+_Feb. 26_: Bad luck continues but made fast flight after two forced
+descents, one of them had to make difficult landing, plane down on
+railroad track, avoiding telegraph wires, and get machine off track as
+could hear train coming, awful job. Nerves not very good. Once when up
+at 200 ft. heighth from which Tony Bean fell, I saw his face right in
+air in front of me and jumped so I jerked the stuffings out of control
+wires.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_March 15_: Just out of hospital, after three weeks there, broken leg
+still in splints. Glad Walter MacM got thru in time limit, got prize.
+Too week and shaky write much, shoulder still hurts.
+
+_March 18_: How I came to fall (fall that broke my leg, three weeks
+ago) Was flying over rough country when bad gust came thru hill
+defile. Wing crumpled. Up at 400 ft. Machine plunged forward then
+sideways. Gosh, I thought, I'm gone, but will live as long as I can,
+even a few seconds more, and kept working with elevator, trying to
+right her even a little. Ground coming up fast. Must have jumped, I
+think. Landed in marsh, that saved my life, but woke up at doctor's
+house, leg busted and shoulder bad, etc. Machine shot to pieces, but
+Martin Dockerill has it pretty well repaired. He and the doc and I
+play poker every day, Martin always wins with his dog-gone funeral
+face no matter tho he has an ace full.
+
+_March 24_: Leg all right, pretty nearly. Rigged up steering bar so I
+can work it with one foot. Flew a mile to-day, went not badly. Hope to
+fly at Springfield, Ill. meet next week. Will be able to make Brazil
+trip with Forrest Haviland all right. The dear old boy has been
+writing to me every day while I've been on the bum. Newspapers have
+made a lot of my flying so soon again, several engagements and now
+things look bright again. Reading lots and chipper as can be.
+
+_March 25_: Forrest Haviland is dead He was killed to-day.
+
+_March 27_: Disposed of monoplane by telegraph. Got Martin job with
+Sunset Aviation Company.
+
+_March 28_: Started for Europe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_May 8, Paris_: Forrest and I would have met to-day in New York to
+perfect plans for Brazil trip.
+
+_May 10_: Am still trying to answer letter from Forrest's father.
+Can't seem to make it go right. If I could have seen Forrest again.
+But maybe they were right, holding funeral before I could get there.
+Captain Faber says Forrest was terribly crushed, falling from 1700 ft.
+I wish I didn't keep on thinking of plans for our Brazil trip, then
+remembering we won't make it after all. I don't think I will fly till
+fall, anyway, though I feel stronger now after rest in England,
+Titherington has beautiful place in Devonshire. England seems to stick
+to biplane, can't make them see monoplane. Don't think I shall fly
+before fall. To-day I would have been with Forrest Haviland in New
+York, I think he could have got leave for Brazil trip. We would taken
+Martin. Tony promised to meet us in Rio. I like France but can't get
+used to language, keep starting to speak Spanish. Maybe I'll fly here
+in France but certainly not for some time, though massage has fixed me
+all O.K. Am studying French. Maybe shall bicycle thru France. Mem.:
+Write to Colonel Haviland when I can.
+
+_Must_ when I can.
+
+
+
+
+Part III
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF LOVE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+In October, 1912, a young man came with an enthusiastic letter from
+the president of the Aero Club to old Stephen VanZile, vice-president
+and general manager of the VanZile Motor Corporation of New York. The
+young man was quiet, self-possessed, an expert in regard to motors,
+used to meeting prominent men. He was immediately set to work at a
+tentative salary of $2,500 a year, to develop the plans of what he
+called the "Touricar"--an automobile with all camping accessories,
+which should enable motorists to travel independent of inns, add the
+joy of camping to the joy of touring, and--a feature of nearly all
+inventions--add money to the purse of the inventor.
+
+The young man was Carl Ericson, whom Mr. VanZile had seen fly at New
+Orleans during the preceding February. Carl had got the idea of the
+Touricar while wandering by motor-cycle through Scandinavia and
+Russia.
+
+He was, at this time, twenty-seven years old; not at all remarkable in
+appearance nor to be considered handsome, but so clean, so well
+bathed, so well set-up and evenly tanned, that one thought of the
+swimming, dancing, tennis-playing city men of good summer resorts, an
+impression enhanced by his sleek corn-silk hair and small, pale
+mustache. His clothes came from London, his watch-chain was a thin
+line of platinum and gold, his cigarette-case of silver engraved in
+inconspicuous bands--a modest and sophisticated cigarette-case, which
+he had possessed long enough to forget that he had it. He was
+apparently too much the easy, well-bred, rather inexperienced Yale or
+Princeton man (not Harvard; there was a tiny twang in his voice, and
+he sometimes murmured "Gee!") to know much about life or work, as
+yet, and his smooth, rosy cheeks made it absurdly evident that he had
+not been away from the college insulation for more than two years.
+
+But when he got to work with draftsman and stenographers, when a curt
+kindliness filled his voice, he proved to be concentrated, unafraid of
+responsibility, able to keep many people busy; trained to something
+besides family tradition and the collegians' naïve belief that it
+matters who wins the Next Game.
+
+His hands would have given away the fact that he had done things. They
+were large, broad; the knuckles heavy; the palms calloused by
+something rougher than oar and tennis-racket. The microscopic traces
+of black grease did not for months quite come out of the cracks in his
+skin. And two of his well-kept but thick nails had obviously been
+smashed.
+
+The men of the same rank as himself in the office, captains and first
+lieutenants of business, said that he "simply ate up work." They
+fancied, with the eager old-womanishness of office gossip, that he had
+a "secret sorrow," for, though he was pleasant enough, he kept very
+much to himself. The cause of his retirement from aviation was the
+theme of many romantic legends. They did not know precisely what it
+was he had done in the pre-historic period of a year before, but they
+treated him with reverence instead of the amused aloofness with which
+an office usually waits to see whether a new man will prove to be a
+fool or a "grouch," a clown or a good fellow. The stenographers and
+filing-girls and telephone-girls followed with yearning eyes the
+hero's straight back. The girl who discovered, in an old _New York
+Chronicle_ lining a bureau drawer, an interview with Carl, became very
+haughty over its possession and lent it only to her best lady friends.
+The older women, who knew that Carl had had a serious accident,
+whispered in cloak-room confidences, "Poor fellow, and so brave about
+it."
+
+Yet all the while Carl's china-blue eyes showed no trace of pain nor
+sorrow nor that detestable appeal for sympathy called "being brave
+about his troubles."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were many thoughtful features which fitted the Touricar for use
+in camping--extra-sized baggage-box whose triangular shape made the
+car more nearly streamline, special folding silk tents, folding
+aluminum cooking-utensils, electric stove run by current from the car,
+electric-battery light attached to a curtain-rod. But the distinctive
+feature, the one which Carl could patent, was the means by which a bed
+was made up inside the car as Pullman seats are turned into berths.
+The back of the front seat was hinged, and dropped back to horizontal.
+The upholstery back of the back seat could be taken out and also
+placed on the horizontal. With blankets spread on the level space thus
+provided, with the extra-heavy top and side curtains in place, and the
+electric light switched on, tourists had a refuge cleaner than a
+country hotel and safer than a tent....
+
+The first Touricar was being built. Carl was circularizing a list of
+possible purchasers, and corresponding with makers of camping goods.
+
+Because he was not office-broken he did not worry about the risks of
+the new enterprise. The stupid details of affairs had, for him, a
+soul--the Adventure of Business.
+
+To be consulted by draftsmen and shop foremen; to feel that if he
+should not arrive at 8.30 A.M. to the second the most important part
+of all the world's business would be halted and stenographers loll in
+expensive idleness; to have the chief, old VanZile, politely anxious
+as to how things were going; to plan ways of making a million dollars
+and not have the plans seem fantastic--all these made it interesting
+to overwork, and hypnotized Carl into a feeling of responsibility
+which was less spectacular than flying before thousands, but more in
+accordance with the spirit of the time and place.
+
+Inside the office--busy and reaching for success. Outside the
+office--frankly bored.
+
+Carl was a dethroned prince. He had been accustomed to a more than
+royal court of admirers. Now he was a nobody the moment he went twenty
+feet from his desk. He was forgotten. He did not seek out the many
+people he had met when he was an aviator and a somebody. He believed,
+perhaps foolishly, that they liked him only as a personage, not as a
+person. He sat lonely at dinner, in cheap restaurants with stains on
+the table-cloths, for he had put much of his capital into the new
+Touricar Company, mothered by the VanZile Corporation; and aeroplanes,
+accessories, traveling-expenses, and the like had devoured much of his
+large earnings at aviation before he had left the game.
+
+In his large, shabby, fairly expensive furnished room on Seventy-fifth
+Street he spent unwilling evenings, working on Touricar plans, or
+reading French--French technical motor literature, light novels,
+Balzac, anything.
+
+He tried to keep in physical form, and, much though the routine and
+silly gestures of gymnasium exercises bored him, he took them three
+times a week. He could not explain the reason, but he kept his
+identity concealed at the gymnasium, giving his name as "O. Ericson."
+
+Even at the Aero Club, where scores knew him by sight, he was a
+nobody. Aviation, like all pioneer arts, must look to the men who are
+doing new things or planning new things, not to heroes past. Carl was
+often alone at lunch at the club. Any group would have welcomed him,
+but he did not seek them out. For the first time he really saw the
+interior decorations of the club. In the old days he had been much too
+busy talking with active comrades to gaze about. But now he stared for
+five minutes together at the stamped-leather wall-covering of the
+dining-room. He noted, much too carefully for a happy man, the
+trophies of the lounging-room. But at one corner he never glanced. For
+here was a framed picture of the forgotten Hawk Ericson, landing on
+Governor's Island, winner of the flight from Chicago to New York....
+Such a beautiful swoop!...
+
+There is no doubt of the fact that he disliked the successful new
+aviators, and did so because he was jealous of them. He admitted the
+fact, but he could not put into his desire to be a good boy
+one-quarter of the force that inspired his resentment at being a
+lonely man and a nobody. But, since he knew he was envious, he was
+careful not to show it, not to inflict it upon others. He was gracious
+and added a wrinkle between his brows, and said "Gosh!" and "ain't"
+much less often.
+
+He had few friends these days. Death had taken many; and he was wary
+of lion-hunters, who in dull seasons condescend to ex-lions and
+dethroned princes. But he was fond of a couple of Aero Club men, an
+automobile ex-racer who was a selling-agent for the VanZile
+Corporation, and Charley Forbes, the bright-eyed, curly-headed, busy,
+dissipated little reporter who had followed him from Chicago to New
+York for the _Chronicle_. Occasionally one of the men with whom he had
+flown--Hank Odell or Walter MacMonnies or Lieutenant Rutledge of the
+navy--came to town, and Carl felt natural again. As for women, the
+only girl whom he had known well in years, Istra Nash, the painter,
+had gone to California to keep house for her father till she should
+have an excuse to escape to New York or Europe again.
+
+Inside the office--a hustling, optimistic young business man. For the
+rest of the time--a dethroned prince. Such was Carl Ericson in
+November, 1912, when a letter from Gertrude Cowles, which had pursued
+him all over America and Europe, finally caught him:
+
+---- West 157th St.
+
+NEW YORK.
+
+CARL DEAR,--Oh such excitement, we have come to _New York_ to live!
+Ray has such a good position with a big NY real estate co. & Mama & I
+are going to make a home for him even if it's only just a flat (but
+it's quite a big one & looks out on the duckiest old house that must
+have been adorning Harlem for heaven knows how long,) & our house has
+all modern conveniences, elevator & all.
+
+Think, Carl, I'm going to study dancing at Madame Vashkowska's
+school--she was with the Russian ballet & really is almost as
+wonderful a dancer as Isadora Duncan or Pavlova. Perhaps I'll teach
+all these ducky new dances to children some day. I'm just terribly
+excited to be here, like the silliest gushiest little girl in the
+world. And I do hope so much you will be able to come to NY & honor us
+with your presence at dinner, famous aviator--our Carl & we are so
+_proud_ of you--if you will still remember simple people like us do
+come _any time_. Wonder where you will be when this reaches you.
+
+I read in the papers that your accident isn't serious but I am
+worried, oh Carl you must take care of yourself.
+
+Yours as ever,
+
+GERTIE.
+
+P.S. Mama sends her best regards, so does Ray, he has a black mustache
+now, we tease him about it dreadfully.
+
+G.
+
+One minute after reading the letter, in his room, Carl was standing on
+the chaste black-and-white tiles of the highly respectable
+white-arched hall down-stairs asking Information for the telephone
+number of ---- West 157th Street, while his landlord, a dry-bearded
+goat of a physician who had failed in the practise of medicine and was
+now failing in the practise of rooming-houses, listened from the front
+of the hall.
+
+Glad to escape from the funereally genteel house, Carl hastily changed
+his collar and tie and, like the little boy Carl whom Gertie had
+known, dog-trotted to the subway, which was going to take him Home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Before the twelve-story Bendingo Apartments, Carl scanned the rows of
+windows which pierced the wall like bank-swallows' nests in a bold
+cliff.... One group of those windows was home--Joralemon and memories,
+Gertie's faith and understanding.... It was she who had always
+understood him.... In anticipation he loitered through the big,
+marble-and-stucco, rug and rubber-tree, negro hallboy and Jew tenant
+hallway.... What would the Cowleses be like, now?
+
+Gertie met him in the coat-smelling private hall of the Cowles
+apartment, greeted him with both hands clasping his, and her voice
+catching in, "Oh, _Carl_, it's so good to see you!" Behind Gertie was
+a swishing, stiff-backed Mrs. Cowles, piping in a high, worn voice:
+"Mr. Ericson! A friend from home! And such a famous friend!"
+
+Gertie drew him into the living-room. He looked at her.
+
+He found, not a girl, but a woman of thirty, plump, solid, with the
+tiniest wrinkles of past unhappiness or ennui at the corners of her
+mouth; but her eyes radiant with sweetness, and her hair appealingly
+soft and brown above her wide, calm forehead. She was gowned in
+lavender crêpe de Chine, with panniers of satin elaborately sprinkled
+with little bunches of futurist flowers; long jet earrings; a low-cut
+neck that hinted of a comfortable bosom. Eyes shining, hands firm on
+his arm, voice ringing, she was unaffectedly glad to see him--her
+childhood playmate, whom she had not beheld for seven years.
+
+Mrs. Cowles was waiting for them to finish their greetings. Carl was
+startled to find Mrs. Cowles smaller than he had remembered, her hair
+nearly white and not perfectly matched, her face crisscrossed with
+wrinkles deeper than her age justified. But her old disapproval of
+Carl, son of a carpenter and cousin of a "hired girl," was gone. She
+even laughed mildly, like a kitten sneezing. And from a room somewhere
+beyond Ray shouted:
+
+"Be right there in a second, old man. Crazy to have a look at you."
+
+Carl did not really see the living-room, their background. Indeed, he
+never really saw it. There was nothing to see--chairs and a table and
+pictures of meadows and roses. It was comfortable, however, and had
+conveniences--a folding card-table, a cribbage-board, score-pads for
+whist and five hundred; a humidor of cigars; a large Morris chair and
+an ugly but well-padded couch of green tufted velvetine.
+
+They sat about in chairs, talking.
+
+Ray came in, slapped Carl on the back, roared: "Well, here's the
+stranger! Holy Mike! have you got a mustache, too? Better shave it off
+before Gert starts kidding you about it. Have a cigar?"
+
+Carl felt at home for the first time in a year; for the first time
+talked easily.
+
+"Say, Gertie, tell me about my folks, and Bone Stillman."
+
+"Why, I saw your father just before we left, Carl. You know he still
+does quite a little business. We got your mother to join the Nautilus
+Club--she doesn't go very often; but she had a nice paper about 'Java
+and Its Products,' and she helps us a lot with the rest-room. I
+haven't seen Mr. Stillman for a long, long time. Ray, what has----"
+
+Ray: "Why, I think old Bone's off on some expedition 'r other. Fellow
+told me Bone was some kind of a forest ranger or mine inspector, or
+some darn thing, up in the Big Woods. He must be pretty well along
+toward seventy now, at that."
+
+Carl: "So dad's getting along well. His letters aren't very
+committal.... Oh, say, Gertie, what ever became of Ben Rusk? I've lost
+track of him entirely."
+
+Gertie: "Why, didn't you know? He went to Rush Medical College. They
+say he did splendidly there; he stood awfully well in his classes, and
+now he's in practise with his father, home."
+
+Carl: "Rush?"
+
+Gertie: "Yes, you know, in Chi----"
+
+Carl: "Oh yes, sure; in Chicago; sure, I remember now; I saw it when I
+was there one time. Why! That's the school his father went to, wasn't
+it?"
+
+Ray: "Yes, sure, that's the one."
+
+The point seemed settled.
+
+Carl: "Well, well, so Ben _did_ study medicine, after----Oh, _say_,
+how's Adelaide Benner?"
+
+Gertie: "Why, you'll see her! She's coming to New York in just a
+couple of weeks to stay with us till she gets settled. Just think,
+she's to have a whole year here, studying domestic science, and then
+she's to have a perfectly dandy position teaching in the Fargo High
+School. I'm not supposed to tell--you mustn't breathe a _word_ of
+it----"
+
+Mrs. Cowles (interrupting): "Adelaide is a good girl....Ray! Don't
+tilt your chair!"
+
+Gertie: "Yes, _isn't_ she, mamma.... Well, I was just saying: between
+you and me, Carl, she is to have the position in Fargo all ready and
+waiting for her, though of course they can't announce it publicly,
+with all the cats that would like to get it, and all. Isn't that
+fine?"
+
+Carl: "Certainly is.... 'Member the time we had the May party at
+Adelaide's, and all I could get for my basket was rag babies and May
+flowers? Gee, but I felt out of it!"
+
+Gertie: "We did have some good parties, _didn't_ we!"
+
+Ray: "Don't call that much of a good party for Carl! Ring off, Gert;
+you got the wrong number that time, all right!"
+
+Gertie (flushing): "Oh, I _didn't_ mean----But we did have some good
+times. Oh, Carl, will you _ever_ forget the time you and I ran away
+when we were just babies?"
+
+Carl: "I'll never forget----"
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "I'll never forget that time! My lands! I thought I
+should die, I was so frightened."
+
+Carl: "You've forgiven me now, though, haven't you?"
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "My dear boy, of course I have!" (She wiped away a few
+tears with a gentlewoman handkerchief of lace and thin linen. Carl
+crossed the room and kissed her pale-veined, silvery old hand.
+Abashed, he subsided on the couch, and, trying to look as though he
+hadn't done it----)
+
+Carl: "Ohhhhh _say_, whatever did become of----Oh, I can't think of
+his name----Oh, _you_ know----I know his name well as I do my own, but
+it's slipped me, just for the moment----You know, he ran the
+billiard-parlor; the son of the----"
+
+(From Mrs. Cowles, a small, disapproving sound; from Ray, a grin of
+knowing naughtiness and a violent head-shake.)
+
+Gertie (gently): "Yes.... He--has left Joralemon.... Klemm, you mean."
+
+Carl (hastily, wondering what Eddie Klemm had done): "Oh, I see....
+Have there been many changes in Joralemon?"
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "Do you write to your father and mother, Carl? You ought
+to."
+
+Carl: "Oh yes, I write to them quite often, now, though for a time I
+didn't."
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "I'm glad, my boy. It's pretty good, after all, to have
+home folks that you can depend on, isn't it? When I first went to
+Joralemon, I thought it was a little pokey, but now I'm older, and
+I've been there so long and all, that I'm almost afraid of New York,
+and I declare I do get real lonely for home sometimes. I'd be glad to
+see Dr. Rusk--Ben's father, I mean, the old doctor--driving by, though
+of course you know I lived in Minneapolis a great many years, and I do
+feel I ought to take advantage of the opportunities here, and I've
+thought quite seriously about taking up French again, it's so long
+since I've studied it----You ought to study it; you will find it
+cultivates the mind. And you must be sure to write often to your
+mother; there's nothing you can depend on like a mother's love, my
+boy."
+
+Ray: "Say, look here, Carl, I want to hear something about all this
+aviation. How does it feel to fly, anyway? I'd be scared to death;
+it's funny, I can't look off the top of a sky-scraper without feeling
+as though I wanted to jump. Gosh! I----"
+
+Gertie: "Now you just let Carl tell us when he gets ready, you big,
+bad brother! Carl wants to hear all about Home first.... All these
+years!... You were asking about the changes. There haven't been so
+very many. You know it's a little slow there. Oh, of course, I almost
+forgot; why, you haven't been in Joralemon since they built up what
+used to be Tubbs's pasture."
+
+Carl: "Not the old pasture by the lake? Well, well! Is that a fact!
+Why, gee! I used to snare gophers there!"
+
+Gertie: "Oh yes. Why, you simply wouldn't _know_ it, Carl, it's so
+much changed. There must be a dozen houses on it, now. Why, there's
+cement walks and everything, and Mr. Upham has a house there, a real
+nice one, with a screened-in porch and everything.... Of course you
+know they've put in the sewer now, and there's lots of modern
+bath-rooms, and almost everybody has a Ford. We would have bought one,
+but planning to come away so soon----Oh yes, and they've added a
+fire-escape to the school-house."
+
+Carl: "Well, well!... Oh, say, Ray, how is Howard Griffin getting
+along?"
+
+Ray: "Why, Howard's graduated from Chicago Law School, and he's
+practising in Denver. Doing pretty well, I guess; settled down and got
+quite some real-estate holdings.... Have 'nother cigar, old man?...
+Say, speaking of Plato, of course you know they ousted old S. Alcott
+Woodski from the presidency, for heresy, something about baptism; and
+the dean succeeded him.... Poor old cuss, he wasn't as mean as the
+dean, anyway.... Say, Carl, I've always thought they gave you a pretty
+raw deal there----"
+
+Gertie (interrupting): "Perfectly dreadful!... Ray, _don't_ put your
+feet on that couch; I brushed it thoroughly, just this morning.... It
+was simply terrible, Carl; I've always said that if Plato couldn't
+appreciate her greatest son----"
+
+Mrs. Cowles (sleepily): "Outrageous.... And don't put your feet on
+that chair, Ray."
+
+Ray: "Oh, leave my feet alone!... Everybody knew you were dead right
+in standing up for Prof Frazer. You remember how I roasted all the
+fellows in Omega Chi when they said you were nutty to boost him? And
+when you stood up in Chapel----Lord! that was nervy."
+
+Gertie: "Indeed you were right, and now you've got so famous I
+guess----"
+
+Carl: "Oh, I ain't so----"
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "I was simply amazed.... Children, if you don't mind, I'm
+afraid I must leave you. Mr. Ericson, I'm so ashamed to be sleepy so
+early. When we lived in Minneapolis, before Mr. Cowles passed beyond,
+he was a regular night-hawk, and we used to sit--sit--" (a yawn)--"sit
+up till all hours. But to-night----"
+
+Gertie: "Oh, must you go so soon? I was just going to make Carl a
+rarebit. Carl has never seen one of my rarebits."
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "Make him one by all means, my dear, and you young people
+sit up and enjoy yourselves just as long as you like. Good night,
+all.... Ray, will you please be sure and see that that window is
+fastened before you go to bed? I get so nervous when----Mr. Ericson,
+I'm very proud to think that one of our Joralemon boys should have
+done so well. Sometimes I wonder if the Lord ever meant men to
+fly--what with so many accidents, and you know aviators often do get
+killed and all. I was reading the other day--such a large
+percentage----But we have been so proud that you should lead them all,
+I was saying to a lady on the train that we had a friend who was a
+famous aviator, and she was so interested to find that we knew you.
+Good night."
+
+They had the Welsh rarebit, with beer, and Carl helped to make it.
+Gertie summoned him into the scoured kitchen, saying, with a beautiful
+casualness, as she tied an apron about him:
+
+"We can't afford a hired girl (I suppose I should say a 'maid'),
+because mamma has put so much of our money into Ray's business, so you
+mustn't expect anything so very grand. But you'd like to help,
+wouldn't you? You're to chop the cheese. Cut it into weenty cubes."
+
+Carl did like to help. He boasted that he was the "champion
+cheese-chopper of Harlem and the Bronx, one-thirty-three ringside,"
+while Gertie was toasting crackers, and Ray was out buying bottles of
+beer in a newspaper. It all made Carl feel more than ever at home....
+It was good to be with people of such divine understanding that they
+knew what he meant when he said, "I suppose there _have_ been worse
+teachers than Prof Larsen----!"
+
+When the rabbit lay pale in death, a saddening _débâcle_ of hardened
+cheese, and they sat with their elbows on the Modified Mission
+dining-table, Gertie exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, Ray, you _must_ do that new stunt of yours for Carl. It's
+screamingly funny, Carl."
+
+Ray rose, had his collar and tie off in two jocund jerks, buttoned his
+collar on backward, cheerily turned his waistcoat back side foremost,
+lengthened his face to an expression of unctuous sanctimoniousness,
+and turned about--transformed in one minute to a fair imitation of a
+stage curate. With his hands folded, Ray droned, "Naow, sistern, it
+behooveth us heuh in St. Timothee's Chutch," while Carl pounded the
+table in his delight at seeing old Ray, the broad-shouldered, the
+lady-killer, the capable business man, drop his eyes and yearn.
+
+"Now you must do a stunt!" shrieked Ray and Gertie; and Carl
+hesitatingly sang what he remembered of Forrest Haviland's foolish
+song:
+
+    "I went up in a balloon so big
+    The people on the earth they looked like a pig,
+    Like a mice, like a katydid, like flieses and like fleasen."
+
+Then, without solicitation, Gertie decided to dance "Gather the Golden
+Sheaves," which she had learned at the school of Mme. Vashkowska, late
+(though not very late) of the Russian ballet.
+
+She explained her work; outlined the theory of sensuous and esthetic
+dancing; mentioned the backgrounds of Bakst and the glories of
+Nijinsky; told her ambition to teach the New Dancing to children. Carl
+listened with awe; and with awe did he gaze as Gertie gathered the
+Golden Sheaves--purely hypothetical sheaves in a field occupying most
+of the living-room.
+
+After the stunts Ray delicately vanished. It was not so much that he
+statedly went off to bed as that, presently, he was not there. Gertie
+and Carl were snugly alone, and at last he talked--of Forrest Haviland
+and Tony Bean, of flying and falling, of excited crowds and the
+fog-filled air-lanes.
+
+In turn she told of her ambition to do something modern and urban. She
+had hesitated between dancing and making exotic jewelry; she was glad
+she had chosen the former; it was so human; it put one in touch with
+People.... She had recently gone to dinner with real Bohemians,
+spirits of fire, splendidly in contrast with the dull plodders of
+Joralemon. The dinner had been at a marvelous place on West Tenth
+Street--very foreign, every one drinking wine and eating spaghetti and
+little red herrings, and the women fearlessly smoking cigarettes--some
+of them. She had gone with a girl from Mme. Vashkowska's school, a
+glorious creature from London, Nebraska, who lived with the most
+fascinating girls at the Three Arts Club. They had met an artist with
+black hair and languishing eyes, who had a Yankee name, but sang
+Italian songs divinely, upon the slightest pretext, so bubbling was he
+with _joie de vivre_.
+
+Carl was alarmed. "Gosh!" he protested, "I hope you aren't going to
+have much to do with the long-haired bunch.... I've invented a name
+for them--'the Hobohemians.'"
+
+"Oh no-o! I don't take them seriously at all. I was just glad to go
+once."
+
+"Of course some of them are clever."
+
+"Oh yes, aren't they clever!"
+
+"But I don't think they last very well."
+
+"Oh no, I'm sure they don't last well. Oh no, Carl, I'm too old and
+fat to be a Bohemian--a Hobohemian, I mean, so----"
+
+"Nonsense! You look so--oh, thunder! I don't know just how to express
+it--well, so _real_! It's wonderfully comfortable to be with you-all
+again. I don't mean you're just the 'so good to her mother' sort, you
+understand. But I mean you're dependable as well as artistic."
+
+"Oh, indeed, I won't take them too seriously. Besides, I suppose lots
+of the people that go to Bohemian restaurants aren't really artists at
+all; they just go to see the artists; they're just as bromidic as can
+be----Don't you hate bromides? Of course I want to see some of that
+part of life, but I think----Oh, don't you think those artists and all
+are dreadfully careless about morals?"
+
+"Well----"
+
+"Yes," she breathed, reflectively. "No, I keep up with my church and
+all--indeed I do. Oh, Carl, you must come to our church--St. Orgul's.
+It's too sweet for anything. It's just two blocks from here; and it
+isn't so far up here, you know, not with the subway--not like
+commuting. It has the _loveliest_ chapel. And the most wonderful
+reredos. And the services are so inspiring and high-church; not like
+that horrid St. Timothy's at home. I do think a church service ought
+to be beautiful. Don't you? It isn't as though we were like a lot of
+poor people who have to have their souls saved in a mission.... What
+church do you attend? You _will_ come to St. Orgul's some time, won't
+you?"
+
+"Be glad to----Oh, say, Gertie, before I forget it, what is Semina
+doing now? Is she married?"
+
+Apropos of this subject, Gertie let it be known that she herself was
+not betrothed.
+
+Carl had not considered that question; but when he was back in his
+room he was glad to know that Gertie was free.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Omega Chi Delta Club, Carl lunched with Ray Cowles. Two nights
+later, Ray and Gertie took Carl and Gertie's friend, the glorious
+creature from London, Nebraska, to the opera. Carl did not know much
+about opera. In other words, being a normal young American who had
+been water-proofed with college culture, he knew absolutely nothing
+about it. But he gratefully listened to Gertie's clear explanation of
+why Mme. Vashkowska preferred Wagner to Verdi.
+
+He had, in the mean time, received a formal invitation for a party to
+occur at Gertie's the coming Friday evening.
+
+Thursday evening Gertie coached him in a new dance, the turkey trot.
+She also gave him a lesson in the Boston, with a new dip invented by
+Mme. Vashkowska, which was certain to sweep the country, because, of
+course, Vashkowska was the only genuinely qualified _maîtresse de
+danse_ in America.
+
+It was a beautiful evening. Home! Ray came in, and the three of them
+had coffee and thin sandwiches. At Gertie's suggestion, Ray again
+turned his collar round and performed his "clergyman stunt." While the
+impersonation did not, perhaps, seem so humorous as before, Carl was
+amused; and he consented to sing the "I went up in a balloon so big"
+song, so that Ray might learn it and sing it at the office.
+
+It was captivating to have Gertie say, quietly, as he left: "I hope
+you'll be able to come to the party a little early to-morrow, Carl.
+You know we count on you to help us."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The party was on at the Cowles flat.
+
+People came. They all set to it, having a party, being lively and gay,
+whether they wanted to or not. They all talked at once, and had
+delicious shocks over the girl from London, Nebraska, who, having
+moved to Washington Place, just a block or two from ever so many
+artists, was now smoking a cigarette and, wearing a gown that was
+black and clinging. It was no news to her that men had a tendency to
+become interested in her ankles. But she still went to church and was
+accepted by quite the nicest of the St. Orgul's set, to whom Gertie
+had introduced her.
+
+She and Gertie were the only thoroughly qualified representatives of
+Art, but Beauty and Gallantry and Wit were common. The conspirators in
+holding a party were, on the male side:
+
+An insurance adjuster, who was a frat-brother to Carl and Ray, though
+he came from Melanchthon College. A young lawyer, ever so jolly, with
+a banjo. A bantling clergyman, who was spoken of with masculine
+approval because he smoked a pipe and said charmingly naughty things.
+Johnson of the Homes and Long Island Real Estate Company, and his
+brother, of the Martinhurst Development Company. Four older men,
+ranging from thin-haired to very bald, who had come with their wives
+and secretly looked at their watches while they talked brightly with
+one another's wives. Five young men whom Carl could not tell apart, as
+they all had smooth hair and eye-glasses and smart dress-shirts and
+obliging smiles and complimentary references to his aviating. He gave
+up trying to remember which was which.
+
+It was equally hard to remember which of the women Gertie knew as a
+result of her girlhood visit to New York, which from their membership
+in St. Orgul's Church, which from their relation to Minnesota. They
+all sat in rows on couches and chairs and called him "You wicked man!"
+for reasons none too clear to him. He finally fled from them and
+joined the group of young men, who showed an ill-bred and disapproved
+tendency to sneak off into Ray's room for a smoke. He did not,
+however, escape one young woman who stood out from the _mêlée_--a
+young woman with a personality almost as remarkable as that of the
+glorious creature from London, Nebraska. This was the more or less
+married young woman named Dorothy, and affectionately called
+"Tottykins" by all the St. Orgul's group. She was of the kind who look
+at men appraisingly, and expect them to come up, be unduly familiar,
+and be crushed. She had seven distinct methods of getting men to say
+indiscreet things, and three variations of reply, of which the
+favorite was to remark with well-bred calmness: "I'm afraid you have
+made a slight error, Mr. Uh---- I didn't quite catch your name?
+Perhaps they failed to tell you that I attend St. Orgul's evvvv'ry
+Sunday, and have a husband and child, and am not at all, really, you
+know. I hope that there has been nothing I said that has given you the
+idea that I have been looking for a flirtation."
+
+A thin, small female with bobbed hair was Tottykins, who kept her
+large husband and her fat, white grub of an infant somewhere in the
+back blocks. She fingered a long, gold, religious chain with her
+square, stubby hand, while she gazed into men's eyes with what she
+privately termed "daring frankness."
+
+Tottykins the fair; Tottykins the modern; Tottykins who had read
+_Three Weeks_ and nearly all of a wicked novel in French, and wore a
+large gold cross; Tottykins who worked so hard in her little flat
+that she had to rest all of every afternoon and morning; Tottykins the
+advanced and liberal--yet without any of the extremes of socialists
+and artists and vegetarians and other ill-conditioned persons who do
+not attend St. Orgul's; Tottykins the firmly domestic, whose husband
+grew more worried every year; Tottykins the intensely cultured and
+inquisitive about life, the primitively free and pervasively original,
+who announced in public places that she wanted always to live like the
+spirit of the Dancing Bacchante statue, but had the assistant rector
+of St. Orgul's in for coffee, every fourth Monday evening.
+
+Tottykins beckoned Carl to a corner and said, with her manner of
+amused condescension, "Now you sit right down here, Hawk Ericson, and
+tell me _all_ about aviation."
+
+Carl was not vastly sensitive. He had not disliked the nice young men
+with eye-glasses. Not till now did he realize how Tottykins's shrill
+references to the Dancing Bacchante and the Bacchanting of her
+mud-colored Dutch-fashioned hair had bored him. Ennui was not, of
+course, an excuse; but it was the explanation of why he answered in
+this wise (very sweetly, looking Tottykins in the eyes and patting her
+hand with a brother-like and altogether maddening condescension):
+
+"No, no, that isn't the way, Dorothy. It's quite _passé_ to ask me to
+tell you all about aviation. That isn't done, not in 1912. Oh
+Dor-o-thy! Oh no, no! No-o! No, no. First you should ask me if I'm
+afraid when I'm flying. Oh, always begin that way. Then you say that
+there's a curious fact about you--when you're on a high building and
+just look down once, then you get so dizzy that you want to jump.
+Then, after you've said that----Let's see. You're a church member,
+aren't you? Well then, next you'd say, 'Just how does it feel to be up
+in an aeroplane?' or if you don't say that then you've simply got to
+say, 'Just how does it feel to fly, anyway?' But if you're just
+_terribly_ interested, Dorothy, you might ask about biplanes _versus_
+monoplanes, and 'Do I think there'll ever be a flight across the
+Atlantic?' But whatever you do, Dorothy, don't fail to ask me if I'll
+give you a free ride when I start flying again. And we'll fly and
+fly----Like birds. You know. Or like the Dancing Bacchante.... That's
+the way to talk about aviation.... And now you tell me _all_ about
+babies!"
+
+"Really, I'm afraid babies is rather a big subject to tell all about!
+At a party! Really, you _know_----"
+
+That was the only time Carl was not bored at the party. And even then
+he had spiritual indigestion from having been rude.
+
+For the rest of the time:
+
+Every one knew everybody else, and took Carl aside to tell him that
+everybody was "the most conscientious man in our office, Ericson; why,
+the Boss would trust him with anything." It saddened Carl to hear the
+insurance adjuster boom, "Oh you Tottykins!" across the room, at
+ten-minute intervals, like a human fog-horn on the sea of ennui.
+
+They were all so uniformly polite, so neat-minded and church-going and
+dull. Nearly all the girls did their hair and coquetries one exactly
+like another. Carl is not to be pitied. He had the pleasure of
+martyrdom when he heard the younger Johnson tell of Martinhurst, the
+Suburb Beautiful. He believed that he had reached the nadir of
+boredom. But he was mistaken.
+
+After simple and pleasing refreshments of the wooden-plate and
+paper-napkin school, Gertie announced: "Now we're going to have some
+stunts, and you're each to give one. I know you all can, and if
+anybody tries to beg off--my, what will happen----! My brother has a
+new one----"
+
+For the third time that month, Carl saw Ray turn his collar round and
+become clerical, while every one rustled with delight, including the
+jolly bantling clergyman.
+
+And for the fourth time he saw Gertie dance "Gather the Golden
+Sheaves." She appeared, shy and serious, in bloomers and flat
+dancing-shoes, which made her ample calves bulge the more; she started
+at sight of the harvest moon (and well she may have been astonished,
+if she did, indeed, see a harvest moon there, above the gilded buffalo
+horns on the unit bookcase), rose to her toes, flapped her arms, and
+began to gather the sheaves to her breast, with enough plump and
+panting energy to enable her to gather at least a quarter-section of
+them before the whistle blew.
+
+It was not only esthetic, but Close to the Soil.
+
+Then, to banjo accompaniment, the insurance adjuster sighed for his
+old Kentucky home, which Carl judged to have been located in Brooklyn.
+The whole crowd joined in the chorus and----
+
+Suddenly, with a shock that made him despise himself for the cynical
+superiority which he had been enjoying, Carl remembered that Forrest
+Haviland, Tony Bean, Hank Odell, even surly Jack Ryan and the alien
+Carmeau, had sung "My Old Kentucky Home" on their last night at the
+Bagby School. He felt their beloved presences in the room. He had to
+fight against tears as he too joined in the chorus.... "Then weep no
+more, my lady."... He was beside a California poppy-field. The
+blossoms slumbered beneath the moon, and on his shoulder was the hand
+of Forrest Haviland....
+
+He had repented. He became part of the group. He spoke kindly to
+Tottykins. But presently Tottykins postponed her well-advertised
+return to her husband and baby, and gave a ten-minute dramatic recital
+from Byron; and the younger Johnson sang a Swiss mountaineer song with
+yodels.
+
+Gertie looked speculatively at Carl twice during this offering. He knew
+that the gods were plotting an abominable thing. She was going to call upon
+him for the "stunt" which had been inescapably identified with him, the
+song, "I went up in a balloon so big." He met the crisis heroically. He
+said loudly, as the shaky strains of the Swiss ballad died on the midnight
+mountain air of 157th Street (while the older men concealed yawns and
+applauded, and the family in the adjoining flat rapped on the radiator):
+"I'm sorry my throat 's so sore to-night. Otherwise I'd sing a song I
+learned from a fellow in California--balloon s' big."
+
+Gertie stared at him doubtfully, but passed to a kitten-faced girl
+from Minnesota, who was quite ready to give an imitation of a child
+whose doll has been broken. Her "stunt" was greeted with, "Oh, how
+cun-ning! Please do it again!"
+
+She prepared to do it again. Carl made hasty motions of departure,
+pathetically holding his throat.
+
+He did not begin to get restless till he had reached Ninety-sixth
+Street and had given up his seat in the subway to a woman who
+resembled Tottykins. He wondered if he had not been at the Old Home
+long enough. At Seventy-second Street, on an inspiration that came as
+the train was entering the station, he changed to a local and went
+down to Fifty-ninth Street. He found an all-night garage, hired a
+racing-car, and at dawn he was driving furiously through Long Island,
+a hundred miles from New York, on a roadway perilously slippery with
+falling snow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Carl wished that Adelaide Benner had never come from Joralemon to
+study domestic science. He felt that he was a sullen brute, but he
+could not master his helpless irritation as he walked with Adelaide
+and Gertie Cowles through Central Park, on a snowy Sunday afternoon of
+December. Adelaide assumed that one remained in the state of mind
+called Joralemon all one's life; that, however famous he might be, the
+son of Oscar Ericson was not sufficiently refined for Miss Cowles of
+the Big House on the Hill, though he might improve under Cowles
+influences. He was still a person who had run away from Plato! But
+that assumption was far less irritating than one into which Adelaide
+threw all of her faded yearning--that Gertie and he were in love.
+
+Adelaide kept repeating, with coy slyness: "Isn't it too bad you two
+have me in the way!" and: "Don't mind poor me. Auntie will turn her
+back any time you want her to."
+
+And Gertie merely blushed, murmuring, "Don't be a silly."
+
+At Eightieth Street Adelaide announced: "Now I must leave you
+children. I'm going over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I do love
+to see art pictures. I've always wanted to. Now be as good as you can,
+you two."
+
+Gertie was mechanical about replying. "Oh, don't run away, Addy dear."
+
+"Oh yes, you two will miss an old maid like me terribly!" And Adelaide
+was off, a small, sturdy, undistinguished figure, with an unyielding
+loyalty to Gertie and to the idea of marriage.
+
+Carl looked at her bobbing back (with wrinkles in her cloth jacket
+over the shoulders) as she melted into the crowd of glossy fur-trimmed
+New-Yorkers. He comprehended her goodness, her devotion. He sighed,
+"If she'd only stop this hinting about Gertie and me----" He was
+repentant of his irritation, and said to Gertie, who was intimately
+cuddling her arm into his: "Adelaide's an awfully good kid. Sorry she
+had to go."
+
+Gertie jerked her arm away, averted her profile, grated: "If you miss
+her so much, perhaps you'd better run after her. Really, I wouldn't
+interfere, not for _worlds_!"
+
+"Why, hello, Gertie! What seems to be the matter? Don't I detect a
+chill in the atmosphere? So sorry you've gone and gotten refined on
+me. I was just going to suggest some low-brow amusement like tea at
+the Casino."
+
+"Well, you ought to know a lady doesn't----"
+
+"Oh, now, Gertie dear, not 'lady.'"
+
+"I don't think you're a bit nice, Carl Ericson, I don't, to be making
+fun of me when I'm serious. And why haven't you been up to see us?
+Mamma and Ray have spoken of it, and you've only been up once since my
+party, and then you were----"
+
+"Oh, please let's not start anything. Sorry I haven't been able to get
+up oftener, but I've been taking work home. You know how it is--you
+know when you get busy with your dancing-school----"
+
+"Oh, I meant to tell you. I'm through, just _through_ with Vashkowska
+and her horrid old school. She's a cat and I don't believe she ever
+had anything to do with the Russian ballet, either. What do you think
+she had the effrontery to tell me? She said that I wasn't practising
+and really trying to learn anything. And I've been working myself
+into----Really, my nerves were in such a shape, I would have been in
+danger of a nervous breakdown if I had kept on. Tottykins told me how
+she had a nervous breakdown, and had me see her doctor, such a dear,
+Dr. St. Claire, so refined and sympathetic, and he told me I was right
+in suspecting that nobody takes Vashkowska seriously any more, and,
+besides, I don't think much of all this symbolistic dancing, anyway,
+and at last I've found out what I really want to do. Oh, Carl, it's so
+wonderful! I'm studying ceramics with Miss Deitz, she's so wonderful
+and temperamental and she has the dearest studio on Gramercy Park. Of
+course I haven't made anything yet, but I know I'm going to like it so
+much, and Miss Deitz says I have a natural taste for vahzes and----"
+
+"Huh? Oh yes, vases. I get you."
+
+"(Don't be vulgar.)----I'm going to go down to her studio and work
+every other day, and she doesn't think you have to work like a
+scrubwoman to succeed, like that horrid Vashkowska did. Miss Deitz has
+a temperament herself. And, oh, Carl, she says that 'Gertrude' isn't
+suited to me (and 'Gertie' certainly isn't!) and she calls me
+'Eltruda.' Don't you think that's a sweet name? Would you like to call
+me 'Eltruda,' sometimes?"
+
+"Look here, Gertie, I don't want to butt in, and I'm guessing at it,
+but looks to me as though one of these artistic grafters was working
+you. What do you know about this Deitz person? Has she done anything
+worth while? And honestly, Gertie----By the way, I don't want to be
+brutal, but I don't think I could stand 'Eltruda.' It sounds like
+'Tottykins.'"
+
+"Now really, Carl----"
+
+"Wait a second. How do you know you've got what you call a
+temperament? Go to it, and good luck, if you can get away with it. But
+how do you know it isn't simply living in a flat and not having any
+work to do _except_ developing a temperament? Why don't you try
+working with Ray in his office? He's a mighty good business man. This
+is just a sugges----"
+
+"Now really, this is----"
+
+"Look here, Gertie, the thing I've always admired about you is your
+wholesomeness and----"
+
+"'Wholesome!' Oh, that word! As Miss Deitz was saying just the other
+day, it's as bad----"
+
+"But you are wholesome, Gertie. That is, if you don't let New York
+turn your head; and if you'd use your ability on a real job, like
+helping Ray, or teaching--yes, or really sticking to your ceramics or
+dancing, and leave the temperament business to those who can get away
+with it. No, wait. I know I'm butting in; I know that people won't go
+and change their natures because I ask them to; but you see you--and
+Ray and Adelaide--you are the friends I depend on, and so I hate to
+see----"
+
+"Now, Carl dear, you might let me talk," said Gertie, in tones of
+maddening sweetness. "As I think it over, I don't seem to recall that
+you've been an authority on temperament for so very long. I seem to
+remember that you weren't so terribly wonderful in Joralemon! I'm glad
+to be the first to honor what you've done in aviation, but I don't
+know that that gives you the right to----"
+
+"Never said it did!" Carl insisted, with fictitious good humor.
+
+"----assume that you are an authority on temperament and art. I'm
+afraid that your head has been just a little turned by----"
+
+"Oh, hell.... Oh, I'm sorry. That just slipped."
+
+"It _shouldn't_ have slipped, you know. I'm _afraid_ it can't be
+passed over so _easily_." Gertie might have been a bustling Joralemon
+school-teacher pleasantly bidding the dirty Ericson boy, "Now go and
+wash the little hands."
+
+Carl said nothing. He was bored. He wished that he had not become
+entangled in their vague discussion of "temperament."
+
+Even more brightly Gertie announced: "I'm afraid you're not in a very
+good humor this afternoon. I'm sorry that my plans don't interest you.
+Of course, I should be very temperamental if I expected you to
+apologize for cursing and swearing, so I think I'll just leave you
+here, and when you feel better----" She was infuriatingly cheerful.
+"----I should be pleased to have you call me up. Good-by, Carl, and I
+hope that your walk will do you good."
+
+She turned into a footpath; left him muttering in tones of youthful
+injury, "Jiminy! I've done it now!"
+
+He was in Joralemon.
+
+A victoria drove by with a dowager who did not seem to be humbly
+courting the best set in Joralemon. A grin lightened Carl's face. He
+chuckled: "By golly! Gertie handled it splendidly! I'm to call up and
+be humble, and then--bing!--the least I can do is to propose and be
+led to the altar and teach a Sunday-school class at St. Orgul's for
+the rest of my life! Come hither, Hawk Ericson, let us hold council.
+Here's the way Gertie will dope it out, I guess. ('Eltruda!') I'll
+dine in solitary regret for saying 'hell'----No. First I'm to walk
+down-town, alone and busy repenting, and then I'll feed alone, and by
+eight o'clock I'll be so tired of myself that I'll call up and beg
+pretty. Rats! It's rotten mean to dope it out like that, but just the
+same----Me that have done what I've done--worried to death over one
+accidental 'hell'!... Hey there, you taxi!"
+
+Grandly he rode through the Park, and in an unrepentant manner bowed
+to every pretty woman he saw, to the disapproval of their silk-hatted
+escorts.
+
+He forgot the existence of Gertie Cowles and the Old Home Folks.
+
+But he really could not afford a taxicab, and he had to make up for it
+by economy. At seven-thirty he gloomily entered Miggleton's
+Restaurant, on Forty-second Street, the least unbearable of the
+"Popular Prices--Tables for Ladies" dens, and slumped down at a table
+near the window. There were few diners. Carl was as much a stranger as
+on the morning when he had first invaded New York, to find work with
+an automobile company, and had passed this same restaurant; still was
+he a segregated stranger, despite the fact that, two blocks away, in
+the Aero Club, two famous aviators were agreeing that there had never
+been a more consistently excellent flight in America than Hawk
+Ericson's race from Chicago to New York.
+
+Carl considered the delights of the Cowles flat, Ray's stories about
+Plato and business, and the sentimental things Gertie played on the
+guitar. He suddenly determined to go off some place and fly an
+aeroplane; as suddenly knew that he was not yet ready to return to the
+game. He read the _Evening Telegram_ and cheerlessly peered out of the
+window at the gray snow-veil which shrouded Forty-second Street.
+
+As he finished his dessert and stirred his coffee he stared into a
+street-car stalled in a line of traffic outside. Within the car, seen
+through the snow-mist, was a girl of twenty-two or three, with satiny
+slim features and ash-blond hair. She was radiant in white-fox furs.
+Carl craned to watch. He thought of the girl who, asking a direction
+before the Florida Lunch Room in Chicago, had inspired him to become a
+chauffeur.
+
+The girl in the street-car was listening to her companion, who was a
+dark-haired girl with humor and excitement about life in her face,
+well set-up, not tall, in a smartly tailored coat of brown pony-skin
+and a small hat that was all lines and no trimming. Both of them
+seemed amused, possibly by the lofty melancholy of a traffic policeman
+beside the car, who raised his hand as though he had high ideals and a
+slight stomach-ache. The dark-haired girl tapped her round knees with
+the joy of being alive.
+
+The street-car started. Carl was already losing in the city jungle the
+two acquaintances whom he had just made. The car stopped again, still
+blocked. Carl seized his coat, dropped a fifty-cent piece on the
+cashier's desk, did not wait for his ten cents change, ran across the
+street (barely escaping a taxicab), galloped around the end of the
+car, swung up on the platform.
+
+As he took a seat opposite the two girls he asked himself just what he
+expected to do now. The girls were unaware of his existence. And why
+had he hurried? The car had not started again. But he studied his
+unconscious conquests from behind his newspaper, vastly content.
+
+In the unnatural quiet of the stalled car the girls were irreverently
+discussing "George." He heard enough to know that they were of the
+rather smart, rather cultured class known as "New-Yorkers"--they might
+be Russian-American princesses or social workers or ill-paid
+governesses or actresses or merely persons with one motor-car and a
+useful papa in the family.
+
+But in any case they were not of the kind he could pick up.
+
+The tall girl of the ash-blond hair seemed to be named Olive, being
+quite unolive in tint, while her livelier companion was apparently
+christened Ruth. Carl wearied of Olive's changeless beauty as quickly
+as he did of her silver-handled umbrella. She merely knew how to
+listen. But the less spectacular, less beautiful, less languorous,
+dark-haired Ruth was born a good comrade. Her laughter marked her as
+one of the women whom earth-quake and flood and child-bearing cannot
+rob of a sense of humor; she would have the inside view, the
+sophisticated understanding of everything.
+
+The car was at last free of the traffic. It turned a corner and
+started northward. Carl studied the girls.
+
+Ruth was twenty-four, perhaps, or twenty-five. Not tall, slight enough
+to nestle, but strong and self-reliant. She had quantities of
+dark-brown hair, crisp and glinty, though not sleek, with eyebrows
+noticeably dark and heavy. Her smile was made irresistible by her
+splendidly shining teeth, fairly large but close-set and white; and
+not only the corners of her eyes joined in her smile, but even her
+nose, her delicate yet piquant nose, which could quiver like a
+deer's. When she laughed, Carl noted, Ruth had a trick of lifting her
+heavy lids quickly, and surprising one with a glint of blue eyes where
+brown were expected. Her smooth, healthy, cream-colored skin was rosy
+with winter, and looked as though in summer it would tan evenly,
+without freckles. Her chin was soft, but without a dimple, and her
+jaws had a clean, boyish leanness. Her smooth neck and delicious
+shoulders were curved, not fatly, but with youth and happiness. They
+were square, capable shoulders, with no mid-Victorian droop about
+them. Her waist was slender naturally, not from stays. Her short but
+not fat fingers were the ideal instruments for the piano. Slim were
+her crossed feet, and her unwrinkled pumps (foolish footgear for a
+snowy evening) seemed eager to dance.
+
+There was no hint of the coquette about her. Physical appeal this Ruth
+had, but it was the allure of sunlight and meadows, of tennis and a
+boat with bright, canted sails, not of boudoir nor garden
+dizzy-scented with jasmine. She was young and clean, sweet without
+being sprinkled with pink sugar; too young to know much about the
+world's furious struggle; too happy to have realized its inevitable
+sordidness; yet born a woman who would not always wish to be
+"protected," and round whom all her circle of life would center....
+
+So Carl inarticulately mused, with the intentness which one gives to
+strangers in a quiet car, till he laughed, "I feel as if I knew her
+like a book." The century's greatest problem was whether he would
+finally prefer her to Olive, if he knew them. If he could speak to
+them----But that was, in New York, more difficult than beating a
+policeman or getting acquainted with the mayor. He would lose them.
+
+Already they were rising, going out.
+
+He couldn't let them be lost. He glanced out of the window, sprang up
+with an elaborate pretense that he had come to his own street. He
+followed them out, still conning head-lines in his paper. His grave
+absorption said, plain that all might behold, that he was a
+respectable citizen to whom it would never occur to pursue strange
+young women.
+
+His new friends had been close to him in the illuminated car, but they
+were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar
+street-crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a
+street-sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the
+Fifties. As they turned east on Fifty-blankth Street he stopped under
+the street-light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it
+the address of that dear old friend, living on Fifty-blankth, on whom
+he was going to call. This was to convince the policeman of the
+perfect purity of his intentions. The fact that there was no policeman
+nearer than the man on fixed post a block away did not lessen Carl's
+pleasure in the make-believe. He industriously inspected the
+house-numbers as he followed the quickly moving girls, and frequently
+took out his watch. Nothing should make him late in calling on that
+dear old friend.
+
+Not since Adam glowered at the intruder Eve has a man been so darkly
+uninterested in two charmers. He stared clear through them; he looked
+over their heads; he observed objects on the other side of the street.
+He indignantly told the imaginary policemen who stopped him that he
+hadn't even seen the girls till this moment; that he was the victim of
+a plot.
+
+The block through which the cavalcade was passing was lined with
+shabby-genteel brownstone houses, with high stoops and haughty dark
+doors, and dressmakers' placards or doctors' cards in the windows.
+Carl was puzzled. The girls seemed rather too cheerful to belong in
+this decayed and gloomy block, which, in the days when horsehair
+furniture and bankers had mattered, had seemed imposing. But the girls
+ascended the steps of a house which was typical of the row, except
+that five motor-cars stood before it. Carl, passing, went up the
+steps of the next house and rang the bell.
+
+"What a funny place!" he heard one of the girls--he judged that it was
+Ruth--remark from the neighboring stoop. "It looks exactly like Aunt
+Emma when she wears an Alexandra bang. Do we go right up? Oughtn't we
+to ring? It ought to be the craziest party--anarchists----"
+
+"A party, eh?" thought Carl.
+
+"----ought to ring, I suppose, but----Yes, there's sure to be all
+sorts of strange people at Mrs. Hallet's----" said the voice of the
+other girl, then the door closed upon both of them.
+
+And an abashed Carl realized that a maid had opened the door of the
+house at which he himself had rung, and was glaring at him as he
+craned over to view the next-door stoop.
+
+"W-where----Does Dr. Brown live here?" he stuttered.
+
+"No, 'e don't," the maid snapped, closing the door.
+
+Carl groaned: "He don't? Dear old Brown? Not live here? Huh? What
+shall I do?"
+
+In remarkably good spirits he moved over in front of the house into
+which Ruth and Olive had gone. People were coming to the party in twos
+and threes. Yes. The men were in evening clothes. He had his
+information.
+
+Swinging his stick up to a level with his shoulder at each stride, he
+raced to Fifty-ninth Street and the nearest taxi-stand. He was whirled
+to his room. He literally threw his clothes off. He shaved hastily,
+singing, "Will You Come to the Ball," from "The Quaker Girl," and
+slipped into evening clothes and his suavest dress-shirt. Seizing
+things all at once--top-hat, muffler, gloves, pocketbook,
+handkerchief, cigarette-case, keys--and hanging them about him as he
+fled down the decorous stairs, he skipped to the taxicab and started
+again for Fifty-blankth Street.
+
+At the house of the party he stopped to find on the letter-box in the
+entry the name "Mrs. Hallet," mentioned by Olive. There was no such
+name. He tried the inner door. It opened. He cheerily began to mount
+steep stairs, which kept on for miles, climbing among slate-colored
+walls, past empty wall-niches with toeless plaster statues. The
+hallways, dim and high and snobbish, and the dark old double doors,
+scowled at him. He boldly returned the scowl. He could hear the
+increasing din of a talk-party coming from above. When he reached the
+top floor he found a door open on a big room crowded with shrilly
+chattering people in florid clothes. There was a hint of brassware and
+paintings and silken Turkish rugs.
+
+But no sight of Ruth or Olive.
+
+A maid was bobbing to him and breathing, "That way, please, at the end
+of the hall." He went meekly. He did not dare to search the clamorous
+crowd for the girls, as yet.
+
+He obediently added his hat and coat and stick to an
+uncomfortable-looking pile of wraps writhing on a bed in a small room
+that had a Copley print of Sargent's "Prophets," a calendar, and an
+unimportant white rocker.
+
+It was time to go out and face the party, but he had stage-fright.
+While climbing the stairs he had believed that he was in touch with
+the two girls, but now he was separated from them by a crowd, farther
+from them than when he had followed them down the unfriendly street.
+And not till now did he quite grasp the fact that the hostess might
+not welcome him. His glowing game was becoming very dull-toned. He
+lighted a cigarette and listened to the beating surf of the talk in
+the other room.
+
+Another man came in. Like all the rest, he gave up the brilliant idea
+of trying to find an unpreëmpted place for his precious newly ironed
+silk hat, and resignedly dumped it on the bed. He was a passable man,
+with a gentlemanly mustache and good pumps. Carl knew that fact
+because he was comparing his own clothes and deciding that he had none
+the worst of it. But he was relieved when the waxed mustache moved a
+couple of times, and its owner said, in a friendly way: "Beastly
+jam!... May I trouble you for a match?"
+
+Carl followed him out to the hostess, a small, busy woman who made a
+business of being vivacious and letting the light catch the fringes of
+her gold hair as she nodded. Carl nonchalantly shook hands with her,
+bubbling: "So afraid couldn't get here. My play----But at last----"
+
+He was in a panic. But the hostess, instead of calling for the police,
+gushed, "_So_ glad you _could_ come!" combining a kittenish mechanical
+smile for him with a glance over his shoulder at the temporary butler.
+"I want you to meet Miss Moeller, Mr.--uh--Mr----"
+
+"I knew you'd forget it!" Carl was brotherly and protecting in his
+manner. "Ericson, Oscar Ericson."
+
+"Oh, of course. How stupid of me! Miss Moeller, want you to meet Mr.
+Oscar Ericson--you know----"
+
+"S' happy meet you, Miss Mmmmmmm," said Carl, tremendously well-bred
+in manner. "Can we possibly go over and be clever in a corner, do you
+think?"
+
+He had heard Colonel Haviland say that, but his manner gave it no
+quotation-marks.
+
+Presumably he talked to Miss Moeller about something usual--the snow
+or the party or Owen Johnson's novels. Presumably Miss Moeller had
+eyes to look into and banalities to look away from. Presumably there
+was something in the room besides people and talk and rugs hung over
+the bookcases. But Carl never knew. He was looking for Ruth. He did
+not see her.
+
+Within ten minutes he had manoeuvered himself free of Miss Moeller
+and was searching for Ruth, his nerves quivering amazingly with the
+fear that she might already have gone.
+
+How would he ever find her? He could scarce ask the hostess, "Say,
+where's Ruth?"
+
+She was nowhere in the fog of people in the big room.... If he could
+find even Olive....
+
+Strolling, nodding to perfectly strange people who agreeably nodded
+back under the mistaken impression that they were glad to see him, he
+systematically checked up all the groups. Ruth was not among the
+punch-table devotees, who were being humorous and amorous over
+cigarettes; not among the Caustic Wits exclusively assembled in a
+corner; not among the shy sisters aligned on the davenport and
+wondering why they had come; not in the general maelstrom in the
+center of the room.
+
+He stopped calmly to greet the hostess again, remarking, "You look so
+beautifully sophisticated to-night," and listened suavely to her
+fluttering remarks. He was the picture of the cynical cityman who has
+to be nowhere at no especial time. But he was not cynical. He had to
+find Ruth!
+
+He escaped and, between the main room and the dining-room, penetrated
+a small den filled with witty young men, old stories, cigarette-smoke,
+and siphons. Then he charged into the dining-room, where there were
+candles and plate much like silver--and Ruth and Olive at the farther
+end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+He wanted to run forward, take their hands, cry, "At last!" He seemed
+to hear his voice wording it. But, not glancing at them again, he
+established himself on a chair by the doorway between the two rooms.
+
+It was safe to watch the two girls in this Babel, where words swarmed
+and battled everywhere in the air. Ruth was in a brown velvet frock
+whose golden tones harmonized with her brown hair. She was being
+enthusiastically talked at by a man to whom she listened with a
+courteously amused curiosity. Carl could fancy her nudging Olive, who
+sat beside her on the Jacobean settee and was attended by another
+talking-man. Carl told Ruth (though she did not know that he was
+telling her) that she had no right to be "so blasted New-Yorkishly
+superior and condescending," but he admitted that she was scarcely to
+blame, for the man made kindergarten gestures and emitted conversation
+like air from an exploded tire.
+
+The important thing was that he heard the man call her "Miss Winslow."
+
+"Great! Got her name--Ruth Winslow!"
+
+Watching the man's lips (occasionally trying to find an excuse for
+eavesdropping, and giving up the quest because there was no excuse),
+he discovered that Ruth was being honored with a thrilling account of
+aviation. The talking-man, it appeared, knew a great deal about the
+subject. Carl heard through a rift in the cloud of words that the man
+had once actually flown, as a passenger with Henry Odell! For five
+minutes on end, judging by the motions with which he steered a
+monoplane through perilous abysses, the reckless spirit kept flying
+(as a passenger). Ruth Winslow was obviously getting bored, and the
+man showed no signs of volplaning as yet. Olive's man departed, and
+Olive was also listening to the parlor aviator, who was unable to see
+that a terrific fight was being waged by the hands of the two girls in
+the space down between them. It was won by Ruth's hand, which got a
+death-grip on Olive's thumb, and held it, to Olive's agony, while both
+girls sat up straight and beamed propriety.
+
+Carl walked over and, smoothly ignoring the pocket entertainer, said:
+"So glad to see you, Miss Winslow. I think this is my dance?"
+
+"Y-yes?" from Miss Winslow, while the entertainer drifted off into the
+flotsam of the party. Olive went to join a group about the hostess,
+who had just come in to stir up mirth and jocund merriment in the
+dining-room, as it had settled down into a lower state of exhilaration
+than the canons of talk-parties require.
+
+Said Carl to Ruth, "Not that there's any dancing, but I felt you'd get
+dizzy if you climbed any higher in that aeroplane."
+
+Ruth tried to look haughty, but her dark lashes went up and her
+unexpected blue eyes grinned at him boyishly.
+
+"Gee! she's clever!" Carl was thinking. Since, to date, her only
+remark had been "Y-yes?" he may have been premature.
+
+"That was a bully strangle hold you got on Miss Olive's hand, Miss
+Winslow."
+
+"You saw our hands?"
+
+"Perhaps.... Tell me a good way to express how superior you and I are
+to this fool party and its noise. Isn't it a fool party?"
+
+"I'm afraid it really is."
+
+"What's the purpose of it, anyway? Do the people have to come here and
+breathe this air, I wonder? I asked several people that, and I'm
+afraid they think I'm crazy."
+
+"But you are here? Do you come to Mrs. Salisbury's often?"
+
+"Never been before. Never seen a person here in my life before--except
+you and Miss Olive. Came on a bet. Chap bet I wouldn't dare come
+without being invited. I came. Bowed to the hostess and told her I was
+so sorry my play-rehearsals made me late, and she was _so_ glad I
+could come, _after all_--you know. She's never seen me in her life."
+
+"Oh? Are you a dramatist?"
+
+"I was--in the other room. But I was a doctor out in the hall and a
+sculptor on the stairs, so I'm getting sort of confused myself--as
+confused as you are, trying to remember who I am, Miss Winslow. You
+really don't remember me at all? Tea at--wasn't it at the Vanderbilt?
+or the Plaza?"
+
+"Oh yes, that must have been----I was trying to remember----"
+
+Carl grinned. "The chap who introduced me to you called me 'Mr.
+Um-m-m,' because he didn't remember my name, either. So you've never
+heard it. It happens to be Ericson.... I'm on a mission. Serious one.
+I'm planning to go out and buy a medium-sized bomb and blow up this
+bunch. I suspect there's poets around."
+
+"I do too," sighed Ruth. "I understand that Mrs. Salisbury always has
+seven lawyers and nineteen advertising men and a dentist and a poet
+and an explorer at her affairs. Are you the poet or the explorer?"
+
+"I'm the dentist. I think----You don't happen to have done any
+authoring, do you?"
+
+"Well, nothing except an epic poyem on Jonah and the Whale, which I
+wrote at the age of seven. Most of it consisted of a conversation
+between them, while Jonah was in the Whale's stomach, which I think
+showed agility on the part of the Whale."
+
+"Then maybe it's safe to say what I think of authors--and more or less
+of poets and painters and so on. One time I was in charge of some
+mechanical investigations, and a lot of writers used to come around
+looking for what they called 'copy.' That's where I first got my
+grouch on them, and I've never really got over it; and coming here
+to-night and hearing the littery talk I've been thinking how these
+authors have a sort of an admiration trust. They make authors the
+heroes of their stories and so on, and so they make people think that
+writing is sacred. I'm so sick of reading novels about how young Bill,
+as had a pure white soul, came to New York and had an 'orrible time
+till his great novel was accepted. Authors seem to think they're the
+only ones that have ideals. Now I'm in the automobile business, and I
+help to make people get out into the country--bet a lot more of them
+get out because of motoring than because of reading poetry about
+spring. But if I claimed a temperament because I introduce the
+motorist's soul to the daisy, every one would die laughing."
+
+"But don't you think that art is the--oh, the object of civilization
+and that sort of thing?"
+
+"I do _not_! Honestly, Miss Winslow, I think it would be a good stunt
+to get along without any art at all for a generation, and see what we
+miss. We probably need dance music, but I doubt if we need opera.
+Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays
+'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good
+shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction. I'd like to
+see all the shoemakers get together and refuse to make any more shoes
+till people promised to write reviews about them, like all these
+book-reviews. Then just as soon as people's shoes began to wear out
+they'd come right around, and you'd read about the new masterpieces of
+Mr. Regal and Mr. Walkover and Mr. Stetson."
+
+"Yes! I can imagine it. 'This laced boot is one of the most vital and
+gripping and wholesome shoes of the season.' And probably all the
+young shoemakers would sit around cafés, looking quizzical and
+artistic. But don't you think your theory is dangerous, Mr. Ericson?
+You give me an excuse for being content with being a commonplace
+Upper-West-Sider. And aren't authors better than commonplaceness?
+You're so serious that I almost suspect you of having started to be an
+author yourself."
+
+"Really not. As a matter of fact, I'm the kiddy in patched overalls
+you used to play with when you kept house in the willows."
+
+"Oh, of course! In the Forest of Arden! And you had a toad that you
+traded for my hair-ribbon."
+
+"And we ate bread and milk out of blue bowls!"
+
+"Oh yes!" she agreed, "blue bowls with bunny-rabbits painted on them."
+
+"And giants and a six-cylinder castle, with warders and a donjon keep.
+And Jack the Giant-killer. But certainly bunnies."
+
+"Do you really like bunnies?" Her voice caressed the word.
+
+"I like them so much that when I think of them I know that there's one
+thing worse than having a cut-rate literary salon, and that's to be
+too respectable----"
+
+"Too Upper-West-Side!"
+
+"----to dare to eat bread and milk out of blue bowls."
+
+"Yes, I think I shall have to admit you to the Blue Bowl League, Mr.
+Ericson. Speaking of which----Tell me, who did introduce us, you and
+me? I feel so apologetic for not remembering."
+
+"Mayn't I be a mystery, Miss Winslow? At least as long as I have this
+new shirt, which you observed with some approval while I was drooling
+on about authors? It makes me look like a count, you must admit. Or
+maybe like a Knight of the Order of the Bunny Rabbit. Please let me be
+a mystery still."
+
+"Yes, you may. Life has no mysteries left 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
+associations, and that we would seek the Primitive, and maybe even
+Life in the Raw. Olive knows a woman mountain-climber who always says
+she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We
+expected to have raw-meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the
+Savage Woman gave us Suchong and deviled-chicken sandwiches and pink
+cakes and Nabiscos, and told us how well her 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 noble race or something.
+But even she was disappointed in Chinatown.
+
+"We had expected opium-fiends, like the melodramas they used to have
+on Fourteenth Street, before the movies came. But we had a
+disgustingly clean table, with a mad, reckless picture worked in silk,
+showing two doves and a boiled lotos flower, hanging near us, to
+intimidate us. The waiter was a Harvard graduate, I know--perhaps
+Oxford--and he said, 'May I sugges' ladies velly nize China dinner?'
+He suggested chow-main--we thought it would be either birds' nests or
+rats' tails, and it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous
+sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like
+ourselves, except for a Jap, with his cunnin' Sunday tie, and his
+little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky.
+And he was 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 château,
+with footmen and automatic elevators, to a bachelor girl's flat in an
+old-fashioned red-brick Harlem tenement. But more than that: What
+would she herself be like against that background?
+
+Monday he could think of nothing but the joy of having discovered a
+playmate. The secret popped out from behind everything he did. Tuesday
+he was worried by finding himself unable to remember whether Ruth's
+hair was black or dark brown. Yet he could visualize Olive's
+ash-blond. Why? Wednesday afternoon, when he was sleepy in the office
+after eating too much beefsteak and kidney pie, drinking too much
+coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes, at lunch with Mr. VanZile,
+when he was tortured by the desire to lay his head on his arms and
+yield to drowsiness, he was suddenly invaded by a fear that Ruth was
+snobbish. It seemed to him that he ought to do something about it
+immediately.
+
+The rest of the week he merely waited to see what sort of person the
+totally unknown Miss Ruth Winslow might be. His most active occupation
+outside the office was feeling guilty over not telephoning to Gertie.
+
+At 3.30 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-basement gray stone dwelling, with heavy Russian net
+curtains at the broad, clear-glassed windows of the first floor, and
+an attempt to escape from the stern drabness of the older type of New
+York houses by introducing a box-stoop and steps with a carved stone
+balustrade, at the top of which perched a meek old lion of 1890, with
+battered ears and a truly sensitive stone nose. A typical house of the
+very well-to-do yet not wealthy "upper middle class"; a house
+predicating one motor-car, three not expensive maids, brief European
+tours, and the best preparatory schools and colleges for the sons.
+
+A maid answered the door and took his card--a maid in a frilly apron
+and black uniform--neither a butler nor a slatternly Biddy. In the
+hall, as the maid disappeared up-stairs, Carl had an impression of
+furnace heat and respectability. Rather shy, uncomfortable, anxious to
+be acceptable, warning himself that as a famous aviator he need not be
+in awe of any one, but finding that the warning did not completely
+take, he drew off his coat and gloves and, after a swift inspection of
+his tie, gazed about with more curiosity than he had ever given to any
+other house.
+
+For all the stone lion in front, this was quite the old-line
+English-basement house, with the inevitable 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 brass and knobby red-and-blue glass. The floor
+was of hardwood in squares, dark and richly polished, highly
+self-respecting--a floor that assumed civic responsibility from a
+republican point of view, and a sound conservative business
+established since 1875 or 1880. By the door was a huge Japanese vase,
+convenient either for depositing umbrellas or falling over in the
+dark. Then, a long mirror in a dull-red mahogany frame, and a table of
+mahogany so refined that no one would ever dream of using it for
+anything more useful than calling-cards. It might have been the table
+by the king's bed, on which he leaves his crown on a little purple
+cushion at night. Solid and ostentatious.
+
+The drawing-room, to the left, was dark and still and unsympathetic
+and expensive; a vista of brocade-covered French-gilt chairs and a
+marquetry table and a table of onyx top, on which was one book bound
+in ooze calf, and one vase; cream-colored heavy carpet and a crystal
+chandelier; fairly meretricious paintings of rocks, and thatched
+cottages, and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of
+them in large gilt frames protected by shadow-boxes. In a corner was a
+cabinet of gilt and glass, filled with Dresden-china figurines and toy
+tables and a carven Swiss musical powder-box. The fireplace was of
+smooth, chilly white marble, with an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece,
+and a fire-screen painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses,
+making silken unreal love and scandalously neglecting silky unreal
+sheep. By the hearth were shiny fire-irons which looked as though they
+had never been used. The whole room looked as though it had never been
+used--except during the formal calls of overdressed matrons with
+card-cases and prejudices. The one human piece of furniture in the
+room, a couch soft and slightly worn, on which lovers might have sat
+and small boys bounced, was trying to appear useless, too, under its
+row of stiff satin cushions with gold cords.... Well-dusted chairs on
+which no one wished to sit; expensive fireplace that never shone;
+prized pictures with less imagination than the engravings on a
+bond--that drawing-room had the soul of a banker with side-whiskers.
+
+Carl by no means catalogued all the details, but he did get the effect
+of ingrowing propriety. It is not certain that he thought the room in
+bad taste. It is not certain that he had any artistic taste whatever;
+or that his attack upon the pretensions of authors had been based on
+anything more fundamental than a personal irritation due to having met
+blatant camp-followers of the arts. And it is certain that one of his
+reactions as he surveyed the abject respectability of that room was a
+slight awe of the solidity of social position which it represented,
+and which he consciously lacked. But, whether from artistic instinct
+or from ignorance, he was sure that into the room ought to blow a
+sudden great wind, with the scent of forest and snow. He shook his
+head when the maid returned, and he followed her up-stairs. Surely a
+girl reared here would never run away and play with him.
+
+He heard lively voices from the library above. He entered a room to be
+lived in and be happy in, with a jolly fire on the hearth and friendly
+people on a big, brown davenport. Ruth Winslow smiled at him from
+behind the Colonial silver and thin cups on the tea-table, and as he
+saw her light-filled eyes, saw her cock her head gaily in welcome, he
+was again convinced that he had found a playmate.
+
+A sensation of being pleasantly accepted warmed him as she cried, "So
+glad----" and introduced him, gave him tea and a cake with nuts in it.
+From a wing-chair Carl searched the room and the people. There were
+two paintings--a pale night sea and an arching Japanese bridge under
+slanting rain, both imaginative and well-done. There was a mahogany
+escritoire, which might have been stiff but was made human by
+scattered papers on the great blotter and books crammed into the
+shelves. Other books were heaped on a table as though people had been
+reading them. Later he found how amazingly they were assorted--the
+latest novel of Robert Chambers beside H. G. Wells's _First and Last
+Things_; a dusty expensive book on Italian sculpture near a cheap
+reprint of _Dodo_.
+
+The chairs were capacious, the piano a workmanlike upright, not
+dominating the room, but ready for music; and in front of the fire was
+an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering
+in his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the
+room. They were New-Yorkers and, unlike over half of the population,
+born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody
+and remembers when Fourteenth Street was the shopping-center. Olive
+Dunleavy was shinily present, her ash-blond hair in a new coiffure.
+She was arguing with a man of tight morning-clothes and a high-bred
+face about the merits of "Parsifal," which, Olive declared, no one
+ever attended except as a matter of conscience.
+
+"Now, Georgie," she said, "issa Georgie, you shall have your
+opera--and you shall jolly well have it alone, too!" Olive was vivid
+about it all, but Carl saw that she was watching him, and he was shy
+as he wondered what Ruth had told her.
+
+Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, a clear-faced, slender, well-bathed
+boy of twenty-six, with too high a forehead, with discontent in his
+face and in his thin voice, carelessly well-dressed in a soft-gray
+suit and an impressionistic tie, was also inspecting Carl, while
+talking to a pretty, commonplace, finishing-school-finished girl. Carl
+instantly disliked Philip Dunleavy, and was afraid of his latent
+sarcasm.
+
+Indeed, Carl felt more and more that beneath the friendliness with
+which he was greeted there was no real welcome as yet, save possibly
+on the part of Ruth. He was taken on trial. He was a Mr. Ericson, not
+any Mr. Ericson in particular.
+
+Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl
+himself was part of a hash-group--an older woman who seemed to know
+Rome and Paris better than New York, and might be anything from a
+milliner to a mondaine; a keen-looking youngster with tortoise-shell
+spectacles; finally, Ruth's elder brother, Mason J. Winslow, Jr., a
+tall, thin, solemn, intensely well-intentioned man of thirty-seven,
+with a long, clean-shaven face, and a long, narrow head whose growing
+baldness was always spoken of as a result of his hard work. Mason J.
+Winslow, Jr., spoke hesitatingly, worried over everything, and stood
+for morality and good business. He was rather dull in conversation,
+rather kind in manner, and accomplished solid things by
+unimaginatively sticking at them. He didn't understand people who did
+not belong to a good club.
+
+Carl contributed a few careful platitudes to a frivolous discussion of
+whether it would not be advisable to solve the woman-suffrage question
+by taking the vote away from men and women both and conferring it on
+children. Mason Winslow ambled to the big table for a cigarette, and
+Carl pursued him. While they stood talking about "the times are bad,"
+Carl was spying upon Ruth, and the minute her current group wandered
+off to the davenport he made a dash at the tea-table and got there
+before Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, who was obviously
+manoeuvering like himself. Philip gave him a covert "Who are you,
+fellow?" glance, took a cake, and retired.
+
+From his wicker chair facing Ruth's, Carl said, gloomily, "It isn't
+done."
+
+"Yes," said Ruth, "I know it, but still some very smart people are
+doing it this season."
+
+"But do you think the woman that writes 'What the man will wear' in
+the theater programs would stand for it?"
+
+"Not," gravely considered Ruth, "if there were black stitching on the
+dress-glove. Yet there is some authority for frilled shirts."
+
+"You think it might be considered then?"
+
+"I will not come between you and your haberdasher, Mr. Ericson."
+
+"This is a foolish conversation. But since you think the better
+classes do it--gee! it's getting hard for me to keep up this kind of
+'Dolly Dialogue.' What I wanted to do was to request you to give me
+concisely but fully a sketch of 'Who is Miss Ruth Winslow?' and save
+me from making any pet particular breaks. And hereafter, I warn you,
+I'm going to talk like my cousin, the carpet-slipper model."
+
+"Name, Ruth Winslow. Age, between twenty and thirty. Father, Mason
+Winslow, manufacturing contractor for concrete. Brothers, Mason
+Winslow, Jr., whose poor dear head is getting somewhat bald, as you
+observe, and Bobby Winslow, ne'er-do-weel, who is engaged in
+subverting discipline at medical school, and who dances divinely. My
+mother died three years ago. I do nothing useful, but I play a good
+game of bridge and possess a voice that those as know pronounce
+passable. I have a speaking knowledge of French, a reading knowledge
+of German, and a singing knowledge of Italian. I am wearing an
+imported gown, for which the House of Winslow will probably never pay.
+I live in this house, and am Episcopalian--not so much High Church as
+highly infrequent church. I regard the drawing-room down-stairs as the
+worst example of late-Victorian abominations in my knowledge, but I
+shall probably never persuade father to change it because Mason thinks
+it is sacred to the past. My ambition in life is to be catty to the
+Newport set after I've married an English diplomat with a divine
+mustache. Never having met such a personage outside of _Tatler_ and
+_Vogue_, I can't give you very many details regarding him. Oh yes, of
+course, he'll have to play a marvelous game of polo and have a château
+in Provençe and also a ranch in Texas, where I shall wear
+riding-breeches and live next to Nature and have a Chinese cook in
+blue silk. I think that's my whole history. Oh, I forgot. I play at
+the piano and am very ignorant, and completely immersed in the worst
+traditions of the wealthy Micks of the Upper West Side, and I always
+pretend that I live here instead of on the Upper East Side because
+'the air is better.'"
+
+"What is this Upper West Side? Is it a state of mind?"
+
+"Indeed it is not. It's a state of pocketbook. The Upper West Side is
+composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in
+society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue.
+You know everybody and went to school with everybody and played in the
+Park with everybody, and mostly your papa is in wholesale trade and
+haughty about people in retail. You go to Europe one summer and to the
+Jersey coast the next. All your clothes and parties and weddings and
+funerals might be described as 'elegant.' That's the Upper West Side.
+Now the dread truth about you.... Do you know, after the unscrupulous
+way in which you followed up a mere chance introduction at a tea
+somewhere, I suspect you to be a well-behaved young man who leads an
+entirely blameless life. Or else you'd never dare to jump the fence
+and come and play in my back yard when all the other boys politely
+knock at the front door and get sent home."
+
+"Me--well, I'm a wage-slave of the VanZile Motor people, in charge of
+the Touricar department. Age, twenty-eight--almost. Habits, all
+bad.... No, I'll tell you. I'm one of those stern, silent men of
+granite you read about, and only my man knows the human side of me,
+because all the guys on Wall Street tremble in me presence."
+
+"Yes, but then how can you belong to the Blue Bowl Sodality?"
+
+"Um, Yes----I've got it. You must have read novels in which the stern,
+silent man of granite has a secret tenderness in his heart, and he
+keeps the band of the first cigar he ever smoked in a little safe in
+the wall, and the first dollar he ever made in a frame--that's me."
+
+"Of course! The cigar was given him by his flaxen-haired sweetheart
+back in Jenkins Corners, and in the last chapter he goes back and
+marries her."
+
+"Not always, I hope!" Of what Carl was thinking is not recorded.
+"Well, as a matter of fact, I've been a fairly industrious young man
+of granite the last few months, getting out the Touricar."
+
+"What is a Touricar? It sounds like an island inhabited by cannibals,
+exports hemp and cocoanut, see pink dot on the map, nor' by nor'east
+of Mogador."
+
+Carl explained.
+
+"I'm terribly interested," said Ruth. (But she made it sound as though
+she really was.) "I think it's so wonderful.... I want to go off
+tramping through the Berkshires. I'm so tired of going to the same old
+places."
+
+"Some time, when you're quite sure I'm an estimable young Y. M. C. A.
+man, I'm going to try to persuade you to come out for a real tramp."
+
+She seemed to be considering the idea, not seriously, but----
+
+Philip Dunleavy eventuated.
+
+For some time Philip had been showing signs of interest in Ruth and
+Carl. Now he sauntered to the table, begged for another cup of tea,
+said agreeable things in regard to putting orange marmalade in tea,
+and calmly established himself. Ruth turned toward him.
+
+Carl had fancied that there was, for himself, in Ruth's voice,
+something more friendly, in her infectious smile something more
+intimate than she had given the others, but when she turned precisely
+the same cheery expression upon Philip, Carl seemed to have lost
+something which he had trustingly treasured for years. He was the more
+forlorn as Olive Dunleavy joined them, and Ruth, Philip, and Olive
+discussed the engagement of one Mary Meldon. Olive recalled Miss
+Meldon as she had been in school days at the Convent of the Sacred
+Heart. Philip told of her flirtations at the old Long Beach Hotel.
+
+The names of New York people whom they had always known; the names of
+country clubs--Baltusrol and Meadow Brook and Peace Waters; the names
+of streets, with a sharp differentiation between Seventy-fourth Street
+and Seventy-fifth Street; Durland's Riding Academy, the Rink of a
+Monday morning, and other souvenirs of a New York childhood; the score
+of the last American polo team and the coming dances--these things
+shut Carl out as definitely as though he were a foreigner. He was
+lonely. He disliked Phil Dunleavy's sarcastic references. He wanted to
+run away.
+
+Ruth seemed to realize that Carl was shut out. Said she to Phil
+Dunleavy: "I wish you could have seen Mr. Ericson save my life last
+Sunday. I had an experience."
+
+"What was that?" asked the man whom Olive called "Georgie," joining
+the tea-table set.
+
+The whole room listened as Ruth recounted the trip to Chinatown, Mrs.
+Salisbury's party, and the hero who had once been a passenger in an
+aeroplane.
+
+Throughout she kept turning toward Carl. It seemed to reunite him to
+the company. As she closed, he said:
+
+"The thing that amused me about the parlor aviator was his laying down
+the law that the Atlantic will be crossed before the end of 1913, and
+his assumption that we'll all have aeroplanes in five years. I know
+from my own business, the automobile business, about how much such
+prophecies are worth."
+
+"Don't you think the Atlantic will be crossed soon?" asked the
+keen-looking man with the tortoise-shell spectacles.
+
+Phil Dunleavy broke in with an air of amused sophistication: "I think
+the parlor aviator was right. Really, you know, aviation is too
+difficult a subject for the layman to make any predictions
+about--either what it can or can't do."
+
+"Oh yes," admitted Carl; and the whole room breathed. "Oh yes."
+
+Dunleavy went on in his thin, overbred, insolent voice, "Now I have it
+on good authority, from a man who's a member of the Aero Club, that
+next year will be the greatest year aviation has ever known, and that
+the Wrights have an aeroplane up their sleeve with which they'll cross
+the Atlantic without a stop, during the spring of 1914 at the very
+latest."
+
+"That's unfortunate, because the aviation game has gone up completely
+in this country, except for hydro-aeroplaning and military aviation,
+and possibly it never will come back," said Carl, a hint of pique in
+his voice.
+
+"What is your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring
+round on his slender left little finger and the whole room waited,
+testing this positive-spoken outsider.
+
+"Well," drawled Carl, "I have fairly good authority. Walter
+MacMonnies, for instance, and he is probably the best flier in the
+country to-day, except for Lincoln Beachey."
+
+"Oh yes, he's a good flier," said Phil, contemptuously, with a shadowy
+smile for Ruth. "Still, he's no better than Aaron Solomons, and he
+isn't half so great a flier as that chap with the same surname as your
+own, Hawk Ericson, whom I myself saw coming up the Jersey coast when
+he won that big race to New York.... You see, I've been following this
+aviation pretty closely."
+
+Carl saw Ruth's head drop an inch, and her eyes 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-shell spectacles. "Of
+course! I remember your picture, now."
+
+Phil was open-mouthed. Ruth laughed. The rest of the room gasped.
+Mason Winslow, long and bald, was worrying over the question of How to
+Receive Aviators at Tea.
+
+And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing the jam.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+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.
+
+"Hello?" said Gertie over the telephone. "Oh, hello, Carl; I just
+called up to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I
+thought perhaps you might like to come up if you haven't anything
+better to do."
+
+Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole
+evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Dunleavy and
+English-basement houses with cream-colored drawing-rooms. But he went
+up to Gertie's.
+
+They were all there--Gertie and Adelaide, Ray and his mother, and Miss
+Greene, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis; all playing parcheesi,
+explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on
+Sunday, but that parcheesi was "different." Ray winked at Carl as they
+said it.
+
+The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at
+home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic
+science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top
+of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a
+cockroach with a ruler.
+
+As the others began to disappear, Gertie said to Carl: "Don't go till
+I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday. Lots of news from
+home. Joe Jordan is engaged!"
+
+They were left alone. Gertie glanced at him intimately. He stiffened.
+He knew that Gertie was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display
+to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would
+be the inevitable sequence of a friendship which Ruth or Olive could
+take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man
+just starting in business, was un-heroically afraid of matrimony.
+
+Yet his stiffness of attitude disappeared when Gertie had read the
+letter from Joralemon and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy: "I
+can just see them out sleighing. Sometimes I wish I was out there.
+Honest, Carl, for all the sea and the hills here, don't you wish
+sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooded
+bluff over a lake?"
+
+"Yes!" he cried. "I've been away so long now that I don't ever feel
+homesick for any particular part of the country; but just the same I
+would like to see the lakes. And I do miss the prairies sometimes. Oh,
+I was reading something the other day--fellow was trying to define the
+different sorts of terrain--here it is, cut it out of the paper." He
+produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a
+clipping hacked from a newspaper with a nail-file, and read:
+
+"'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their
+promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in
+small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long grasses
+shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for
+hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the
+forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral to grave
+saints of the open; all these 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 God
+unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, clustered about my door
+while I was dressing and bawled in queries about laundry and other
+horribly vulgar things."
+
+Carl did not see much of the play. He was watching Ruth's eyes,
+listening to her whispered comments. She declared that she was awed by
+the presence of two aviators and a newspaper man. Actually, she was
+working, working at bringing out MacMonnies, a shy, broad-shouldered,
+inarticulate youth who supposed that he never had to talk.
+
+Carl had planned to go to the Ritz for after-theater supper, but Ruth
+and Olive persuaded him to take them to the café of the Rector's of
+that time; for, they said, they had never been in a Broadway café, and
+they wanted to see the famous actors with their make-ups off.
+
+At the table Carl carried Ruth off in talk, like a young Lochinvar out
+of the Middle West. Around them was the storm of highballs and brandy
+and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar-smoke,
+shirt-fronts, white shoulders, and drab waiters; yet here was a quiet
+refuge for the eternal force of life....
+
+Carl was asking: "Would you rather be a perfect lady and have blue
+bowls with bunnies on them for your very worst dissipation, or be like
+your mountain-climbing woman and have anarchists for friends one day
+and be off hiking through the clouds the next?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the 'nice things
+of life,' but I do get tired of being nice. Especially when I have a
+bad temper, as I had to-night. I'm not at all imprisoned in a harem,
+and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been
+brought up to look at things that aren't 'like the home life of our
+dear Queen' as impossible, and I'm quite sure that father believes
+that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be
+rich. But I've been reading; and I've made--to you it may seem silly
+to call it a discovery, but to me it's the greatest discovery I've
+ever made: that people are just people, all of them--that the little
+mousey clerk may be a hero, and the hero may be a nobody--that the
+motorman that lets his beastly car spatter mud on my nice new velvet
+skirt may be exactly the same sort of person as the swain who
+commiserates with me in his cunnin' Harvard accent. Do you think
+that?"
+
+"I know it. Most of my life I've been working with men with dirty
+finger-nails, and the only difference between them and the men with
+clean nails is a nail-cleaner, and that costs just ten cents at the
+corner drug-store. Seriously--I remember a cook I used to talk to on
+my way down to Panama once----"
+
+("Panama! How I'd like to go there!")
+
+"----and he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met."
+
+"Yes, but generally do you find very much--oh, courtesy and that sort
+of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself 'the
+better class'?"
+
+"No, I don't."
+
+"You don't? Why, I thought--the way you spoke----"
+
+"Why, blessed, what in the world would be the use of their trying to
+climb if they already had all the rich have? You can't be as gracious
+as the man that's got nothing else to do, when you're about one jump
+ahead of the steam-roller every second. That's why they ought 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 negligées we're making and
+the gorgeous tea-gowns we're going to have when we're married, we
+rescue the poor and think we're dreadfully advanced, but does it do
+any good to just talk?--Dear me, I split that poor infinitive right
+down his middle."
+
+"I don't know. But I do know I don't want to be just stupidly
+satisfied, and talking does keep me from that, anyway. See here, Miss
+Winslow, suppose some time I suggested that we become nice and earnest
+and take up socialism and single tax and this--what is it?--oh,
+syndicalism--and really studied them, would you do it? Make each other
+study?"
+
+"Love to."
+
+"Does Dunleavy think much?"
+
+She raised her eyebrows a bit, but hesitated. "Oh yes--no, I don't
+suppose he does. Or anyway, mostly about the violin. He played a lot
+when he was in Yale."
+
+Thus was Carl encouraged to be fatuous, and he said, in a manner which
+quite dismissed Phil Dunleavy: "I don't believe he's very deep.
+Ra-ther light, I'd say."
+
+Her eyebrows had ascended farther. "Do you think so? I'm sorry."
+
+"Why sorry?"
+
+"Oh, he's always been rather a friend of mine. Olive and Phil and I
+roller-skated together at the age of eight."
+
+"But----"
+
+"And I shall probably--marry--Phil--some day before long." She turned
+abruptly to Charley Forbes with a question.
+
+Lost, already lost, was the playmate; a loss that disgusted him with
+life. He beat his spirit, cursed himself as a clumsy mechanic. He
+listened to Olive only by self-compulsion. It was minutes before he
+had the ability and the chance to say to Ruth:
+
+"Forgive me--in the name of the Blue Bowl. Mr. Dunleavy was rather
+rude to me, and I've been just as rude--and to you! And without his
+excuse. For he naturally would want to protect you from a wild aviator
+coming from Lord knows where."
+
+"You are forgiven. And Phil _was_ rude. And you're not a
+Lord-knows-where, I'm sure."
+
+Almost brusquely Carl demanded: "Come for a long tramp with me, on the
+Palisades. Next Saturday, if you can and if it's a decent day.... You
+said you liked to run away.... And we can be back before dinner, if
+you like."
+
+"Why--let me think it over. Oh, I _would_ like to. I've always wanted
+to do just that--think of it, the Palisades just opposite, and I
+never see them except for a walk of half a mile or so when I stay with
+a friend of mine, Laura Needham, at Winklehurst, up on the Palisades.
+My mother never approved of a wilder wilderness than Central Park and
+the habit----I've never been able to get Olive to explore. But it
+isn't conventional to go on long tramps with even the nicest new
+Johnnies, is it?"
+
+"No, but----"
+
+"I know. You'll say, 'Who makes the convention?' and of course there's
+no answer but 'They.' But They are so all-present. They----Oh yes,
+yes, yes, I will go! But you will let me get back by dinner-time,
+won't you? Will you call for me about two?... And can you----I wonder
+if a hawk out of the windy skies can understand how daring a dove out
+of Ninety-second Street feels at going walking on the Palisades?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+The 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 know exactly 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 husband at 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; that _is_ good 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 of
+pure-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 dissipation you 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. _Am_ I 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, I _think_ we 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 play cards, 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 front of 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?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+For 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, you know! 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 new things 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 and _more_ I'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,
+_anybody_ would 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 the _nicest_
+people 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 crystallized in
+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 ate _Wiener Schnitzel_ and shot dice 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+From 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 for days: 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 Mansion
+    The 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 you _are_ in 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!
+
+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 you know 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 influences lately." 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's _Nonsense 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 Westchester
+Hills, 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 skees _were_ unmanageable.
+
+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 then the
+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 the mass 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's _la 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 after hour. 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 the last 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 that _no_ man--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 dropped his burden and faced her in the
+low firelight. "Ruth, you won't make up your mind to marry Phil till
+you're _sure_, 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."
+
+"You _won't_ let 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 yourself by 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, _please_
+don'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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+While scientists seek germs that shall change the world, while war
+comes or winter takes earth captive, even while love visibly flowers,
+a power, mighty as any of these, lashes its human pack-train on the
+dusty road to futility. The Day's Work is the name of that power.
+
+All these days of first love Carl had the office for lowering
+background. The warm trust of Ruth's hand on a Saturday did not make
+plans for the Touricar any the less pressing on a Monday. The tyranny
+of nine to five is stronger, more insistent, in every department of
+life, than the most officious oligarchy. Inspectors can be bribed,
+judges softened, and recruiting sergeants evaded, but only the grace
+of God will turn 3.30 into 5.30. And Mr. Ericson of the Touricar
+Company, a not vastly important employee of the mothering VanZile
+Corporation, was not entitled to go home at 3.30, as a really rational
+man would have done when the sun gold-misted the windows and suggested
+skating.
+
+No longer was business essentially an adventure to Carl. Doubtless he
+would have given it up and have gone to Palm Beach to fly a hydro for
+Bagby, Jr., had there been no Ruth. Bagby wrote that he was coming
+North, to prepare for the spring's experiments; wouldn't Carl consider
+joining him?
+
+Carl was now, between his salary and his investment in the Touricar
+Company, making about four thousand dollars a year, and saving nearly
+half of it, against the inevitable next change in his life, whatever
+that should be. He would probably climb to ten thousand dollars in
+five years. The Touricar was promising success. Several had been
+ordered at the Automobile Show; the Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia
+agents of the company reported interest. For no particular reason,
+apparently, Milwaukee had taken them up first; three Milwaukee people
+had ordered cars.... An artist was making posters with beautiful
+gipsies and a Touricar and tourists whose countenances showed lively
+appreciation of the efforts of the kind Touricar manufacturers to
+please and benefit them. But the head salesman of the company laughed
+at Carl when he suggested that the Touricar might not only bring them
+money, but really take people off to a larger freedom:
+
+"I don't care a hang where they go with the thing as long as they pay
+for it. You can't be an idealist and make money. You make the money
+and then you can have all the ideals you want to, and give away some
+hospitals and libraries."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They walked and talked, Ruth and Carl. They threaded the
+Sunday-afternoon throng on upper Broadway, where on every clear Sunday
+all the apartment-dwellers (if they have remembered to have their
+trousers pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation) promenade
+like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting
+apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two
+blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and
+hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the
+Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they
+scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat,
+and were thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause
+makes honest friendship; but hating the same people makes alliances so
+delightful that one can sit up late nights, talking.
+
+At the opening of the flying season Carl took her to the Hempstead
+Plains Aviation Field, and, hearing his explanations, she at last
+comprehended emotionally that he really was an aviator.
+
+They tramped through Staten Island; they had tea at the Manhattan.
+Carl dined with Ruth and her father; once he took her brother, Mason,
+to lunch at the Aero Club.
+
+Ruth was ill in March; not with a mysterious and romantic malady, but
+with grippe, which, she wrote Carl, made her hate the human race, New
+York, charity, and Shakespeare. She could not decide whether to go to
+Europe, or to die in a swoon and be buried under a mossy headstone.
+
+He answered that he would go abroad for her; and every day she
+received tokens bearing New York post-marks, yet obviously coming from
+foreign parts: a souvenir card from the Piræus, stating that Carl was
+"visiting cousin T. Demetrieff Philopopudopulos, and we are enjoying
+our drives so much. Dem. sends his love; wish you could be with us";
+an absurd string of beads from Port Saïd and a box of Syrian sweets; a
+Hindu puzzle guaranteed to amuse victims of the grippe, and
+gold-fabric slippers of China; with long letters nonchalantly relating
+encounters with outlaws and wrecks and new varieties of disease.
+
+He called on her before her nose had quite lost the grippe or her
+temper the badness.
+
+Phil Dunleavy was there, lofty and cultured in evening clothes,
+apparently not eager to go. He stayed till ten minutes to ten, and, by
+his manner of cold surprise when Carl tried to influence the
+conversation, was able to keep it to the Kreisler violin recitals, the
+architecture of St. John the Divine's, and Whitney's polo, while Carl
+tried not to look sulky, and manoeuvered to get out the excellent
+things he was prepared to say on other topics; not unlike the small
+boy who wants to interrupt whist-players and tell them about his new
+skates. When Phil was gone Ruth sighed and said, belligerently:
+
+"Poor Phil, he has to work so hard, and all the people at his office,
+even the firm, are just as common as they can be; common as the
+children at my beastly old settlement-house."
+
+"What do you mean by 'common'?" bristled Carl.
+
+"Not of our class."
+
+"What do you mean by 'our class'?"
+
+And the battle was set.
+
+Ruth refused to withdraw "common." Carl recalled Abraham Lincoln and
+Golden-Rule Jones and Walt Whitman on the subject of the Common
+People, though as to what these sages had said he was vague. Ruth
+burst out:
+
+"Oh, you can talk all you like about theories, but just the same, in
+real life most people are common as dirt. And just about as admissible
+to Society. It's all very fine to be good to servants, but you would
+be the first to complain if I invited the cook up here."
+
+"Give her and her children education for three generations----"
+
+She was perfectly unreasonable, and right in most of the things she
+said. He was perfectly unreasonable, and right in all of the things he
+said. Their argument was absurdly hot, and hurt them pathetically. It
+was difficult, at first, for Carl to admit that he was at odds with
+his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would
+soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not
+to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen
+minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he
+remembering the fact that she was a result of city life; she the fact
+that he wasn't a product of city life.
+
+And a fact which neither of them realized, save subconsciously, was in
+the background: Carl himself had come in a few years from Oscar
+Ericson's back yard to Ruth Winslow's library--he had made the step
+naturally, as only an American could, but it was a step.
+
+She was loftily polite. "I'm afraid you can't quite understand what
+the niceties of life mean to people like Phil. I'm sorry he won't give
+them up to the first truck-driver he meets, but I'm afraid he won't,
+and occasionally it's necessary to face facts! Niceties of the kind he
+has gr----"
+
+"_Nice!_"
+
+"Really----" Her heavy eyebrows arched in a frown.
+
+"If you're going to get 'nice' on me, of course you'll have to be
+condescending, and that's one thing I won't permit."
+
+"I'm afraid you'll find that one has to permit a great many things.
+Sometimes, apparently, I must permit great rudeness."
+
+"Have I been rude? Have----"
+
+"Yes. Very."
+
+He could endure no more. "Good night!" he growled, and was gone.
+
+He was frightened to find himself out of the house; the door closed
+between them; no going back without ringing the bell. He couldn't go
+back. He walked a block, slow, incredulous. He stood hesitant before
+the nearest corner drug-store, shivering in the March wind, wondering
+if he dared go into the store and telephone her. He was willing to
+concede anything. He planned apt phrases to use. Surely everything
+would be made right if he could only speak to her. He pictured himself
+crossing the drug-store floor, entering the telephone-booth, putting
+five cents in the slot. He stared at the red-and-green globes in the
+druggist's window; inspected a display of soaps, and recollected the
+fact that for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving-soap
+and had had to use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a
+shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I
+_must_ try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for
+thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that
+soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave and angel, for
+while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he
+sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went
+into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. There was no
+sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly
+ice-cream soda, and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank
+it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he
+knew not what.
+
+He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her.
+But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into
+defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his
+top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of
+"niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go
+anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and
+comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the
+results of losing his job, or of being robbed of his interests in the
+Touricar. He glanced interestedly at a pretty girl; recklessly went
+into a cigar-store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again.
+
+As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went
+over every word Ruth or he had said, and when he reached his room he
+sat deep in an arm-chair, like a hurt animal crouching, his coat still
+on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged, his legs
+straight out before him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he
+disconsolately contemplated a photograph of Forrest Haviland in
+full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau among tangled ties,
+stray cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff-buttons, and a
+haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and
+gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not
+know how the play would end.
+
+But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in
+earnest.
+
+Forrest's portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no
+picture of Ruth, that he wanted one. Next time he saw her he would
+ask her.... Then he remembered.
+
+He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over gloweringly, and
+chewed it without lighting it, the right corner of his mouth vicious
+in appearance. But his tone was plaintive as he mourned, "How did it
+all start, anyway?"
+
+He drew off his top-coat and shoes, and put on his shabby though once
+expensive slippers. Slowly. He lay on his bed. He certainly did not
+intend to go to sleep--but he awoke at 2 A.M., dressed, the light
+burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and
+dry-mouthed--a victim of all the woes since tall Troy burned. He
+shucked off his clothes as you shuck an ear of corn.
+
+When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual, greeting a shining new
+day, till he realized that it was not a shining day; it was an ominous
+day; everything was wrong. That something had happened--really
+had--was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His chief reaction
+was not repentance nor dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to
+unwish the whole affair. "Hang it!" he groaned.
+
+Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth. "Poor
+kid! it was rotten to row with her, her completely all in with the
+grippe."
+
+At three in the afternoon he telephoned to her house. "Miss Ruth," he
+was informed, "was asleep; she was not very well."
+
+Would the maid please ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ericson when she woke?
+
+Certainly the maid would.
+
+But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him
+call again, for days, and Ruth never called him.
+
+He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing
+himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance,
+on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She
+was with Phil Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily,
+oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of Carl Ericson.
+
+That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train; stood there
+alone, due at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, but suddenly not
+wishing to go, not wishing to go anywhere nor do anything, friendless,
+bored, driftwood in the city.
+
+So easily had the Hawk swooped down into her life, coming by chance,
+but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For three days he planned in a headachy way to make an end of his job
+and join Bagby, Jr., in his hydroaeroplane experiments. He pictured
+the crowd that would worship him. He told himself stories unhappy and
+long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure
+that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever
+displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without
+cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he
+called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.
+
+"May I come up to-night?" he said, urgently.
+
+"Yes," she said. That was all.
+
+When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed
+that she had wanted to telephone to him.
+
+Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:
+
+"I was grouchy----"
+
+"I was beastly----"
+
+"I'm honestly sorry----"
+
+"'ll you forgive----"
+
+"What was it all about?"
+
+"Really, I do--not--know!"
+
+"I agree with lots of the things you----"
+
+"No, I agree with you, but just at the time--you know."
+
+Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about
+her shoulders--lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every
+thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the
+smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her
+coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to
+care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished.
+Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual
+scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.
+
+She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz.
+It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano-lamp they were
+silent, happy. He merely touched her hand, when he went, but he sang
+his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman.
+
+"I've found her again; it isn't merely play, now!" he kept repeating.
+"And I've learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it's
+as though I'd learned a new language. Gee! I'm happy!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+On an April Saturday morning Carl rose with a feeling of spring. He
+wanted to be off in the Connecticut hills, among the silvery-gray
+worm-fences, with larks rising on the breeze and pools a-ripple and
+yellow crocus-blossoms afire by the road, where towns white and sleepy
+woke to find the elms misted with young green. Would there be any
+crocuses out as yet? That was the only question worth solving in the
+world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The staid brownstone houses of
+the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over
+them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the
+automobile district past Central Park, sniffing wistfully at the damp
+grass, pale green amid old gray; marveling how a bare patch of brown
+earth, without a single blade of grass, could smell so stirringly of
+coming spring. A girl on Broadway was selling wild violets, white and
+purple, and in front of wretched old houses down a side-street, in the
+negro district, a darky in a tan derby and a scarlet tie was caroling:
+
+    "Mandy, in de spring
+    De mocking-birds do sing,
+    An' de flowers am so sweet along de ol' bayou----"
+
+Above the darky's head, elevated trains roared on the Fifty-third
+Street trestle, and up Broadway streaked a stripped motor-car, all
+steel chassis and grease-mottled board seat and lurid odor of
+gasoline. But sparrows splashed in the pools of sunshine; in a lull
+the darky's voice came again, chanting passionately, "In de spring,
+spring, _spring_!" and Carl clamored: "I've _got_ to get out to-day.
+Terrible glad it's a half-holiday. Wonder if I dare telephone to
+Ruth?"
+
+At a quarter to three they were rollicking down the "smart side" of
+Fifth Avenue. One could see that they were playmates, by her dancing
+steps and his absorption in her. He bent a little toward her, quick to
+laugh with her.
+
+Ruth was in a frock of flowered taffeta. "I won't wait till Easter to
+show off my spring clothes. It isn't done any more," she said. "It's
+as stupid as Bobby's not daring to wear a straw hat one single day
+after September fifteenth. Is an aviator brave enough to wear his
+after the fifteenth?... Think! I didn't know you then--last September.
+I can't understand it."
+
+"But I knew you, blessed, because I was sure spring was coming again,
+and that distinctly implied Ruth."
+
+"Of course it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the Spirit of Spring.
+Last Wednesday, when I lost my marquise ring, I was the spirit of
+vitriol, but now----I'm a poet. I've thought it all out and decided
+that I shall be the American Sappho. At any moment I am quite likely
+to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb and indite
+several stanzas on the back of a calling-card, while the crowd galumps
+around me in an awed ring.... I feel like kidnapping you and making
+you take me aeroplaning, but I'll compromise. You're to buy me a book
+and take me down to the Maison Épinay for tea, and read me poetry
+while I yearn over the window-boxes and try to look like Nicollette.
+Buy me a book with spring in it, and a princess, and a sky like
+this--cornflower blue with bunny-rabbit clouds."
+
+At least a few in the Avenue's flower-garden of pretty débutantes in
+pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots
+were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes.
+
+"I wonder who they all are; they look like an aristocracy, useless
+but made of the very best materials," said Carl.
+
+"They're like maids of honor and young knights, disguised in modern
+costumes! They're charming!"
+
+"Charmingly useless," insisted our revolutionary, but he did not sound
+earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything less
+great than joy and life; a day for shameless luxuriating in the sun,
+and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted
+silk were silver things and jade; satin gowns and shoe-buckles of
+rhinestones. The sleek motor-cars whisked by in an incessant line; the
+traffic policemen nodded familiarly to hansom-drivers; pools on the
+asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze
+tasted of spring.
+
+Carl bought for her Yeats's poems, tucked it under his arm, and they
+trotted off. In Madison Square they saw a gallant and courtly old man
+with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and
+a smile of unquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissus in his
+buttonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs and smiled to see
+one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to
+build for himself and his sparrow bride a bungalow in the foot-hills
+of the Metropolitan Tower.
+
+"I love that old man!" exclaimed Ruth. "I do wish we could pick him up
+and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, 'I prithee, sir,
+of thy good will come thou forthfaring with two vagabonds who do quest
+high and low the land of Nowhere.' Something like that. Go on, Carl,
+be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of
+Arcadia. Go ask him."
+
+"Afraid to. Besides, he might monopolize you."
+
+"He'll go with us, without his knowing it, anyway. Isn't it strange
+how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without
+even speaking to them? You know them the rest of your life and play
+games with them."
+
+The Maison Épinay you must quest long, but great is your reward if you
+find it. Here is no weak remembrance of a lost Paris, but a
+French-Canadian's desire to express what he believes Paris must be;
+therefore a super-Paris, all in brown velvet and wicker tables, and at
+the back a long window edged with boxes red with geraniums, looking to
+a back-yard garden where rose-beds lead to a dancing-faun terminal in
+a shrine of ivy.
+
+They sipped grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had
+the place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of
+benison; and Carl read from Yeats.
+
+He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew
+and misty mere and the fluttering wings of Love till now.
+
+His hand rested on her gloved hand.... Tony the waiter
+re-re-rearranged the serving-table.... When Ruth broke the spell with,
+"You aren't very reverent with perfectly clean gloves," they chattered
+like blackbirds at sunset.
+
+Carl discovered that, being a New-Yorker, she knew part of it as
+intimately as though it were a village, and nothing about the rest.
+She had taught him Fifth Avenue; told him the history of the invasion
+by shops, the social differences between East and West; pointed out
+the pictures of friends in photographers' wall-cases. Now he taught
+her the various New Yorks he had discovered in lonely rambles.
+Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford
+quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation
+dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of
+Italian _tables d'hôte_, clerks, social-workers, and radical
+magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground;
+lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian
+lodgers live on streets named for kings, in wooden houses with
+gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights. From the same small-paned
+windows where frowsy Italian women stared down upon Ruth, Ruth's
+ancestors had leaned out to greet General George Washington.
+
+On an open wharf near Tenth Street they were bespelled by April. The
+Woolworth Tower, to the south, was an immortal shaft of ivory and gold
+against an unwinking blue sky, challenging the castles and cathedrals
+of the Old World, and with its supreme art dignifying the commerce
+which built and uses it. The Hudson was lustrous with sun, and a sweet
+wind sang from unknown Jersey hills across the river. Moored to the
+wharf was a coal-barge, with a tiny dwelling-cabin at whose windows
+white curtains fluttered. Beside the cabin was a garden tended by the
+bargeman's comely white-browed wife; a dozen daisies and geraniums in
+two starch-boxes.
+
+Forging down the river a scarred tramp steamer, whose rusty sides the
+sun turned to damask rose, bobbed in the slight swell, heading for
+open sea, with the British flag a-flicker and men chanting as they
+cleared deck.
+
+"I wish we were going off with her--maybe to Singapore or Nagasaki,"
+Carl said, slipping his arm through hers, as they balanced on the
+stringpiece of the wharf, sniffing like deer at the breeze, which for
+a moment seemed to bear, from distant burgeoning woods, a shadowy hint
+of burning leaves--the perfume of spring and autumn, the eternal
+wander-call.
+
+"Yes!" Ruth mused; "and moonlight in Java, and the Himalayas on the
+horizon, and the Vale of Cashmir."
+
+"But I'm glad we have this. Blessed, it's a day planned for lovers
+like us."
+
+"Carl!"
+
+"Yes. Lovers. Courting. In spring. Like all lovers."
+
+"Really, Carl, even spring doesn't quite let me forget the
+_convenances_ are home waiting."
+
+"We're not lovers?"
+
+"No, we----"
+
+"Yet you enjoy to-day, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"And you'd rather be loafing on a dirty wharf, looking at a tramp
+steamer, than taking tea at the Plaza?"
+
+"Yes, just now, perhaps----"
+
+"And you're protesting because you feel it's proper to----"
+
+"It----"
+
+"And you really trust me so much that you're having difficulty in
+seeming alarmed?"
+
+"Really----"
+
+"And you'd rather play around with me than any of the Skull and Bones
+or Hasty Pudding men you know? Or foreign diplomats with spade
+beards?"
+
+"At least they wouldn't----"
+
+"Oh yes they would, if you'd let them, which you wouldn't.... So, to
+sum up, then, we _are_ lovers and it's spring and you're glad of it,
+and as soon as you get used to it you'll be glad I'm so frank. Won't
+you?"
+
+"I will not be bullied, Carl! You'll be having me married to you
+before I can scream for help, if I don't start at once."
+
+"Probably."
+
+"Indeed you will not! I haven't the slightest intention of letting you
+get away with being masterful."
+
+"Yes, I know, blessed; these masterful people bore me, too. But aren't
+we modern enough so we can discuss frankly the question of whether I'd
+better propose to you, some day?"
+
+"But, boy, what makes you suppose that I have any information on the
+subject? That I've ever thought of it?"
+
+"I credit you with having a reasonable knowledge that there are such
+things as marriage."
+
+"Yes, but----Oh, I'm very confused. You've bullied me into such a
+defensive position that my instinct is to deny everything. If you
+turned on me suddenly and accused me of wearing gloves I'd indignantly
+deny it."
+
+"Meantime, not to change the subject, I'd better be planning and
+watching for a suitable day for proposing, don't you think? Consider
+it. Here's this young Ericson--some sort of a clerk, I believe--no,
+don't _think_ he's a university man----You know; discuss it clearly.
+Think it might be better to propose to-day? I ask your advice as a
+woman."
+
+"Oh, Carl dear, I think not to-day. I'm sorry, but I really don't
+think so."
+
+"But some time, perhaps?"
+
+"Some time, perhaps!" Then she fled from him and from the subject.
+
+They talked, after that, only of the sailors that loafed on West
+Street, but in their voices was content.
+
+They crossed the city, and on Brooklyn Bridge watched the suburbanites
+going home, crowding surface-car and elevated. From their perch on the
+giant spider's web of steel, they saw the Long Island Sound steamers
+below them, passing through a maelstrom of light on waves that
+trembled like quicksilver.
+
+They found a small Italian restaurant, free of local-color hounds and
+what Carl called "hobohemians," and discovered _fritto misto_ and
+Chianti and _zabaglione_--a pale-brown custard flavored like honey and
+served in tall, thin, curving glasses--while the fat proprietress, in
+a red shawl and a large brooch, came to ask them, "Everyt'ing
+all-aright, eh?" Carl insisted that Walter MacMonnies, the aviator,
+had once tried out a motor that was exactly like her, including the
+Italian accent. There was simple and complete bliss for them in the
+dingy pine-and-plaster room, adorned with fly-specked calendars and
+pictures of Victor Emmanuel and President McKinley, copies of the
+_Bolletino Della Sera_ and large vinegar bottles.
+
+The theater was their destination, but they first loitered up
+Broadway, shamelessly stopping to stare at shop windows, pretending
+to be Joe the shoe-clerk and Becky the cashier furnishing a Bronx
+flat. Whether it was anything but a game to Ruth will never be known;
+but to Carl there was a hidden high excitement in planning a
+flower-box for the fire-escape.
+
+Apropos of nothing, she said, as they touched elbows with the
+sweethearting crowd: "You were right. I'm sorry I ever felt superior
+to what I called 'common people.' People! I love them all.
+It's----Come, we must hurry. I hate to miss that one perfect second
+when the orchestra is quiet and the lights wink at you and the
+curtain's going up."
+
+During the second act of the play, when the heroine awoke to love,
+Carl's hand found hers.
+
+And it must have been that night when, standing between the inner and
+outer doors of her house, Carl put his arms about her, kissed her
+hair, timidly kissed her sweet, cold cheek, and cried, "Bless you,
+dear." But, for some reason, he does not remember when he did first
+kiss her, though he had looked forward to that miracle for weeks. He
+does not understand the reason; but there is the fact. Her kisses were
+big things to him, yet possibly there were larger psychological
+changes which occulted everything else, at first. But it must have
+been on that night that he first kissed her. For certainly it was when
+he called on her a week later that he kissed her for the second time.
+
+They had been animated but decorous, that evening a week later. He had
+tried to play an improvisation called "The Battle of San Juan Hill,"
+with a knowledge of the piano limited to the fact that if you struck
+alternate keys at the same time, there appeared not to be a discord.
+
+"I must go now," he said, slowly, as though the bald words had a
+higher significance. She tried to look at him, and could not. His arms
+circled her, with frightened happiness. She tilted back her head, and
+there was the ever-new surprise of blue irises under dark brows.
+Uplifted wonder her eyes spoke. His head drooped till he kissed her
+lips. The two bodies clamored for each other. But she unwound his
+arms, crying, "No, no, no!"
+
+He was enfolded by a sensation that they had instantly changed from
+friendly strangers to intimate lovers, as she said: "I don't
+understand it, Carl. I've never let a man kiss me like that. Oh, I
+suppose I've flirted, like most girls, and been kissed sketchily at
+silly dances. But this----Oh, Carl, Carl dear, don't ever kiss me
+again till--oh, not till I _know_. Why, I'm scarcely acquainted with
+you! I do know how dear you are, but it appals me when I think of how
+little background you have for me. Dear, I don't want to be sordid and
+spoil this moment, but I do know that when you're gone I'll be a
+coward and remember that there are families and things, and want to
+wait till I know how they like you, at the very least. Good night, and
+I----"
+
+"Good night, dear blessed. I know."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+There were, as Ruth had remarked, families.
+
+When Carl was formally invited to dine at the Winslows', on a night
+late in April, his only anxiety was as to the condition of his
+dinner-coat. He arrived in a state of easy briskness, planning apt and
+sensible remarks about the business situation for Mason and Mr.
+Winslow. As the maid opened the door Carl was wondering if he would be
+able to touch Ruth's hand under the table. He had an anticipatory
+fondness for all of the small friendly family group which was about to
+receive him.
+
+And he was cast into a den of strangers, most of them comprised in the
+one electric person of Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow.
+
+Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow was the general-commanding in whatsoever
+group she was placed by Providence (with which she had strong
+influence). At a White House reception she would pleasantly but firmly
+have sent the President about his business, and have taken his place
+in the receiving line. Just now she sat in a pre-historic S chair,
+near the center of the drawing-room, pumping out of Phil Dunleavy most
+of the facts about his chiefs' private lives.
+
+Aunt Emma had the soul of a six-foot dowager duchess, and should have
+had an eagle nose and a white pompadour. Actually, she was of medium
+height, with a not unduly maternal bosom, a broad, commonplace face,
+hair the color of faded grass, a blunt nose with slightly enlarged
+pores, and thin lips that seemed to be a straight line when seen from
+in front, but, seen in profile, puffed out like a fish's. She had a
+habit of nodding intelligently even when she was not listening, and
+another habit of rubbing her left knuckles with the fingers of her
+right hand. Not imposing in appearance was Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow,
+but she was born to discipline a court.
+
+An impeccable widow was she, speaking with a broad A, and dressed
+exquisitely in a black satin evening gown.
+
+By such simple-hearted traits as being always right about unimportant
+matters and idealistically wrong about important matters, politely
+intruding into everything, being earnest about the morality of the
+poor and auction bridge and the chaperonage of nice girls, possessing
+a working knowledge of Wagner and Rodin, wearing fifteen-dollar
+corsets, and believing on her bended knees that the Truegates and
+Winslows were the noblest families in the Social Register, Aunt Emma
+Truegate Winslow had persuaded the whole world, including even her
+near-English butler, that she was a superior woman. Family tradition
+said that she had only to raise a finger to get into really smart
+society. Upon the death of Ruth's mother, Aunt Emma had taken it as
+one of her duties, along with symphony concerts and committees, to
+rear Ruth properly. She had been neglecting this duty so far as to
+permit the invasion of a barbarian named Ericson only because she had
+been in California with her young son, Arthur. Just now, while her
+house was being opened, she was staying at the Winslows', with Arthur
+and a peculiarly beastly Japanese spaniel named Taka-San.
+
+She was introduced at Carl, she glanced him over, and passed him on to
+Olive Dunleavy, all in forty-five seconds. When Carl had recovered
+from a sensation of being a kitten drowned in a sack, he said
+agreeable things to Olive, and observed the situation in the
+drawing-room.
+
+Phil was marked out for Aunt Emma's favors; Mr. Winslow sat in a
+corner, apparently crushed, with restorative conversation administered
+by Ruth; Mason Winslow was haltingly attentive to a plain,
+well-dressed, amiable girl named Florence Crewden, who had
+prematurely gray hair, the week-end habit, and a weakness for baby
+talk. Ruth's medical-student brother, Bobby Winslow, was not there.
+The more he saw of Bobby's kind Aunt Emma, the more Carl could find it
+in his heart to excuse Bobby for having escaped the family dinner.
+
+Carl had an uncomfortable moment when Aunt Emma and Mr. Winslow asked
+him questions about the development of the Touricar. But before he
+could determine whether he was being deliberately inspected by the
+family the ordeal was over.
+
+As they went in to dinner, Mr. Winslow taking in Aunt Emma like a
+small boy accompanying the school principal, Ruth had the chance to
+whisper: "My Hawk, be good. Please believe I'm not responsible. It's
+all Aunt Emma's doing, this dreadfully stately family dinner. Don't
+let her bully you. I'm frightened to death and----Yes, Phil, I'm
+coming."
+
+The warning did not seem justified in view of the attractive
+table--candles, cut glass, a mound of flowers on a beveled mirror,
+silvery linen, and grape-fruit with champagne. Carl was at one side of
+Aunt Emma, but she seemed more interested in Mr. Winslow, at the end
+of the table; and on his other side Carl had a safe companion in Olive
+Dunleavy. Across from him were Florence Crewden, Phil, and Ruth--Ruth
+shimmering in a gown of yellow satin, which broke the curves of her
+fine, flushed shoulders only by a narrow band.
+
+The conversation played with people. Florence Crewden told, to
+applause and laughter, of an exploratory visit to the College of the
+City of New York, and her discovery of a strange race, young Jews
+mostly, who went to college to study, and had no sense of the nobility
+of "making" fraternities.
+
+"Such outsiders!" she said. "Can't you imagine the sort of a party
+they'd have--they'd all stand around and discuss psychology and
+dissecting puppies and Greek roots! Phil, I think it would be a
+lovely punishment for you to have to join them--to work in a
+laboratory all day and wear a celluloid collar."
+
+"Oh, I know their sort; 'greasy grinds' we used to call them; there
+were plenty of them in Yale," condescended Phil.
+
+"Maybe they wear celluloid collars--if they do--because they're poor,"
+protested Ruth.
+
+"My dear child," sniffed Aunt Emma, "with collars only twenty-five
+cents apiece? Don't be silly!"
+
+Mr. Winslow declared, with portly timidity, "Why, Em, my collars don't
+cost me but fifteen----"
+
+"Mason dear, let's not discuss it at dinner.... Tell me, all of you,
+the scandal I've missed by going to California. Which reminds me; did
+I tell you I saw that miserable Amy Baslin, you remember, that married
+the porter or the superintendent or something in her father's factory?
+I saw her and her husband at Pasadena, and they seemed to be happy. Of
+course Amy would put the best face she could on it, but they must have
+been miserably unhappy--such a sad affair, and she could have married
+quite decently."
+
+"What do you mean by 'decently'?" Ruth demanded.
+
+Carl was startled. He had once asked Ruth the same question about the
+same phrase.
+
+Aunt Emma revolved like a gun-turret getting Ruth's range, and
+remarked, calmly: "My dear child, you know quite well what I mean.
+Don't, I beg of you, bring any socialistic problems to dinner till you
+have really learned something about them.... Now I want to hear all
+the nice scandals I have missed."
+
+There were not many she had missed; but she kept the conversation
+sternly to discussions of people whose names Carl had never heard.
+Again he was obviously an Outsider. Still ignoring Carl, Aunt Emma
+demanded of Ruth and Phil, sitting together opposite her:
+
+"Tell me about the good times you children have been having, Ruthie.
+I am so glad that Phil and you finally went to the William Truegates'.
+And your letter about the Beaux Arts festival was charming, Ruthie. I
+quite envied you and Phil."
+
+The dragon continued talking to Ruth, while Carl listened, in the
+interstices of his chatter to Olive:
+
+"I hope you haven't been giving all your time and beauty-sleep doing
+too much of that settlement work, Ruthie--and Heaven only knows what
+germs you will get there--of course I should be the first to praise
+any work for the poor, ungrateful and shiftless though they are--what
+with my committees and the Truegate Temperance Home for Young Working
+Girls--it's all very well to be sympathetic with them, but when it
+comes to a settlement-house, and Heaven knows I have given them all
+the counsel and suggestions I could, though some of the professional
+settlement workers are as pert as they can be, and I really do believe
+some of them think they are trying to end poverty entirely, just as
+though the Lord would have sent poverty into the world if He didn't
+have a very good reason for it--you will remember the Bible says, 'The
+poor you always have with you,' and as Florence Barclay says in her
+novels, which may seem a little sentimental, but they are of such a
+good moral effect, you can't supersede the Scriptures even in the most
+charming social circles. To say nothing of the blessings of poverty,
+I'm sure they're much happier than we are, with our onerous duties,
+I'm sure that if any of these ragamuffin anarchists and socialists and
+anti-militarists want to take over my committees they are welcome, if
+they'll take over the miserable headaches and worried hours they give
+me, trying to do something for the poor, they won't even be clean but
+even in model tenements they will put coal in the bath-tubs. And so I
+do hope you haven't just been wearing yourself to a bone working for
+ungrateful dirty little children, Ruthie."
+
+"No, auntie dear, I've been quite as discreet as any Winslow should
+be. You see, I'm selfish, too. Aren't I, Carl?"
+
+"Oh, very."
+
+Aunt Emma seemed to remember, then, that some sort of a man, whose
+species she didn't quite know, sat next to her. She glanced at Carl,
+again gave him up as an error in social judgment, and went on:
+
+"No, Ruthie, not selfish so much as thoughtless about the duties of a
+family like ours--and I was always the first to say that the Winslows
+are as fine a stock as the Truegates. And I am going to see that you
+go out more the rest of this year, Ruthie. I want you and Phil to plan
+right now to attend the Charity League dances next season. You must
+learn to concentrate your attention----"
+
+"Auntie dear, please leave my wickedness till the next time we----"
+
+"My dear child, now that I have the chance to get all of us
+together--I'm sure Mr. Ericson will pardon the rest of us our little
+family discussions--I want to take you and Master Phil to task
+together. You are both of you negligent of social duties--duties they
+are, Ruthie, for man was not born to serve alone--though Phil is far
+better than you, with your queer habits, and Heaven only knows where
+you got them, neither your father nor your dear sainted mother was
+slack or selfish----"
+
+"Dear auntie, let's admit that I'm a black sheep with a little black
+muzzle and a habit of butting all sorts of ash-cans; and let Phil go
+on his social way rejoicing."
+
+Ruth was jaunty, but her voice was strained, and she bit her lip with
+staccato nervousness when she was not speaking. Carl ventured to face
+the dragon.
+
+"Mrs. Winslow, I'm sure Ruth has been better than you think; she has
+been learning all these fiendishly complicated new dances. You know a
+poor business man like myself finds them----"
+
+"Yes," said Aunt Emma, "I am sure she will always remember that she
+is a Winslow, and must carry on the family traditions, but sometimes I
+am afraid she gets under bad influences, because of her good nature."
+She said it loudly. She looked Carl in the eye.
+
+The whole table stopped talking. Carl felt like a tramp who has kicked
+a chained bulldog and discovers that the chain is broken.
+
+He wanted to be good; not make a scene. He noticed with intense
+indignation that Phil was grinning. He planned to get Phil off in a
+corner, not necessarily a dark corner, and beat him. He wanted to
+telegraph Ruth; dared not. He realized, in a quarter-second, that he
+must have been discussed by the Family, and did not like it.
+
+Every one seemed to be waiting for him to speak. Awkwardly he said,
+wondering all the while if she meant what her tone said she meant, by
+"bad influences":
+
+"Yes, but----Just going to say----I believe settlement work is a good
+influence----"
+
+"Please don't discuss----" Ruth was groaning, when Aunt Emma sternly
+interrupted:
+
+"It is good of you to take up the cudgels, Mr. Ericson, and please
+don't misjudge me--of course I realize that I am only a silly old
+woman and that my passion to see the Winslows keep to their fine
+standards is old-fashioned, but you see it is a hobby of mine that
+I've devoted years to, and you who haven't known the Winslows so very
+long----" Her manner was almost courteous.
+
+"Yes, that's so," Carl mumbled, agreeably, just as she dropped the
+courtesy and went on:
+
+"----you can't judge--in fact (this is nothing personal, you know) I
+don't suppose it's possible for Westerners to have any idea how
+precious family ideals are to Easterners. Of course we're probably
+silly about them, and it's splendid, your wheat-lands, and not caring
+who your grandfather was; but to make up for those things we do have
+to protect what we have gained through the generations."
+
+Carl longed to stand up, to defy them all, to cry: "If you mean that
+you think Ruth has to be protected against me, have the decency to say
+so." Yet he kept his voice gentle:
+
+"But why be narrowed to just a few families in one's interests? Now
+this settlement----"
+
+"One isn't narrowed. There are plenty of _good_ families for Ruth to
+consider when it comes time for my little girl to consider alliances
+at all!" Aunt Emma coldly stated.
+
+"I _will_ shut up!" he told himself. "I will shut up. I'll see this
+dinner through, and then never come near this house again." He tried
+to look casual, as though the conversation was safely finished. But
+Aunt Emma was waiting for him to go on. In the general stillness her
+corsets creaked with belligerent attention. He played with his fork in
+a "Well, if that's how you feel about it, perhaps it would be better
+not to discuss it any further, my dear madam," manner, growing every
+second more flushed, embarrassed, sick, angry; trying harder every
+second to look unconcerned.
+
+Aunt Emma hawked a delicate and ladylike hawk in her patrician throat,
+prefatory to a new attack. Carl knew he would be tempted to retort
+brutally.
+
+Then from the door of the dining-room whimpered the high voice of an
+excited child:
+
+"Oh, mamma, oh, Cousin Ruthie, nurse says Hawk Ericson is here! I want
+to see him!"
+
+Every one turned toward a boy of five or six, round as a baby chicken,
+in his fuzzy miniature pajamas, protectingly holding a cotton monkey
+under his arm, sturdy and shy and defiant.
+
+"Why, Arthur!" "Why, my son!" "Oh, the darling baby!" from the table.
+
+"Come here, Arthur, and let's hear your troubles before nurse nabs
+you, old son," said Phil, not at all condescendingly, rising from the
+table, holding out his arms.
+
+"No, no! You just let me go! I want to see Hawk Ericson. Is that Hawk
+Ericson?" demanded the son of Aunt Emma, pointing at Carl.
+
+"Yes, sweetheart," said Ruth, softly, proudly.
+
+Running madly about the end of the table, Arthur jumped at Carl's lap.
+
+Carl swung him up and inquired, "What is it, old man?"
+
+"Are you Hawk Ericson?"
+
+"At your commands, cap'n."
+
+Aunt Emma rose and said, masterfully, "Come, little son, now you've
+seen Mr. Ericson it's up to beddie again, up--to--beddie."
+
+"No, no; please no, mamma! I've never seen a' aviator before, not in
+all my life, and you promised me 'cross your heart, at Pasadena you
+did, I could see one."
+
+Arthur's face showed signs of imminent badness.
+
+"Well, you may stay for a while, then," said Aunt Emma, weakly,
+unconscious that her sway had departed from her, while the rest of the
+table grinned, except Carl, who was absorbed in Arthur's ecstasy.
+
+"I'm going to be a' aviator, too; I think a' aviator is braver than
+anybody. I'd rather be a' aviator than a general or a policeman or
+anybody. I got a picture of you in my scrap-book--you got a funny hat
+like Cousin Bobby wears when he plays football in it. Shall I get you
+the picture in my scrap-book?... Honest, will you give me another?"
+
+Aunt Emma made one more attempt to coax Arthur up to bed, but his
+Majesty refused, and she compromised by scolding his nurse and sending
+up for his dressing-gown, a small, blue dressing-gown on which yellow
+ducks and white bunny-rabbits paraded proudly.
+
+"Like our blue bowl!" Carl remarked to Ruth.
+
+Not till after coffee in the drawing-room would Arthur consent to go
+to bed. This real head of the Emma Winslow family was far too much
+absorbed in making Carl tell of his long races, and "Why does a
+flying-machine fly? What's a wind pressure? Why does the wind shove
+up? Why is the wings curved? Why does it want to catch the wind?" The
+others listened, including even Aunt Emma.
+
+Carl went home early. Ruth had the opportunity to confide:
+
+"Hawk dear, I can't tell you how ashamed I am of my family for
+enduring anybody so rude and opinionated as Aunt Emma. But--it's all
+right, now, isn't it?... No, no, don't kiss me, but--dear dreams,
+Hawk."
+
+Phil's voice, from behind, shouted: "Oh, Ericson! Just a second."
+
+Carl was not at all pleased. He remembered that Phil had listened with
+obvious amusement to his agonized attempt to turn Aunt Emma's attacks.
+
+Said Phil, while Ruth disappeared: "Which way you going? Walk to the
+subway with you. You win, old man. I admire your nerve for facing Aunt
+Emma. What I wanted to say----I hope to thunder you don't think I was
+in any way responsible for Mrs. Winslow's linking me and Ruth that way
+and----Oh, you understand. I admire you like the devil for knowing
+what you want and going after it. I suppose you'll have to convince
+Ruth yet, but, by Jove! you've convinced me! Glad you had Arthur for
+ally. They don't make kiddies any better. God! if I could have a son
+like that----I turn off here. G-good luck, Ericson."
+
+"Thanks a lot, Phil."
+
+"Thanks. Good night, Carl."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+Long Beach, on the first hot Sunday of May, when motorists come out
+from New York, half-ready to open asphalt hearts to sea and sky.
+Carl's first sight of it, save from an aeroplane, and he was mad-happy
+to find real shore so near the city.
+
+Ruth and he were picnicking, vulgar and unashamed, among the dunes at
+the end of the long board-walk, like the beer-drinking, pickle-eating
+parties of fishermen and the family groups with red table-cloths,
+grape-basket lunches, and colored Sunday supplements. Ruth declared
+that she preferred them to the elegant loungers who were showing off
+new motor-coats on the board-walk. But Carl and she had withdrawn a
+bit from the crowds, and in the dunes had made a nest, with a book and
+a magazine and a box of chocolates and Carl's collapsible lunch-kit.
+
+Not New York only, but all of Ruth's relatives were forgot. Aunt Emma
+Truegate Winslow was a myth of the dragon-haunted past. Here all was
+fresh color and free spaces looking to open sea. Behind the dunes,
+with their traceries of pale grass, reveled the sharp, unshadowed
+green of marshes, and an inland bay that was blue as bluing, a
+startling blue, bordered by the emerald marshes. To one side--afar,
+not troubling their peace--were the crimson roofs of fantastic houses,
+like chalets and California missions and villas of the Riviera, with
+gables and turrets of red tiles.
+
+Before their feet was the cream-colored beach, marked by ridges of
+driftwood mixed with small glistening shells, long ranks of
+pale-yellow seaweed, and the delicate wrinkles in the sand that were
+the tracks of receding waves. The breakers left the beach wet and
+shining for a moment, like plates of raw-colored copper, making one
+cry out with its flashing beauty. Then, at last, the eyes lifted to
+unbroken bluewater--nothing between them and Europe save rolling waves
+and wave-crests like white plumes. The sea was of a diaphanous blue
+that shaded through a bold steel blue and a lucent blue enamel to a
+rich ultramarine which absorbed and healed the office-worn mind. The
+sails of tacking sloops were a-blossom; sea-gulls swooped; a tall
+surf-fisherman in red flannel shirt and shiny black hip-boots strode
+out into the water and cast with a long curve of his line; cumulus
+clouds, whose pure white was shaded with a delicious golden tone, were
+baronial above; and out on the sky-line the steamers raced by.
+
+Round them was the warm intimacy of the dune sands; beyond was
+infinite space calling to them to be big and unafraid.
+
+Talking, falling into silences touched with the mystery of sun and
+sea, they confessed youth's excited wonder about the world; Carl
+sitting cross-legged, rubbing his ankles, a springy figure in blue
+flannel and a daring tie; while Ruth, in deep-rose linen, her throat
+bright and bare, lay with her chin in her hands, a flush beneath the
+gentle brown of her cheeks, her white-clad ankles crossed under her
+skirt, slender against the gray sand, thoughtful of eye, lost in
+happiness.
+
+"Some day," Carl was musing, "your children and mine will say, 'You
+certainly lived in the most marvelous age in the world.' Think of it.
+They talk about the romance of the Crusades and the Romans and all
+that, but think of the miracles we've seen already, and we're only
+kids. Aviation and the automobile and wireless and moving pictures
+and electric locomotives and electric cooking and the use of radium
+and the X-ray and the linotype and the submarine and the labor
+movement--the I. W. W. and syndicalism and all that--not that I know
+anything about the labor movement, but I suppose it's the most
+important of all. And Metchnikoff and Ehrlich. Oh yes, and a good
+share of the development of the electric light and telephone and the
+phonograph.... Golly! In just a few years!"
+
+"Yes," Ruth added, "and Montessori's system of education--that's what
+I think is the most important.... See that sail-boat, Hawk! Like a
+lily. And the late-afternoon gold on those marshes. I think this salt
+breeze blows away all the bad Ruth.... Oh! Don't forget the attempts
+to cure cancer and consumption. So many big things starting right now,
+while we're sitting here."
+
+"Lord! what an age! Romance--why, there's more romance in a wireless
+spark--think of it, little lonely wallowing steamer, at night, out in
+the dark, slamming out a radio like forty thousand tigers
+spitting--and a man getting it here on Long Island. More romance than
+in all the galleons that ever sailed the purple tropics, which they
+mostly ain't purple, but dirty green. Anything 's possible now. World
+cools off--a'right, we'll move on to some other planet. It gets me
+going. Don't have to believe in fairies to give the imagination a job,
+to-day. Glad I've been an aviator; gives me some place in it all,
+anyway."
+
+"I'm glad, too, Hawk, terribly glad."
+
+The sun was crimsoning; the wind grew chilly. The beach was scattered
+with camp-fires. Their own fire settled into compact live coals which,
+in the dusk of the dune-hollow, spread over the million bits of quartz
+a glow through which pirouetted the antic sand-fleas. Carl's cigarette
+had the fragrance that comes only from being impregnated with the
+smoke of an outdoor fire. The waves were lyric, and a group at the
+next fire crooned "Old Black Joe." The two lovers curled in their
+nest. Hand moved toward hand.
+
+Ruth whispered: "It's sweet to be with all these people and their
+fires.... Will I really learn not to be supercilious?"
+
+"Honey! You--supercilious? Democracy---- Oh, the dickens! let's not
+talk about theories any more, but just about Us!"
+
+Her hand, tight-coiled as a snail-shell, was closed in his.
+
+"Your hand is asleep in my hand's arms," he whispered. The ball of his
+thumb pressed her thumb, and he whispered once more: "See. Now our
+hands are kissing each other--we--we must watch them better.... Your
+thumb is like a fairy." Again his thumb, hardened with file and wrench
+and steering-wheel, touched hers. It was startlingly like a kiss of
+real lips.
+
+Lightly she returned the finger-kiss, answering diffidently, "Our
+hands are mad--silly hands to think that Long Beach is a tropical
+jungle."
+
+"You aren't angry at them?"
+
+"N-no."
+
+He cradled her head on his shoulder, his hand gripping her arm till
+she cried, "You hurt me." He kissed her cheek. She drew back as far as
+she could. Her hand, against his chest, held him away for a minute.
+Her defense suddenly collapsed, and she was relaxed and throbbing in
+his arms. He slipped his fingers under her chin, and turned up her
+face till he could kiss her lips. He had not known the kiss of man and
+woman could be so long, so stirring. Yet at first he was disappointed.
+This was, after all, but a touch--just such a touch as finger against
+finger. But her lips grew more intense against his, returning and
+taking the kiss; both of them giving and receiving at once.
+
+Wondering at himself for it, Carl thought of other things. He was
+amazed that, while their lips were hot together, he worried as to what
+train Ruth ought to take, after dinner. Yet, with such thoughts
+conferring, he was in an ecstasy beyond sorrow; praying that to her,
+as to him, there was no pain but instead a rapture in the sting of her
+lips, as her teeth cut a little into them.... A kiss--thing that the
+polite novels sketch as a second's unbodied bliss--how human it was,
+with teeth and lips to consider; common as eating--and divine as
+martyrdom. His lips were saying to her things too vast and extravagant
+for a plain young man to venture upon in words:
+
+"Lady, to you I chant my reverence and faith everlasting, in such
+unearthly music as the angels use when with lambent wings they salute
+the marching dawn." Such lyric tributes, and an emotion too subtle to
+fit into any words whatever, his lips were saying....
+
+Then she was drawing back, rending the kiss, crying, "You're almost
+smothering me!"
+
+With his arms easily about her, but with her weight against his
+shoulder, they and their love veiled from the basket-parties by the
+darkness, he said, quiveringly: "See, my arms are a little house for
+you, just as my hand was a little house for your hand, once. My arms
+are the walls, and your head and mine together are the roof."
+
+"I love the little house."
+
+"No. Say, 'I love _you_."'
+
+"No."
+
+"Say it."
+
+"No."
+
+"Please----"
+
+"Oh, Hawk dear, I couldn't even if--just now, I do want to say it, but
+I want to be fair. I am terribly happy to be in the house of Hawk's
+arms. I'm not afraid in it, even out here on the dark dunes--which
+Aunt Emma wouldn't--somehow--approve! But I do want to be fair to you,
+and I'm afraid I'm not, when I let you love me this way. I don't want
+to hurt you. Ever. Perhaps it's egotistical of me, but I'm afraid you
+would be hurt if I let you kiss me and then afterward I decided I
+didn't love you at all."
+
+"But can't you, some day----"
+
+"Oh, I don't know, I don't _know_! I'm not sure I know what love is.
+I'm not sure it's love that makes me happy (as I really am) when you
+kiss me. Perhaps I'm just curious, and experimenting. I was quite
+conscious, when you kissed me then; quite conscious and curious; and
+once I caught myself wondering for half a second what train we'd take.
+I was ashamed of that, but I wasn't ashamed of taking mental notes and
+learning what these 'kisses,' that we mention so glibly, really are.
+Just experimenting, you see. And if you were _too_ serious about our
+kiss, it wouldn't be at all fair to you."
+
+"I'm glad you're frank, blessed, and I guess I understand pretty well
+how you feel, but, after all, I'm fairly simple about such things.
+Blessed, blessed, I don't really know a thing but 'I love you.'"
+
+His arms were savage again; he kissed her, kissed her lips, kissed the
+hollow of her throat. Then he lifted her from the ground and would not
+set her down till she had kissed him back.
+
+"You frightened me a lot, then," she said. "Did the child want to
+impress Ruth with his mighty strength? Well, she shall be impressed.
+Hawk, I do hope--I do hate myself for not knowing my mind. I will try
+not to experiment. I want you to be happy. I do want to be honest with
+you. If I'm honest, will you try not to be too impatient till I do
+know just what I want?... Oh, I'm sick of the modern lover! I talk and
+talk about love; it seems as though we'd lost the power to be simple,
+like the old ballads. Or weren't the ballad people really simple,
+either? You say you are; so I think you will have to run away with
+me.... But not till after dinner! Come."
+
+The moon was rising. Swinging hands, they tramped toward the
+board-walk. The crunch of their feet in the sand was the rhythmic
+spell of a magician, which she broke when she sighed:
+
+"Should I have let you kiss me, out here in the wilds? Will you
+respect me after it?"
+
+"Princess, you're all the respect there is in the world."
+
+"It seems so strange. We were absorbed in war and electricity and
+then----"
+
+"Love is war and electricity, or else it's dull, and I don't think we
+two 'll ever get dull--if you do decide you can love me. We'll wander:
+cabin in the Rockies, with forty mountains for our garden fence, and
+an eagle for our suburban train."
+
+"And South Sea islands silhouetted at sunset!... Look! That moon!... I
+always imagine it so clearly when I hear Hawaiian singers on the
+Victrola--and a Hawaiian beach, with fireflies in the jungle behind
+and a phosphorescent sea in front and native girls dancing in
+garlands."
+
+"Yes! And Paris boulevards and a mysterious castle in the Austrian
+mountains, with a hidden treasure in dark, secret dungeons, and heavy
+iron armor; and then, bing! a brand-new prairie town in Saskatchewan
+or Dakota, with brand-new sunlight on the fresh pine shacks, and
+beyond the town the plains with brand-new grass rolling."
+
+"But seriously, Hawk, would you want to go to all those places, if you
+were married? Would you, practically? You know, even rich
+globe-trotters go to the same sorts of places, mostly. And we wouldn't
+even be rich, would we?"
+
+"No, just comfortable; maybe five thousand a year."
+
+"Well, would you really want to keep on going, and take your wife? Or
+would you settle down like the rest, and spend money so you could keep
+in shape to make money to spend to keep in shape?"
+
+"Seriously I would keep going--if I had the right girl to go with me.
+It would be mighty important which one, though, I guess--and by that I
+mean you. Once, when I quit flying, I thought that maybe I'd stop
+wandering and settle down, maybe even marry a Joralemon kind of a
+girl. But I was meant to hike for the hiking's sake.... Only, not
+alone any more. I _need_ you.... We'd go and go. No limit.... And we
+wouldn't just go places, either; we'd be different things. We'd be
+Connecticut farmers one year, and run a mine in Mexico the next, and
+loaf in Paris the next, if we had the money."
+
+"Sometimes you almost tempt me to like you."
+
+"Like me now!"
+
+"No, not now, but---- Here's the board-walk."
+
+"Where's those steps? Oh yes. Gee! I hate to leave the water without
+having had a swim. Wish we'd had one. Dare you to go wading!"
+
+"Oh, ought I to, do you think? Wading would be silly. And nice."
+
+"Course you oughtn't. Come on. Don't you remember how the sand feels
+between your toes?"
+
+The moon brooded upon the lulled waves, and quested among the ridges
+of driftwood for pearly shells. The pools left by the waves were
+enticing. Ruth retreated into the shelter of the board-walk and came
+shyly out, clutching her skirts, her feet and ankles silver in the
+light.
+
+"The sand does feel good, but uh! it's getting colder and colder!" she
+wailed, as she cautiously advanced into the water. "I'll think up
+punishments for you. You've not only caused me to be cold, but you've
+made me abominably self-conscious."
+
+"Don't be self-conscious, blessed. We are just children exploring." He
+splashed out, coat off, trousers rolled to the knee above his thin,
+muscular legs, galloping along the edge of the water like a large
+puppy, while she danced after him.
+
+They were stilled to the persuasive beauty of the night. Music from
+the topaz jeweled hotels far down the beach wove itself into the peace
+on land and sea. A fish lying on shore was turned by the moon into
+ivory with carven scales. Before them, reaching to the ancient towers
+of England and France and the islands of the sea, was the whispering
+water. A tenderness that understood everything, made allowance for
+everything in her and in himself, folded its wings round him as he
+scanned her that stood like a slender statue of silver--dark hair
+moon-brightened, white arms holding her skirts, white legs round which
+the spent waves sparkled with unworldly fire. He waded over to her and
+timidly kissed the edge of her hair.
+
+She rubbed her cheek against his. "Now we must run," she said. She
+quickly turned back to the shadow of the board-walk, to draw on her
+stockings and shoes, kneeling on the sand like the simple maid of the
+ballads which she had been envying.
+
+They tramped along the board-walk, with heels clicking like castanets,
+conscious that the world was hushed in night's old enchantment.
+
+As they had answered to companionship with the humble picnic-parties
+among the dunes, so now they found it amusing to dine among the
+semi-great and the semi-motorists at the Nassau. Ruth had a distinct
+pleasure when T. Wentler, horse-fancier, aviation enthusiast,
+president of the First State Bank of Sacramento, came up, reminded
+Carl of their acquaintanceship at the Oakland-Berkeley Aero Meet, and
+begged Ruth and Carl to join him, his wife, and Senator Leeford, for
+coffee.
+
+As they waited for their train, quiet after laughter, Ruth remarked:
+"It was jolly to play with the Personages. You haven't seen much of
+the frivolous side of me. It's pretty important. You don't know how
+much soul satisfaction I get out of dancing all night and playing
+tennis with flanneled oafs and eating _marrons glacés_ and chatting in
+a box at the opera till I spoil the entire evening for all the German
+music-lovers, and talking to all the nice doggies from the Tennis and
+Racquet Club whenever I get invited to Piping Rock or Meadow Brook or
+any other country club that has ancestors. I want you to take
+warning."
+
+"Did you really miss Piping Rock much to-day?".
+
+"No--but I might to-morrow, and I might get horribly bored in our
+cabin in the Rockies and hate the stony old peaks, and long for tea
+and scandal in a corner at the Ritz."
+
+"Then we'd hike on to San Francisco; have tea at the St. Francis or
+the Fairmont or the Palace; then beat it for your Hawaii and fireflies
+in the bush."
+
+"Perhaps, but suppose, just suppose we were married, and suppose the
+Touricar didn't go so awfully well, and we had to be poor, and
+couldn't go running away, but had to stick in one beastly city flat
+and economize! It's all very well to talk of working things out
+together, but think of not being able to have decent clothes, and
+going to the movies every night--ugh! When I see some of the girls who
+used to be so pretty and gay, and they went and married poor men--now
+they are so worn and tired and bedraggled and perambulatorious, and
+they worry about Biddies and furnaces and cabbages, and their hair is
+just scratched together, with the dubbest hats--I'd rather be an idle
+rich."
+
+"If we got stuck like that, I'd sell out and we'd hike to the mountain
+cabin, anyway, say go up in the Santa Lucias, and keep wild bees."
+
+"And probably get stung--in the many subtle senses of that word. And
+I'd have to cook and wash. That would be fun _as_ fun, but to have to
+do it----"
+
+"Ruth, honey, let's not worry about it now, anyhow. I don't believe
+there's much danger. And don't let's spoil this bully day."
+
+"It has been sweet. I won't croak any more."
+
+"There's the train coming."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+While the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and
+stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as
+unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in
+the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening
+called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to
+go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires. Carl tried to bring her
+coolness. He ate only poached eggs on toast or soup and salad for
+dinner, that he might not be torpid. He gave her moss-roses with drops
+of water like dew on the stems. They sat out on the box-stoop--the
+unfriendly New York street adopting for a time the frank
+neighborliness of a village--and exclaimed over every breeze. They
+talked about the charm of forty degrees below zero. That is,
+sometimes. Their favorite topic was themselves.
+
+She still insisted that she was not in love with him; hooted at the
+idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to
+some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were
+engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the
+windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to
+sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till
+his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into
+his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into
+warm slumber in the familiarity of his arms. Yet he dared not kiss her
+throat, as he had done at Long Beach.
+
+As lovers do, Carl had thought intently of her warning that she did
+care for clothes, dancing, country clubs. Ruth would have been
+caressingly surprised had she known the thought and worried
+conscientiousness he gave to the problem of planning "parties" for
+her. Ideas were always popping up in the midst of his work, and never
+giving him rest till he had noted them down on memo.-papers. He
+carried about, on the backs of envelopes, such notes as these:
+
+Join country clb take R dances there?
+Basket of fruit for R
+Invite Mason W lunch
+Orgnze Tcar tour NY to SF
+Newspaper men on tour probly Forbes
+Rem Walter's new altitude 16,954
+R to Astor Roof
+Rem country c
+
+He did get a card to the Peace Waters Country Club and take Ruth to a
+dance there. She seemed to know every other member, and danced
+eloquently. He took her to the Josiah Bagbys' for dinner; to the
+first-night of a summer musical comedy. But he was still the stranger
+in New York, and "parties" are not to be had by tipping waiters and
+buying tickets. Half of the half-dozen affairs which they attended
+were of her inspiration; he was invited to go yachting at Larchmont,
+motoring, swimming on Long Island, with friends of herself and her
+brothers.
+
+One evening that strikes into Carl's memories of those days of the
+_pays du tendre_ is the evening on which Phil Dunleavy insisted on
+celebrating a Yale baseball victory by taking them to dinner in the
+oak-room of the Ritz-Carlton, under whose alabaster lights, among the
+cosmopolites, they dined elaborately and smoked slim, imported
+cigarettes. The thin music of violins took them into the lonely gray
+groves of the Land of Wandering Tunes, till Phil began to talk,
+disclosing to them a devotion to beauty, a satirical sense of humor,
+and a final acceptance of Carl as his friend.
+
+A hundred other "parties" Carl planned, while dining alone at inferior
+restaurants. A hundred times he took a ten-cent dessert instead of an
+exciting fifteen-cent strawberry shortcake, to save money for those
+parties. (Out of such sordid thoughts of nickel coins is built a love
+enduring, and even tolerable before breakfast coffee.)
+
+Yet always to him their real life was in simple jaunts out of doors,
+arranged without considering other people. Her father seemed glad of
+that. He once said to Carl (giving him a cigar), "You children had
+better not let Aunt Emma know that you are enjoying yourselves as you
+want to! How is the automobile business going?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would be pleasant to relate that Carl was inspired by love to put
+so much of that celebrated American quality "punch" into his work that
+the Touricar was sweeping the market. Or to picture with quietly
+falling tears the pathos of his business failure at the time when he
+most needed money. As a matter of fact, the Touricar affairs were
+going as, in real life, most businesses go--just fairly well. A few
+cars were sold; there were prospects of other sales; the VanZile
+Corporation neither planned to drop the Touricar, nor elected our
+young hero vice-president of the corporation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In June Gertrude Cowles and her mother left for Joralemon. Carl had,
+since Christmas, seen them about once a month. Gertie had at first
+represented an unhappy old friend to whom he had to be kind. Then, as
+she seemed never to be able to give up the desire to see him tied
+down, whether by her affection or by his work, Carl came to regard her
+as an irritating foe to the freedom which he prized the more because
+of the increasing bondage of the office. The last stage was pure
+indifference to her. Gertie was either a chance for simple sweetness
+which he failed to take, or she was a peril which he had escaped,
+according to one's view of her; but in any case he had missed--or
+escaped--her as a romantic hero escapes fire, flood, and plot. She
+meant nothing to him, never could again. Life had flowed past her as,
+except in novels with plots, most lives do flow past temporary and
+fortuitous points of interest.... Gertie was farther from him now than
+those dancing Hawaiian girls whom Ruth and he hoped some day to see.
+Yet by her reaching out for his liberty Gertie had first made him
+prize Ruth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The 1st of July, 1913, Ruth left for the Patton Kerrs' country house
+in the Berkshires, near Pittsfield. Carl wrote to her every day. He
+told her, apropos of Touricars and roof-gardens and aviation records
+and Sunday motor-cycling with Bobby Winslow, that he loved her; he
+even made, at the end of his letters, the old-fashioned lines of
+crosses to represent kisses. Whenever he hinted how much he missed
+her, how much he wanted to feel her startle in his arms, he wondered
+what she would read out of it; wondered if she would put the letter
+under her pillow.
+
+She answered every other day with friendly letters droll in their
+descriptions of the people she met. His call of love she did not
+answer--directly. But she admitted that she missed their playtimes;
+and once she wrote to him, late on a cold Berkshire night, with a
+black rain and wind like a baying bloodhound:
+
+     It is so still in my room & so wild outside that I am
+     frightened. I have tried to make myself smart in a blue silk
+     dressing gown & a tosh lace breakfast cap, & I will write
+     neatly with a quill pen from the Mayfair, but just the same
+     I am a lonely baby & I want you here to comfort me. Would
+     you be too shocked to come? I would put a Navajo blanket on
+     my bed & a papier maché Turkish dagger & head of Othello
+     over my bed & pretend it was a cozy corner, that is of
+     course if they still have papier maché ornaments, I suppose
+     they still live in Harlem & Brooklyn. We would sit _very_
+     quietly in two wicker chairs on either side of my fireplace
+     & listen to the swollen brook in the ravine just below my
+     window. But with no Hawk here the wind keeps wailing that
+     Pan is dead & that there won't ever again be any sunshine on
+     the valley. Dear, it really _isn't_ safe to be writing like
+     this, after reading it you will suppose that it's just you
+     that I am lonely for, but of course I'd be glad for Phil or
+     Puggy Crewden or your nice solemn Walter MacMonnies or _any_
+     suitor who would make foolish noises & hide me from the
+     wind's hunting. Now I will seal this up & _NOT_ send it in
+     the morning.
+
+Your playmate Ruth
+
+     Here is one small kiss on the forehead but remember it is
+     just because of the wind & rain.
+
+Presumably she did mail the letter. At least, he received it.
+
+He carried her letters in the side-pocket of his coat till the
+envelopes were worn at the edges and nearly covered with smudged
+pencil-notes about things he wanted to keep in mind and would, of
+course, have kept in mind without making notes. He kept finding new
+meanings in her letters. He wanted them to indicate that she loved
+him; and any ambiguous phrase signified successively that she loved,
+laughed at, loathed, and loved him. Once he got up from bed to take
+another look at a letter and see whether she had said, "I hope you had
+a dear good time at the Explorers' Club dinner," or "I hope you had a
+good time, dear."
+
+Carl was entirely sincere in his worried investigation of her state of
+mind. He knew that both Ruth and he had the instability as well as the
+initiative of the vagabond. As quickly as they had claimed each other,
+so quickly could either of them break love's alliance, if bored. Carl
+himself, being anything but bored, was as faithfully devoted as the
+least enterprising of moral young men, He forgot Gertie, did not write
+to Istra Nash the artist, and when the VanZile office got a new
+telephone-girl, a tall, languorous brunette with shadowy eyes and fine
+cheeks, he did not even smile at her.
+
+But--was Ruth so bound? She still refused to admit even that she could
+fall in love. He knew that Ruth and he were not romantic characters,
+but every-day people with a tendency to quarrel and demand and be
+slack. He knew that even if the rose dream came true, there would be
+drab spots in it. And now that she was away, with Lenox and polo to
+absorb her, could the gauche, ignorant Carl Ericson, that he privately
+knew himself to be, retain her interest?
+
+Late in July he received an invitation to spend a week-end, Friday to
+Tuesday, with Ruth at the Patton Kerrs'.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+The brief trip to the Berkshires was longer than any he had taken
+these nine months. He looked forward animatedly to the journey,
+remembering details of travel--such trivial touches as the oval brass
+wash-bowls of a Pullman sleeper, and how, when the water is running
+out, the inside of the bowl is covered with a whitish film of water,
+which swiftly peels off. He recalled the cracked white paint of a
+steamer's ventilator; the abruptly stopping zhhhhh of a fog-horn; the
+vast smoky roof of a Philadelphia train-shed, clamorous with the
+train-bells of a strange town, giving a sense of mystery to the
+traveler stepping from the car for a moment to stretch his legs; an
+ugly junction station platform, with resin oozing from the heavy
+planks in the spring sun; the polished binnacle of the S.S. _Panama_.
+
+He expected keen joy in new fields and hills. Yet all the way north he
+was trying to hold the train back. In a few minutes, now, he would see
+Ruth. And at this hour he did not even know definitely that he liked
+her.
+
+He could not visualize her. He could see the sleeve of her blue
+corduroy jacket; her eyes he could not see. She was a stranger. Had he
+idealized her? He was apologetic for his unflattering doubt, but of
+what sort _was_ she?
+
+The train was stopping at her station with rattling windows and a
+despairing grind of the wheels. Carl seized his overnight bag and
+suit-case with fictitious enthusiasm. He was in a panic. Emerging
+from the safe, impersonal train upon the platform, he saw her.
+
+She was waving to him from a one-seated phaeton, come alone to meet
+him--and she was the adorable, the perfect comrade. He thought
+jubilantly as he strode along the platform: "She's wonderful. Love
+her? Should say I do!"
+
+While they drove under the elms, past white cottages and the village
+green, while they were talking so lightly and properly that none of
+the New England gossips could be wounded in the sense of propriety,
+Carl was learning her anew. She was an outdoor girl now, in
+low-collared blouse and white linen skirt. He rejoiced in her
+modulating laugh; the contrast of blue eyes and dark brows under her
+Panama hat; her full dark hair, with a lock sun-drenched; her bare
+throat, boyishly brown, femininely smooth; the sweet, clean,
+fine-textured girl flesh of the hollow of one shoulder faintly to be
+seen in the shadow of her broad, drooping collar; one hand, with a
+curious ring of rose quartz and steel points, excitedly pounding a
+tattoo of greeting with the whip-handle; her spirited irreverences
+regarding the people they passed; chatter which showed the world
+transformed as through ruby glass--a Ruth radiant, understanding, his
+comrade. She was all that he had believed during her absence and
+doubted while he was coming to her. But he had no time to repent of
+his doubt, now, so busily was he exulting to himself, slipping a hand
+under her arm: "Love her? I--should--say--I--do!"
+
+The carriage rolled out of town with the rhythmic creak of a country
+buggy, climbed a hill range by means of the black, oily state road,
+and turned upon a sandy side-road. A brook ran beside them. Sunny
+fields alternated with woods leaf-floored, quiet, holy--miraculous
+after the weary city. Below was a vista of downward-sloping fields,
+divided by creeper-covered stone walls; then a sun-meshed valley set
+with ponds like shining glass dishes on a green table-cloth; beyond
+all, a long reach of hillsides covered with unbroken fleecy forest,
+like green down....
+
+"So much unspoiled country, and yet there's people herded in subways!"
+complained Carl.
+
+They drove along a level road, lined with wild raspberry-bushes and
+full of a thin jade light from the shading maples. They gossiped of
+the Patton Kerrs and the Berkshires; of the difference between the
+professional English week-ender and the American, who still has
+something of the naïve provincial delight of "going visiting"; of New
+York and the Dunleavys. But their talk lulled to a nervous hush. It
+seemed to him that a great voice cried from the clouds: "It is beside
+_Ruth_ that you are sitting; Ruth whose arm you feel!" In silence he
+caught her left hand.
+
+As he slowly drew back her hand and the reins with it, to stop the
+ambling horse, the two children stared straight at each other, hungry,
+tremulously afraid. Their kiss--not only their lips, but their spirits
+met without one reserve. A straining long kiss, as though they were
+forcing their lips into one body of living flame. A kiss in which his
+eyes were blind to the enchantment of the jade light about them, his
+ears deaf to brook and rustling forest. All his senses were
+concentrated on the close warmth of her misty lips, the curve of her
+young shoulder, her woman sweetness and longing. Then his senses
+forgot even her lips, and floated off into a blurred trance of
+bodiless happiness--the kiss of Nirvana. No foreign thought of trains
+or people or the future came now to drag him to earth. It was the most
+devoted, most sacred moment he had known.
+
+As he became again conscious of lips and cheek and brave shoulders and
+of her wide-spread fingers gripping his upper arm, she was slowly
+breaking the spell of the kiss. But again and again she kissed him,
+hastily, savage tokens of rejoicing possession.
+
+She cried: "I do know now! I do love you!"
+
+"Blessed----"
+
+In silence they stared into the woods while her fingers smoothed his
+knuckles. Her eyes were faint with tears, in the magic jade light.
+
+"I didn't know a kiss could be like that," she marveled, presently. "I
+wouldn't have believed selfish Ruth could give all of herself."
+
+"Yes! It was the whole universe."
+
+"Hawk dear, I wasn't experimenting, that time. I'm glad, glad! To know
+I can really love; not just curiosity!... I've wanted you so all day.
+I thought four o'clock wouldn't ever come--and oh, darling, my dear,
+dear Hawk, I didn't even know for sure I'd like you when you came!
+Sometimes I wanted terribly to have your silly, foolish, childish,
+pale hair on my breast--such hair! lady's hair!--but sometimes I
+didn't want to see you at all, and I was frightened at the thought of
+your coming, and I fussed around the house till Mrs. Pat laughed at me
+and accused me of being in love, and I denied it--and she was right!"
+
+"Blessed, I was scared to death, all the way up here. I didn't think
+you could be as wonderful as I knew you were! That sounds mixed
+but---- Oh, blessed, blessed, you really love me? You really love me?
+It's hard to believe I've actually heard you say it! And I love you so
+completely. Everything."
+
+"I love you!... That is such an adorable spot to kiss, just below your
+ear," she said. "Darling, keep me safe in the little house of arms,
+where there's only room for you and me--no room for offices or Aunt
+Emmas!... But not now. We must hurry on.... If a wagon had been coming
+along the road----!"
+
+As they entered the rhododendron-lined drive of the Patton Kerr place,
+Carl remembered a detail, not important, but usual. "Oh yes," he said,
+"I've forgotten to propose."
+
+"Need you? Proposals sound like contracts and all those other dull
+forms; not like--that kiss.... See! There's Pat Kerr, Jr., waving to
+us. You can just make him out, there on the upper balcony. He is the
+darlingest child, with ash-blond hair cut Dutch style. I wonder if you
+didn't look like him when you were a boy, with your light hair?"
+
+"Not a chance. I was a grubby kid. Made noises.... Gee! what a bully
+place. And the house!... Will you marry me?"
+
+"Yes, I will!... It _is_ a dear place. Mrs. Pat is----"
+
+"When?"
+
+"----always fussing over it; she plants narcissuses and crocuses in
+the woods, so you find them growing wild."
+
+"I like those awnings. Against the white walls.... May I consider that
+we are engaged then, Miss Winslow--engaged for the next marriage?"
+
+"Oh no, no, not engaged, dear. Don't you know it's one of my
+principles----"
+
+"But look----"
+
+"----not to be engaged, Hawk? Everybody brings the cunnin' old jokes
+out of the moth-balls when you're engaged. I'll marry you, but----"
+
+"Marry me next month--August?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"September?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"Please, Ruthie. Aw yes, September. Nice month, September is. Autumn.
+Harvest moon. And apples to swipe. Come on. September."
+
+"Well, perhaps September. We'll see. Oh, Hawk dear, can you conceive
+of us actually sitting here and solemnly discussing being _married_?
+Us, the babes in the wood? And I've only known you three days or so,
+seems to me.... Well, as I was saying, _perhaps_ I'll marry you in
+September (um! frightens me to think of it; frightens me and awes me
+and amuses me to death, all at once). That is, I shall marry you
+unless you take to wearing pearl-gray derbies or white evening ties
+with black edging, or kill Mason in a duel, or do something equally
+disgraceful. But engaged I will not be. And we'll put the money for a
+diamond ring into a big davenport.... Are we going to be dreadfully
+poor?"
+
+"Oh, not pawn-shop poor. I made VanZile boost my salary, last week,
+and with my Touricar stock I'm getting a little over four thousand
+dollars a year."
+
+"Is that lots or little?"
+
+"Well, it 'll give us a decent apartment and a nearly decent maid, I
+guess. And if the Touricar keeps going, we can beat it off for a year,
+wandering, after maybe three four years."
+
+"I hope so. Here we are! That's Mrs. Pat waiting for us."
+
+The Patton Kerr house, set near the top of the highest hill in that
+range of the Berkshires, stood out white against a slope of crisp
+green; an old manor house of long lines and solid beams, with striped
+awnings of red and white, and in front a brick terrace, with
+basket-chairs, a swinging couch, and a wicker tea-table already
+welcomingly spread with a service of Royal Doulton. From the terrace
+one saw miles of valley and hills, and villages strung on a rambling
+river. The valley was a golden bowl filled with the peace of
+afternoon; a world of sun and listening woods.
+
+On the terrace waited a woman of thirty-five, of clever face a bit
+worn at the edges, carefully coiffed hair, and careless white blouse
+with a tweed walking-skirt. She was gracefully holding out her hand,
+greeting Carl, "It's terribly good of you to come clear out into our
+wilderness." She was interrupted by the bouncing appearance of a
+stocky, handsome, red-faced, full-chinned, curly-black-haired man of
+forty, in riding-breeches and boots and a silk shirt; with him an
+excited small boy in rompers--Patton Kerr, Sr. and Jr.
+
+"Here you are!" Senior observantly remarked. "Glad to see you,
+Ericson. You and Ruthie been a deuce of a time coming up from town.
+Holding hands along the road, eh? Lord! these aviators!"
+
+"Pat!"
+
+"Animal!"
+
+----protested Mrs. Kerr and Ruth, simultaneously.
+
+"All right. I'll be good. Saw you fly at Nassau Boulevard, Ericson.
+Turned my horn loose and hooted till they thought I was a militant,
+like Ruthie here. Lord! what flying, what flying! I'd like to see you
+race Weymann and Vedrines.... Ruthie, will you show Mr. Ericson where
+his room is, or has poor old Pat got to go and drag a servant away
+from reading _Town Topics_, heh?"
+
+"I will, Pat," said Ruth.
+
+"I will, daddy," cried Pat, Jr.
+
+"No, my son, I guess maybe Ruthie had better do it. There's a certain
+look in her eyes----"
+
+"Basilisk!"
+
+"Salamander!"
+
+Ruth and Carl passed through the wide colonial hall, with mahogany
+tables and portraits of the Kerrs and the sword of Colonel Patton. At
+the far end was an open door, and a glimpse of an old-fashioned garden
+radiant with hollyhocks and Canterbury bells. It was a world of utter
+content. As they climbed the curving stairs Ruth tucked her arm in
+his, saying:
+
+"Now do you see why I won't be engaged? Pat Kerr is the best chum in
+the world, yet he finds even a possible engagement wildly
+humorous--like mothers-in-law or poets or falling on your ear."
+
+"But gee! Ruth, you _are_ going to marry me?"
+
+"You little child! My little boy Hawk! Of course I'm going to marry
+you. Do you think I would miss my chance of a cabin in the Rockies?...
+My famous Hawk what everybody cheered at Nassau Boulevard!" She opened
+the door of his room with a deferential, "Thy chamber, milord!... Come
+down quickly," she said. "We mustn't miss a moment of these days....
+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 spaces. 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.
+
+Saturday, 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 shore. 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 cumbersome. So I put on a boy's
+bathing-suit under my dress--and--I'm terribly embarrassed."
+
+"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
+sturdily 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
+shells 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 class 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 talcum 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 Japanese paper. There were
+no portières between living-room and dining-room and small hall, so
+that the three rooms, with their light-reflecting walls, gave an
+effect of spaciousness to rather a cramped and old-fashioned
+apartment. There were not many pictures and no bric-à-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 assembled 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 basement; 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
+assured 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-à-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 muffin-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
+Maupassant 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 Japanese 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
+pronunciation 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
+gods--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-shell 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 God as
+to discuss sex, 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 God, 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
+assortment of personages and awkward rovers whom the ex-aviator knew. The
+Ericsons made an institution 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 Saturday 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. Saturday,
+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.
+She may have had more curiosity than principle, but she did badger
+policemen pluckily. She was studying Italian, the Montessori method,
+cooking. She taught new dishes to her maid. She adopted a careless
+suggestion of Carl and voluntarily increased the maid's salary,
+thereby shaking the rock-ribbed foundations of Upper West Side
+society.
+
+In nothing did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither
+"the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which
+recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends
+expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her
+honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly
+and tinily telling her difficulties with household work.
+
+When a purring, baby-talking acquaintance gurgled: "How did the Ruthie
+bride spend her morning? Did she cook some little dainty for her
+husband? Nothing bourgeois, I'm _sure_!" in reply Ruth pleasantly
+observed: "Not a chance. The Ruthie bride cussed out the janitor for
+not shooting up a dainty cabbage on the dumb-waiter, and then counted
+up her husband's cigarette coupons and skipped right down to the
+premium parlors with 'em and got him a pair of pale-blue Boston
+garters and a cunning granite-ware stew-pan, and then sponged lunch
+off Olive Dunleavy. But nothing bourgeois!"
+
+Such experiences, told to Carl, he found diverting. He seemed, in the
+spring of 1914, to want no others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+
+The apparently satisfactory development of the Touricar in the late
+spring of 1914 was the result of an uneconomical expenditure of energy
+on the part of Carl. Personally he followed by letter the trail of
+every amateur aviator, every motoring big-game hunter. He never let up
+for an afternoon. VanZile had lost interest in the whole matter.
+Whenever Carl thought of how much the development of the Touricar
+business depended upon himself, he was uneasy about the future, and
+bent more closely over his desk. On his way home, swaying on a subway
+strap, his pleasant sensation of returning to Ruth was interrupted by
+worry in regard to things he might have done at the office. Nights he
+dreamed of lists of "prospects."
+
+Late in May he was disturbed for several days by headaches, lassitude,
+nausea. He lied to Ruth: "Guess I've eaten something at lunch that was
+a little off. You know what these restaurants are." He admitted,
+however, that he felt like a Symptom. He stuck to the office, though
+his chief emotion about life and business was that he wished to go off
+somewhere and lie down and die gently.
+
+Directly after a Sunday bruncheon, at which he was silent and looked
+washed out, he went to bed with typhoid fever.
+
+For six weeks he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the
+boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun.
+That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the
+specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the
+intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one
+splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed,
+she mourned and mourned for her lost boy, while she hid her fear and
+kept her blouses fresh and her hair well-coiffed, and mothered the
+stern man who lay so dreadfully still in the bed.... He was not shaved
+every day; he had a pale beard under his hollow cheeks.... Even when
+he was out of delirium, even when he was comparatively strong, he
+never said anything gaily foolish for the sake of being young and
+noisy with her.
+
+During convalescence Carl was so wearily gentle that she hoped the
+little boy she loved was coming back to dwell in him. But the Hawk's
+wings seemed broken. For the first time Carl was afraid of life. He
+sat and worried, going over the possibilities of the Touricar, and the
+positions he might get if the Touricar failed. He was willing to loaf
+by the window all day, his eyes on a narrow, blood-red stripe in the
+Navajo blanket on his knees, along which he incessantly ran a
+finger-nail, back and forth, back and forth, for whole quarter-hours,
+while she read aloud from Kipling and London and Conrad, hoping to
+rekindle the spirit of daring.
+
+One sweet drop was in their cup of iron. As woodland playmates they
+could never have known such intimacy as hovered about them when she
+rested her head lightly against his knees and they watched the Hudson,
+the storms and flurries of light on its waves, the windy clouds and
+the processional of barges, the beetle-like ferries and the great
+steamers for Albany. They talked in half sentences, understanding the
+rest: "Tough in winter----" "Might be good trip----" Carl's hand was
+always demanding her thick hair, but he stroked it gently. The coarse,
+wholesome vigor was drained from him; part even of his slang went with
+it; his "Gee!" was not explosive.
+
+He took to watching her like a solemn baby, when she moved about the
+room; thus she found the little boy Carl again; laughed full-throated
+and secretly cried over him, as his sternness passed into a wistful
+obedience. He was not quite the same impudent boy whose naughtiness
+she had loved. But the good child who came in his place did trust her
+so, depend upon her so....
+
+When Carl was strong enough they went for three weeks to Point
+Pleasant, on the Jersey coast, where the pines and breakers from the
+open sea healed his weakness and his multitudinous worries. They even
+swam, once, and Carl played at learning two new dances, strangely
+called the "fox trot" and the "lu lu fado." Their hotel was a vast
+barn, all porches, white flannels, and handsome young Jews chattering
+tremendously with young Jewesses; but its ball-room floor was smooth,
+and Ruth had lacked music and excitement for so long that she danced
+every night, and conducted an amiable flirtation with a mysterious
+young man of Harvard accent, Jewish features, fine brown eyes, and
+tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses, while Carl looked on, a contented
+wall-flower.
+
+They came back to town with ocean breeze and pine scent in their
+throats and sea-sparkle in their eyes--and Carl promptly tied himself
+to the office desk as though sickness and recovery had never given him
+a vision of play.
+
+Ruth had not taken the Point Pleasant dances seriously, but as day on
+day she stifled in a half-darkened flat that summer, she sometimes
+sobbed at the thought of the moon-path on the sea, the reflection of
+lights on the ball-room floor, the wavelike swish of music-mad feet.
+
+The flat was hot, dead. The summer heat was unrelenting as bedclothes
+drawn over the head and lashed down. Flies in sneering circles mocked
+the listless hand she flipped at them. Too hot to wear many clothes,
+yet hating the disorder of a flimsy negligée, she panted by a window,
+while the venomous sun glared on tin roofs, and a few feet away
+snarled the ceaseless trrrrrr of a steam-riveter that was erecting new
+flats to shut off their view of the Hudson. In the lava-paved back
+yard was the insistent filelike voice of the janitor's son, who kept
+piping: "Haaay, Bil-lay, hey; Billy's got a girl! Hey, Billy's got a
+girl! Haaay, Bil-lay!" She imagined herself going down and
+slaughtering him; vividly saw herself waiting for the elevator,
+venturing into the hot sepulcher of the back areaway, and there
+becoming too languid to complete the task of ridding the world of the
+dear child. She was horrified to discover what she had been imagining,
+and presently imagined it all over again.
+
+Two blocks across from her, seen through the rising walls of the new
+apartment-houses, were the drab windows of a group of run-down
+tenements, which broke the sleek respectability of the well-to-do
+quarter. In those windows Ruth observed foreign-looking, idle women,
+not very clean, who had nothing to do after they had completed half an
+hour of slovenly housework in the morning. They watched their
+neighbors breathlessly. They peered out with the petty virulent
+curiosity of the workless at whatever passed in the streets below
+them. Fifty times a day they could be seen to lean far out on their
+fire-escapes and follow with slowly craning necks and unblinking eyes
+the passing of something--ice-wagons, undertakers' wagons, ole-clo'
+men, Ruth surmised. The rest of the time, ragged-haired and greasy of
+wrapper, gum-chewing and yawning, they rested their unlovely stomachs
+on discolored sofa-cushions on the window-sills and waited for
+something to appear. Two blocks away they were--yet to Ruth they
+seemed to be in the room with her, claiming her as one of their
+sisterhood. For now she was a useless woman, as they were. She raged
+with the thought that she might grow to be like them in every
+respect--she, Ruth Winslow!... She wondered if any of them were
+Norwegians named Ericson.... With the fascination of dread she watched
+them as closely as they watched the world with the hypnotization of
+unspeakable hopelessness.... She had to find her work, something for
+which the world needed her, lest she be left here, useless and
+unhappy in a flat. In her kitchen she was merely an intruder on the
+efficient maid, and there was no nursery.
+
+She sat apprehensively on the edge of a chair, hating the women at the
+windows, hating the dull, persistent flies, hating the wetness of her
+forehead and the dampness of her palm; repenting of her hate and
+hating again--and taking another cold bath to be fresh for the
+home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother and whom, of
+all the world, she did not hate.
+
+Even on the many cool days when the streets and the flat became
+tolerable and the vulture women of the tenements ceased to exist for
+her, Ruth was not much interested, whether she went out or some one
+came to see her. Every one she knew, except for the Dunleavys and a
+few others, was out of town, and she was tired of Olive Dunleavy's
+mirth and shallow gossip. After her days with Carl in the valley of
+the shadow, Olive was to her a stranger giggling about strange people.
+Phil was rather better. He occasionally came in for tea, poked about,
+stared at the color prints, and said cryptic things about feminism and
+playing squash.
+
+Her settlement-house classes were closed for the summer. She brooded
+over the settlement work and accused herself of caring less for people
+than for the sensation of being charitable. She wondered if she was a
+hypocrite.... Then she would take another cold bath to be fresh for
+the home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother, and
+toward whom, of all the world's energies, she knew that she was not
+hypocritical.
+
+This is not the story of Ruth Winslow, but of Carl Ericson. Yet Ruth's
+stifling days are a part of it, for her unhappiness meant as much to
+him as it did to her. In the swelter of his office, overlooking
+motor-hooting, gasoline-reeking Broadway, he was aware that Ruth was
+in the flat, buried alive. He made plans for her going away, but she
+refused to desert him. He tried to arrange for a week more of holiday
+for them both; he could not; he came to understand that he was now
+completely a prisoner of business.
+
+He was in a rut, both sides of which were hedged with "back work that
+had piled up on him." He had no desire, no ambition, no interest,
+except in Ruth and in making the Touricar pay.
+
+The Touricar Company had never paid expenses as yet. How much longer
+would old VanZile be satisfied with millions to come in the
+future--perhaps?
+
+Carl even took work home with him, though for Ruth's sake he wanted to
+go out and play. It really was for her sake; he himself liked to play,
+but the disease of perpetual overwork had hold of him. He was glad to
+have her desert him for an evening now and then and go out to the
+Peace Waters Country Club for a dance with Phil and Olive Dunleavy.
+She felt guilty when she came home and found him still making
+calculations. But she hummed waltzes while she put on a thin, blue
+silk dressing-gown and took down her hair.
+
+"I _can't_ stand this grubby, shut-in prison," she finally snapped at
+him, on an evening when he would not go to the first night of a
+roof-garden.
+
+He snarled back: "You don't have to! Why don't you go with your
+bloomin' Phil and Olive? Of course, I don't ever want to go myself!"
+
+"See here, my friend, you have been taking advantage for a long time
+now of the fact that you were ill. I'm not going to be your nurse
+indefinitely." She slammed her bedroom door.
+
+Later she came stalking out, very dignified, and left the flat. He
+pretended not to see her. But as soon as the elevator door had clanged
+and the rumbling old car had begun to carry her down, away from him,
+the flat was noisy with her absence. She came home eagerly sorry--to
+find an eagerly sorry Carl. Then, while they cried together, and he
+kissed her lips, they made a compact that no matter for what reason
+or through whose fault they might quarrel, they would always settle it
+before either went to bed.... But they were uncomfortably polite for
+two days, and obviously were so afraid that they might quarrel that
+they were both prepared to quarrel.
+
+Carl had been back at work for less than one month, but he hoped that
+the Touricar was giving enough promise now of positive success to
+permit him to play during the evening. He rented a VanZile car for
+part time; planned week-end trips; hoped they could spend----
+
+Then the whole world exploded.
+
+Just at the time when the investigation of Twilight Sleep indicated
+that the world might become civilized, the Powers plunged into a war
+whose reason no man has yet discovered. Carl read the head-lines on
+the morning of August 5th, 1914, with a delusion of not reading
+"news," but history, with himself in the history book.
+
+Ten thousand books record the Great War, and how bitterly Europe
+realized it; this is to record that Carl, like most of America, did
+not comprehend it, even when recruits of the Kaiser marched down
+Broadway with German and American flags intertwined, even when his
+business was threatened. It was too big for his imagination.
+
+Every noon he bought half a dozen newspaper extras and hurried down to
+the bulletin-boards on the _Times_ and _Herald_ buildings. He
+pretended that he was a character in one of the fantastic novels about
+a world-war when he saw such items as "Russians invading Prussia,"
+"Japs will enter war," "Aeroplane and submarine attack English
+cruiser."
+
+"Rats!" he said, "I'm dreaming. There couldn't be a war like that.
+We're too civilized. I can prove the whole thing 's impossible."
+
+In the world-puzzle nothing confused Carl more than the question of
+socialism. He had known as a final fact that the alliance of French
+and German socialist workmen made war between the two nations
+absolutely impossible--and his knowledge was proven ignorance, his
+faith folly. He tentatively bought a socialist magazine or two, to
+find some explanation, and found only greater confusion on the part of
+the scholars and leaders of the party. They, too, did not understand
+how it had all happened; they stood amid the ruins of international
+socialism, sorrowing. If their faith was darkened, how much more so
+was Carl's vague untutored optimism about world-brotherhood.
+
+He had two courses--to discard socialism as a failure, or to stand by
+it as a course of action which was logical but had not, as yet, been
+able to accomplish its end. He decided to stand by it; he could not
+see himself plunging into the unutterable pessimism of believing that
+all of mankind were such beast fools that, after this one great sin,
+they could not repent and turn from tribal murder. And what other
+remedy was there? If socialism had not prevented the war, neither had
+monarchy nor bureaucracy, bourgeois peace movements, nor the church.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a whole world at war, Carl thought chiefly of his own business.
+He was not abnormal. The press was filled with bewildered queries as
+to what would happen to America. For two weeks the automobile business
+seemed dead, save for a grim activity in war-trucks. VanZile called in
+Carl and shook his head over the future of the Touricar, now that all
+luxuries were threatened.
+
+But the Middle West promised a huge crop and prosperity. The East
+followed; then, slowly, the South, despite the closed outlet for its
+cotton crop. Within a few weeks all sorts of motor-cars were selling
+well, especially expensive cars. It was apparent that automobiles were
+no longer merely luxuries. There was even a promise of greater trade
+than ever, so rapidly were all the cars of the warring nations being
+destroyed.
+
+But, once VanZile had considered the possibility of letting go his
+Touricar interest in order to be safe, he seemed always to be
+considering it. Carl read fate in VanZile's abstracted manner. And if
+VanZile withdrew, Carl's own stock would be worthless. But he stuck at
+his work, with something of a boy's frightened stubbornness and
+something of a man's quiet sternness. Fear was never far from him. In
+an aeroplane he had never been greatly frightened; he could himself,
+by his own efforts, fight the wind. But how could he steer a world-war
+or a world-industry?
+
+He tried to conceal his anxiety from Ruth, but she guessed it. She
+said, one evening: "Sometimes I think we two are unusual, because we
+really want to be free. And then a thing like this war comes and our
+bread and butter and little pink cakes are in danger, and I realize
+we're not free at all; that we're just like all the rest, prisoners,
+dependent on how much the job brings and how fast the subway runs. Oh,
+sweetheart, we mustn't forget to be just a bit mad, no matter how
+serious things become." Standing very close to him, she put her head
+on his shoulder.
+
+"Sure mustn't. Must stick by each other all the more when the world
+takes a run and jumps on us."
+
+"Indeed we will!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unsparingly the war's cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along
+the edge of a business precipice, looking down. He became so
+accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with
+the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called
+"courage," began to come to life again, laughing, "Let the darned old
+business bust, if she's going to."
+
+Only, it refused to bust.
+
+It kept on trembling, while Carl became nervous again, then gaily
+defiant, then nervous again, till the alternation of gloom and bravado
+disgusted him and made Ruth wonder whether he was an office-slave or a
+freebooter. As he happened to be both at the time, it was hard for
+him to be either convincingly. She accused him of vacillating; he
+retorted; the suspense kept them both raw....
+
+To add to their difficulties of adjustment to each other, and to the
+ego-mad world, Ruth's sense of established amenities was shocked by
+the reappearance of Carl's pioneering past as revealed in the lively
+but vulgar person of Martin Dockerill, Carl's former aviation
+mechanic.
+
+Martin Dockerill was lanky and awkward as ever, he still wrote
+post-cards to his aunt in Fall River, and admired burlesque-show
+choruses, but he no longer played the mouth-organ (publicly), for he
+had become so well-to-do as to be respectable. As foreign agent for
+the Des Moines Auto-Truck Company he had toured Europe, selling
+war-trucks, or lorries, as the English called them, first to the
+Balkan States, then to Italy, Russia, and Turkey. He was for a time
+detailed to the New York office.
+
+It did not occur either to him nor to Carl that he was not "welcome to
+drop in any time; often as possible," to slap Carl on the back, loudly
+recollect the time when he had got drunk and fought with a policeman
+in San Antonio, or to spend a whole evening belligerently discussing
+the idea of war or types of motor-trucks when Ruth wistfully wanted
+Carl to herself. Martin supposed, because she smiled, that she was as
+interested as Carl in his theories about aeroplane-scouting in war.
+
+Ruth knew that most of Carl's life had been devoted to things quite
+outside her own sphere of action, but she had known it without feeling
+it. His talk with Martin showed her how sufficient his life had been
+without her. She began to worry lest he go back to aviation.
+
+So began their serious quarrels; there were not many of them, and they
+were forgotten out of existence in a day or two; but there were at
+least three pitched battles during which both of them believed that
+"this ended everything." They quarreled always about the one thing
+which had intimidated them before--the need of quarreling; though
+apropos of this every detail of life came up: Ruth's conformities; her
+fear that he would fly again; her fear that the wavering job was
+making him indecisive.
+
+And Martin Dockerill kept coming, as an excellent starting-point for
+dissension.
+
+Ruth did not dislike Martin's roughness, but when the ex-mechanic
+discovered that he was making more money than was Carl, and asked
+Carl, in her presence, if he'd like a loan, then she hated Martin, and
+would give no reason. She became unable to see him as anything but a
+boor, an upstart servant, whose friendship with Carl indicated that
+her husband, too, was an "outsider." Believing that she was superbly
+holding herself in, she asked Carl if there was not some way of
+tactfully suggesting to Martin that he come to the flat only once in
+two weeks, instead of two or three times a week. Carl was angry. She
+said furiously what she really thought, and retired to Aunt Emma's for
+the evening. When she returned she expected to find Carl as repentant
+as herself. Unfortunately that same Carl who had declared that it was
+pure egotism to regard one's own religion or country as necessarily
+sacred, regarded his own friends as sacred--a noble faith which is an
+important cause of political graft. He was ramping about the
+living-room, waiting for a fight--and he got it.
+
+Their moment of indiscretion. The inevitable time when, believing
+themselves fearlessly frank, they exaggerated every memory of an
+injury. Ruth pointed out that Carl had disliked Florence Crewden as
+much as she had disliked Martin. She renewed her accusation that he
+was vacillating; scoffed at Walter MacMonnies (whom she really liked),
+Gertie Cowles (whom she had never met), and even, hesitatingly, Carl's
+farmer relatives.
+
+And Carl was equally unpleasant. At her last thrust he called her a
+thin-blooded New-Yorker and slammed his bedroom door. They had broken
+their pledge not to go to bed on a quarrel.
+
+He was gone before she came out to breakfast in the morning.
+
+In the evening they were perilously polite again. Martin Dockerill
+appeared and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind
+had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she
+could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks
+wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the
+British Aero Corps, to get life's supreme sensation--scouting ten
+thousand feet in air, while dozens of batteries fired at him; a
+nose-to-earth volplane. The thinking Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth
+knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer--and as one who was not
+merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured. And Martin
+Dockerill seemed so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might
+go.
+
+Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter-of-fact chatter about
+a kind of wandering which shut her out as completely as did the
+project of war. "I don't know," said he, "but what the biggest fun in
+chasing round the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where
+you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of
+greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a hand-out and sneak on a
+blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every
+brakie and constabule out after you. That's living!"
+
+When Martin was gone Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended
+to be absorbed in a magazine. He took from the mess of papers and
+letters that lived in his inside coat pocket a war-map he had clipped
+from a newspaper, and drew tactical lines on it. From his room he
+brought a small book he had bought that day. He studied it intently.
+Ruth managed to see that the title of the book was _Aeroplanes and
+Air-Scouting in the European Armies_.
+
+She sprang up, cried: "Hawk! Why are you reading that?"
+
+"Why shouldn't I read it?"
+
+"You don't mean to---- You----"
+
+"Oh no, I don't suppose I'd have the nerve to go and enlist now.
+You've already pointed out to me that I've been getting cold feet."
+
+"But why do you shut me out? Why do you?"
+
+"Oh, good Lord! have we got to go all over that again? We've gone over
+it and over it and over it till I'm sick of telling you it isn't
+true."
+
+"I'm very sorry, Hawk. Thank you for making it clear to me that I'm a
+typical silly wife."
+
+"And thank you for showing me I'm a clumsy brute. You've done it quite
+often now. Of course it doesn't mean anything that I've given up
+aviation."
+
+"Oh, don't be melodramatic. Or if you must be, don't fail to tell me
+that I've ruined your life."
+
+"Very well. I won't say anything, then, Ruth."
+
+"Don't look at me like that, Hawk. So hard. Studying me.... Can't you
+understand---- Haven't you any perception? Can't you understand how
+hard it is for me to come to you like this, after last night, and
+try----"
+
+"Very nice of you," he said, grimly.
+
+With one cry of "Oh!" she ran into her bedroom.
+
+He could hear her sobbing; he could feel her agony dragging him to
+her. But no woman's arms should drug his anger, this time, to let it
+ache again. For once he definitely did not want to go to her. So
+futile to make up and quarrel, make up and quarrel. He was impatient
+that her distant sobs expressed so clearly a wordless demand that he
+come to her and make peace. "Hell!" he crawked; jerked his top-coat
+from its nail, and left the flat--eleven o'clock of a chilly November
+evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+Dizzy with all the problems of life, he did not notice where he went.
+He walked blocks; took a trolley-car; got off to buy a strong cigar;
+took the next trolley that came along; was carried across the
+Fifty-ninth Street bridge to Long Island. At the eighth or tenth stop
+he hurried out of the car just as it was starting again. He wondered
+why he had been such a fool as to leave it in a dark street of
+flat-faced wooden houses with dooryards of trampled earth and a
+general air of poverty, goats, and lunch-pails. He tramped on, a
+sullen and youthless man. Presently he was in shaggy, open country.
+
+He was frightened by his desertion of Ruth, but he did not want to go
+back, nor even telephone to her. He had to diagram where and what and
+why he was; determine what he was to do.
+
+He disregarded the war as a cause of trouble. Had there been no extra
+business-pressure caused by the war, there would have been some other
+focus for their misunderstandings. They would have quarreled over
+clothes and aviation, Aunt Emma and Martin Dockerill, poverty and
+dancing, quite the same.
+
+Walking steadily, with long periods when he did not think, but stared
+at the dusty stars or the shaky, ill-lighted old houses, he alined her
+every fault, unhappily rehearsed every quarrel in which she had been
+to blame, his lips moving as he emphasized the righteous retorts he
+was almost certain he had made. It was not hard to find faults in her.
+Any two people who have spent more than two days together already have
+the material for a life-long feud, in traits which at first were
+amusing or admirable. Ruth's pretty manners, of which Carl had been
+proud, he now cited as snobbish affectation. He did not spare his
+reverence, his passion, his fondness. He mutilated his soul like a
+hermit. He recalled her pleasure in giving him jolly surprises, in
+writing unexpected notes addressed to him at the office, as fussy
+discontent with a quiet, normal life; he regarded her excitement over
+dances as evidence that she was so dependent on country-club society
+that he would have to spend the rest of his life drudging for her.
+
+He wanted to flee. He saw the whole world as a conspiracy of secret,
+sinister powers that are concealed from the child, but to the man are
+gradually revealed by a pitiless and never-ending succession of
+misfortunes. He would never be foot-loose again. His land of heart's
+desire would be the office.
+
+But the ache of disappointment grew dull. He was stunned. He did not
+know what had happened; did not even know precisely how he came to be
+walking here. Now and then he remembered anew that he had sharply left
+Ruth--Ruth, his dear girl!--remembered that she was not at hand, ready
+to explain with love's lips the somber puzzles of life. He was
+frightened again, and beginning to be angry with himself for having
+been angry with Ruth.
+
+He had walked many miles. Brown fields came up at him through the
+paling darkness. A sign-board showed that he was a few miles from
+Mineola. Letting the coming dawn uplift him, he tramped into Mineola,
+with a half-plan of going on to the near-by Hempstead Plains Aviation
+Field, to see if there was any early-morning flying. It would be bully
+to see a machine again!
+
+At a lunch-wagon he ordered buckwheat-cakes and coffee. Sitting on a
+high stool before a seven-inch shelf attached to the wall, facing an
+array of salt-castors and catsup-bottles and one of those colored
+glass windows with a portrait of Washington which give to all
+lunch-wagons their air of sober refinement, Carl ate solemnly,
+meditatively.... It did not seem to him an ignoble setting for his
+grief; but he was depressed when he came out to a drab first light of
+day that made the street seem hopeless and unrested after the night.
+The shops were becoming visible, gray and chilly, like a just-awakened
+janitor in slippers, suspenders, and tousled hair. The pavement was
+wet. Carl crossed the street, stared at the fly-specked cover of a
+magazine six months old that lay in a shop window lighted by one
+incandescent. He gloomily planned to go back and have another cup of
+coffee on the shelf before Washington's glassy but benign face.
+
+But he looked down the street, and all the sky was becoming a delicate
+and luminous blue.
+
+He trotted off toward Hempstead Plains.
+
+The Aviation Field was almost abandoned. Most of the ambitious line of
+hangars were empty, now, with faded grass thick before the great doors
+that no one ever opened. A recent fire had destroyed a group of five
+hangars.
+
+He found one door open, and three sleepy youngsters in sweaters and
+khaki trousers bringing out a monoplane.
+
+Carl watched them start, bobbed his chin to the music of the motor,
+saw the machine canter down the field and ascend from dawn to the
+glory of day. The rising sun picked out the lines of the uninclosed
+framework and hovered on the silvery wing-surface. The machine circled
+the field at two hundred feet elevation, smoothly, peacefully. And
+peace beyond understanding came to Carl.
+
+He studied the flight. "Mm. Good and steady. Banks a little sharp, but
+very thorough. Firs' rate. I believe I could get more speed out of her
+if I were flying. Like to try."
+
+Wonderingly he realized that he did not want to fly; that only his
+lips said, "Like to try." He was almost as much an outsider to
+aviation as though he had never flown. He discovered that he was
+telling Ruth this fact, in an imaginary conversation; was commenting
+for her on dawn-sky and the plains before him and his alienation from
+exploits in which she could not share.
+
+The monoplane landed with a clean volplane. The aviator and his
+mechanicians were wheeling it toward the hangar. They glanced at him
+uninterestedly. Carl understood that, to them, he was a Typical
+Bystander, here where he had once starred.
+
+The aviator stared again, let go the machine, walked over, exclaiming:
+"Say, aren't you Hawk Ericson? This is an honor. I heard you were
+somewhere in New York. Just missed you at the Aero Club one night.
+Wanted to ask you about the Bagby hydro. Won't you come in and have
+some coffee and sinkers with us? Proud to have you. My name 's Berry."
+
+"Thanks. Be glad to."
+
+While the youngsters were admiring him, hearing of the giants of
+earlier days, while they were drinking inspiration from this veteran
+of twenty-nine, they were in turn inspiring Carl by their faith in
+him. He had been humble. They made him trust himself, not
+egotistically, but with a feeling that he did matter, that it was
+worth while to be in tune with life.
+
+Yet all the while he knew that he wanted to be by himself, because he
+could thus be with the spirit of Ruth. And he knew, subconsciously,
+that he was going to hurry back to Mineola and telephone to her.
+
+As he dog-trotted down the road, he noted the old Dutch houses for
+her; picked out the spot where he had once had a canvas hangar, and
+fancied himself telling her of those days. He did not remember that at
+this hangar he had known Istra, Istra Nash, the artist, whose name he
+scarce recalled. Istra was an incident; Ruth was the meaning of his
+life.
+
+And the solution of his problem came, all at once, when suddenly it
+was given to him to understand what that problem was.
+
+Ruth and he had to be up and away, immediately; go any place, do
+anything, so long as they followed new trails, and followed them
+together. He knew positively, after his lonely night, that he could
+not be happy without her as comrade in the freedom he craved. And he
+also knew that they had not done the one thing for which their
+marriage existed. They were not just a man and a woman. They were a
+man and a woman who had promised to find new horizons for each other.
+
+However much he believed in the sanctity of love's children, Carl also
+believed that merely to be married and breed casual children and die
+is a sort of suspended energy which has no conceivable place in this
+over-complex and unwieldy world. He had no clear nor ringing message,
+but he did have, just then, an overpowering conviction that Ruth and
+he--not every one, but Ruth and he, at least--had a vocation in
+keeping clear of vocations, and that they must fulfil it.
+
+Over the telephone he said: "Ruth dear, I'll be right there. Walked
+all night. Got straightened out now. I'm out at Mineola. It's all
+right with me now, blessed. I want so frightfully much to make it all
+right with you. I'll be there in about an hour."
+
+She answered "Yes" so non-committally that he was smitten by the fact
+that he had yet to win forgiveness for his frenzy in leaving her; that
+he must break the shell of resentment which would incase her after a
+whole night's brooding between sullen walls.
+
+On the train, unconscious of its uproar, he was bespelled by his new
+love. During a few moments of their lives, ordinary real people,
+people real as a tooth-brush, do actually transcend the coarsely
+physical aspects of sex and feeding, and do approximate to the
+unwavering glow of romantic heroes. Carl was no more a romantic
+hero-lover than, as a celebrated aviator, he had been a
+hero-adventurer. He was a human being. He was not even admirable,
+except as all people are admirable, from the ash-man to the king.
+There had been nothing exemplary in his struggle to find adjustment
+with his wife; he had been bad in his impatience just as he had been
+good in his boyish affection; in both he had been human. Even now,
+when without reserve he gave himself up to love, he was aware that he
+would ascend, not on godlike pinions, but by a jerky old
+apartment-house elevator, to make peace with a vexed girl who was also
+a human being, with a digestive system and prejudices. Yet with a joy
+that encompassed all the beauty of banners and saluting swords,
+romantic towers and a fugitive queen, a joy transcending trains and
+elevators and prejudices, Carl knew that human girl as the symbol of
+man's yearning for union with the divine; he desired happiness for her
+with a devotion great as the passion in Galahad's heart when all night
+he knelt before the high altar.
+
+He came slowly up to their apartment-house. If it were only possible
+for Ruth to trust him, now----
+
+Mingled with his painfully clear remembrance of all the sweet things
+Ruth was and had done was a tragic astonishment that he--this same he
+who was all hers now--could possibly have turned impatiently from her
+sobs. Yet it would have been for good, if only she would trust him.
+
+Not till he left the elevator, on their floor, did he comprehend that
+Ruth might not be awaiting him; might have gone. He looked
+irresolutely at the grill of the elevator door, shut on the black
+shaft.
+
+"She was here when I telephoned----"
+
+He waited. Perhaps she would peep out to see if it was he who had come
+up in the elevator.
+
+She did not appear.
+
+He walked the endless distance of ten feet to their door, unlocked it,
+labored across the tiny hall into the living-room. She was there. She
+stood supporting herself by the back of the davenport, her eyes
+red-edged and doubtful, her face tightened, expressing enmity or dread
+or shy longing. He held out his hands, like a prisoner beseeching
+royal mercy. She in turn threw out her arms. He could not say one
+word. The clumsy signs called "words" could not tell his emotion. He
+ran to her, and she welcomed his arms. He held her, abandoned himself
+utterly to her kiss. His hard-driving mind relaxed; relaxed was her
+body in his arms. He knew, not merely with his mind, but with the
+vaster powers that drive mind and emotion and body, that Ruth, in her
+disheveled dressing-gown, was the glorious lover to whom he had been
+hastening this hour past. All the love which civilization had tried to
+turn into Normal Married Life had escaped Efficiency's pruning-hook,
+and had flowered.
+
+"It's all right with me, now," she said; "so wonderfully all right."
+
+"I want to explain. Had to be by myself; find out. Must have seemed so
+unspeakably r----"
+
+"Oh, don't, don't explain! Our kiss explained."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While they talked on the davenport together, reaching out again and
+again for the hands that now really were there, Ruth agreed with Carl
+that they must be up and away, not wait till it should be too late.
+She, too, saw how many lovers plan under the June honeymoon to sail
+away after a year or two and see the great world, and, when they
+wearily die, know that it will still be a year or two before they can
+flee to the halcyon isles.
+
+But she did insist that they plan practically; and it was she who
+wondered: "But what would happen if everybody went skipping off like
+us? Who'd bear the children and keep the fields plowed to feed the
+ones that ran away?"
+
+"Golly!" cried Carl, "wish that were the worst problem we had! Maybe a
+thousand years from now, when every one is so artistic that they want
+to write books, it will be hard to get enough drudges. But now----
+Look at any office, with the clerks toiling day after day, even the
+unmarried ones. Look at all the young fathers of families, giving up
+everything they want to do, to support children who'll do the same
+thing right over again with _their_ children. Always handing on the
+torch of life, but never getting any light from it. People don't run
+away from slavery often enough. And so they don't ever get to do real
+work, either!"
+
+"But, sweetheart, what if we should have children some day? You
+know---- Of course, we haven't been ready for them yet, but some day
+they might come, anyhow, and how could we wander round----"
+
+"Oh, probably they will come some day, and then we'll take our dose of
+drudgery like the rest. There's nothing that our dear civilization
+punishes as it does begetting children. For poisoning food by
+adulterating it you may get fined fifty dollars, but if you have
+children they call it a miracle--as it is--and then they get busy and
+condemn you to a lifetime of being scared by the boss."
+
+"Well, darling, please don't blame it on me."
+
+"I didn't mean to get so oratorical, blessed. But it does make me mad
+the way the state punishes one for being willing to work and have
+children. Perhaps if enough of us run away from nice normal grinding,
+we'll start people wondering just why they should go on toiling to
+produce a lot of booze and clothes and things that nobody needs."
+
+"Perhaps, my Hawk.... Don't you think, though, that we might be bored
+in your Rocky Mountain cabin, if we were there for months and months?"
+
+"Yes, I suppose so," Carl mused. "The rebellion against stuffy
+marriage has to be a whole lot wider than some little detail like
+changing from city to country. Probably for some people the happiest
+thing 'd be to live in a hobohemian flat and have parties, and for
+some to live in the suburbs and get the missus elected president of
+the Village Improvement Society. For us, I believe, it's change and
+_keep going_."
+
+"Yes, I do think so. Hawk, my Hawk, I lay awake nearly all night last
+night, realizing that we _are_ one, not because of a wedding ceremony,
+but because we can understand each other's make-b'lieves and
+seriousnesses. I knew that no matter what happened, we had to try
+again.... I saw last night, by myself, that it was not a question of
+finding out whose fault a quarrel was; that it wasn't anybody's
+'fault,' but just conditions.... And we'll change them.... We won't be
+afraid to be free."
+
+"We won't! Lord! life's wonderful!"
+
+"Yes! When I think of how sweet life can be--so wonderfully sweet--I
+know that all the prophets must love human beings, oh, so terribly, no
+matter how sad they are about the petty things that lives are wasted
+over.... But I'm not a prophet. I'm a girl that's awfully much in
+love, and, darling, I want you to hold me close."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three months later, in February, 1915, Ruth and Carl sailed for Buenos
+Ayres, America's new export-market. Carl was the Argentine Republic
+manager for the VanZile Motor Corporation, possessed of an unimportant
+salary, a possibility of large commissions, and hopes like comets.
+Their happiness seemed a thing enchanted. They had not quarreled
+again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The S.S. _Sangrael_, for Buenos Ayres and Rio, had sailed from snow
+into summer. Ruth and Carl watched isles of palms turn to fantasies
+carved of ebony, in the rose and garnet sunset waters, and the vast
+sky laugh out in stars. Carl was quoting Kipling:
+
+    "The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
+    And the deuce knows what we may do--
+    But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the
+        out trail,
+    We're down, hull down on the Old Trail--the trail that is always new."
+
+"Anyway," he commented, "deuce only knows what we'll do after
+Argentine, and I don't care. Do you?"
+
+Her clasping hand answered, as he went on:
+
+"Oh, say, bles-sed! I forgot to look in the directory before we left
+New York to see if there wasn't a Society for the Spread of Madness
+among the Respectable. It might have sent us out as missionaries....
+There's a flying-fish; and to-morrow I won't have to watch clerks
+punch a time-clock; and you can hear a sailor shifting the
+ventilators; and there's a little star perched on the fore-mast;
+singing; but the big thing is that you're here beside me, and we're
+_going_. How bully it is to be living, if you don't have to give up
+living in order to make a living."
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trail of the Hawk, by Sinclair Lewis
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trail of the Hawk, by Sinclair Lewis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Trail of the Hawk
+       A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
+
+Author: Sinclair Lewis
+
+Release Date: September 14, 2008 [EBook #26610]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, K Nordquist, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<div class="tr"><a name="NOTE" id="NOTE"></a><p class="center">Transcriber's Note.</p> <p class="center">The Table of Contents is not part of the original book.</p><p>In <a href="#Page_212">page 212</a> there is an incomplete sentence "Poor Tad was". This sentence is incomplete in this book as well as the many editions verified.</p>
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 461px;">
+<img src="images/image_01.jpg" width="461" height="711" alt="[See page 290
+THE COLD BREEZE ENLIVENED THEM, THE STERNNESS OF THE SWIFT, CRUEL
+RIVER AND MILES OF BROWN SHORE MADE THEM GRAVELY HAPPY." title="" />
+<span class="caption">[See page <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+THE COLD BREEZE ENLIVENED THEM, THE STERNNESS OF THE SWIFT, CRUEL
+RIVER AND MILES OF BROWN SHORE MADE THEM GRAVELY HAPPY.</span>
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/image_02.jpg" width="400" height="656" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>THE TRAIL OF</h2>
+
+<h1>THE HAWK</h1>
+
+
+<h3>A COMEDY<br />
+
+OF THE SERIOUSNESS<br />
+
+OF LIFE</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>SINCLAIR LEWIS</h2>
+
+<h5>AUTHOR OF</h5>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Our Mr. Wrenn</span></h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 150px;">
+<img src="images/seal.jpg" width="150" height="189" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS</h3>
+<h3>NEW YORK AND LONDON</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Trail of the Hawk</span></h4>
+
+<h4>Copyright, 1915, by Harper &amp; Brothers</h4>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table class="tab1" summary="Contenrs">
+<tr>
+  <td class="f1">CHAPTER</td>
+  <td class="tocpg f1">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr><td class="center"><a href="#Part_I"><b>Part I</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocpg">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_71">71</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_78">78</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_106">106</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XII"><b>CHAPTER XII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="center">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocpg">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="center"><a href="#Part_II"><b>Part II</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocpg">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII"><b>CHAPTER XIII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV"><b>CHAPTER XIV</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XV"><b>CHAPTER XV</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI"><b>CHAPTER XVI</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII"><b>CHAPTER XVII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_162">162</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII"><b>CHAPTER XVIII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_167">167</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX"><b>CHAPTER XIX</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XX"><b>CHAPTER XX</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI"><b>CHAPTER XXI</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_187">187</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII"><b>CHAPTER XXII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_202">202</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII"><b>CHAPTER XXIII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="center">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocpg">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="center"><a href="#Part_III"><b>Part III</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tocpg">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV"><b>CHAPTER XXIV</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV"><b>CHAPTER XXV</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI"><b>CHAPTER XXVI</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_242">242</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII"><b>CHAPTER XXVII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII"><b>CHAPTER XXVIII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX"><b>CHAPTER XXIX</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX"><b>CHAPTER XXX</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_282">282</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI"><b>CHAPTER XXXI</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_290">290</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII"><b>CHAPTER XXXII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_300">300</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII"><b>CHAPTER XXXIII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_310">310</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV"><b>CHAPTER XXXIV</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_324">324</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXV"><b>CHAPTER XXXV</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_333">333</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVI"><b>CHAPTER XXXVI</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_342">342</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVII"><b>CHAPTER XXXVII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_352">352</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVIII"><b>CHAPTER XXXVIII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_362">362</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIX"><b>CHAPTER XXXIX</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_368">368</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XL"><b>CHAPTER XL</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_379">379</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLI"><b>CHAPTER XLI</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_387">387</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLII"><b>CHAPTER XLII</b></a></td>
+  <td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_400">400</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>
+TO THE OPTIMISTIC REBELS THROUGH<br />
+WHOSE TALK AT LUNCHEON THE AUTHOR<br />
+WATCHES THE MANY-COLORED SPECTACLE<br />
+OF LIFE&mdash;GEORGE SOULE, HARRISON<br />
+SMITH, ALLAN UPDEGRAFF, F. K. NOYES,<br />
+ALFRED HARCOURT, B. W. HUEBSCH.<br />
+</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Part_I" id="Part_I"></a>Part I</h2>
+
+<h2>THE ADVENTURE OF YOUTH</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>
+<h3>THE TRAIL OF</h3>
+<h2>THE HAWK</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_c.jpg" alt="C" width="45" height="50" /></div>
+<p>arl Ericson was being naughty. Probably no boy in Joralemon was being
+naughtier that October Saturday afternoon. He had not half finished
+the wood-piling which was his punishment for having chased the family
+rooster thirteen times squawking around the chicken-yard, while
+playing soldiers with Bennie Rusk.</p>
+
+<p>He stood in the middle of the musty woodshed, pessimistically kicking
+at the scattered wood. His face was stern, as became a man of eight
+who was a soldier of fortune famed from the front gate to the
+chicken-yard. An unromantic film of dirt hid the fact that his
+Scandinavian cheeks were like cream-colored silk stained with
+rose-petals. A baby Norseman, with only an average boy's prettiness,
+yet with the whiteness and slenderness of a girl's little finger. A
+back-yard boy, in baggy jacket and pants, gingham blouse, and cap
+whose lining oozed back over his ash-blond hair, which was tangled now
+like trampled grass, with a tiny chip riding grotesquely on one flossy
+lock.</p>
+
+<p>The darkness of the shed displeased Carl. The whole basic conception
+of work bored him. The sticks of wood were personal enemies to which
+he gave insulting names.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> He had always admired the hard bark and
+metallic resonance of the ironwood, but he hated the poplar&mdash;"popple"
+it is called in Joralemon, Minnesota. Poplar becomes dry and dusty,
+and the bark turns to a monstrously mottled and evil greenish-white.
+Carl announced to one poplar stick, "I could lick you! I'm a gen'ral,
+I am." The stick made no reply whatever, and he contemptuously shied
+it out into the chickweed which matted the grubby back yard. This
+necessitated his sneaking out and capturing it by stalking it from the
+rear, lest it rouse the Popple Army.</p>
+
+<p>He loitered outside the shed, sniffing at the smoke from burning
+leaves&mdash;the scent of autumn and migration and wanderlust. He glanced
+down between houses to the reedy shore of Joralemon Lake. The surface
+of the water was smooth, and tinted like a bluebell, save for one
+patch in the current where wavelets leaped with October madness in
+sparkles of diamond fire. Across the lake, woods sprinkled with
+gold-dust and paprika broke the sweep of sparse yellow stubble, and a
+red barn was softly brilliant in the caressing sunlight and lively air
+of the Minnesota prairie. Over there was the field of valor, where
+grown-up men with shiny shotguns went hunting prairie-chickens; the
+Great World, leading clear to the Red River Valley and Canada.</p>
+
+<p>Three mallard-ducks, with necks far out and wings beating hurriedly,
+shot over Carl's head. From far off a gun-shot floated echoing through
+forest hollows; in the waiting stillness sounded a rooster's crow,
+distant, magical.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to go hunting!" mourned Carl, as he trailed back into the
+woodshed. It seemed darker than ever and smelled of moldy chips. He
+bounced like an enraged chipmunk. His phlegmatic china-blue eyes
+filmed with tears. "Won't pile no more wood!" he declared.</p>
+
+<p>Naughty he undoubtedly was. But since he knew that his father, Oscar
+Ericson, the carpenter, all knuckles and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> patched overalls and bad
+temper, would probably whip him for rebellion, he may have acquired
+merit. He did not even look toward the house to see whether his mother
+was watching him&mdash;his farm-bred, worried, kindly, small, flat-chested,
+pinch-nosed, bleached, twangy-voiced, plucky Norwegian mother. He
+marched to the workshop and brought a collection of miscellaneous
+nails and screws out to a bare patch of earth in front of the
+chicken-yard. They were the Nail People, the most reckless band of
+mercenaries the world has ever known, led by old General Door-Hinge,
+who was somewhat inclined to collapse in the middle, but possessed of
+the unusual virtue of eyes in both ends of him. He had explored the
+deepest ca&ntilde;ons of the woodshed, and victoriously led his ten-penny
+warriors against the sumacs in the vacant lot beyond Irving Lamb's
+house.</p>
+
+<p>Carl marshaled the Nail People, sticking them upright in the ground.
+After reasoning sternly with an intruding sparrow, thus did the
+dauntless General Door-Hinge address them:</p>
+
+<p>"Men, there's a nawful big army against us, but le's die like men, my
+men. Forwards!"</p>
+
+<p>As the veteran finished, a devastating fire of stones enfiladed the
+company, and one by one they fell, save for the commander himself, who
+bowed his grizzled wrought-steel head and sobbed, "The brave boys done
+their duty."</p>
+
+<p>From across the lake rolled another gun-shot.</p>
+
+<p>Carl dug his grimy fingers into the earth. "Jiminy! I wisht I was out
+hunting. Why can't I never go? I guess I'll pile the wood, but I'm
+gonna go seek-my-fortune after that."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Since Carl Ericson (some day to be known as "Hawk" Ericson) was the
+divinely restless seeker of the romance that must&mdash;or we die!&mdash;lie
+beyond the hills, you first see him in action; find him in the year
+1893, aged eight, leading revolutions in the back yard. But equally,
+since<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> this is a serious study of an average young American, there
+should be an indication of his soil-nourished ancestry.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was second-generation Norwegian; American-born, American in
+speech, American in appearance, save for his flaxen hair and
+china-blue eyes; and, thanks to the flag-decked public school,
+overwhelmingly American in tradition. When he was born the "typical
+Americans" of earlier stocks had moved to city palaces or were
+marooned on run-down farms. It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a
+Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was the "typical American" of his
+period. It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending
+the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the
+exuberant, October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to
+add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>They are the New Yankees, these Scandinavians of Wisconsin and
+Minnesota and the Dakotas, with a human breed that can grow, and a
+thousand miles to grow in. The foreign-born parents, when they first
+come to the Northern Middlewest, huddle in unpainted farm-houses with
+grassless dooryards and fly-zizzing kitchens and smelly dairies, set
+on treeless, shadeless, unsoftened leagues of prairie or bunched in
+new clearings ragged with small stumps. The first generation are alien
+and forlorn. The echoing fjords of Trondhjem and the moors of Finmark
+have clipped their imaginations, silenced their laughter, hidden with
+ice their real tenderness. In America they go sedulously to the bare
+Lutheran church and frequently drink ninety-per-cent. alcohol. They
+are also heroes, and have been the makers of a new land, from the days
+of Indian raids and ox-teams and hillside dug-outs to now, repeating
+in their patient hewing the history of the Western Reserve.... In one
+generation or even in one decade they emerge from the desolation of
+being foreigners. They, and the Germans, pay Yankee mortgages<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> with
+blood and sweat. They swiftly master politics, voting for honesty
+rather than for hand-shakes; they make keen, scrupulously honest
+business deals; send their children to school; accumulate land&mdash;one
+section, two sections&mdash;or move to town to keep shop and ply skilled
+tools; become Methodists and Congregationalists; are neighborly with
+Yankee manufacturers and doctors and teachers; and in one generation,
+or less, are completely American.</p>
+
+<p>So was it with Carl Ericson. His carpenter father had come from
+Norway, by way of steerage and a farm in Wisconsin, changing his name
+from Ericsen. Ericson senior owned his cottage and, though he still
+said, "Aye ban going," he talked as naturally of his own American
+tariff and his own Norwegian-American Governor as though he had five
+generations of Connecticut or Virginia ancestry.</p>
+
+<p>Now, it was Carl's to go on, to seek the flowering.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Unconscious that he was the heir-apparent of the age, but decidedly
+conscious that the woodshed was dark, Carl finished the pile.</p>
+
+<p>From the step of the woodshed he regarded the world with plaintive
+boredom.</p>
+
+<p>"Ir-r-r-r-rving!" he called.</p>
+
+<p>No answer from Irving, the next-door boy.</p>
+
+<p>The village was rustlingly quiet. Carl skipped slowly and unhappily to
+the group of box-elders beside the workshop and stuck his finger-nails
+into the cobwebby crevices of the black bark. He made overtures for
+company on any terms to a hop-robin, a woolly worm, and a large blue
+fly, but they all scorned his advances, and when he yelled an
+ingratiating invitation to a passing dog it seemed to swallow its tail
+and ears as it galloped off. No one else appeared.</p>
+
+<p>Before the kitchen window he quavered:</p>
+
+<p>"Ma-ma!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the kitchen, the muffled pounding of a sad-iron upon the padded
+ironing-board.</p>
+
+<p>"Ma!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ericson's whitey-yellow hair, pale eyes, and small nervous
+features were shadowed behind the cotton fly-screen.</p>
+
+<p>"Vell?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't got noth-ing to do-o."</p>
+
+<p>"Go pile the vood."</p>
+
+<p>"I piled piles of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you can go and play."</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>been</i> playing."</p>
+
+<p>"Then play some more."</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't got nobody to play with."</p>
+
+<p>"Then find somebody. But don't you step vun step out of this yard."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see <i>why</i> I can't go outa the yard!"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I said so."</p>
+
+<p>Again the sound of the sad-iron.</p>
+
+<p>Carl invented a game in which he was to run in circles, but not step
+on the grass; he made the tenth inspection that day of the drying
+hazelnuts whose husks were turning to seal-brown on the woodshed roof;
+he hunted for a good new bottle to throw at Irving Lamb's barn; he
+mended his sling-shot; he perched on a sawbuck and watched the street.
+Nothing passed, nothing made an interesting rattling, except one
+democrat wagon.</p>
+
+<p>From over the water another gun-shot murmured of distant hazards.</p>
+
+<p>Carl jumped down from the sawbuck and marched deliberately out of the
+yard, along Oak Street toward The Hill, the smart section of
+Joralemon, where live in exclusive state five large houses that get
+painted nearly every year.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm gonna seek-my-fortune. I'm gonna find Bennie and go swimming," he
+vowed. Calmly as Napoleon defying his marshals, General Carl
+disregarded the sordid facts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span> that it was too late in the year to go
+swimming, and that Benjamin Franklin Rusk couldn't swim, anyway. He
+clumped along, planting his feet with spats of dust, very dignified
+and melancholy but, like all small boys, occasionally going mad and
+running in chase of nothing at all till he found it.</p>
+
+<p>He stopped before the House with Mysterious Shutters.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had never made b'lieve fairies or princes; rather, he was in the
+secret world of boyhood a soldier, a trapper, or a swing-brakeman on
+the M. &amp; D. R.R. But he was bespelled by the suggestion of grandeur in
+the iron fence and gracious trees and dark carriage-shed of the House
+with Shutters. It was a large, square, solid brick structure, set
+among oaks and sinister pines, once the home, or perhaps the mansion,
+of Banker Whiteley, but unoccupied for years. Leaves rotted before the
+deserted carriage-shed. The disregarded steps in front were seamed
+with shallow pools of water for days after a rain. The windows had
+always been darkened, but not by broad-slatted outside shutters,
+smeared with house-paint to which stuck tiny black hairs from the
+paint-brush, like the ordinary frame houses of Joralemon. Instead,
+these windows were masked with inside shutters haughtily varnished to
+a hard refined brown.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the windows were open, the shutters folded; furniture was being
+moved in; and just inside the iron gate a frilly little girl was
+playing with a whitewashed conch-shell.</p>
+
+<p>She must have been about ten at that time, since Carl was eight. She
+was a very dressy and complacent child, possessed not only of a clean
+white muslin with three rows of tucks, immaculate bronze boots, and a
+green tam-o'-shanter, but also of a large hair-ribbon, a ribbon sash,
+and a silver chain with a large, gold-washed, heart-shaped locket. She
+was softly plump, softly gentle of face, softly brown of hair, and
+softly pleasant of speech.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello!" said she.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"H'lo!"</p>
+
+<p>"What's your name, little boy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't a little boy. I'm Carl Ericson."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, are you? I'm&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm gonna have a shotgun when I'm fifteen." He shyly hurled a stone
+at a telegraph-pole to prove that he was not shy.</p>
+
+<p>"My name is Gertie Cowles. I came from Minneapolis. My mamma owns part
+of the Joralemon Flour Mill.... Are you a nice boy? We just moved here
+and I don't know anybody. Maybe my mamma will let me play with you if
+you are a nice boy."</p>
+
+<p>"I jus' soon come play with you. If you play soldiers.... My pa 's the
+smartest man in Joralemon. He builded Alex Johnson's house. He's got a
+ten-gauge gun."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh.... My mamma 's a widow."</p>
+
+<p>Carl hung by his arms from the gate-pickets while she breathed,
+"M-m-m-m-m-m-y!" in admiration at the feat.</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't nothing. I can hang by my knees on a trapeze.... What did
+you come from Minneapolis for?"</p>
+
+<p>"We're going to live here," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh."</p>
+
+<p>"I went to the Chicago World's Fair with my mamma this summer."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, you didn't!"</p>
+
+<p>"I did so. And I saw a teeny engine so small it was in a walnut-shell
+and you had to look at it through a magnifying-glass and it kept on
+running like anything."</p>
+
+<p>"Huh! that's nothing! Ben Rusk, he went to the World's Fair, too, and
+he saw a statchue that was bigger 'n our house and all pure gold. You
+didn't see that."</p>
+
+<p>"I did so! And we got cousins in Chicago and we stayed with them, and
+Cousin Edgar is a very <i>prominent</i> doctor for eyenear and stummick."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, Ben Rusk's pa is a doctor, too. And he's got a brother what's
+going to be a sturgeon."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I got a brother. He's a year older than me. His name is Ray....
+There's lots more people in Minneapolis than there is in Joralemon.
+There's a hundred thousand people in Minneapolis."</p>
+
+<p>"That ain't nothing. My pa was born in Christiania, in the Old
+Country, and they's a million million people there."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there is not!"</p>
+
+<p>"Honest there is."</p>
+
+<p>"Is there, honest?" Gertie was admiring now.</p>
+
+<p>He looked patronizingly at the red-plush furniture which was being
+splendidly carried into the great house from Jordan's dray&mdash;an old
+friend of Carl's, which had often carried him banging through town. He
+condescended:</p>
+
+<p>"Jiminy! You don't know Bennie Rusk nor nobody, do you! I'll bring him
+and we can play soldiers. And we can make tents out of carpets. Did
+you ever run through carpets on the line?"</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to the row of rugs and carpets airing beside the
+carriage-shed.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Is it fun?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's awful scary. But I ain't afraid."</p>
+
+<p>He dashed at the carpets and entered their long narrow tent. To tell
+the truth, when he stepped from the sunshine into the intense darkness
+he was slightly afraid. The Ericsons' one carpet made a short passage,
+but to pass on and on and on through this succession of heavy rug
+mats, where snakes and poisonous bugs might hide, and where the
+rough-threaded, gritty under-surface scratched his pushing hands, was
+fearsome. He emerged with a whoop and encouraged her to try the feat.
+She peeped inside the first carpet, but withdrew her head, giving
+homage:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's so <i>dark</i> in there where you went!"</p>
+
+<p>He promptly performed the feat again.</p>
+
+<p>As they wandered back to the gate to watch the furniture<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>-man Gertie
+tried to regain the superiority due her years by remarking, of a large
+escritoire which was being juggled into the front door, "My papa
+bought that desk in Chicago&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl broke in, "I'll bring Bennie Rusk, and me and him 'll teach you
+to play soldiers."</p>
+
+<p>"My mamma don't think I ought to play games. I've got a lot of dolls,
+but I'm too old for dolls. I play Authors with mamma, sometimes. And
+dominoes. Authors is a very nice game."</p>
+
+<p>"But maybe your ma will let you play Indian squaw, and me and Bennie
+'ll tie you to a stake and scalp you. That won't be rough like
+soldiers. But I'm going to be a really-truly soldier. I'm going to be
+a norficer in the army."</p>
+
+<p>"I got a cousin that's an officer in the army," Gertie said grandly,
+bringing her yellow-ribboned braid round over her shoulder and gently
+brushing her lips with the end.</p>
+
+<p>"Cross-your-heart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Um-huh."</p>
+
+<p>"Cross-your-heart, hope-t'-die if you ain't?"</p>
+
+<p>"Honest he's an officer."</p>
+
+<p>"Jiminy crickets! Say, Gertie, could he make me a norficer? Let's go
+find him. Does he live near here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh my, no! He's 'way off in San Francisco."</p>
+
+<p>"Come on. Let's go there. You and me. Gee! I like you! You got a'
+awful pertty dress."</p>
+
+<p>"'Tain't polite to compliment me to my face. Mamma says&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Come on! Let's go! We're going!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no. I'd like to," she faltered, "but my mamma wouldn't let me. She
+don't let me play around with boys, anyway. She's in the house now.
+And besides, it's 'way far off across the sea, to San Francisco; it's
+beyond the salt sea where the Mormons live, and they all got seven
+wives."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Beyond the sea like Christiania? Ah, 'tain't! It's in America,
+because Mr. Lamb went there last winter. 'Sides, even if it was across
+the sea, couldn't we go an' be stow'ways, like the Younger Brothers
+and all them? And Little Lord Fauntleroy. He went and was a lord, and
+he wasn't nothing but a' orphing. My ma read me about him, only she
+don't talk English very good, but we'll go stow'ways," he wound up,
+triumphantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Gerrrrrrtrrrrrude!" A high-pitched voice from the stoop.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie glowered at a tall, meager woman with a long green-and-white
+apron over a most respectable black alpaca gown. Her nose was large,
+her complexion dull, but she carried herself so commandingly as to be
+almost handsome and very formidable.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dear!" Gertie stamped her foot. "Now I got to go in. I never can
+have any fun. Good-by, Carl&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He urgently interrupted her tragic farewell. "Say! Gee whillikins! I
+know what we'll do. You sneak out the back door and I'll meet you, and
+we'll run away and go seek-our-fortunes and we'll find your
+cousin&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Gerrrtrrrude!" from the stoop.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, mamma, I'm just coming." To Carl: "'Sides, I'm older 'n you and
+I'm 'most grown-up, and I don't believe in Santy Claus, and onc't I
+taught the infant class at St. Chrysostom's Sunday-school when the
+teacher wasn't there; anyway, I and Miss Bessie did, and I asked them
+'most all the questions about the trumpets and pitchers. So I couldn't
+run away. I'm too old."</p>
+
+<p>"Gerrrtrrrude, come here this <i>instant</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Come on. I'll be waiting," Carl demanded.</p>
+
+<p>She was gone. She was being ushered into the House of Mysterious
+Shutters by Mrs. Cowles. Carl prowled down the street, a fine, new,
+long stick at his side, like a saber. He rounded the block, and waited
+back of the Cowles carriage-shed, doing sentry-go and planning the
+number of parrots and pieces of eight he would bring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> back from San
+Francisco. <i>Then</i> his father and mother would be sorry they'd talked
+about him in their Norwegian!</p>
+
+<p>"Carl!" Gertie was running around the corner of the carriage-shed.
+"Oh, Carl, I had to come out and see you again, but I can't go
+seek-our-fortunes with you, 'cause they've got the piano moved in now
+and I got to practise, else I'll grow up just an ignorant common
+person, and, besides, there's going to be tea-biscuits and honey for
+supper. I saw the honey."</p>
+
+<p>He smartly swung his saber to his shoulder, ordering, "Come on!"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie edged forward, perplexedly sucking a finger-joint, and followed
+him along Lake Street toward open country. They took to the Minnesota
+&amp; Dakota railroad track, a natural footpath in a land where the trains
+were few and not fast, as was the condition of the single-tracked M. &amp;
+D. of 1893. In a worried manner Carl inquired whether San Francisco
+was northwest or southeast&mdash;the directions in which ran all
+self-respecting railroads. Gertie blandly declared that it lay to the
+northwest; and northwest they started&mdash;toward the swamps and the first
+forests of the Big Woods.</p>
+
+<p>He had wonderlands to show her along the track. To him every detail
+was of scientific importance. He knew intimately the topography of the
+fields beside the track; in which corner of Tubbs's pasture, between
+the track and the lake, the scraggly wild clover grew, and down what
+part of the gravel-bank it was most exciting to roll. As far along the
+track as the Arch, each railroad tie (or sleeper) had for him a
+personality: the fat, white tie, which oozed at the end into an
+awkward knob, he had always hated because it resembled a flattened
+grub; a new tamarack tie with a sliver of fresh bark still on it,
+recently put in by the section gang, was an entertaining stranger; and
+he particularly introduced Gertie to his favorite, a wine-colored tie
+which always smiled.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Gertie, though <i>noblesse oblige</i> compelled her to be gracious to the
+imprisoned ties writhing under the steel rails, did not really show
+much enthusiasm till he led her to the justly celebrated Arch. Even
+then she boasted of Minnehaha Falls and Fort Snelling and Lake
+Calhoun; but, upon his grieved solicitation, declared that, after all,
+the Twin Cities had nothing to compare with the Arch&mdash;a sandstone
+tunnel full twenty feet high, miraculously boring through the railroad
+embankment, and faced with great stones which you could descend by
+lowering yourself from stone to stone. Through the Arch ran the creek,
+with rare minnows in its pools, while important paths led from the
+creek to a wilderness of hazelnut-bushes. He taught her to tear the
+drying husks from the nuts and crack the nuts with stones. At his
+request Gertie produced two pins from unexpected parts of her small
+frilly dress. He found a piece of string, and they fished for perch in
+the creek. As they had no bait whatever, their success was not large.</p>
+
+<p>A flock of ducks flew low above them, seeking a pond for the night.</p>
+
+<p>"Jiminy!" Carl cried, "it's getting late. We got to hurry. It's awful
+far to San Francisco and&mdash;I don't know&mdash;gee! where'll we sleep
+to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"We hadn't ought to go on, had we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! Come on!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_f.jpg" alt="F" width="35" height="50" /></div>
+<p>rom the creek they tramped nearly two miles, through the dark
+gravel-banks of the railroad cut, across the high trestle over
+Joralemon River where Gertie had to be coaxed from stringer to
+stringer. They stopped only when a gopher in a clearing demanded
+attention. Gertie finally forgot the superiority of age when she saw
+Carl whistle the quivering gopher-cry, while the gopher sat as though
+hypnotized on his pile of fresh black earth. Carl stalked him. As
+always happened, the gopher popped into his hole just before Carl
+reached him; but it certainly did seem that he had nearly been caught;
+and Gertie was jumping with excitement when Carl returned, strutting,
+cocking his saber-stick over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie was tired. She, the Minneapolis girl, had not been much awed by
+the railroad ties nor the Arch, but now she tramped proudly beside the
+man who could catch gophers, till Carl inquired:</p>
+
+<p>"Are you gettin' awful hungry? It's a'most supper-time."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I <i>am</i> hungry," trustingly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to go and swipe some 'taters. I guess maybe there's a
+farm-house over there. I see a chimbly beyond the slough. You stay
+here."</p>
+
+<p>"I dassn't stay alone. Oh, I better go home. I'm scared."</p>
+
+<p>"Come on. I won't let nothing hurt you."</p>
+
+<p>They circled a swamp surrounded by woods, Carl's left arm about her,
+his right clutching the saber. Though the sunset was magnificent and a
+gay company of blackbirds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> swayed on the reeds of the slough, dusk was
+sneaking out from the underbrush that blurred the forest floor, and
+Gertie caught the panic fear. She wished to go home at once. She saw
+darkness reaching for them. Her mother would unquestionably whip her
+for staying out so late. She discovered a mud-smear on the side of her
+skirt, and a shoe-button was gone. She was cold. Finally, if she
+missed supper at home she would get no tea-biscuits and honey.
+Gertie's polite little stomach knew its rights and insisted upon them.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I hadn't come!" she lamented. "I wish I hadn't. Do you s'pose
+mamma will be dreadfully angry? Won't you 'splain to her? You will,
+won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>It was Carl's duty, as officer commanding, to watch the blackened
+stumps that sprang from the underbrush. And there was Something, 'way
+over in the woods, beyond the trees horribly gashed to whiteness by
+lightning. Perhaps the Something hadn't moved; perhaps it <i>was</i> a
+stump&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But he answered her loudly, so that lurking robbers might overhear: "I
+know a great big man over there, and he's a friend of mine; he's a
+brakie on the M. &amp; D., and he lets me ride in the caboose any time I
+want to, and he's right behind us. (I was just making b'lieve, Gertie;
+I'll 'splain everything to your mother.) He's bigger 'n anybody!" More
+conversationally: "Aw, Jiminy! Gertie, don't cry! Please don't. I'll
+take care of you. And if you ain't going to have any supper we'll
+swipe some 'taters and roast 'em." He gulped. He hated to give up, to
+return to woodshed and chicken-yard, but he conceded: "I guess maybe
+we hadn't better go seek-our-fortunes no more to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A long wail tore through the air. The children shrieked together and
+fled, stumbling in dry bog, weeping in terror. Carl's backbone was all
+one prickling bar of ice. But he waved his stick fiercely, and,
+because he had to care for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> her, was calm enough to realize that the
+wail must have been the cry of the bittern.</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't nothing but a bird, Gertie; it can't hurt us. Heard 'em
+lots of times."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he was still trembling when they reached the edge of a
+farm-yard clearing beyond the swamp. It was gray-dark. They could see
+only the mass of a barn and a farmer's cabin, both new to Carl.
+Holding her hand, he whispered:</p>
+
+<p>"They must be some 'taters or 'beggies in the barn. I'll sneak in and
+see. You stand here by the corn-crib and work out some ears between
+the bars. See&mdash;like this."</p>
+
+<p>He left her. The sound of her frightened snivel aged him. He tiptoed
+to the barn door, eying a light in the farm-house. He reached far up
+to the latch of the broad door and pulled out the wooden pin. The
+latch slipped noisily from its staple. The door opened with a groaning
+creek and banged against the barn.</p>
+
+<p>Paralyzed, hearing all the silence of the wild clearing, he waited.
+There was a step in the house. The door opened. A huge farmer,
+tousle-haired, black-bearded, held up a lamp and peered out. It was
+the Black Dutchman.</p>
+
+<p>The Black Dutchman was a living legend. He often got drunk and rode
+past Carl's home at night, lashing his horses and cursing in German.
+He had once thrashed the school-teacher for whipping his son. He had
+no friends.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, oh dear, I wisht I was home!" sobbed Carl; but he started to
+run to Gertie's protection.</p>
+
+<p>The Black Dutchman set down the lamp. "<i>Wer ist da?</i> I see you!
+Damnation!" he roared, and lumbered out, seizing a pitchfork from the
+manure-pile.</p>
+
+<p>Carl galloped up to Gertie, panting, "He's after us!" and dragged her
+into the hazel-bushes beyond the corn-crib. As his country-bred feet
+found and followed a path<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> toward deeper woods, he heard the Black
+Dutchman beating the bushes with his pitchfork, shouting:</p>
+
+<p>"Hiding! I know vere you are! <i>Hah!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Carl jerked his companion forward till he lost the path. There was no
+light. They could only crawl on through the bushes, whose malicious
+fingers stung Gertie's face and plucked at her proud frills. He lifted
+her over fallen trees, freed her from branches, and all the time,
+between his own sobs, he encouraged her and tried to pretend that
+their incredible plight was not the end of the world, whimpering:</p>
+
+<p>"We're a'most on the road now, Gertie; honest we are. I can't hear him
+now. I ain't afraid of him&mdash;he wouldn't dast hurt us or my pa would
+fix him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! I hear him! He's coming! Oh, please save me, Carl!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gee! run fast!... Aw, I don't hear him. I ain't afraid of him!"</p>
+
+<p>They burst out on a grassy woodland road and lay down, panting. They
+could see a strip of stars overhead; and the world was dark, silent,
+in the inscrutable night of autumn. Carl said nothing. He tried to
+make out where they were&mdash;where this road would take them. It might
+run deeper into the woods, which he did not know as he did the Arch
+environs; and he had so twisted through the brush that he could not
+tell in what direction lay either the main wagon-road or the M. &amp; D.
+track.</p>
+
+<p>He lifted her up, and they plodded hand in hand till she said:</p>
+
+<p>"I'm awful tired. It's awful cold. My feet hurt awfully. Carl dear,
+oh, pleassssse take me home now. I want my mamma. Maybe she won't whip
+me now. It's so dark and&mdash;ohhhhhh&mdash;&mdash;" She muttered, incoherently:
+"There! By the road! He's waiting for us!" She sank down, her arm over
+her face, groaning, "Don't hurt me!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl straddled before her, on guard. There was a distorted mass
+crouched by the road just ahead. He tingled with the chill of fear,
+down through his thighs. He had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> lost his stick-saber, but he bent,
+felt for, and found another stick, and piped to the shadowy watcher:</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't af-f-fraid of you! You gwan away from here!"</p>
+
+<p>The watcher did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>"I know who you are!" Bellowing with fear, Carl ran forward, furiously
+waving his stick and clamoring: "You better not touch me!" The stick
+came down with a silly, flat clack upon the watcher&mdash;a roadside
+boulder. "It's just a rock, Gertie! Jiminy, I'm glad! It's just a
+rock!... Aw, I knew it was a rock all the time! Ben Rusk gets scared
+every time he sees a stump in the woods, and he always thinks it's a
+robber."</p>
+
+<p>Chattily, Carl went back, lifted her again, endured her kissing his
+cheek, and they started on.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm so cold," Gertie moaned from time to time, till he offered:</p>
+
+<p>"I'll try and build a fire. Maybe we better camp. I got a match what I
+swiped from the kitchen. Maybe I can make a fire, so we better camp."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to camp. I want to go home."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know where we are, I told you."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you make a regular camp-fire? Like Indians?"</p>
+
+<p>"Um-huh."</p>
+
+<p>"Let's.... But I rather go home."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> ain't scared now. <i>Are</i> you, Gertie? Gee! you're a' awful brave
+girl!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I'm cold and I wisht we had some tea-biscuits&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Ever too complacent was Miss Gertrude Cowles, the Good Girl in
+whatever group she joined; but she seemed to trust in Carl's heroism,
+and as she murmured of a certain chilliness she seemed to take it for
+granted that he would immediately bring her some warmth. Carl had
+never heard of the romantic males who, in fiction, so frequently offer
+their coats to ladies fair but chill; yet he stripped off his jacket
+and wrapped it about her, while his gingham-clad shoulders twitched
+with cold.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I can hear a crick, 'way, 'way over there. Le's camp by it," he
+decided.</p>
+
+<p>They scrambled through the brush, Carl leading her and feeling the
+way. He found a patch of long grass beside the creek; with only his
+tremulous hands for eyes he gathered leaves, twigs, and dead branches,
+and piled them together in a pyramid, as he had been taught to do by
+the older woods-faring boys.</p>
+
+<p>It was still; no wind; but Carl, who had gobbled up every word he had
+heard about deer-hunting in the north woods, got a great deal of
+interesting fear out of dreading what might happen if his one match
+did not light. He made Gertie kneel beside him with the jacket
+outspread, and he hesitated several times before he scratched the
+match. It flared up; the leaves caught; the pile of twigs was
+instantly aflame.</p>
+
+<p>He wept, "Jiminy, if it hadn't lighted!..." By and by he announced,
+loudly, "I wasn't afraid," to convince himself, and sat up, throwing
+twigs on the fire grandly.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie, who didn't really appreciate heroism, sighed, "I'm hungry
+and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"My second-grade teacher told us a story how they was a' arctic
+explorer and he was out in a blizzard&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;and I wish we had some tea-biscuits," concluded Gertie,
+companionably but firmly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go pick some hazelnuts."</p>
+
+<p>He left her feeding the flame. As he crept away, the fire behind him,
+he was dreadfully frightened, now that he had no one to protect. A few
+yards from the fire he stopped in terror. He clutched a branch so
+tightly that it creased his palm. Two hundred yards away, across the
+creek, was the small square of a lighted window hovering detached in
+the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>For a panic-filled second Carl was sure that it must be the Black
+Dutchman's window. His tired child-mind whined. But there was no creek
+near the Black Dutchman's. Though he did not want to venture up to
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> unknown light, he growled, "I will if I want to!" and limped
+forward.</p>
+
+<p>He had to cross the creek, the strange creek whose stepping-stones he
+did not know. Shivering, hesitant, he stripped off his shoes and
+stockings and dabbled the edge of the water with reluctant toes, to
+see if it was cold. It was.</p>
+
+<p>"Dog-gone!" he swore, mightily. He plunged in, waded across.</p>
+
+<p>He found a rock and held it ready to throw at the dog that was certain
+to come snapping at him as he tiptoed through the clearing. His wet
+legs smarted with cold. The fact that he was trespassing made him feel
+more forlornly lost than ever. But he stumbled up to the one-room
+shack that was now shaping itself against the sky. It was a house
+that, he believed, he had never seen before. When he reached it he
+stood for fully a minute, afraid to move. But from across the creek
+whimpered Gertie's call:</p>
+
+<p>"Carl, oh, <i>Carl</i>, where are you?"</p>
+
+<p>He had to hurry. He crept along the side of the shack to the window.
+It was too high in the wall for him to peer through. He felt for
+something to stand upon, and found a short board, which he wedged
+against the side of the shack.</p>
+
+<p>He looked through the dusty window for a second. He sprang from the
+board.</p>
+
+<p>Alone in the shack was the one person about Joralemon more feared,
+more fabulous than the Black Dutchman&mdash;"Bone" Stillman, the man who
+didn't believe in God.</p>
+
+<p>Bone Stillman read Robert G. Ingersoll, and said what he thought.
+Otherwise he was not dangerous to the public peace; a lone old
+bachelor farmer. It was said that he had been a sailor or a policeman,
+a college professor or a priest, a forger or an embezzler. Nothing
+positive was known except that three years ago he had appeared and
+bought this farm. He was a grizzled man of fifty-five,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> with a long,
+tobacco-stained, gray mustache and an open-necked blue-flannel shirt.
+To Carl, beside the shack, Bone Stillman was all that was demoniac.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie was calling again. Carl climbed upon his board and resumed his
+inspection, seeking a course of action.</p>
+
+<p>The one-room shack was lined with tar-paper, on which were pinned
+lithographs of Robert G. Ingersoll, Karl Marx, and Napoleon. Under a
+gun-rack made of deer antlers was a cupboard half filled with dingy
+books, shotgun shells, and fishing tackle. Bone was reading by a pine
+table still littered with supper-dishes. Before him lay a clean-limbed
+English setter. The dog was asleep. In the shack was absolute
+stillness and loneliness intimidating.</p>
+
+<p>While Carl watched, Bone dropped his book and said, "Here, Bob, what
+d'you think of single-tax, heh?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl gazed apprehensively.... No one but Bone was in the shack.... It
+was said that the devil himself sometimes visited here.... On Carl was
+the chill of a nightmare.</p>
+
+<p>The dog raised his head, stirred, blinked, pounded his tail on the
+floor, and rose, a gentlemanly, affable chap, to lay his muzzle on
+Bone's knee while the solitary droned:</p>
+
+<p>"This fellow says in this book here that the city 's the natural place
+to live&mdash;aboriginal tribes prove man 's naturally gregarious. What
+d'you think about it, heh, Bob?... Bum country, this is. No thinking.
+What in the name of the seven saintly sisters did I ever want to be a
+farmer for, heh?</p>
+
+<p>"Let's skedaddle, Bob.</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't an atheist. I'm an agnostic.</p>
+
+<p>"Lonely, Bob? Go over and talk to his whiskers, Karl Marx. He's
+liberal. He don't care what you say. He&mdash;&mdash; Oh, shut up! You're damn
+poor company. Say something!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl, still motionless, was the more agonized because there was no
+sound from Gertie, not even a sobbing call. Anything might have
+happened to her. While he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> coaxing himself to knock on the pane,
+Stillman puttered about the shack, petting the dog, filling his pipe.
+He passed out of Carl's range of vision toward the side of the room in
+which was the window.</p>
+
+<p>A huge hand jerked the window open and caught Carl by the hair. Two
+wild faces stared at each other, six inches apart.</p>
+
+<p>"I saw you. Came here to plague me!" roared Bone Stillman.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mister, oh please, mister, I wasn't. Me and Gertie is lost in the
+woods&mdash;we&mdash;&mdash;Ouch! Oh, <i>please</i> lemme go!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you're just a brat! Come here."</p>
+
+<p>The lean arm of Bone Stillman dragged Carl through the window by the
+slack of his gingham waist.</p>
+
+<p>"Lost, heh? Where's t'other one&mdash;Gertie, was it?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's over in the woods."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor little tyke! Wait 'll I light my lantern."</p>
+
+<p>The swinging lantern made friendly ever-changing circles of light, and
+Carl no longer feared the dangerous territory of the yard. Riding
+pick-a-back on Bone Stillman, he looked down contentedly on the dog's
+deferential tail beside them. They found Gertie asleep by the fire.
+She scarcely awoke as Stillman picked her up and carried her back to
+his shack. She nestled her downy hair beneath his chin and closed her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Stillman said, cheerily, as he ushered them into his mansion: "I'll
+hitch up and take you back to town. You young tropical tramps! First
+you better have a bite to eat, though. What do kids eat, bub?"</p>
+
+<p>The dog was nuzzling Carl's hand, and Carl had almost forgotten his
+fear that the devil might appear. He was flatteringly friendly in his
+answer: "Porritch and meat and potatoes&mdash;only I don't like potatoes,
+and&mdash;<i>pie!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"'Fraid I haven't any pie, but how'd some bacon and eggs go?" As he
+stoked up his cannon-ball stove and sliced the bacon, Stillman
+continued to the children, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> were shyly perched on the buffalo-robe
+cover of his bed, "Were you scared in the woods?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't ever for&mdash;&mdash;Da&mdash;&mdash;Blast that egg! Don't forget this, son:
+nothing outside of you can ever hurt you. It can chew up your toes,
+but it can't reach you. Nobody but you can hurt you. Let me try to
+make that clear, old man, if I can....</p>
+
+<p>"There's your fodder. Draw up and set to. Pretty sleepy, are you? I'll
+tell you a story. J' like to hear about how Napoleon smashed the
+theory of divine rule, or about how me and Charlie Weems explored
+Tiburon? Well&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Though Carl afterward remembered not one word of what Bone Stillman
+said, it is possible that the outcast's treatment of him as a grown-up
+friend was one of the most powerful of the intangible influences which
+were to push him toward the great world outside of Joralemon. The
+school-bound child&mdash;taught by young ladies that the worst immorality
+was whispering in school; the chief virtue, a dull quietude&mdash;was here
+first given a reasonable basis for supposing that he was not always to
+be a back-yard boy.</p>
+
+<p>The man in the flannel shirt, who chewed tobacco, who wrenched
+infinitives apart and thrust profane words between, was for fifteen
+minutes Carl's Froebel and Montessori.</p>
+
+<p>Carl's recollection of listening to Bone blurs into one of being
+somewhere in the back of a wagon beside Gertie, wrapped in buffalo
+robes, and of being awakened by the stopping of the wagon when Bone
+called to a band of men with lanterns who were searching for the
+missing Gertie. Apparently the next second he was being lifted out
+before his home, and his aproned mother was kissing him and sobbing,
+"Oh, my boy!" He snuggled his head on her shoulder and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I'm cold. But I'm going to San Francisco."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_c.jpg" alt="C" width="45" height="50" /></div>
+<p>arl Ericson, grown to sixteen and long trousers, trimmed the
+arc-lights for the Joralemon Power and Lighting Company, after school;
+then at Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor he won two games of Kelly pool,
+smoked a cigarette of flake tobacco and wheat-straw paper, and
+"chipped in" five cents toward a can of beer.</p>
+
+<p>A slender Carl, hesitating in speech, but with plenty to say; rangy as
+a setter pup, silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an
+age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn
+and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black
+four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian
+of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who
+quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even
+Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin
+haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the
+high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked"
+in stores on Saturdays, or tended furnaces. Sometimes he donned the
+virile&mdash;and noisy&mdash;uniform of an electrician: army gauntlets, a coil
+of wire, pole-climbers strapped to his legs. Crunching his steel spurs
+into the crisp pine wood of the lighting-poles, he carelessly ascended
+to the place of humming wires and red cross-bars and green-glass
+insulators, while crowds of two and three small boys stared in awe
+from below. At such moments Carl did not envy the aristocratic leisure
+of his high-school classmate, Fatty Ben Rusk, who, as son of the
+leading doctor, did not work, but stayed home and read library books.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Carl's own home was not adapted to the enchantments of a boy's
+reading. Perfectly comfortable it was, and clean with the hard
+cleanness that keeps oilcloth looking perpetually unused, but it was
+so airlessly respectable that it doubled Carl's natural restlessness.
+It had been old Oscar Ericson's labor of love, but the carpenter loved
+shininess more than space and leisure. His model for a house would
+have been a pine dry-goods box grained in imitation of oak. Oscar
+Ericson radiated intolerance and a belief in unimaginative, unresting
+labor. Every evening, collarless and carpet-slippered, ruffling his
+broom-colored hair or stroking his large, long chin, while his
+shirt-tab moved ceaselessly in time to his breathing, he read a
+Norwegian paper. Carl's mother darned woolen socks and thought about
+milk-pans and the neighbors and breakfast. The creak of rockers filled
+the unventilated, oilcloth-floored sitting-room. The sound was as
+unchanging as the sacred positions of the crayon enlargement of Mrs.
+Ericson's father, the green-glass top-hat for matches, or the violent
+ingrain rug with its dog's-head pattern.</p>
+
+<p>Carl's own room contained only plaster walls, a narrow wooden bed, a
+bureau, a kitchen chair. Fifteen minutes in this irreproachable home
+sent Carl off to Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor, which was not
+irreproachable.</p>
+
+<p>He rather disliked the bitterness of beer and the acrid specks of
+cigarette tobacco that stuck to his lips, but the "bunch at Eddie's"
+were among the few people in Joralemon who were conscious of life.
+Eddie's establishment was a long, white-plastered room with a
+pressed-steel ceiling and an unswept floor. On the walls were
+billiard-table-makers' calendars and a collection of cigarette-premium
+chromos portraying bathing girls. The girls were of lithographic
+complexions, almost too perfect of feature, and their lips were more
+than ruby. Carl admired them.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A September afternoon. The sixteen-year-old Carl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> was tipped back in a
+chair at Eddie Klemm's, one foot on a rung, while he discussed village
+scandals and told outrageous stories with Eddie Klemm, a brisk
+money-maker and vulgarian aged twenty-three, who wore a "fancy vest"
+and celluloid buttons on his lapels. Ben Rusk hesitatingly poked his
+head through the door.</p>
+
+<p>Eddie Klemm called, with business-like cordiality: "H'lo, Fatty! Come
+in. How's your good health? Haven't reformed, have you? Going to join
+us rough-necks? Come on; I'll teach you to play pool. Won't cost you a
+cent."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I guess I hadn't better. I was just looking for Carl."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well, Fatty, ain't we ree-fined! Why do we guess we hadn't to
+probably maybe oughtn't to had better?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know. Some day I'll learn, I guess," sighed Fatty Ben
+Rusk, who knew perfectly that with a doctor father, a religious
+mother, and an effeminate taste for reading he could never be a town
+sport.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey! watch out!" shrieked Eddie.</p>
+
+<p>"Wh-what's the matter?" gasped Fatty.</p>
+
+<p>"The floor 's falling on you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Th&mdash;th&mdash;&mdash;Aw, say, you're kidding me," said Fatty, weakly, with a
+propitiating smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't worry, son; you're the third guy to-day that I've caught on
+that! Stick around, son, and sit in any time, and I'll learn you some
+pool. You got just the right build for a champ player. Have a
+cigarette?"</p>
+
+<p>The social amenities whereby Joralemon prepares her youth for the
+graces of life having been recognized, Fatty Rusk hitched a chair
+beside Carl, and muttered:</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Carl, here's what I wanted to tell you: I was just up to the
+Cowleses' to take back a French grammar I borrowed to look at&mdash;&mdash;Maybe
+that ain't a hard-looking language! What d'you think? Mrs. Cowles told
+me Gertie is expected back to-morrow."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Gee whiz! I thought she was going to stay in New York for two years!
+And she's only been gone six months."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess Mrs. Cowles is kind of lonely without her," Ben mooned.</p>
+
+<p>"So now you'll be all nice and in love with Gertie again, heh? It
+certainly gets me why you want to fall in love, Fatty, when you could
+go hunting."</p>
+
+<p>"If you'd read about King Arthur and Galahad and all them instead of
+reading the <i>Scientific American</i>, and about these fool horseless
+carriages and stuff&mdash;&mdash;There never will be any practical use for
+horseless carriages, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"There will&mdash;&mdash;" growled Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother says she don't believe the Lord ever intended us to ride
+without horses, or what did He give us horses for? And the things
+always get stuck in the mud and you have to walk home&mdash;mother was
+reading that in a newspaper, just the other day."</p>
+
+<p>"Son, let me tell you, I'll own a horseless carriage some day, and I
+bet I go an average of twenty miles an hour with it, maybe forty."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, rats! But I was saying, if you'd read some library books you'd
+know about love. Why, what 'd God put love in the world for&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Say, will you quit explaining to me about what God did things for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ouch! Quit! Awwww, quit, Carl.... Say, listen; here's what I wanted
+to tell you: How if you and me and Adelaide Benner and some of us went
+down to the depot to meet Gertie, to-morrow? She comes in on the
+twelve-forty-seven."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, all right. Say, Bennie, you don't want to be worried when I kid
+you about being in love with Gertie. I don't think I'll ever get
+married. But it's all right for you."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Saturday morning was so cool, so radiant, that Carl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> awakened early to
+a conviction that, no matter how important meeting Gertie might be in
+the cosmic scheme, he was going hunting. He was down-stairs by five.
+He fried two eggs, called Dollar Ingersoll, his dog&mdash;son of Robert
+Ingersoll Stillman, gentleman dog&mdash;then, in canvas hunting-coat and
+slouch-hat, tramped out of town southward, where the woods ended in
+prairie. Gertie's arrival was forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>It was a gipsy day. The sun rolled splendidly through the dry air,
+over miles of wheat stubble, whose gray-yellow prickles were
+transmuted by distance into tawny velvet, seeming only the more
+spacious because of the straight, thin lines of barbed-wire fences
+lined with goldenrod, and solitary houses in willow groves. The dips
+and curves of the rolling plain drew him on; the distances satisfied
+his eyes. A pleasant hum of insects filled the land's wide serenity
+with hidden life.</p>
+
+<p>Carl left a trail of happy, monotonous whistling behind him all day,
+as his dog followed the winding trail of prairie-chickens, as a covey
+of chickens rose with booming wings and he swung his shotgun for a
+bead. He stopped by prairie-sloughs or bright-green bogs to watch for
+a duck. He hailed as equals the occasional groups of hunters in
+two-seated buggies, quartering the fields after circling dogs. He
+lunched contentedly on sandwiches of cold lamb, and lay with his arms
+under his head, gazing at a steeple fully ten miles away.</p>
+
+<p>By six of the afternoon he had seven prairie-chickens tucked inside
+the long pocket that lined the tail of his coat, and he headed for
+home, superior to miles, his quiet eyes missing none of the purple
+asters and goldenrod.</p>
+
+<p>As he began to think he felt a bit guilty. The flowers suggested
+Gertie. He gathered a large bunch, poking stalks of aster among the
+goldenrod, examining the result at arm's-length. Yet when he stopped
+at the Rusks' in town, to bid Bennie take the rustic bouquet to
+Gertie, he replied to reproaches:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What you making all the fuss about my not being there to meet her
+for? She got here all right, didn't she? What j' expect me to do? Kiss
+her? You ought to known it was too good a day for hunting to miss....
+How's Gert? Have a good time in New York?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl himself took the flowers to her, however, and was so shyly
+attentive to her account of New York that he scarcely stopped to speak
+to the Cowleses' "hired girl," who was his second cousin.... Mrs.
+Cowles overheard him shout, "Hello, Lena! How's it going?" to the
+hired girl with cousinly ease. Mrs. Cowles seemed chilly. Carl
+wondered why.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>From month to month of his junior year in high school Carl grew more
+discontented. He let the lines of his Cicero fade into a gray blur
+that confounded Cicero's blatant virtue and Cataline's treachery,
+while he pictured himself tramping with snow-shoes and a mackinaw coat
+into the snowy solemnities of the northern Minnesota tamarack swamps.
+Much of his discontent was caused by his learned preceptors. The
+teachers for this year were almost perfectly calculated to make any
+lad of the slightest independence hate culture for the rest of his
+life. With the earnestness and industry usually ascribed to the devil,
+"Prof" Sybrant E. Larsen (B. A. Platonis), Miss McDonald, and Miss
+Muzzy kept up ninety-five per cent. discipline, and seven per cent.
+instruction in anything in the least worth while.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Muzzy was sarcastic, and proud of it. She was sarcastic to Carl
+when he gruffly asked why he couldn't study French instead of "all
+this Latin stuff." If there be any virtue in the study of Latin (and
+we have all forgotten all our Latin except the fact that "suburb"
+means "under the city"&mdash;<i>i. e.</i>, a subway), Carl was blinded to it for
+ever. Miss Muzzy wore eye-glasses and had no bosom. Carl's father used
+to say approvingly, "Dat Miss Muzzy don't stand for no nonsense," and
+Mrs. Dr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> Rusk often had her for dinner.... Miss McDonald, fat and
+slow-spoken and kind, prone to use the word "dearie," to read
+Longfellow, and to have buttons off her shirt-waists, used on Carl a
+feminine weapon more unfair than the robust sarcasm of Miss Muzzy. For
+after irritating a self-respecting boy into rudeness by pawing his
+soul with damp, puffy hands, she would weep. She was a kind, honest,
+and reverent bovine. Carl sat under her supervision in the junior
+room, with its hardwood and blackboards and plaster, high windows and
+portraits of Washington and a President who was either Madison or
+Monroe (no one ever remembered which). He hated the eternal school
+smell of drinking-water pails and chalk and slates and varnish; he
+loathed the blackboard erasers, white with crayon-dust; he found
+inspiration only in the laboratory where "Prof" Larsen mistaught
+physics and rebuked questions about the useless part of
+chemistry&mdash;that is, the part that wasn't in their text-books.</p>
+
+<p>As for literature, Ben Rusk persuaded him to try Captain Marryat and
+Conan Doyle. Carl met Sherlock Holmes in a paper-bound book, during a
+wait for flocks of mallards on the duck-pass, which was a little
+temple of silver birches bare with November. He crouched down in his
+canvas coat and rubber boots, gun across knees, and read for an hour
+without moving. As he tramped home, into a vast Minnesota sunset like
+a furnace of fantastic coals, past the garnet-tinged ice of lakes, he
+kept his gun cocked and under his elbow, ready for the royal robber
+who was dogging the personage of Baker Street.</p>
+
+<p>He hunted much; distinguished himself in geometry and chemistry;
+nearly flunked in Cicero and English; learned to play an
+extraordinarily steady game of bottle pool at Eddie Klemm's.</p>
+
+<p>And always Gertie Cowles, gently hesitant toward Ben Rusk's affection,
+kept asking Carl why he didn't come to see her oftener, and play
+tiddledywinks.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On the Friday morning before Christmas vacation, Carl and Ben Rusk
+were cleaning up the chemical laboratory, its pine experiment-bench
+and iron sink and rough floor. Bennie worried a rag in the sink with
+the resigned manner of a man who, having sailed with purple banners
+the sunset sea of tragedy, goes bravely on with a life gray and weary.</p>
+
+<p>The town was excited. Gertie Cowles was giving a party, and she had
+withdrawn her invitation to Eddie Klemm. Gertie was staying away from
+high school, gracefully recovering from a cold. For two weeks the
+junior and senior classes had been furtively exhibiting her
+holly-decked cards of invitation. Eddie had been included, but after
+his quarrel with Howard Griffin, a Plato College freshman who was
+spending the vacation with Ray Cowles, it had been explained to Eddie
+that perhaps he would be more comfortable not to come to the party.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie's brother, Murray, or "Ray," was the town hero. He had
+captained the high-school football team. He was tall and very
+black-haired, and he "jollied" the girls. It was said that twenty
+girls in Joralemon and Wakamin, and a "grass widow" in St. Hilary,
+wrote to him. He was now a freshman in Plato College, Plato,
+Minnesota. He had brought home with him his classmate, Howard Griffin,
+whose people lived in South Dakota and were said to be wealthy.
+Griffin had been very haughty to Eddie Klemm, when introduced to that
+brisk young man at the billiard-parlor, and now, the town eagerly
+learned, Eddie had been rejected of society.</p>
+
+<p>In the laboratory Carl was growling: "Well, say, Fatty, if it was
+right for them to throw Eddie out, where do I come in? His dad 's a
+barber, and mine 's a carpenter, and that's just as bad. Or how about
+you? I was reading that docs used to be just barbers."</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, thunder!" said Ben Rusk, the doctor's scion, uncomfortably,
+"you're just arguing. I don't believe that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> about doctors being
+barbers. Don't it tell about doctors 'way back in the Bible? Why, of
+course! Luke was a physician! 'Sides, it ain't a question of Eddie's
+being a barber's son. I sh'd think you'd realize that Gertie isn't
+well. She wouldn't want to have to entertain both Eddie and Griffin,
+and Griffin 's her guest; and besides&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You're getting all tangled up. If I was to let you go on you'd trip
+over a long word and bust your dome. Come on. We've done enough
+cleaning. Le's hike. Come on up to the house and help me on my bobs. I
+got a new scheme for pivoting the back sled.... You just wait till
+to-night. I'm going to tell Gertie and Mister Howard Griffin just what
+I think of them for being such two-bit snobs. And your future
+ma-in-law. Gee! I'm glad I don't have to be in love with anybody, and
+become a snob! Come on."</p>
+
+<p>Out of this wholesome, democratic, and stuffy village life Carl
+suddenly stepped into the great world. A motor-car, the first he had
+ever seen, was drawn up before the Hennepin House.</p>
+
+<p>He stopped. His china-blue eyes widened. His shoulders shot forward to
+a rigid stoop of astonishment. His mouth opened. He gasped as they ran
+to join the gathering crowd.</p>
+
+<p>"A horseless carriage! Do you get that? There's one <i>here</i>!" He
+touched the bonnet of the two-cylinder 1901 car, and worshiped. "Under
+there&mdash;the engine! And there's where you steer.... I <i>will</i> own
+one!... Gee! you're right, Fatty; I believe I will go to college. And
+then I'll study mechanical engineering."</p>
+
+<p>"Thought you said you were going to try and go to Annapolis and be a
+sailor."</p>
+
+<p>"No. Rats! I'm going to own a horseless carriage, and I'm going to
+tour every state in the Union.... Think of seeing mountains! And the
+ocean! And going twenty miles an hour, like a train!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_w.jpg" alt="W" width="69" height="50" /></div>
+<p>hile Carl prepared for Gertie Cowles's party by pressing his trousers
+with his mother's flat-iron, while he blacked his shoes and took his
+weekly sponge-bath, he was perturbed by partisanship with Eddie Klemm,
+and a longing for the world of motors, and some anxiety as to how he
+could dance at the party when he could not dance.</p>
+
+<p>He clumped up the new stone steps of the Cowles house carelessly, not
+unusually shy, ready to tell Gertie what he thought of her treatment
+of Eddie. Then the front door opened and an agonized Carl was
+smothered in politeness. His second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses' "hired
+girl," was opening the door, stiff and uncomfortable in a cap, a black
+dress, and a small frilly apron that dangled on her boniness like a
+lace kerchief pinned on a broom-handle. Murray Cowles rushed up. He
+was in evening clothes!</p>
+
+<p>Behind Murray, Mrs. Cowles greeted Carl with thawed majesty: "We are
+so glad to have you, Carl. Won't you take your things off in the room
+at the head of the stairs?"</p>
+
+<p>An affable introduction to Howard Griffin (also in evening clothes)
+was poured on Carl like soothing balm. Said Griffin: "Mighty glad to
+meet you, Ericson. Ray told me you'd make a ripping sprinter. The
+captain of the track team 'll be on the lookout for you when you get
+to Plato. Course you're going to go there. The U. of Minn. is too
+big.... You'll <i>do</i> something for old Plato. Wish I could. But all I
+can do is warble like a darn' dicky-bird. Have a cigarette?... They're
+just starting to dance. Come on, old man. Come on, Ray."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Carl was drawn down-stairs and instantly precipitated into a dance
+regarding which he was sure only that it was either a waltz, a
+two-step, or something else. It filled with glamour the Cowles
+library&mdash;the only parlor in Joralemon that was called a library, and
+the only one with a fireplace or a polished hardwood floor. Grandeur
+was in the red lambrequins over the doors and windows; the bead
+porti&egrave;re; a hand-painted coal-scuttle; small, round paintings of
+flowers set in black velvet; an enormous black-walnut bookcase with
+fully a hundred volumes; and the two lamps of green-mottled shades and
+wrought-iron frames, set on pyrographed leather skins brought from New
+York by Gertie. The light was courtly on the polished floor. Adelaide
+Benner&mdash;a new Adelaide, in chiffon over yellow satin, and
+patent-leather slippers&mdash;grinned at him and ruthlessly towed him into
+the tide of dancers. In the spell of society no one seemed to remember
+Eddie Klemm. Adelaide did not mention the incident.</p>
+
+<p>Carl found himself bumping into others, continually apologizing to
+Adelaide and the rest&mdash;and not caring. For he saw a vision! Each time
+he turned toward the south end of the room he beheld Gertie Cowles
+glorified.</p>
+
+<p>She was out of ankle-length dresses! She looked her impressive
+eighteen, in a foaming long white mull that showed her soft throat. A
+red rose was in her brown hair. She reclined in a big chair of leather
+and oak and smiled her gentlest, especially when Carl bobbed his head
+to her.</p>
+
+<p>He had always taken her as a matter of course; she had no age, no sex,
+no wonder. That afternoon she had been a negligible bit of Joralemon,
+to be accused of snobbery toward Eddie Klemm, and always to be watched
+suspiciously lest she "spring some New York airs on us."... Gertie had
+craftily seemed unchanged after her New York enlightenment till
+now&mdash;here she was, suddenly grown-up and beautiful, haloed with a
+peculiar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> magic, which distinguished her from all the rest of the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>"She's the one that would ride in that horseless carriage when I got
+it!" Carl exulted. "That must be a train, that thing she's got on."</p>
+
+<p>After the dance he disposed of Adelaide Benner as though she were only
+a sister. He hung over the back of Gertie's chair and urged: "I was
+awful sorry to hear you were sick.... Say, you look wonderful,
+to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm so glad you could come to my party. Oh, I must speak to you
+about&mdash;&mdash;Do you suppose you would ever get very, very angry at poor
+me? Me so bad sometimes."</p>
+
+<p>He cut an awkward little caper to show his aplomb, and assured her, "I
+guess probably I'll kill you some time, all right."</p>
+
+<p>"No, listen, Carl; I'm dreadfully serious. I hope you didn't go and
+get dreadfully angry at me about Eddie Klemm. I know Eddie 's good
+friends with you. And I did want to have him come to my party. But you
+see it was this way: Mr. Griffin is our guest (he likes you a <i>lot</i>,
+Carl. Isn't he a dandy fellow? I guess Adelaide and Hazel 're just
+crazy about him. I think he's just as swell as the men in New York).
+Eddie and he didn't get along very well together. It isn't anybody's
+fault, I don't guess. I thought Eddie would be lots happier if he
+didn't come, don't you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, of course; oh yes, I see. Sure. I can see how&mdash;&mdash;Say, Gertie,
+I never did know you could look so grown-up. I suppose now you'll
+never play with me."</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to be a good friend of mine always. We always have been
+awfully good friends, haven't we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Do you remember how we ran away?"</p>
+
+<p>"And how the Black Dutchman chassssed us!" Her sweet and complacent
+voice was so cheerful that he lost his awe of her new magic and
+chortled:</p>
+
+<p>"And how we used to play pum-pum-pull-away."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She delicately leaned her cheek on a finger-tip and sighed: "Yes, I
+wonder if we shall ever be so happy as when we were young.... I don't
+believe you care to play with me so much now."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, gee! Gertie! Like to&mdash;&mdash;!" The shyness was on him again. "Say,
+are you feeling better now? You're all over being sick?"</p>
+
+<p>"Almost, now. I'll be back in school right after vacation."</p>
+
+<p>"It's you that don't want to play, I guess.... I can't get over that
+long white dress. It makes you look so&mdash;oh, you know, so, uh&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"They're going to dance again. I wish I felt able to dance."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me sit and talk to you, Gertie, instead of dancing."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you're dreadfully bored, though, when you could be down at
+the billiard-parlor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I could! Not! Eddie Klemm and his fancy vest wouldn't have much
+chance, alongside of Griffin in his dress-suit! Course I don't want to
+knock Eddie. Him and me are pretty good side-kicks&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no; I understand. It's just that people have to go with their own
+class, don't you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh Yes. Sure. I do think so, myself." Carl said it with a spurious
+society manner. In Gertie's aristocratic presence he desired to keep
+aloof from all vulgar persons.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, I think we ought to make allowances for Eddie's father,
+Carl, but then&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She sighed with the responsibilities of <i>noblesse oblige</i>; and Carl
+gravely sighed with her.</p>
+
+<p>He brought a stool and sat at her feet. Immediately he was afraid that
+every one was watching him. Ray Cowles bawled to them, as he passed in
+the waltz, "Watch out for that Carl, Gert. He's a regular badix."</p>
+
+<p>Carl's scalp tickled, but he tried to be very offhand in remarking:
+"You must have gotten that dress in New<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> York, didn't you? Why haven't
+you ever told me about New York? You've hardly told me anything at
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I like that! And you never been near me to give me a chance!"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I was kind of scared you wouldn't care much for Joralemon,
+after New York."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Carl, you mustn't say that to me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Gertie, honestly I didn't. I was
+just joking. I didn't think you'd take me seriously."</p>
+
+<p>"As though I could forget my old friends, even in New York!"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't think that. Straight. Please tell me about New York. That's
+the place, all right. Jiminy! wouldn't I like to go there!"</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you could have been there, Carl. We had such fun in my school.
+There weren't any boys in it, but we&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No boys in it? Why, how's that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it was just for girls."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," he said, fatuously, completely satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>"We did have the best times, Carl. I <i>must</i> tell you about one awfully
+naughty thing Carrie&mdash;she was my chum in school&mdash;and I did. There was
+a stock company on Twenty-third Street, and we were all crazy about
+the actors, especially Clements Devereaux, and one afternoon Carrie
+told the principal she had a headache, and I asked if I could go home
+with her and read her the assignments for next day (they called the
+lessons 'assignments' there), and they thought I was such a meek
+little country mouse that I wouldn't ever fib, and so they let us go,
+and what do you think we did? She had tickets for 'The Two Orphans' at
+the stock company. (You've never seen 'The Two Orphans,' have you?
+It's perfectly splendid. I used to weep my eyes out over it.) And
+afterward we went and waited outside, right near the stage entrance,
+and what do you think? The leading man,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> Clements Devereaux, went
+right by us as near as I am to you. Oh, <i>Carl</i>, I wish you could have
+seen him! Maybe he wasn't the handsomest thing! He had the blackest,
+curliest hair, and he wore a thumb ring."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think much of all these hamfatters," growled Carl. "Actors
+always go broke and have to walk back to Chicago. Don't you think it
+'d be better to be a civil engineer or something like that, instead of
+having to slick up your hair and carry a cane? They're just dudes."</p>
+
+<p>"Why! of course, Carl, you silly boy! You don't suppose I'd take
+Clements seriously, do you? You silly boy!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not a boy."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean it that way." She sat up, touched his shoulder, and sank
+back. He blushed with bliss, and the fear that some one had seen, as
+she continued: "I always think of you as just as old as I am. We
+always will be, won't we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"Now you must go and talk to Doris Carson. Poor thing, she always is a
+wall-flower."</p>
+
+<p>However much he thought of common things as he left her, beyond those
+common things was the miracle that Gertie had grown into the one
+perfect, divinely ordained woman, and that he would talk to her again.
+He danced the Virginia reel. Instead of clumping sulkily through the
+steps, as at other parties, he heeded Adelaide Benner's lessons, and
+watched Gertie in the hope that she would see how well he was dancing.
+He shouted a demand that they play "Skip to Maloo," and cried down the
+shy girls who giggled that they were too old for the childish
+party-game. He howled, without prejudice in favor of any particular
+key, the ancient words:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Rats in the sugar-bowl, two by two,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bats in the belfry, two by two,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rats in the sugar-bowl, two by two,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Skip to Maloo, my darling."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>In the nonchalant company of the smarter young bachelors up-stairs he
+smoked a cigarette. But he sneaked away. He paused at the bend in the
+stairs. Below him was Gertie, silver-gowned, wonderful. He wanted to
+go down to her. He would have given up his chance for a motor-car to
+be able to swagger down like an Eddie Klemm. For the Carl Ericson who
+sailed his ice-boat over inch-thick ice was timid now. He poked into
+the library, and in a nausea of discomfort he conversed with Mrs.
+Cowles, Mrs. Cowles doing the conversing.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to be a Republican or a Democrat, Carl?" asked the
+forbidding lady.</p>
+
+<p>"Yessum," mumbled Carl, peering over at Gertie's throne, where Ben
+Rusk was being cultured.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you are having a good time. We always wish our young friends
+to have an especially good time at Gertrude's parties," Mrs. Cowles
+sniffed, and bowed away.</p>
+
+<p>Carl sat beside Adelaide Benner in the decorous and giggling circle
+that ringed the room, waiting for the "refreshments." He was healthily
+interested in devouring maple ice-cream and chocolate layer-cake. But
+all the while he was spying on the group gathering about Gertie&mdash;Ben
+Rusk, Howard Griffin, and Joe Jordan. He took the most strategic
+precautions lest some one think that he wanted to look at Gertie; made
+such ponderous efforts to prove he was care-free that every one knew
+something was the matter.</p>
+
+<p>Ben Rusk was taking no part in the gaiety of Howard and Joe. The
+serious man of letters was not easily led into paths of frivolity.
+Carl swore to himself: "Ben 's the only guy I know that's got any
+delicate feelings. He appreciates how Gertie feels when she's sick,
+poor girl. He don't make a goat of himself, like Joe.... Or maybe he's
+got a stomach-ache."</p>
+
+<p>"Post-office!" cried Howard Griffin to the room at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> large. "Come on!
+We're all of us going to be kids again, and play post-office. Who's
+the first girl wants to be kissed?"</p>
+
+<p>"The idea!" giggled Adelaide Benner.</p>
+
+<p>"Me for Adelaide!" bawled Joe Jordan.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Jo-oe, bet I kiss Gertie!" from Irving Lamb.</p>
+
+<p>"The idea!"</p>
+
+<p>"Just as if we were children&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He must think we're kids again&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Shamey! Winnie wants to be kissed, and Carl won't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't, either, so there&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it's awful."</p>
+
+<p>"Bet I kiss Gertie&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl was furious at all of them as they strained their shoulders
+forward from their chairs and laughed. He asked himself, "Haven't
+these galoots got any sense?"</p>
+
+<p>To speak so lightly of kissing Gertie! He stared at the smooth
+rounding of her left cheek below the cheek-bone till it took a
+separate identity, and its white softness filled the room.</p>
+
+<p>Ten minutes afterward, playing "post-office," he was facing Gertie in
+the semi-darkness of the sitting-room, authorized by the game to kiss
+her; shut in with his divinity.</p>
+
+<p>She took his hand. Her voice was crooning, "Are you going to kiss me
+terribly hard?"</p>
+
+<p>He tried to be gracefully mocking: "Oh yes! Sure! I'm going to eat you
+alive."</p>
+
+<p>She was waiting.</p>
+
+<p>He wished that she would not hold his hand. Within he groaned, "Gee
+whiz! I feel foolish!" He croaked: "Do you feel better, now? You'll
+catch more cold in here, won't you? There's kind of a draught. Lemme
+look at this window."</p>
+
+<p>Crossing to the obviously tight window, he ran his finger along the
+edge of the sash with infinite care. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> trembled. In a second, <i>now</i>,
+he had to turn and make light of the lips which he would fain have
+approached with ceremony pompous and lingering.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie flopped into a chair, laughing: "I believe you're afraid to
+kiss me! 'Fraid cat! You'll never be a squire of dames, like those
+actors are! All right for you!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not afraid!" he piped.... Even his prized semi-bass voice had
+deserted him.... He rushed to the back of her chair and leaned over,
+confused, determined. Hastily he kissed her. The kiss landed on the
+tip of her cold nose.</p>
+
+<p>And the whole party was tumbling in, crying:</p>
+
+<p>"Time 's up! You can't hug her all evening!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see? He kissed her on the nose!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did he? Ohhhhh!"</p>
+
+<p>"Time 's up. Can't try it again."</p>
+
+<p>Joe Jordan, in the van, was dancing fantastically, scraping his
+forefinger at Carl, in token of disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>The riotous crowd, Gertie and Carl among them, flooded out again. To
+show that he had not minded the incident of the misplaced kiss, Carl
+had to be very loud and merry in the library for a few minutes; but
+when the game of "post-office" was over and Mrs. Cowles asked Ray to
+turn down the lamp in the sitting-room, Carl insisted:</p>
+
+<p>"I'll do it, Mrs. Cowles; I'm nearer 'n Ray," and bolted.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that he was wicked in not staying in the library and
+continuing his duties to the party. He had to crowd into a minute all
+his agonizing and be back at once.</p>
+
+<p>It was beautiful in the stilly sitting-room, away from the noisy
+crowd, to hear love's heart beating. He darted to the chair where
+Gertie had sat and guiltily kissed its arm. He tiptoed to the table,
+blew out the lamp, remembered that he should only have turned down the
+wick, tried to raise the chimney, burnt his fingers,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> snatched his
+handkerchief, dropped it, groaned, picked up the handkerchief, raised
+the chimney, put it on the table, searched his pockets for a match,
+found it, dropped it, picked it up from the floor, dropped his knife
+from his pocket as he stooped, felt itchy about the scalp, picked up
+the knife, relighted the lamp, exquisitely adjusted the chimney&mdash;and
+again blew out the flame. And swore.</p>
+
+<p>As darkness whirled into the room again the vision of Gertie came
+nearer. Then he understood his illness, and gasped: "Great jumping
+Jupiter on a high mountain! I guess&mdash;I'm&mdash;in&mdash;love! <i>Me!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The party was breaking up. Each boy, as he accompanied a girl from the
+yellow lamplight into the below-zero cold, shouted and scuffled the
+snow, to indicate that there was nothing serious in his attentions,
+and immediately tried to man&oelig;uver his girl away from the others.
+Mrs. Cowles was standing in the hall&mdash;not hurrying the guests away,
+you understand, but perfectly resigned to accepting any
+farewells&mdash;when Gertie, moving gently among them with little sounds of
+pleasure, penned Carl in a corner and demanded:</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to see some one home? I suppose you'll forget poor me
+completely, now!"</p>
+
+<p>"I will not!"</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted to tell you what Ray and Mr. Griffin said about Plato and
+about being lawyers. Isn't it nice you'll know them when you go to
+Plato?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it 'll be great."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Griffin 's going to be a lawyer and maybe Ray will, too, and why don't
+you think about being one? You can get to be a judge and know all the best
+people. It would be lovely.... Refining influences&mdash;they&mdash;that's&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't ever be a high-class lawyer like Griffin will," said Carl,
+his head on one side, much pleased.</p>
+
+<p>"You silly boy, of course you could. I think you've got just as much
+brains as he has, and Ray says they all look up to him even in Plato.
+And I don't see why Plato<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> isn't just as good&mdash;of course it isn't as
+large, but it's so select and the faculty can give you so much more
+individual attention, and I don't see why it isn't every bit as good
+as Yale and Michigan and all those Eastern colleges.... Howard&mdash;Mr.
+Griffin&mdash;he says that he wouldn't ever have thought of being a lawyer
+only a girl was such a good influence with him, and if you get to be a
+famous man, too, maybe I'll have been just a teeny-weeny bit of an
+influence, too, won't I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh <i>yes</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"I must get back now and say good-by to my guests. Good night, Carl."</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to study&mdash;you just watch me; and if I do get to go to
+Plato&mdash;&mdash;Oh, gee! you always have been a good influence&mdash;&mdash;" He
+noticed that Doris Carson was watching them. "Well, I gotta be going.
+I've had a peach of a time. Good night."</p>
+
+<p>Doris Carson was expectantly waiting for one of the boys to "see her
+home," but Carl guiltily stole up to Ben Rusk and commanded:</p>
+
+<p>"Le's hike, Fatty. Le's take a walk. Something big to tell you."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_c.jpg" alt="C" width="45" height="50" /></div>
+<p>arl kicked up the snow in moon-shot veils. The lake boomed. For all
+their woolen mittens, ribbed red-cotton wristlets, and plush caps with
+ear-laps, the cold seared them. Carl encouraged Ben to discourse of
+Gertie and the delights of a long and hopeless love. He discovered
+that, actually, Ben had suddenly fallen in love with Adelaide Benner.
+"Gee!" he exulted. "Maybe that gives me a chance with Gertie, then.
+But I won't let her know Ben ain't in love with her any more. Jiminy!
+ain't it lucky Gertie liked me just when Ben fell in love with
+somebody else! Funny the way things go; and her never knowing about
+Ben." He laid down his cards. While they plowed through the hard
+snow-drifts, swinging their arms against their chests like milkmen, he
+blurted out all his secret: that Gertie was the "slickest girl in
+town"; that no one appreciated her.</p>
+
+<p>"Ho, ho!" jeered Ben.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you were crazy about her, and then you start kidding about
+her! A swell bunch of chivalry you got, you and your Galahad! You&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you go jumping on Galahad, or I'll fight!"</p>
+
+<p>"He was all right, but you ain't," said Carl. "You hadn't ought to
+ever sneer at love."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you said, just this afternoon&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You poor yahoo, I was only teasing you. No; about Gertie. It's like
+this: she was telling me a lot about how Griffin 's going to be a
+lawyer, about how much they make in cities, and I've about decided
+I'll be a lawyer."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Thought you were going to be a mechanical engineer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, can't a fellow change his mind? When you're an engineer you're
+always running around the country, and you never get shaved or
+anything, and there ain't any refining influences&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The absorbing game of "what we're going to be" made them forget snow
+and cold-squeezed fingers. Ben, it was decided, was to own a newspaper
+and support C. Ericson, Attorney-at-Law, in his dramatic run for state
+senator.</p>
+
+<p>Carl did not mention Gertie again. But it all meant Gertie.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Carl made his round trimming the arc-lights next day, apparently a
+rudely healthy young person, but really a dreamer love-lorn and
+misunderstood. He had found a good excuse for calling on Gertie, at
+noon, and had been informed that Miss Gertrude was taking a nap. He
+determined to go up the lake for rabbits. He doubted if he would ever
+return, and wondered if he would be missed. Who would care if he froze
+to death? He wouldn't! (Though he did seem to be taking certain
+precautions, by donning a mackinaw coat, two pairs of trousers, two
+pairs of woolen socks, and shoe-packs.)</p>
+
+<p>He was graceful as an Indian when he swept, on skees he had made
+himself, across miles of snow covering the lake and dazzling in the
+diffused light of an even gray sky. The reeds by the marshy shore were
+frost-glittering and clattered faintly. Marshy islands were lost in
+snow. Hummocks and ice-jams and the weaving patterns of mink tracks
+were blended in one white immensity, on which Carl was like a fly on a
+plaster ceiling. The world was deserted. But Carl was not lonely. He
+forgot all about Gertie as he cached his skees by the shore and
+prowled through the woods, leaping on brush-piles and shooting quickly
+when a rabbit ran out.</p>
+
+<p>When he had bagged three rabbits he was besieged by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> the melancholy of
+loneliness, the perfection of the silver-gowned Gertie. He wanted to
+talk. He thought of Bone Stillman.</p>
+
+<p>It was very likely that Bone was, as usual in winter, up beyond Big
+Bend, fishing for pickerel with tip-ups. A never-stopping dot in the
+dusk, Carl headed for Big Bend, three miles away.</p>
+
+<p>The tip-up fisher watches a dozen tip-ups&mdash;short, automatic
+fishing-rods, with lines running through the ice, the pivoted arm
+signaling the presence of a fish at the bait. Sometimes, for warmth,
+he has a tiny shanty, perhaps five feet by six in ground area, heated
+by a powder-can stove. Bone Stillman often spent the night in his
+movable shanty on the lake, which added to his reputation as village
+eccentric. But he was more popular, now, with the local sporting
+gentlemen, who found that he played a divine game of poker.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, son!" he greeted Carl. "Come in. Leave them long legs of yours
+up on shore if there ain't room."</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Bone, do you think a fellow ever ought to join a church?"</p>
+
+<p>"Depends. Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, suppose he was going to be a lawyer and go in for politics?"</p>
+
+<p>"Look here. What 're you thinking of becoming a lawyer for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't say I was."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you're thinking of it. Look here. Don't you know you've got a
+chance of seeing the world? You're one of the lucky people that can have a
+touch of the wanderlust without being made useless by it&mdash;as I have. You
+may, you <i>may</i> wander in thought as well as on freight-trains, and discover
+something for the world. Whereas a lawyer&mdash;&mdash;They're priests. They decide
+what's holy and punish you if you don't guess right. They set up codes that
+it takes lawyers to interpret, and so they perpetuate themselves. I don't
+mean to say<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> you're extraordinary in having a chance to wander. Don't get
+the big-head over it. You're a pretty average young American. There's
+plenty of the same kind. Only, mostly they get tied up to something before
+they see what a big world there is to hike in, and I want to keep you from
+that. I'm not roasting lawyers&mdash;&mdash;Yes, I am, too. They live in calf-bound
+books. Son, son, for God's sake live in life."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but look here, Bone; I was just thinking about it, that's all.
+You're always drumming it into me about not taking anything for
+granted. Anyway, by the time I go to Plato I'll know&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"D'you mean to say you're going to that back-creek nunnery? That
+Blackhaw University? Are you going to play checkers all through life?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know, now, Bone. Plato ain't so bad. A fellow's got to go
+some place so he can mix with people that know what's the proper thing
+to do. Refining influences and like that."</p>
+
+<p>"Proper! <i>Refining!</i> Son, son, are you going to get Joralemonized? If
+you want what the French folks call the grand manner, if you're going
+to be a tip-top, A Number 1, genuwine grand senyor, or however they
+pronounce it, why, all right, go to it; that's one way of playing a
+big game. But when it comes down to a short-bit, fresh-water
+sewing-circle like Plato College, where an imitation scholar teaches
+you imitation translations of useless classics, and amble-footed girls
+teach you imitation party manners that 'd make you just as plumb
+ridic'lous in a real <i>salon</i> as they would in a lumber-camp,
+why&mdash;&mdash;Oh, sa-a-a-y! I've got it. Girls, eh? What girl 've you been
+falling in love with to get this Plato idea from, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, I ain't in love, Bone."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't opine you are. At your age you got about as much chance
+of being in love as you have of being a grandfather. But somehow I
+seem to have a little old suspicion that you <i>think</i> you're in love.
+But it's none<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> of my business, and I ain't going to ask questions
+about it." He patted Carl on the shoulder, moving his arm with
+difficulty in their small, dark space. "Son, I've learned this in my
+life&mdash;and I've done quite some hiking at that, even if I didn't have
+the book-l'arnin' and the git-up-and-git to make anything out of my
+experience. It's a thing I ain't big enough to follow up, but I know
+it's there. Life is just a little old checker game played by the
+alfalfa contingent at the country store unless you've got an ambition
+that's too big to ever quite lasso it. You want to know that there's
+something ahead that's bigger and more beautiful than anything you've
+ever seen, and never stop till&mdash;well, till you can't follow the road
+any more. And anything or anybody that doesn't pack any surprises&mdash;get
+that?&mdash;<i>surprises</i> for you, is dead, and you want to slough it like a
+snake does its skin. You want to keep on remembering that Chicago's
+beyond Joralemon, and Paris beyond Chicago, and beyond Paris&mdash;well,
+maybe there's some big peak of the Himalayas."</p>
+
+<p>For hours they talked, Bone desperately striving to make his dreams
+articulate to Carl&mdash;and to himself. They ate fish fried on the
+powder-can stove, with half-warm coffee. They walked a few steps
+outside the shack in the ringing cold, to stretch stiff legs. Carl saw
+a world of unuttered freedom and beauty forthshadowed in Bone's cloudy
+speech. But he was melancholy. For he was going to give up his
+citizenship in wonderland for Gertie Cowles.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Gertie continued to enjoy ill health for another week. Every evening
+Carl walked past her house, hoping that he might see her at a window,
+longing to dare to call. Each night he pictured rescuing her from
+things&mdash;rescuing her from fire, from drowning, from evil men. He felt
+himself the more bound to her by the social recognition of having his
+name in the <i>Joralemon Dynamite</i>, the following Thursday:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>One of the pleasantest affairs of the holiday season among
+the younger set was held last Friday evening, when Gertrude
+Cowles entertained a number of her young friends at a party
+at her mother's handsome residence on Maple Hill. Among
+those present were Mesdames Benner and Rusk, who came in for
+a brief time to assist in the jollities of the evening,
+Misses Benner, Carson, Wesselius, Madlund, Ripka, Smith,
+Lansing, and Brick; and Messrs. Ray Cowles, his classmate
+Howard Griffin, who is spending his vacation here from Plato
+College, Carl Ericson, Joseph Jordan, Irving Lamb, Benjamin
+Rusk, Nels Thorsten, Peter Schoenhof, and William T. Upham.
+After dancing and games, which were thoroughly enjoyed by
+all present, and a social hour spent in discussing the
+events of the season in J. H. S., a most delicious repast
+was served and the party adjourned, one and all voting that
+they had been royally entertained.</p></div>
+
+<p>The glory was the greater because at least seven names had been
+omitted from the list of guests. Such social recognition satisfied
+Carl&mdash;for half an hour. Possibly it nerved him finally to call on
+Gertie.</p>
+
+<p>Since for a week he had been dreading a chilly reception when he
+should call, he was immeasurably surprised when he did call and got
+what he expected. He had not expected the fates to be so treacherous
+as to treat him as he expected, after he had disarmed them by
+expecting it.</p>
+
+<p>When he rang the bell he was an immensely grown-up lawyer (though he
+couldn't get his worn, navy-blue tie to hang exactly right). He turned
+into a crestfallen youth as Mrs. Cowles opened the door and
+waited&mdash;waited!&mdash;for him to speak, after a crisp:</p>
+
+<p>"Well? What is it, Carl?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, uh, I just thought I'd come and see how Gertie is."</p>
+
+<p>"Gertrude is much better, thank you. I presume she will return to
+school at the end of vacation."</p>
+
+<p>The hall behind Mrs. Cowles seemed very stately, very long.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I've heard a lot saying they hoped she was better."</p>
+
+<p>"You may tell them that she is better."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles shivered. No one could possibly have looked more like a
+person closing a door without actually closing one. "Lena!" she
+shrieked, "close the kitchen door. There's a draught." She turned back
+to Carl.</p>
+
+<p>The shy lover vanished. An angry young man challenged, "If Gertie 's
+up I think I'll come in a few minutes and see her."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, uh&mdash;&mdash;" hesitated Mrs. Cowles.</p>
+
+<p>He merely walked in past her. His anger kept its own council, for he
+could depend upon Gertie's warm greeting&mdash;lonely Gertie, he would
+bring her the cheer of the great open.</p>
+
+<p>The piano sounded in the library, and the voice of the one perfect
+girl mingled with a man's tenor in "Old Black Joe." Carl stalked into
+the library. Gertie was there, much corseted, well powdered, wearing a
+blue foulard frenziedly dotted with white, and being cultured in
+company with Dr. Doyle, the lively young dentist who had recently
+taken an office in the National Bank Block. He was a graduate of the
+University of Minnesota&mdash;dental department. He had oily black hair,
+and smiled with gold-filled teeth before one came to the real point of
+a joke. He sang in the Congregational church choir, and played tennis
+in a crimson-and-black blazer&mdash;the only one in Joralemon.</p>
+
+<p>To Carl Dr. Doyle was dismayingly mature and smart. He horribly feared
+him as a rival. For the second time that evening he did not balk fate
+by fearing it. The dentist was a rival. After fluttering about the
+mature charms of Miss Dietz, the school drawing-teacher, and taking a
+tentative buggy-ride or two with the miller's daughter, Dr. Doyle was
+bringing all the charm of his professional position and professional
+teeth and patent-leather shoes to bear upon Gertie.</p>
+
+<p>And Gertie was interested. Obviously. She was all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span> of eighteen
+to-night. She frowned slightly as she turned on the piano-stool at
+Carl's entrance, and mechanically: "This is a pleasant surprise."
+Then, enthusiastically: "Isn't it too bad that Dr. Doyle was out of
+town, or I would have invited him to my party, and he would have given
+us some of his lovely songs.... Do try the second verse, doctor. The
+harmony is so lovely."</p>
+
+<p>Carl sat at the other end of the library from Gertie and the piano,
+while Mrs. Cowles entertained him. He obediently said "Yessum" and
+"No, 'm" to the observations which she offered from the fullness of
+her lack of experience of life. He sat straight and still. Behind his
+fixed smile he was simultaneously longing to break into the musical
+fiesta, and envying the dentist's ability to get married without
+having to wait to grow up, and trying to follow what Mrs. Cowles was
+saying.</p>
+
+<p>She droned, while crocheting with high-minded industry a useless
+piano-scarf, "Do you still go hunting, Carl?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yessum. Quite a little rabbit-hunting. Oh, not very much."</p>
+
+<p>(At the distant piano, across the shining acres of floor, the mystical
+woman and a dentist had ceased singing, and were examining a fresh
+sheet of music. The dentist coyly poked his finger at her coiffure,
+and she slapped the finger, gurgling.)</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you don't neglect your school work, though, Carl." Mrs. Cowles
+held the scarf nearer the lamp and squinted at it, deliberately and
+solemnly, through the eye-glasses that lorded it atop her severe nose.
+A headachy scent of moth-balls was in the dull air. She forbiddingly
+moved the shade of the lamp about a tenth of an inch. She removed some
+non-existent dust from the wrought-iron standard. Her gestures said
+that the lamp was decidedly more chic than the pink-shaded hanging
+lamps, raised and lowered on squeaking chains, which characterized<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+most Joralemon living-rooms. She glanced at the red lambrequin over
+the nearest window. The moth-ball smell grew more stupifying.</p>
+
+<p>Carl felt stuffy in the top of his nose as he mumbled, "Oh, I work
+pretty hard at chemistry, but, gee! I can't see much to all this
+Latin."</p>
+
+<p>"When you're a little <i>older</i>, Carl, you'll <i>learn</i> that the things
+you like now aren't necessarily the things that are <i>good</i> for you. I
+used to say to Gertrude&mdash;of course she is older than you, but she
+hasn't been a young lady for so very long, even yet&mdash;and I used to say
+to her, 'Gertrude, you will do exactly what I <i>tell</i> you to, and not
+what you <i>want</i> to do, and we shall make&mdash;no&mdash;more&mdash;words&mdash;<i>about</i>
+it!' And I think she <i>sees</i> now that her mother was right about some
+things! Dr. Doyle said to me, and of course you know, Carl, that he's
+a very fine scholar&mdash;our pastor told me that the doctor reads French
+better than <i>he</i> does, and the doctor's told me some things about
+modern French authors that I didn't know, and I used to read French
+almost as well as English, when I was a girl, my teachers all told
+me&mdash;and he says that he thinks that Gertrude has a very fine mind, and
+he was <i>so</i> glad that she hasn't been taken in by all this wicked,
+hysterical way girls have to-day of thinking they know more than their
+mothers."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she is&mdash;Gertie is&mdash;&mdash;I think she's got a very fine mind," Carl
+commented.</p>
+
+<p>(From the other end of the room Gertie could be overheard confiding to
+the dentist in tones of hushed and delicious adult scandal, "They say
+that when she was in St. Paul she&mdash;&mdash;")</p>
+
+<p>"So," Mrs. Cowles serenely sniffed on, while the bridge of Carl's nose
+felt broader and broader, stretching wider and wider, as that stuffy
+feeling increased and the intensive heat stung his eyelids, "you see
+you mustn't think because you'd rather play around with the boys than
+study Latin, Carl, that it's the fault of your Latin-teacher."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> She
+nodded at him with a condescending smile that was infinitely
+insulting.</p>
+
+<p>He knew it and resented it, but he did not resent it actively, for he
+was busy marveling, "How the dickens is it I never heard Doc Doyle was
+stuck on Gertie? Everybody thought he was going with Bertha. Dang him,
+anyway! The way he snickers, you'd think she was his best girl."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles was loftily pursuing her pillared way: "Latin was <i>known</i>
+to be the best study for developing the mind a long, long time&mdash;&mdash;"
+And her clicking crochet-needles impishly echoed, "A long, <i>long</i>
+time," and the odor of moth-balls got down into Carl's throat, while
+in the golden Olympian atmosphere at the other end of the room Gertie
+coyly pretended to slap the dentist's hand with a series of tittering
+taps. "A long, <i>long</i> time before either you or I were born, Carl, and
+we can't very well set ourselves up to be wiser than the wisest men
+that ever lived, now <i>can</i> we?" Again the patronizing smile. "That
+would scarcely&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl resolved: "This 's got to stop. I got to do something." He felt
+her monologue as a blank steel wall which he could not pierce. Aloud:
+"Yes, that's so, I guess. Say, that's a fine dress Gertie 's got on
+to-night, ain't it.... Say, I been learning to play crokinole at Ben
+Rusk's. You got a board, haven't you? Would you like to play? Does the
+doctor play?"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, I haven't the slightest idea, but I have very little doubt
+that he does&mdash;he plays tennis so beautifully. He is going to teach
+Gertrude, in the spring." She stopped, and again held the scarf up to
+the light. "I am so glad that my girly, that was so naughty once and
+ran away with you&mdash;I don't think I shall <i>ever</i> get over the awful
+fright I had that night!&mdash;I am so glad that, now she is growing up,
+clever people like Dr. Doyle appreciate her so much, so very much."</p>
+
+<p>She dropped her crochet to her lap and stared squarely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span> at Carl. Her
+warning that he would do exceedingly well to go home was more than
+plain. He stared back, agitated but not surrendering. Deliberately,
+almost suavely, with ten years of experience added to the sixteen
+years that he had brought into the room, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"I'll see if they'd like to play." He sauntered to the other end of
+the room, abashed before the mystic woman, and ventured: "I saw Ray,
+to-day.... I got to be going, pretty quick, but I was wondering if you
+two felt like playing some crokinole?"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie said, slowly: "I'd like to, Carl, but&mdash;&mdash;Unless you'd like to
+play, doctor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why of course it's <i>comme il faut</i> to play, Miss Cowles, but I was
+just hoping to have the pleasure of hearing you make some more of your
+delectable music," bowed the dentist, and Gertie bowed back; and their
+smiles joined in a glittery bridge of social aplomb.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," from Carl, "that&mdash;yes, do&mdash;&mdash;But you hadn't ought to play
+too much if you haven't been well."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Carl!" shrieked Gertie. "'Ought not to,' not 'hadn't ought to'!"</p>
+
+<p>"'Ought not to,'" repeated Mrs. Cowles, icily, while the dentist waved
+his hand in an amused manner and contributed:</p>
+
+<p>"Ought not to say 'hadn't ought to,' as my preceptor used to tell
+me.... I'd like to hear you sing Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life,' Miss
+Cowles."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think Longfellow's a bum poet?" growled Carl. "Bone
+Stillman says Longfellow's the grind-organ of poetry. Like this: 'Life
+is re-al, life is ear-nest, tum te diddle dydle dum!'"</p>
+
+<p>"Carl," ordered Mrs. Cowles, "you will please to never mention that
+Stillman person in my house!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Carl!" rebuked Gertie. She rose from the piano-stool. Her essence
+of virginal femininity, its pure and cloistered and white-camisoled
+odor, bespelled Carl to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span> fainting timidity. And while he was thus
+defenseless the dentist thrust:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, they tell me Stillman doesn't even believe the Bible!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl was not to retrieve his credit with Gertie, but he couldn't
+betray Bone Stillman. Hastily: "Yes, maybe, that way&mdash;&mdash;Oh, say,
+doctor, Pete Jordan was telling me" (liar!) "that you were one of the
+best tennis-players at the U."</p>
+
+<p>Gertie sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>The dentist coyly fluffed his hair and deprecated, "Oh no, I wouldn't
+say that!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl had won. Instantly they three became a country club of urban
+aristocrats, who laughed at the poor rustics of Joralemon for knowing
+nothing of golf and polo. Carl was winning their tolerance&mdash;though not
+their close attention&mdash;by relating certain interesting facts from the
+inside pages of the local paper as to how far the tennis-rackets sold
+in one year would extend, if laid end to end, when he saw Gertie and
+her mother glance at the hall. Gertie giggled. Mrs. Cowles frowned. He
+followed their glance.</p>
+
+<p>Clumping through the hall was his second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses'
+"hired girl." Lena nodded and said, "Hallo, Carl!"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie and the dentist raised their eyebrows at each other.</p>
+
+<p>Carl talked for two minutes about something, he did not know what, and
+took his leave. In the intensity of his effort to be resentfully
+dignified he stumbled over the hall hat-rack. He heard Gertie yelp
+with laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>got</i> to go to college&mdash;be worthy of her!" he groaned, all the way
+home. "And I can't afford to go to the U. of M. I'd like to be free,
+like Bone says, but I've got to go to Plato."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_p.jpg" alt="P" width="38" height="50" /></div>
+<p>lato College, Minnesota, is as earnest and undistinguished, as
+provincially dull and pathetically human, as a spinster missionary.
+Its two hundred or two hundred and fifty students come from the
+furrows, asking for spiritual bread, and are given a Greek root.
+Red-brick buildings, designed by the architect of county jails, are
+grouped about that high, bare, cupola-crowned gray-stone barracks, the
+Academic Building, like red and faded blossoms about a tombstone. In
+the air is the scent of crab-apples and meadowy prairies, for a time,
+but soon settles down a winter bitter as the learning of the Rev. S.
+Alcott Wood, D.D., the president. The town and college of Plato
+disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks.
+In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees
+shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on
+a frozen bed-sheet&mdash;no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no
+windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time
+individuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the
+prairie itself&mdash;far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops
+in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch
+with the fields. From droning class-rooms the victims of education see
+the rippling wheat in summer; and in winter the impenetrable wall of
+sky. Footsteps and quick laughter of men and girls, furtively flirting
+along the brick walls under the beautiful maples, do make Plato dear
+to remember. They do not make it brilliant. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> do not explain the
+advantages of leaving the farm for another farm.</p>
+
+<p>To the freshman, Carl Ericson, descending from the dusty smoking-car
+of the M. &amp; D., in company with tumultuous youths in pin-head caps and
+enormous sweaters, the town of Plato was metropolitan. As he walked
+humbly up Main Street and beheld two four-story buildings and a marble
+bank and an interurban trolley-car, he had, at last, an idea of what
+Minneapolis and Chicago must be. Two men in sweaters adorned with a
+large "P," athletes, generals, heroes, walked the streets in the
+flesh, and he saw&mdash;it really was there, for him!&mdash;the "College Book
+Store," whose windows were filled with leather-backed treatises on
+Greek, logic, and trigonometry; and, finally, he was gaping through a
+sandstone gateway at four buildings, each of them nearly as big as the
+Joralemon High School, surrounding a vast stone castle.</p>
+
+<p>He entered the campus. He passed an old man with white side-whiskers
+and a cord on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses; an aged old man who might
+easily be a professor. A blithe student with "Y. M. C. A. Receptn.
+Com." large on his hat-band, rushed up to Carl, shook his hand busily,
+and inquired:</p>
+
+<p>"Freshman, old man? Got your room yet? There's a list of
+rooming-houses over at the Y. M. Come on, I'll show you the way."</p>
+
+<p>He was received in Academe, in Arcadia, in Elysium; in fact, in Plato
+College.</p>
+
+<p>He was directed to a large but decomposing house conducted by the
+widow of a college janitor, and advised to take a room at $1.75 a week
+for his share of the rent. That implied taking with the room a large,
+solemn room-mate, fresh from teaching country school, a heavy,
+slow-spoken, serious man of thirty-one, named Albert Smith, registered
+as A. Smith, and usually known as "Plain Smith." Plain Smith sat
+studying in his cotton socks, and never emptied the wash-basin. He
+remarked, during<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> the first hour of their discourse in the groves of
+Academe: "I hope you ain't going to bother me by singing and
+skylarking around. I'm here to work, bub." Smith then returned to the
+large books which he was diligently scanning that he might find
+wisdom, while Carl sniffed at the brown-blotched wall-paper, the faded
+grass matting, the shallow, standing wardrobe.... He liked the house,
+however. It had a real bath-room! He could, for the first time in his
+life, splash in a tub. Perhaps it would not be regarded as modern
+to-day; perhaps effete souls would disdain its honest tin tub, smeared
+with a paint that peeled instantly; but it was elegance and the
+Hesperides compared with the sponge and two lard-pails of hot water
+from the Ericson kitchen reservoir, which had for years been his
+conception of luxurious means of bathing.</p>
+
+<p>Also, there were choicer spirits in the house. One man, who pressed
+clothes for a living and carried a large line of cigarettes in his
+room, was second vice-president of the sophomore class. As smoking was
+dourly forbidden to all Platonians, the sophomore's room was a refuge.
+The sophomore encouraged Carl in his natural talent for cheerful
+noises, while Plain Smith objected even to singing while one dressed.</p>
+
+<p>Like four of his classmates, Carl became a waiter at Mrs. Henkel's
+student boarding-house, for his board and two dollars a week. The two
+dollars constituted his pin-money&mdash;a really considerable sum for
+Plato, where the young men were pure and smoked not, neither did they
+drink; where evening clothes were snobbish and sweaters thought rather
+well of; where the only theatrical attractions were week-stand
+melodramas playing such attractions as "Poor but True," or the Rev.
+Sam J. Pitkins's celebrated lecture on "The Father of Lies," annually
+delivered at the I.O.O.F. Hall.</p>
+
+<p>Carl's father assured him in every letter that he was extravagant. He
+ran through the two dollars in practically no time at all. He was a
+member in good and regular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> standing of the informal club that hung
+about the Corner Drug Store, to drink coffee soda and discuss
+athletics and stare at the passing girls. He loved to set off his
+clear skin and shining pale hair with linen collars, though soft
+roll-collar shirts were in vogue. And he was ready for any wild
+expedition, though it should cost fifty or sixty cents. With the
+sophomore second vice-president and John Terry of the freshman class
+(usually known as "the Turk") he often tramped to the large
+neighboring town of Jamaica Mills to play pool, smoke Turkish
+cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused Plato songs, in
+long-drawn close harmony. Once they had imported English ale, out of
+bottles, and carried the bottles back to decorate and distinguish
+their rooms.</p>
+
+<p>Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl
+students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little
+college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it
+never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of
+the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters
+as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she
+did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then
+before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen
+washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they
+discussed the value of the "classical course" <i>versus</i> the "scientific
+course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and
+arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's
+dining-room&mdash;a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a
+gilded rope porti&egrave;re, a comfortable rocker with a Plato cushion, a
+Garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-framed
+photograph of the champion Plato football team of 1899.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the
+piano in the evening. His graceful-seeming body, his puppyish
+awkwardness, his quietly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of
+new things, won him respect; though he was too boyish to rouse
+admiration, except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful,
+fuzzy-haired, candy-eating Mae Thurston. Mae so influenced Carl that
+he learned to jest casually; and he practised a new dance, called the
+"Boston," which Mae had brought from Minneapolis, though as a rival to
+the waltz and two-step the new dance was ridiculed by every one. He
+mastered all the <i>savoir faire</i> of the boarding-house. But he was
+always hurrying away from it to practise football, to prowl about the
+Plato power-house, to skim through magazines in the Y. M. C. A.
+reading-room, even to study.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the dish-washing and furnace-tending set he had no probable
+social future, though everybody knew everybody at Plato. Those
+immaculate upper-classmen, Murray Cowles and Howard Griffin, never
+invited him to their room (in a house on Elm Street with a screened
+porch and piano sounds). He missed Ben Rusk, who had gone to Oberlin
+College, and Joe Jordan, who had gone to work for the Joralemon
+Specialty Manufacturing Company.</p>
+
+<p>Life at Plato was suspicious, prejudiced, provincial, as it affected
+the ambitious students; and for the weaker brethren it was
+philandering and vague. The class work was largely pure rot&mdash;arbitrary
+mathematics, antiquated botany, hesitating German, and a veritable
+military drill in the conjunction of Greek verbs conducted by a man
+with a non-com. soul, a pompous, sandy-whiskered manikin with cold
+eyes and a perpetual cold in the nose, who had inflicted upon a
+patient world the four-millionth commentary on Xenophon. Few of the
+students realized the futility of it all; certainly not Carl, who
+slept well and believed in football.</p>
+
+<p>The life habit justifies itself. One comes to take anything as a
+matter of course; to take one's neighbors seriously, whether one lives
+in Plato or Persia, in Mrs.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> Henkel's kitchen or a fo'c's'le. The
+Platonians raced toward their various goals of high-school teaching,
+or law, or marriage, or permanently escaping their parents; they made
+love, and were lazy, and ate, and swore off bad habits, and had
+religious emotions, all quite naturally; they were not much bored,
+rarely exhilarated, always ready to gossip about their acquaintances;
+precisely like a duke or a delicatessen-keeper. They played out their
+game. But it was so tiny a game, so played to the exclusion of all
+other games, that it tended to dwarf its victims&mdash;and the restless
+children, such as Carl, instinctively resent this dwarfing. They seek
+to associate themselves with other rebels. Carl's unconscious rebel
+band was the group of rowdyish freshmen who called themselves "the
+Gang," and loafed about the room of their unofficial captain, John
+Terry, nicknamed "the Turk," a swarthy, large-featured youth with a
+loud laugh, a habit of slapping people upon the shoulder, an ingenious
+mind for deviltry, and considerable promise as a football end.</p>
+
+<p>Most small local colleges, and many good ones, have their "gangs" of
+boys, who presumably become honorable men and fathers, yet who in
+college days regard it as heroic to sneak out and break things, and as
+humorous to lead countryside girls astray in sordid amours. The more
+cloistered the seat of learning, the more vicious are the active boys,
+to keep up with the swiftness of life forces. The Turk's gang painted
+the statues of the Memorial Arch; they stole signs; they were the
+creators of noises unexpected and intolerable, during small, quiet
+hours of moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>As the silkworm draws its exquisite stuff from dowdy leaves, so youth
+finds beauty and mystery in stupid days. Carl went out unreservedly to
+practise with the football squad; he had a joy of martyrdom in
+tackling the dummy and peeling his nose on the frozen ground. He knew
+a sacred aspiration when Mr. Bjorken, the coach, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> former University
+of Minnesota star, told him that he might actually "make" the team in
+a year or two; that he had twice as much chance as Ray Cowles,
+who&mdash;while Carl was thinking only of helping the scrub team to
+win&mdash;was too engrossed in his own dignity as a high-school notable to
+get into the scrimmage.</p>
+
+<p>At the games, among the Gang on the bleachers, Carl went mad with
+fervor. He kept shooting to his feet, and believed that he was saving
+his country every time he yelled in obedience to the St. Vitus
+gestures of the cheer-leader, or sang "On the Goal-line of Plato" to
+the tune of "On the Sidewalks of New York." Tears of a real patriotism
+came when, at the critical moment of a losing game against the
+Minnesota Military Institute, with sunset forlorn behind bare trees,
+the veteran cheer-leader flung the hoarse Plato rooters into another
+defiant yell. It was the never-say-die of men who rose, with clenched
+hands and arms outstretched, to the despairing need of their college,
+and then&mdash;Lord! They hurled up to their feet in frenzy as Pete Madlund
+got away with the ball for a long run and victory.... The next week,
+when the University of Keokuk whipped them, 40 to 10, Carl stood
+weeping and cheering the defeated Plato team till his throat burned.</p>
+
+<p>He loved the laughter of the Turk, Mae Thurston's welcome, experiments
+in the physics laboratory. And he was sure that he was progressing
+toward the state of grace in which he might aspire to marry Gertie
+Cowles.</p>
+
+<p>He did not think of her every day, but she was always somewhere in his
+thoughts, and the heroines of magazine stories recalled some of her
+virtues to his mind, invariably. The dentist who had loved her had
+moved away. She was bored. She occasionally wrote to Carl. But she was
+still superior&mdash;tried to "influence him for good" and advised him to
+"cultivate nice people."</p>
+
+<p>He was convinced that he was going to become a lawyer, for her sake,
+but he knew that some day he would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> be tempted by the desire to become
+a civil or a mechanical engineer.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A January thaw. Carl was tramping miles out into the hilly country
+north of Plato. He hadn't been able to persuade any of the Gang to
+leave their smoky loafing-place in the Turk's room, but his own lungs
+demanded the open. With his heavy boots swashing through icy pools,
+calling to an imaginary dog and victoriously running Olympic races
+before millions of spectators, he defied the chill of the day and
+reached Hiawatha Mound, a hill eight miles north of Plato.</p>
+
+<p>Toward the top a man was to be seen crouched in a pebbly, sunny
+arroyo, peering across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending,
+Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That
+amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that
+"Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the
+head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek
+books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of
+merit in the three manly arts&mdash;athletics, flirting, and breaking rules
+by smoking. Genie was small, anemic, and too well dressed. He
+stuttered slightly and was always peering doubtfully at you with large
+and childish eyes that were made more eerie by his pale, bulbous
+forehead and the penthouse of tangled mouse-brown hair over it.... The
+Gang often stopped him on the campus to ask mock-polite questions
+about his ambition, which was to be a teacher of English at Harvard or
+Yale. Not very consistently, but without ever wearying of the jest,
+they shadowed him to find out if he did not write poetry; and while no
+one had actually caught him, he was still suspect.</p>
+
+<p>Genie said nothing when Carl called, "H'lo, son!" and sat on a
+neighboring rock.</p>
+
+<p>"What's trouble, Genie? You look worried."</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't any of you fellows like me?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Carl felt like a bug inspected by a German professor. "W-why, how
+d'you mean, Genie?"</p>
+
+<p>"None of you take me seriously. You simply let me hang around. And you
+think I'm a grind. I'm not. I like to read, that's all. Perhaps you
+think I shouldn't like to go out for athletics if I could! I wish I
+could run the way you can, Ericson. Darn it! I was happy out here by
+myself on the Mound, where every prospect pleases, and&mdash;'n' now here I
+am again, envying you."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, son, I&mdash;I guess&mdash;I guess we admire you a whole lot more than we
+let on to. Cheer up, old man! When you're valedictorian and on the
+debating team and wallop Hamlin you'll laugh at the Gang, and we'll be
+proud to write home we know you." Carl was hating himself for ever
+having teased Genie Linderbeck. "You've helped me a thundering lot
+whenever I've asked you about that blame Greek syntax. I guess we're
+jealous of you. You&mdash;uh&mdash;you don't want to <i>let</i> 'em kid you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl was embarrassed before Genie's steady, youthful, trusting gaze.
+He stooped for a handful of pebbles, with which he pelted the
+landscape, maundering, "Say, why don't you come around to the Turk's
+room and get better acquainted with the Gang?"</p>
+
+<p>"When shall I come?"</p>
+
+<p>"When? Oh, why, thunder!&mdash;you know, Genie&mdash;just drop in any time."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be glad to."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was perspiring at the thought of what the Gang would do to him
+when they discovered that he had invited Genie. But he was game. "Come
+up to my room whenever you can, and help me with my boning," he added.
+"You mustn't ever get the idea that we're conferring any blooming
+favor by having you around. It's you that help us. Our necks are
+pretty well sandpapered, I'm afraid.... Come up to my room any
+time.... I'll have to be hiking on if I'm going to get much of a walk.
+Come over and see me to-night."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I wish you'd come up to Mr. Frazer's with me some Sunday afternoon
+for tea, Ericson."</p>
+
+<p>Henry Frazer, M.A. (Yale), associate professor of English literature,
+was a college mystery. He was a thin-haired young man, with a
+consuming love of his work, which was the saving of souls by teaching
+Lycidas and Comus. This was his first year out of graduate school, his
+first year at Plato&mdash;and possibly his last. It was whispered about
+that he believed in socialism, and the president, the Rev. Dr. S.
+Alcott Wood, had no patience with such silly fads.</p>
+
+<p>Carl marveled, "Do you go to Frazer's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"Thought everybody was down on him. They say he's an anarchist, and I
+know he gives fierce assignments in English lit.; that's what all the
+fellows in his classes say."</p>
+
+<p>"All the fools are down on him. That's why I go to his house."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't the fellows&mdash;uh&mdash;kind of&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," piped Genie in his most childish tone of anger, his tendency to
+stammer betraying him, "they k-kid me for liking Frazer. He's&mdash;he's
+the only t-teacher here that isn't p-p-p&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Spit!"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;provincial!"</p>
+
+<p>"What d'you mean by 'provincial'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Narrow. Villagey. Do you know what Bernard Shaw says&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never read a word of him, my son. And let me tell you that my idea of
+no kind of conversation is to have a guy spring 'Have you read?' on me
+every few seconds, and me coming back with: 'No, I haven't. Ain't it
+interesting!' If that's the brand of converse at Prof Frazer's you can
+count me out."</p>
+
+<p>Genie laughed. "Think how much more novelty you get out of roasting me
+like that than telling Terry he's got 'bats in his belfry' ten or
+twelve times a day."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"All right, my son; you win. Maybe I'll go to Frazer's with you.
+Sometime."</p>
+
+<p>The Sunday following Carl went to tea at Professor Henry Frazer's.</p>
+
+<p>The house was Platonian without, plain and dumpy, with gingerbread
+Gothic on the porch, blistered paint, and the general lines of a
+prairie barn, but the living-room was more nearly beautiful than any
+room Carl had seen. In accordance with the ideal of that era it had
+Mission furniture with large leather cushions, brown wood-work, and
+tan oatmeal paper scattered with German color prints, instead of the
+patent rockers and carbon prints of Roman monuments which adorned the
+houses of the other professors. While waiting with Genie Linderbeck
+for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table
+such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound
+in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs,
+heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic
+legends and Proven&ccedil;al jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters
+of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books
+and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his
+experiences of literature that he suddenly believed in culture.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Frazer appeared, walking into the room <i>after</i> his fragile
+wife and gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon
+instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few
+stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an
+Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor
+Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in
+brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars,
+and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" seniors,
+listened with nodding interest while Carl bashfully analyzed each of
+the nine cars owned in Plato and Jamaica Mills. At dusk the Diana in
+brown played MacDowell, and the light of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> silken-shaded lamp was
+on a print of a fairy Swiss village.</p>
+
+<p>That evening Carl wrestled with the Turk for one hour,
+catch-as-catch-can, on the Turk's bed and under it and nearly out of
+the window, to prove the value of Professor Frazer and culture. Next
+morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in
+modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt
+Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt
+Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling
+from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of
+emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes,
+rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair of
+scissors on his knee, and persisted in his violent pursuit of the
+beautiful. Meanwhile his room-mate, Plain Smith, flapped the pages of
+a Latin lexicon or took a little recreation by reading the Rev. Mr.
+Todd's <i>Students' Manual</i>, that gem of the alarm-clock and
+water-bucket epoch in American colleges.</p>
+
+<p>Carl never understood Genie Linderbeck's conviction that words are
+living things that dream and sing and battle. But he did learn that
+there was speech transcending the barking of the Gang.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of his freshman year Carl gave up waiting on table and
+drove a motor-car for a town banker. He learned every screw and spring
+in the car. He also made Genie go out with him for track athletics.
+Carl won his place on the college team as a half-miler, and viciously
+assaulted two freshmen and a junior for laughing at Genie's legs,
+which stuck out of his large running-pants like straws out of a
+lemonade-glass.</p>
+
+<p>In the great meet with Hamlin University, though Plato lost most of
+the events, Carl won the half-mile race. He was elected to the
+exclusive fraternity of Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, Omega Chi
+Delta, just before Commencement. That excited him less than the fact
+that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> Turk and he were to spend the summer up north, in the
+hard-wheat country, stringing wire for the telephone company with a
+gang of Minneapolis wiremen.</p>
+
+<p>Oh yes. And he would see Gertie in Joralemon.... She had written to
+him with so much enthusiasm when he had won the half-mile.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_h.jpg" alt="H" width="41" height="50" /></div>
+<p>e saw Gertie two hours after he had reached Joralemon for a week's
+stay before going north. They sat in rockers on the grass beside her
+stoop. They were embarrassed, and rocked profusely and chattily. Mrs.
+Cowles was surprised and not much pleased to find him, but Gertie
+murmured that she had been lonely, and Carl felt that he must be nobly
+patient under Mrs. Cowles's slight. He got so far as to sigh, "O
+Gertie!" but grew frightened, as though he were binding himself for
+life. He wished that Gertie were not wearing so many combs stuck all
+over her pompadoured hair. He noted that his rocker creaked at the
+joints, and thought out a method of strengthening it by braces. She
+bubbled that he was going to be the Big Man in his class. He said,
+"Aw, rats!" and felt that his collar was too tight.... He went home.
+His father remarked that Carl was late for supper, that he had been
+extravagant in Plato, and that he was unlikely to make money out of
+"all this runnin' races." But his mother stroked his hair and called
+him her big boy.... He tramped out to Bone Stillman's shack, impatient
+for the hand-clasp of the pioneer, and grew eloquent, for the first
+time since his home-coming, as he described Professor Frazer and the
+delights of poesy. A busy week Carl had in Joralemon. Adelaide Benner
+gave a porch-supper for him. They sat under the trees, laughing, while
+in the dimly lighted street bicycles whirred, and box-elders he had
+always known whispered that this guest of honor was Carl Ericson, come
+home a hero.</p>
+
+<p>The cycling craze still existed in Joralemon. Carl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> rented a wheel for
+a week from the Blue Front Hardware Store. Once he rode with a party
+of boys and girls to Tamarack Lake. Once he rode to Wakamin with Ben
+Rusk, home from Oberlin College. The ride was not entirely enjoyable,
+because Oberlin had nearly two thousand students and Ben was amusedly
+superior about Plato. They did, however, enjoy the stylishness of
+buying bottles of strawberry pop at Wakamin.</p>
+
+<p>Twice Carl rode to Tamarack Lake with Gertie. They sat on the shore,
+and while he shied flat skipping-stones across the water and flapped
+his old cap at the hovering horse-flies he babbled of the Turk's
+"stunts," and the banker's car, and the misty hinterlands of Professor
+Frazer's lectures. Gertie appeared interested, and smiled at regular
+intervals, but so soon as Carl fumbled at one of Frazer's abstract
+theories she interrupted him with highly concrete Joralemon gossip....
+He suspected that she had not kept up with the times. True, she
+referred to New York, but as the reference was one she had been using
+these two years he still identified her with Joralemon.... He did not
+even hold her hand, though he wondered if it might not be possible;
+her hand lay so listlessly by her skirt, on the sand.... They rode
+back in twilight of early June. Carl was cheerful as their wheels
+crunched the dirt roads in a long, crisp hum. The stilly rhythm of
+frogs drowned the clank of their pedals, and the sky was vast and pale
+and wistful.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie, however, seemed less cheerful.</p>
+
+<p>On the last evening of his stay in Joralemon Gertie gave him a
+hay-ride party. They sang "Seeing Nelly Home," and "Merrily We Roll
+Along," and "Suwanee River," and "My Old Kentucky Home," and "My
+Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and "In the Good Old Summertime," under a
+delicate new moon in a sky of apple-green. Carl pressed Gertie's hand;
+she returned the pressure so quickly that he was embarrassed. He
+withdrew his hand as quickly as possible, ostensibly to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span> help in the
+unpacking of the basket of ginger-ale and chicken sandwiches and three
+cakes (white-frosted, chocolate layer, and banana cake).</p>
+
+<p>The same group said good-by to Carl at the M. &amp; D. station. As the
+train started, Carl saw Gertie turn away disconsolately, her shoulders
+so drooping that her blouse was baggy in the back. He mourned that he
+had not been more tender with her that week. He pictured himself
+kissing Gertie on the shore of Tamarack Lake, enfolded by afternoon
+and the mystery of sex and a protecting reverence for Gertie's
+loneliness. He wanted to go back&mdash;back for one more day, one more ride
+with Gertie. But he picked up a mechanics magazine, glanced at an
+article on gliders, read in the first paragraph a prophecy about
+aviation, slid down in his seat with his head bent over the
+magazine&mdash;and the idyl of Gertie and afternoon was gone.</p>
+
+<p>He was reading the article on gliders in June, 1905, so early in the
+history of air conquest that its suggestions were miraculous to him;
+for it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world
+by his flights at Le Mans; four years before Bl&eacute;riot was to cross the
+Channel&mdash;though, indeed, it was a year and a half after the Wrights'
+first secret ascent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kittyhawk, and
+fourteen years after Lilienthal had begun that epochal series of
+glider-flights which was followed by the experiments of Pilcher and
+Chanute, Langley and Montgomery.</p>
+
+<p>The article declared that if gasoline or alcohol engines could be made
+light enough we should all be aviating to the office in ten years;
+that now was the time for youngsters to practise gliding, as pioneers
+of the new age. Carl "guessed" that flying would be even better than
+automobiling. He made designs for three revolutionary new aeroplanes,
+drawing on the margins of the magazine with a tooth-mark-pitted pencil
+stub.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie was miles back, concealed behind piles of triplanes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span> and
+helicopters and following-surface monoplanes which the wizard
+inventor, C. Ericson, was creating and ruthlessly destroying.... A
+small boy was squalling in the seat opposite, and Carl took him from
+his tired mother and lured him into a game of tit-tat-toe.</p>
+
+<p>He joined the Turk and the wire-stringers at a prairie
+hamlet&mdash;straggly rows of unpainted frame shanties, the stores with
+tin-corniced false fronts that pretended to be two stories high. There
+were pig-pens in the dooryards, and the single church had a square,
+low, white steeple like the paper cap which Labor wears in the
+posters. Farm-wagons were hitched before a gloomy saloon. Carl was
+exceeding glum. But the Turk introduced him to a University of
+Minnesota Pharmacy School student who was with the crew during
+vacation, and the three went tramping across breezy, flowered
+prairies. So began for Carl a galloping summer.</p>
+
+<p>The crew strung telephone wire from pole to pole all day, playing the
+jokes of hardy men, and on Sunday loafed in haystacks, recalling
+experiences from Winnipeg to El Paso. Carl resolved to come back to
+this life of the open, with Gertie, after graduation. He would buy a
+ranch "on time." Or the Turk and Carl would go exploring in Alaska or
+the Orient. "Law?" he would ask himself in monologues, "law? Me in a
+stuffy office? Not a chance!"</p>
+
+<p>The crew stayed for four weeks in a boom town of nine thousand,
+installing a complete telephone system. South-east of the town lay
+rolling hills. As Carl talked with the Turk and the Pharmacy School
+man on a hilltop, the first evening of their arrival, he told them the
+scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these
+hills were of the sort Lilienthal would probably have chosen for his
+glider-flights.</p>
+
+<p>"Say! by the great Jim Hill, let's make us a glider!" he exulted,
+sitting up, his eyelids flipping rapidly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Sure!" said the Pharmacy man. "How would you make one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;uh&mdash;I guess you could make a frame out of willow&mdash;have to; the
+willows along the creeks are the only kind of trees near here. You'd
+cover it with varnished cotton&mdash;that's what Lilienthal did, anyway.
+But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved&mdash;cambered&mdash;like
+he did. You got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays.
+Like a quarter barrel-hoop.... I guess it would be better to try to
+make a Chanute glider&mdash;just a plain pair of sup'rimposed planes,
+instead of one all combobulated like a bat's wings, like Lilienthal's
+glider was.... Or we could try some experiments with paper
+models&mdash;&mdash;Oh no! Thunder! Let's make a glider."</p>
+
+<p>They did.</p>
+
+<p>They studied with aching heads the dry-looking tables of lift and
+resistance for which Carl telegraphed to Chicago. Stripped to their
+undershirts, they worked all through the hot prairie evenings in the
+oil-smelling, greasy engine-room of the local power-house, in front of
+the dynamos, which kept evilly throwing out green sparks and rumbling
+the mystic syllable "Om-m-m-m," to greet their modern magic.</p>
+
+<p>They hunted for three-quarter-inch willow rods, but discarded them for
+seasoned ash from the lumber-yard. They coated cotton with thin
+varnish. They stopped to dispute furiously over angles of incidence,
+bellowing, "Well, look here then, you mutton-head; I'll draw it for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>On their last Sunday in the town they assembled the glider,
+single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span, with a
+tail, and with a double bar beneath the plane, by which the pilot was
+to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the
+plane, balancing the glider by movements of his body.</p>
+
+<p>At dawn on Monday they loaded the glider upon a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> wagon and galloped
+with it out to a forty-foot hill. They stared down the easy slope,
+which grew in steepness and length every second, and thought about
+Lilienthal's death.</p>
+
+<p>"W-w-well," shivered the Turk, "who tries it first?"</p>
+
+<p>All three pretended to be adjusting the lashings, waiting for one
+another, till Carl snarled, "Oh, all <i>right</i>! I'll do it if I got to."</p>
+
+<p>"Course it breaks my heart to see you swipe the honor," the Turk said,
+"but I'm unselfish. I'll let you do it. Brrrr! It's as bad as the
+first jump into the swimming-hole in spring."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was smiling at the comparison as they lifted the glider, with him
+holding the bars beneath. The plane was instantly buoyed up like a
+cork on water as the fifteen-mile head-wind poured under it. He
+stopped smiling. This was a dangerous living thing he was going to
+guide. It jerked at him as he slipped his arms over the suspended
+bars. He wanted to stop and think this all over. "Get it done!" he
+snapped at himself, and began to run down-hill, against the wind.</p>
+
+<p>The wind lifted the plane again. With a shock Carl knew that his feet
+had left the ground. He was actually flying! He kicked wildly in air.
+All his body strained to get balance in the air, to control itself, to
+keep from falling, of which he now felt the world-old instinctive
+horror.</p>
+
+<p>The plane began to tip to one side, apparently irresistibly, like a
+sheet of paper turning over in the wind. Carl was sick with fear for a
+tenth of a second. Every cell in his body shrank before coming
+disaster. He flung his legs in the direction opposite to the tipping
+of the plane. With this counter-balancing weight, the glider righted.
+It was running on an even keel, twenty-five feet above the sloping
+ground, while Carl hung easily by the double bar beneath, like a
+circus performer with a trapeze under each arm. He ventured to glance
+down. The turf was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> flowing beneath him, a green and sunny blur. He
+exulted. Flying!</p>
+
+<p>The glider dipped forward. Carl leaned back, his arms wide-spread. A
+gust struck the plane, head on. Overloaded at the back, it tilted
+back, then soared up to thirty-five or forty feet. Slow-seeming,
+inevitable, the whole structure turned vertically upward.</p>
+
+<p>Carl dangled there against a flimsy sheet of wood and cotton, which
+for part of a second stuck straight up against the wind, like a paper
+on a screen-door.</p>
+
+<p>The plane turned turtle, slithered sidewise through the air, and
+dropped, horizontal now, but upside down, Carl on top.</p>
+
+<p>Thirty-five, forty feet down.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm up against it," was his only thought while he was falling.</p>
+
+<p>The left tip of the plane smashed against the ground, crashing,
+horribly jarring. But it broke the fall. Carl shot forward and landed
+on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>He got up, rubbing his shoulder, wondering at the suspended life in
+the faces of the other two as they ran down-hill toward him.</p>
+
+<p>"Jiminy," he said. "Glad the glider broke the fall. Wish we had time
+to make a new glider, with wing-warp. Say, we'll be late on the job.
+Better beat it P. D. Q."</p>
+
+<p>The others stood gaping.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_a.jpg" alt="A" width="44" height="50" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;pile of shoes and nose-guards and bicycle-pumps and broken
+hockey-sticks; a wall covered with such stolen signs as "East College
+Avenue," and "Pants Presser Ladys Garments Carefully Done," and "Dr.
+Sloats Liniment for Young and Old"; a broken-backed couch with a
+red-and-green afghan of mangy tassels; an ink-spattered wooden table,
+burnt in small black spots along the edges; a plaster bust of Martha
+Washington with a mustache added in ink; a few books; an inundation of
+sweaters and old hats; and a large, expensive mouth-organ&mdash;such were a
+few of the interesting characteristics of the room which Carl and the
+Turk were occupying as room-mates for sophomore year at Plato.</p>
+
+<p>Most objectionable sounds came from the room constantly: the Gang's
+songs, suggestive laughter, imitations of cats and fowls and
+fog-horns. These noises were less ingenious, however, than the devices
+of the Gang for getting rid of tobacco-smoke, such as blowing the
+smoke up the stove.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was happy. In this room he encouraged stammering Genie Linderbeck
+to become adaptable. Here he scribbled to Gertie and Ben Rusk little
+notes decorated with badly drawn caricatures of himself loafing. Here,
+with the Turk, he talked out half the night, planning future glory in
+engineering. Carl adored the Turk for his frankness, his lively
+speech, his interest in mechanics&mdash;and in Carl.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was still out for football, but he was rather light for a team
+largely composed of one-hundred-and-eighty-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>pound Norwegians. He had a
+chance, however. He drove the banker's car two or three evenings a
+week and cared for the banker's lawn and furnace and cow. He still
+boarded at Mrs. Henkel's, as did jolly Mae Thurston, whom he took for
+surreptitious rides in the banker's car, after which he wrote
+extra-long and pleasant letters to Gertie. It was becoming harder and
+harder to write to Gertie, because he had, in freshman year, exhausted
+all the things one can say about the weather without being profane.
+When, in October, a new bank clerk stormed, meteor-like, the Joralemon
+social horizon, and became devoted to Gertie, as faithfully reported
+in letters from Joe Jordan, Carl was melancholy over the loss of a
+comrade. But he strictly confined his mourning to leisure hours&mdash;and
+with books, football, and chores for the banker, he was a busy young
+man.... After about ten days it was a relief not to have to plan
+letters to Gertie. The emotions that should have gone to her Carl
+devoted to Professor Frazer's new course in modern drama.</p>
+
+<p>This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw,
+Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck,
+D'Annunzio, and Rostand; but unofficially announced by Professor
+Frazer as an attempt to follow the spirit of to-day wherever it should
+be found in contemporary literature. Carl and the Turk were bewildered
+but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course. They made every
+member of the Gang enroll in it, and discouraged inattention in the
+lecture-room by dexterous side-kicks.</p>
+
+<p>Even to his ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, the grim and slovenly
+school-teacher who had called him "bub" and discouraged his
+confidences, Carl presented the attractions of Professor Frazer's
+lectures when he met him on the campus. Smith looked quizzical and
+"guessed" that plays and play-actin' were useless, if not actually
+immoral.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but this isn't just plays, my young friend," said Carl, with a
+hauteur new but not exceedingly impressive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> to Plain Smith. "He takes
+up all these new stunts, all this new philosophy and stuff they have
+in London and Paris. There's something besides Shakespeare and the
+Bible!" he added, intending to be spiteful. It may be stated that he
+did not like Plain Smith.</p>
+
+<p>"What new philosophy?"</p>
+
+<p>"The spirit of brotherhood. I suppose you're too orthodox for that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, sonny, not for that, not for that. And it ain't so <i>very</i> new.
+That's what Christ taught! No, sonny, I ain't so orthodox but what I'm
+willing to have 'em show me anything that tries to advance
+brotherhood. Not that I think it's very likely to be found in a lot of
+Noo York plays. But I'll look in at one lesson, anyway," and Plain
+Smith clumped away, humming "Greenland's Icy Mountains."</p>
+
+<p>Professor Frazer's modern drama course began with Ibsen. The first
+five lectures were almost conventional; they were an attempt to place
+contemporary dramatists, with reflections on the box-office
+standpoint. But his sixth lecture began rather unusually.</p>
+
+<p>There was an audience of sixty-four in Lecture-room A&mdash;earnest girl
+students bringing out note-books and spectacle-cases, frivolous girls
+feeling their back hair, and the men settling down with a "Come, let's
+get it over!" air, or glowing up worshipingly, like Eugene Field
+Linderbeck, or determined not to miss anything, like Carl&mdash;the
+captious college audience, credulous as to statements of fact and
+heavily unresponsive to the spirit. Professor Frazer, younger than
+half a dozen of the plow-trained undergraduates, thin of hair and
+sensitive of face, sitting before them, with one hand in his pocket
+and the other nervously tapping the small reading-table, spoke
+quietly:</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not going to be a lecturer to-day. I'm not going to analyze the
+plays of Shaw which I assigned to you. You're supposed to have read
+them yourselves. I am going to imagine that I am at tea in New Haven,
+or down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span> in New York, at dinner in the basement of the old Brevoort,
+talking with a bunch of men who are trying to find out where the world
+is going, and why and when and how, and asking who are the prophets
+who are going to show it the way. We'd be getting excited over Shaw
+and Wells. There's something really worth getting excited over.</p>
+
+<p>"These men have perceived that this world is not a crazy-quilt of
+unrelated races, but a collection of human beings completely related,
+with all our interests&mdash;food and ambitions and the desire to
+play&mdash;absolutely in common; so that if we would take thought all
+together, and work together, as a football team does, we would start
+making a perfect world.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what socialism&mdash;of which you're beginning to hear so much, and
+of which you're going to hear so much more&mdash;means. If you feel
+genuinely impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my
+affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist party of this country
+constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do
+demand of you that you try to think for yourselves, if you are going
+to have the nerve to vote at all&mdash;think of it&mdash;to vote how this whole
+nation is to be conducted! Doesn't that tremendous responsibility
+demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting?
+that you really think, think hard, why you vote as you do?... Pardon
+me for getting away from the subject proper&mdash;yet am I, actually? For
+just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells.</p>
+
+<p>"The great vision of the glory that shall be, not in one sudden
+millennium, but slowly advancing toward joys of life which we can no
+more prevision than the aboriginal medicine-man could imagine the
+X-ray! I wish that this were the time and the place to rhapsodize
+about that vision, as William Morris has done, in <i>News from Nowhere</i>.
+You tell me that the various brands of socialists differ so much in
+their beliefs about this future that the bewildered layman can make
+nothing at all of their theories.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> Very well. They differ so much
+because there are so many different things we <i>can</i> do with this human
+race.... The defeat of death; the life period advancing to ten-score
+years all crowded with happy activity. The solution of labor's
+problem; increasing safety and decreasing hours of toil, and a way out
+for the unhappy consumer who is ground between labor and capital. A
+real democracy and the love of work that shall come when work is not
+relegated to wage-slaves, but joyously shared in a community inclusive
+of the living beings of all nations. France and Germany uniting
+precisely as Saxony and Prussia and Bavaria have united. And, most of
+all, a general realization that the fact that we cannot accomplish all
+these things at once does not indicate that they are hopeless; an
+understanding that one of the wonders of the future is the fact that
+we shall <i>always</i>, in all ages, have improvements to look forward to.</p>
+
+<p>"Fellow-students, object as strongly as you wish to the petty
+narrowness and vituperation of certain street-corner ranters, but do
+not be petty and narrow and vituperative in doing it!</p>
+
+<p>"Now, to relate all this to the plays of Bernard Shaw. When he
+says&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Professor Frazer's utterances seem tamely conservative nowadays; but
+this was in 1905, in a small, intensely religious college among the
+furrows. Imagine a devout pastor when his son kicks the family Bible
+and you have the mental state of half the students of Plato upon
+hearing a defense of socialism. Carl, catching echoes of his own talks
+with Bone Stillman in the lecture, exultantly glanced about, and found
+the class staring at one another with frightened anxiety. He saw the
+grim Plain Smith, not so much angry as ill. He saw two class clowns
+snickering at the ecstasy in the eyes of Genie Linderbeck.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the corner drug-store, popularly known as "The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> Club," where all
+the college bloods gather to drink lemon phosphate, an excited old
+man, whose tieless collar was almost concealed by his tobacco-stained
+beard, pushed back his black slouch-hat with the G. A. R. cord, and
+banged his fist on the prescription-counter, shouting, half at the
+clerk and half at the students matching pennies on the soda-counter,
+"I've lived in Plato, man and boy, for forty-seven years&mdash;ever since
+it wa'n't nothing but a frontier trading-post. I packed logs on my
+back and I tramped fifty-three miles to get me a yoke of oxen. I
+remember when the Indians went raiding during the war and the cavalry
+rode here from St. Paul. And this town has always stood for decency
+and law and order. But when things come to such a pass that this
+fellow Frazer or any of the rest of these infidels from one of these
+here Eastern colleges is allowed to stand up on his hind legs in a
+college building and bray about anarchism and tell us to trample on
+the old flag that we fought for, and none of these professors that
+call themselves 'reverends' step in and stop him, then let me tell you
+I'm about ready to pull up stakes and go out West, where there's
+patriotism and decency still, and where they'd hang one of these
+foreign anarchists to the nearest lamp-post, yes, sir, and this fellow
+Frazer, too, if he encouraged them in their crank notions. Got no
+right in the country, anyway. Better deport 'em if they ain't
+satisfied with the way we run things. I won't stand for preaching
+anarchism, and never knew any decent place that would, never since I
+was a baby in Canada. Yes, sir, I mean it; I'm an old man, but I'd
+pull up stakes and go plugging down the Santa Fe trail first, and I
+mean it."</p>
+
+<p>"Here's your Bog Bitters, Mr. Goff," said the clerk, hastily, as a
+passer-by was drawn into the store by the old man's tirade.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Goff stalked out, muttering, and the college sports at the
+soda-counter grinned at one another. But Gus Osberg, of the junior
+class, remarked to Carl Ericson:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> "At that, though, there's a good
+deal to what old Goff says. Bet a hat Prexy won't stand for Prof
+Frazer's talking anarchy. Fellow in the class told me it was fierce
+stuff he was talking. Reg'lar anarchy."</p>
+
+<p>"Rats! It wasn't anything of the kind," protested Carl. "I was there
+and I heard the whole thing. He just explained what this Bernard Shaw
+that writes plays meant by socialism."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, even so, don't you think it's kind of unnecessary to talk
+publicly, right out in a college lecture-room, about socialism?"
+inquired a senior who was high up in the debating society.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, thunder&mdash;&mdash;!" was all Carl said, as the whole group stared at
+him. He felt ridiculous; he was afraid of seeming to be a "crank." He
+escaped from the drug-store.</p>
+
+<p>When he arrived at Mrs. Henkel's boarding-house for supper the next
+evening he found the students passing from hand to hand a copy of the
+town paper, the <i>Plato Weekly Times</i>, which bore on the front page
+what the town regarded as a red-hot news story:</p>
+
+<p class="center">PLATO PROFESSOR</p>
+
+<p class="center">TALKS SEDITIOUSLY</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As we go to press we learn that rumors are flying about the
+campus that the "powers that be" are highly incensed by the
+remarks of a well-known member of the local faculty praising
+Socialism and other form of anarchy. It is said that one of
+the older members of the faculty will demand from the erring
+teacher an explanation of his remarks which are alleged to
+have taken the form of a defense of the English anarchist
+Bernhard Shaw. Those on the que vive are expecting
+sensational developments and campus talk is so extensively
+occupied with discussions of the affair that the important
+coming game with St. John's college is almost forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>While the TIMES has always supported Plato College as one of
+the chief glories in the proud crown of Minnesota learning,
+we can but illy stomach such news. It goes without saying
+that we cannot too strongly disapprove express our
+disapproval of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> such incendiary utterances and we shall
+fearlessly report the whole of this fair let the chips fall
+where they may.</p></div>
+
+<p>"There, Mr. Ericson," said Mrs. Henkel, a plump, decent, disapproving
+person, who had known too many generations of great Platonians to be
+impressed by anything, "you see what the public thinks of your
+Professor Frazer. I told you people wouldn't stomach such news, and I
+wouldn't wonder if they strongly disapproved."</p>
+
+<p>"This ain't anything but gossip," said Carl, feebly; but as he read
+the account in the <i>Weekly Times</i> he was sick and frightened, such was
+his youthful awe of print. He wanted to beat the mossy-whiskered
+editor of the <i>Times</i>, who always had white food-stains on his lapels.
+When he raised his eyes the coquette Mae Thurston tried to cheer him:
+"It 'll all come out in the wash, Eric; don't worry. These editors
+have to have something to write about or they couldn't fill up the
+paper."</p>
+
+<p>He pressed her foot under the table. He was chatty, and helped to keep
+the general conversation away from the Frazer affair; but he was
+growing more and more angry, with a desire for effective action which
+expressed itself within him only by, "I'll show 'em! Makes me so
+<i>sore</i>!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Everywhere they discussed and rediscussed Professor Frazer: in the
+dressing-room of the gymnasium, where the football squad dressed in
+the sweat-reeking air and shouted at one another, balancing each on
+one leg before small lockers, and rubbing themselves with brown,
+unclean Turkish towels; in the neat rooms of girl co-eds with their
+banners and cushions and pink comforters and chafing-dishes of nut
+fudge and photographic postal-cards showing the folks at home; in the
+close, horse-smelling, lap-robe and whip scattered office of the town
+livery-stable, where Mr. Goff droned with the editor of the <i>Times</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere Carl heard the echoes, and resolved, "I've got to <i>do</i>
+something!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>he day of Professor Frazer's next lecture, a rain-sodden day at the
+end of October, with the stubble-fields bleakly shelterless beyond the
+campus. The rain splashed up from pools on the worn brick walks and
+dripped from trees and whipped about buildings, soaking the legs and
+leaving them itchingly wet and the feet sloshily uncomfortable. Carl
+returned to his room at one; talked to the Turk, his feet thrust
+against the side of their rusty stove. He wanted to keep three
+o'clock, the hour of Frazer's lecture, from coming. "I feel as if I
+was in for a fight and scared to death about it. Listen to that rain
+outside. Gee! but the old dame keeps these windows dirty. I hope
+Frazer will give it to them good and hard. I wish we could applaud
+him. I do feel funny, like something tragic was going to happen."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, tie that dog outside," yawned the Turk, stanch adherent of Carl,
+and therefore of Professor Frazer, but not imaginative. "Come on,
+young Kerl; I'll play you a slick little piece on the mouth-organ.
+Heh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, thunder! I'm too restless to listen to anything except a cannon."
+Carl stumped to the window and pondered on the pool of water flooding
+the graying grass stems in the shabby yard.</p>
+
+<p>When it was time to start for Professor Frazer's lecture the Turk
+blurted: "Why don't we stay away and forget about it? Get her off your
+nerves. Let's go down to the bowling-alley and work up a sweat."</p>
+
+<p>"Not a chance, Turk. He'll want all the supporters he's got. And you'd
+hate to stay away as much as I would.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> I feel cheered up now; all
+ready for the scrap. Yip! Come on!"</p>
+
+<p>"All right, governor. I like the scrap, all right, but I don't want to
+see you get all worked up."</p>
+
+<p>Through the rain, across the campus, an unusual number of students in
+shining, cheap, black raincoats were hastening to the three o'clock
+classes, clattering up the stone steps of the Academic Building,
+talking excitedly, glancing up at the arched door as though they
+expected to see something startling. Dozens stared at Carl. He felt
+rather important. It was plain that he was known as a belligerent, a
+supporter of Professor Frazer. As he came to the door of Lecture-room
+A he found that many of the crowd were deserting their proper classes
+to attend the Frazer event. He bumped down into his own seat, gazing
+back superciliously at the outsiders who were edging into unclaimed
+seats at the back of the room or standing about the door&mdash;students
+from other classes, town girls, the young instructor in French,
+German, and music; a couple of town club-women in glasses and galoshes
+and woolen stockings bunchy at the ankles. Every one was rapidly
+whispering, watching every one else, peeping often at the platform and
+the small door beside it through which Professor Frazer would enter.
+Carl had a smile ready for him. But there was no chance that the smile
+would be seen. There must have been a hundred and fifty in the room,
+seated and standing, though there were but seventy in the course, and
+but two hundred and fifty-six students in the whole college that year.</p>
+
+<p>Carl looked back. He clenched his fist and pounded the soft side of it
+on his thigh, drawing in his breath, puffing it out with a long
+exasperated "Hellll!" For the Greek professor, the comma-sized,
+sandy-whiskered martinet, to whom nothing that was new was moral and
+nothing that was old was to be questioned by any undergraduate,
+stalked into the room like indignant Napoleon posing before two guards
+and a penguin at St. Helena. A student<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span> in the back row thriftily gave
+the Greek god his seat. The god sat down, with a precise nod.
+Instantly a straggly man with a celluloid collar left the group by the
+door, whisked over to the Greek professor, and fawned upon him. It was
+the fearless editor and owner (also part-time type-setter) of the
+<i>Plato Weekly Times</i>, who dated back to the days of Washington
+flat-bed hand-presses and pure Jeffersonian politics, and feared
+neither man nor devil, though he was uneasy in the presence of his
+landlady. He ostentatiously flapped a wad of copy-paper in his left
+hand, and shook a spatter of ink-drops from a fountain-pen as he
+interviewed the Greek professor, who could be seen answering
+pompously. Carl was hating them both, fearing the Greek as a faculty
+spy on Frazer, picturing himself kicking the editor, when he was aware
+of a rustling all over the room, of a general turning of heads toward
+the platform.</p>
+
+<p>He turned. He was smiling like a shy child in his hero-worship.
+Professor Frazer was inconspicuously walking through the low door
+beside the platform. Frazer's lips were together. He was obviously
+self-conscious. His motions were jerky. He elaborately did not look at
+the audience. He nearly stumbled on the steps up to the platform. His
+hand shook as he drew papers from a leather portfolio and arranged
+them on the small reading-table. One of the papers escaped and sailed
+off the platform, nearly to the front row. Nearly every one in the
+room snickered. Frazer flushed. A girl student in the front row
+nervously bounded out of her seat, picked up the paper, and handed it
+up to Frazer. They both fumbled it, and their heads nearly touched.
+Most of the crowd laughed audibly.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Frazer sat down in his low chair, took out his watch with a
+twitching hand, and compared his time with the clock at the back of
+the room&mdash;and so closely were the amateur executioners observing their
+victim that every eye went back to the clock as well. Even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> Carl was
+guilty of that imitation. Consequently he saw the editor, standing at
+the back, make notes on his copy-paper and smirk like an ill-bred
+hound stealing a bone. And the Greek professor stared at Frazer's
+gauche movements with a grim smugness that indicated, "Quite the sort
+of thing I expected." The Greek's elbows were on the arm of the seat,
+and he held up before his breast a small red-leather-covered note-book
+which he superciliously tapped with a thin pencil. He was waiting.
+Like a judge of the Inquisition....</p>
+
+<p>"Old Greek 's going to take notes and make a report to the faculty
+about what Frazer says," reflected Carl. "If I could only get hold of
+his notes and destroy them!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl turned again. It was just three. Professor Frazer had risen.
+Usually he sat while lecturing. Fifty whispers commented on that fact;
+fifty regular members of the course became self-important through
+knowing it. Frazer was leaning slightly against the table. It moved an
+inch or two with his weight, but by this time every one was too
+high-strung to laugh. He was pale. He re-arranged his papers. He had
+to clear his throat twice before he could speak, in the now silent,
+vulturishly attentive room, smelling of wet second-rate clothes.</p>
+
+<p>The gusty rain could be heard. They all hitched in their seats.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Frazer <i>can't</i> be going to retract," groaned Carl; "but he's
+scared."</p>
+
+<p>Carl suddenly wished himself away from all this useless conflict; out
+tramping the wet roads with the Turk, or slashing through the puddles
+at thirty-five miles an hour in the banker's car. He noted stupidly
+that Genie Linderbeck's hair was scarcely combed. He found he was
+saying, "Frazer 'll flunk, flunk, flunk; he's going to flunk, flunk,
+flunk."</p>
+
+<p>Then Frazer spoke. His voice sounded harsh and un-rhythmical, but soon
+swung into the natural periods of a public speaker as he got into his
+lecture:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My friends," said he, "a part of you have come here legitimately, to hear
+a lecture; a part to satisfy the curiosity aroused by rumors to the effect
+that I am likely to make indecorous and indecent remarks, which your
+decorum and decency make you wish to hear, and of which you will carry away
+evil and twisted reports, to gain the reputation of being fearless
+defenders of the truth. It is a temptation to gratify your desire and shock
+you&mdash;a far greater temptation than to be repentant and reactionary. Only,
+it occurs to me that this place and time are supposed to be devoted to a
+lecture by Henry Frazer on his opinions about contemporary drama. It is in
+no sense to be given to the puling defense of a martyr, nor to the
+sensational self-advertisement of either myself or any of you. I have no
+intention of devoting any part of my lecture, aside from these introductory
+adumbrations, to the astonishing number of new friends whose bright and
+morning faces I see before me. I shall neither be so insincerely tactful as
+to welcome you, nor so frightened as to ignore you. Nor shall I invite you
+to come to me with any complaints you have about me. I am far too busy with
+my real work!</p>
+
+<p>"I am not speaking patiently. I am not patient with you! I am not
+speaking politely. Truly, I do not think that I shall much longer be
+polite!</p>
+
+<p>"Wait. That sounds now in my ears as rhetorical! Forgive me, and
+translate my indiscretions into more colloquial language.</p>
+
+<p>"Though from rumors I have overheard, I fancy some of you will do
+that, anyway.... And now, I think, you see where I stand.</p>
+
+<p>"Now then. For such of you as have a genuine interest in the brilliant
+work of Bernard Shaw I shall first continue the animadversions on the
+importance of his social thought, endeavor to link it with the great
+and growing vision of H. G. Wells (novelist and not dramatist though
+he is, because of the significance of his new books, <i>Kips</i> and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+<i>Mankind in the Making</i>), and point out the serious purpose that seems
+to me to underlie Shaw's sarcastic pictures of life's shams.</p>
+
+<p>"In my last lecture I endeavored to present the destructive side of
+present social theories as little as possible; to dwell more on the
+keen desire of the modern thinkers for constructive imagination. But I
+judge that I was regarded as too destructive, which amuses me, and to
+which I shall apply the antidote of showing how destructive modern
+thought is and must be&mdash;whether running with sootily smoking torch of
+individuality in Bakunin, or hissing in Nietzsche, or laughing at
+Olympus in Bernard Shaw. My 'radicalism' has been spoken of. Radical!
+Do you realize that I am not suggesting that there might possibly some
+day be a revolution in America, but rather that now I am stating that
+there is, this minute, and for some years has been, an actual state of
+warfare between capital and labor? Do you know that daily more people
+are saying openly and violently that we starve our poor, we stuff our
+own children with useless bookishness, and work the children of others
+in mills and let them sell papers on the streets in red-light
+districts at night, and thereby prove our state nothing short of
+insane? If you tell me that there is no revolution because there are
+no barricades, I point to actual battles at Homestead, Pullman, and
+the rest. If you say that there has been no declaration of war, open
+war, I shall read you editorials from <i>The Appeal to Reason</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Mind you, I shall not say whether I am enlisted for or against the
+revolutionary army. But I demand that you look about you and
+understand the significance of the industrial disturbances and
+religious unrest of the time. Never till then will you understand
+anything&mdash;certainly not that Shaw is something more than an <i>enfant
+terrible</i>; Ibsen something more than an ill-natured old man with
+dyspepsia and a silly lack of interest in skating. Then you will
+realize that in the most extravagant utterances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> of a red-shirted
+strike-leader there may be more fervent faith and honor, oftentimes,
+than in the virgin prayers of a girl who devoutly attends Christian
+Endeavor, but presumes to call Emma Goldman 'that dreadful woman.'
+Follow the labor-leader. Or fight him, good and hard. But do not
+overlook him.</p>
+
+<p>"But I must be more systematic. When John Tanner's independent
+chauffeur, of whom you have&mdash;I hope you have&mdash;read in <i>Man and
+Superman</i>&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Carl looked about. Many were frowning; a few leaning sidewise to
+whisper to neighbors, with a perplexed head-shake that plainly meant,
+"I don't quite get that." Wet feet were shifted carefully; breaths
+caught quickly; hands nervously played with lower lips. The Greek
+professor was writing something. Carl's ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, was
+rigid, staring unyieldingly at the platform. Carl hated Smith's
+sinister stillness.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Professor Frazer was finishing his lecture:</p>
+
+<p>"If it please you, flunk this course, don't read a single play I
+assign to you, be disrespectful, disbelieve all my contentions. And I
+shall still be content. But do not, as you are living souls, blind
+yourself to the fact that there is a world-wide movement to build a
+wider new world&mdash;and that the world needs it&mdash;and that in Jamaica
+Mills, on land owned by a director of Plato College, there are two
+particularly vile saloons which you must wipe out before you disprove
+me!" Silence for ten seconds. Then, "That is all."</p>
+
+<p>The crowd began to move hesitatingly, while Professor Frazer hastily
+picked up his papers and raincoat and hurried out through the door
+beside the platform. Voices immediately rose in a web of talk,
+many-colored, hot-colored.</p>
+
+<p>Carl babbled to the man next him, "He sure is broad.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> He doesn't care
+whether they're conservative or not. And some sensation at the end!"</p>
+
+<p>"Heh? What? Him?" The sophomore was staring.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Why, sure! Whadya mean?" demanded Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, and wha' do <i>you</i> mean by 'broad'? Sure! He's broad just like a
+razor edge."</p>
+
+<p>"Heh?" echoed the next man down the row, a Y. M. C. A. senior. "Do you
+mean to say you liked it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, sure! Why not? Didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes. Yes indeed! All he said was that scarlet women like Emma
+Goldman were better than a C. E. girl, and that he hoped his students
+would bluff the course and flunk it, and that we could find booze at
+Jamaica Mills, and a few little things like that. That's all. Sure!
+That's the sort of thing we came here to study." The senior was
+buttoning his raincoat with angry fingers. "That's&mdash;&mdash;Why, the man was
+insane! And the way he denounced decency and&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I can't talk about
+it!"</p>
+
+<p>"W-w-w-well by gosh, of all the&mdash;the&mdash;&mdash;" spluttered Carl. "You and
+your Y. M. C. A.&mdash;calling yourself religious, and misrepresenting like
+that&mdash;you and your&mdash;&mdash;Why, you ain't worth arguing with. I don't
+believe you 'came to study' anything. You know it all already."
+Passionate but bewildered, trying not to injure the cause of Frazer by
+being nasty, he begged: "Straight, didn't you like his spiel? Didn't
+it give you some new ideas?"</p>
+
+<p>The senior vouchsafed: "No, 'me and my Y. M.' didn't like it. Now
+don't let me keep you, Ericson. I suppose you'll be wanting to join
+dear Mr. Frazer in a highball; you're such a pet of his. Did he teach
+you to booze? I understand you're good at it."</p>
+
+<p>"You apologize or I'll punch your face off," said Carl. "I don't
+understand Professor Frazer's principles like I ought to. I'm not
+fighting for them. Prob'ly would if I knew enough. But I don't like
+your face. It's too long. It's like a horse's face. It's an insult to
+Frazer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span> to have a horse-faced guy listen to him. You apologize for
+having a horse face, see?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're bluffing. You wouldn't start anything here, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"Apologize!" Carl's fist was clenched. People were staring.</p>
+
+<p>"Cut it out, will you! I didn't mean anything."</p>
+
+<p>"You wouldn't," snapped Carl, and rammed his way out, making wistful
+boyish plans to go to Frazer with devotion and offers of service in a
+fight whose causes grew more confused to him every moment. Beside him,
+as he hurried off to football practice, strode a big lineman of the
+junior class, cajoling:</p>
+
+<p>"Calm down, son. You can't lick the whole college."</p>
+
+<p>"But it makes me so sore&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know, but it strikes me that no matter how much you like
+Frazer, he was going pretty far when he said that anarchists had more
+sense than decent folks."</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't! You didn't get him. He meant&mdash;&mdash;O Lord, what's the use!"</p>
+
+<p>He did not say another word as they hastened to the gymnasium for
+indoor practice.</p>
+
+<p>He was sure that they who knew of his partisanship would try to make
+him lose his temper. "Dear Lord, please just let me take out just one
+bonehead and beat him to a pulp, and then I'll be good and not open my
+head again," was his perfectly reverent prayer as he stripped before
+his locker.</p>
+
+<p>Carl and most of the other substitutes had to wait, and most of them
+gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazer's charge
+that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots, and tried to
+decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazer credit. Twenty
+times Carl wanted to deny; twenty times speech rose in him so hotly
+that he drew a breath and opened his mouth; but each time he muttered
+to himself: "Oh, shut up! You'll only make 'em worse." Students who
+had attended<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> the lecture declared that Professor Frazer had advocated
+bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believed, marveling,
+"Well, well, well, well!" with unctuous appreciation of the scandal.</p>
+
+<p>Still Carl sat aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs
+with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him&mdash;slim,
+wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin
+glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight football jersey; a
+clean-carved boy.</p>
+
+<p>The rubber band of his nose-guard snapped harshly as he plucked at it,
+playing a song of hatred on that hard little harp.</p>
+
+<p>An insignificant thing made him burst out. Tommy La Croix, the French
+Canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken, tobacco-chewing, rather
+likeable young thug, stared directly at Carl and said, loudly:
+"'Nother thing I noticed was that Frazer didn't have his pants
+pressed. Funny, ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to
+be cranks they're short on baths and tailors?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl slid from the parallel bars. He walked up to the line of
+substitutes, glanced sneeringly along them, dramatized himself as a
+fighting rebel, remarked, "Half of you are too dumm to get Frazer, and
+the other half are old-woman gossips and ought to be drinking tea,"
+and gloomed away to the dressing-room, while behind him the
+substitutes laughed, and some one called: "Sorry you don't like us,
+but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericson?"</p>
+
+<p>His ears burned, in the dressing-room. He did not feel that they had
+been much impressed.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>To tell the next day or two in detail would be to make many books
+about the mixed childishness and heroic fineness of Carl's
+partisanship; to repeat a thousand rumors running about the campus to
+the effect that the faculty would demand Frazer's resignation; to
+explain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> the reason why Frazer's charge that a Plato director owned
+land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then
+quite forgotten, while Frazer's reputation as a "crank" was never
+forgotten, so much does muck resent the muck-raker; to describe Carl's
+brief call on Frazer and his confusing discovery that he had nothing
+to say; to repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazer
+affair, Turk's great oath to support Frazer "through hell and high
+water," Turk's repeated defiance: "Well, by golly! we'll show the
+mutts, but I wish we could <i>do</i> something"; to chronicle dreary
+classes whose dullness was evident to Carl, now, after his interest in
+Frazer's lectures.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Returning from Genie Linderbeck's room, Carl found a letter from
+Gertie Cowles on the black-walnut hat-rack. Without reading it, but
+successfully befooling himself into the belief that he was glad to
+have it, he went whistling up to his room.</p>
+
+<p>Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, those great seniors, sat tilted back in
+wooden chairs, and between them was the lord of the world, Mr.
+Bjorken, the football coach, a large, amiable, rather religious young
+man, who believed in football, foreign missions, and the Democratic
+party.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello! Waiting for me or the Turk?" faltered Carl, gravely shaking
+hands all round.</p>
+
+<p>"Just dropped up to see you for a second," said Mr. Bjorken.</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry the Turk wasn't here." Carl had an ill-defined feeling that he
+wanted to keep them from becoming serious as long as he could.</p>
+
+<p>Ray Cowles cleared his throat. Never again would the black-haired
+Adonis, blossom of the flower of Joralemon, be so old and sadly sage
+as then. "We want to talk to you seriously about something&mdash;for your
+own sake. You know I've always been interested in you, and Howard, and
+course we're interested in you as frat brothers, too.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> For old
+Joralemon and Plato, eh? Mr. Bjorken believes&mdash;might as well tell him
+now, don't you think, Mr. Bjorken?"</p>
+
+<p>The coach gave a regally gracious nod. Hitching about on the wood-box,
+Carl felt the bottom drop out of his anxious stomach.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Mr. Bjorken thinks you're practically certain to make the team
+next year, and maybe you may even get put in the Hamlin game for a few
+minutes this year, and get your P."</p>
+
+<p>"Honest?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if you do something for old Plato, same 's you expect her to do
+something for you." Ray was quite sincere. "But not if you put the
+team discipline on the bum and disgrace Omega Chi. Of course I can't
+speak as an actual member of the team, but still, as a senior, I hear
+things&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"How d'you mean 'disgrace'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know that because you've been getting so savage about
+Frazer the whole team 's getting mad?" said the coach. "Cowles and
+Griffin and I have been talking over the whole proposition. Your
+boosting Frazer&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," from Carl, "I won't crawl down on my opinion about
+Frazer. Folks haven't understood him."</p>
+
+<p>"Lord love you, son," soothed Howard Griffin, "we aren't trying to
+change your opinion of Frazer. We're, your friends, you know. We're
+proud of you for standing up for him. Only thing is, now that he's
+practically fired, just tell me how it's going to help him or you or
+anybody else, now, to make everybody sore by roasting them because
+they can't agree with you. Boost; don't knock! Don't make everybody
+think you're a crank."</p>
+
+<p>"To be frank," added Mr. Bjorken, "you're just as likely to hurt
+Frazer as to help him by stirring up all this bad blood. Look here. I
+suppose that if the faculty had already fired Frazer you'd still go
+ahead trying to buck them."</p>
+
+<p>"Hadn't thought about it, but suppose I would."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Afraid it might be that way. But haven't you seen by this time about
+how much good it does for one lone sophomore to try and run the
+faculty?" It was the coach talking again, but the gravely nodding
+mandarin-like heads of Howard and Ray accompanied him. "Mind you, I
+don't mean to disparage you personally, but you must admit that you
+can't hardly expect to boss everything. Just what good 'll it do to go
+on shouting for Frazer? Quite aside from the question of whether he is
+likely to get fired or not."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," grunted Carl, nervously massaging his chin, "I don't know as
+it will do any direct good&mdash;except maybe waking this darn conservative
+college up a little; but it does make me so dog-gone sore&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, we understand, old man," the coach said, "but on the other
+hand here's the direct good of sitting tight and playing the game.
+I've heard you speak about Kipling. Well, you're like a young
+officer&mdash;a subaltern they call it, don't they?&mdash;in a Kipling story, a
+fellow that's under orders, and it's part of his game to play hard and
+keep his mouth shut and to not criticize his superior officers, ain't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I suppose so, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's just the same with you. Can't you see that? Think it over.
+What would you think of a lieutenant that tried to boss all the
+generals? Just same thing.... Besides, if you sit tight, you can make
+the team this year, I can practically promise you that. Do understand
+this now; it isn't a bribe; we want you to be able to play and <i>do</i>
+something for old Plato in a <i>real</i> way&mdash;in athletics. But you most
+certainly can't make the team if you're going to be a disorganizer."</p>
+
+<p>"All we want you to do," put in Ray Cowles, "is not to make a public
+spectacle of yourself&mdash;as I'm afraid you've been doing. Admire Frazer
+all you want to, and talk about him to your own bunch, and don't back
+down on your own opinions, only don't think you've got to go<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> round
+yelling about him. People get a false idea of you. I hate to have to
+tell you this, but several of the fellows, even in Omega Chi, have
+spoken about you, and wondered if you really were a regular crank. 'Of
+course he isn't, you poor cheese,' I tell 'em, but I can't be around
+to answer every one all the time, and you can't lick the whole
+college; that ain't the way the world does things. You don't know what
+a bad impression you make when you're too brash. See how I mean?"</p>
+
+<p>As the council of seers rose, Carl timidly said to Ray, "Straight,
+now, have quite a lot of the fellows been saying I was a goat?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good many, I'm afraid. All talking about you.... It's up to you. All
+you got to do is not think you know it all, and keep still. Keep still
+till you understand the faculty's difficulties just a little better.
+Savvy? Don't that sound fairly reasonable?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>hey were gone. Carl was full of the nauseating shame which a
+matter-of-fact man, who supposes that he is never pilloried, knows
+when a conscientious friend informs him that he has been observed,
+criticized; that his enthusiasms have been regarded as eccentricities;
+his affectionate approaches toward friendship as impertinence.</p>
+
+<p>There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room, nudging one
+another, waiting agape for him to do something idiotic; a
+well-advertised fool on parade. He stalked about, now shamefaced, now
+bursting out with a belligerent, "Aw, rats! I'll show 'em!" now
+plaintively beseeching, "I don't suppose I am helping Frazer, but it
+makes me so darn sore when nobody stands up for him&mdash;and he teaches
+stuff they need so much here. Gee! I'm coming to think this is a
+pretty rough-neck college. He's the first teacher I ever got anything
+out of&mdash;and&mdash;&mdash;Oh, hang it! what 'd I have to get mixed up in all this
+for, when I was getting along so good? And if it isn't going to help
+him&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>His right hand became conscious of Gertie's letter crumpled in his
+pocket. As turning the letter over and over gave him surprisingly
+small knowledge of its contents, he opened it:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dear Carl</span>,&mdash;You are just <i>silly</i> to tease me about any bank
+clerk. I don't like him any more at all and he can go with
+Linda all he likes, much I care!</p>
+
+<p>We are enjoying good health, though it is getting quite cold
+now and we have the furnace running now and it feels pretty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+good to have it. We had <i>such</i> a good time at Adelaide's
+party she wore such a pretty dress. She flirted terribly
+with Joe Jordan though of course you'll call me a cat for
+telling you because you like her so much better than me &amp;
+all.</p>
+
+<p>Oh I haven't told you the news yet Joe has accepted a
+position at St. Hilary in the mill there.</p>
+
+<p>I have some pretty new things for my room, a beautiful
+hand-painted picture. Before Joe goes there is going to be a
+party for him at Semina's. I wish you could come I suppose
+you have learned to dance well, of course you go to lots of
+parties at Plato with all the pretty girls &amp; forget all
+about <i>me</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I was in Minneapolis it is pretty dull here, &amp; such
+good talks you and me had <i>didn't</i> we!</p>
+
+<p>Oh Carl dear Ray writes us you are sticking up for that
+crazy Professor Frazer. I know it must take lots of courage
+&amp; I admire you <i>lots</i> for it even if Ray doesn't but oh Carl
+dear if you can't do any <i>good</i> by it I hope you won't get
+everybody talking about you without its doing any good, will
+you, Carl?</p>
+
+<p>I do so expect you to succeed wonderfully &amp; I hope you won't
+blast your career even to stand up for folks when it's too
+late &amp; won't do any good.</p>
+
+<p>We all expect so much of you&mdash;we are waiting! You are our
+knight &amp; you aren't going to forget to keep your armor
+bright, nor forget,</p></div>
+
+<p class="f6">Yours as ever,</p>
+
+<p class="f2"><span class="smcap">Gertie.</span></p>
+
+<p>"Mmm!" remarked Carl. "Dun'no' about this knight-and-armor business.
+I'd look swell, I would, with a wash-boiler and a few more tons of
+junk on. Mmm! 'Expect you to succeed wonderfully&mdash;&mdash;' Oh, I don't
+suppose I had ought to disappoint 'em. Don't see where I can help
+Frazer, anyway. Not a bit."</p>
+
+<p>The Frazer affair seemed very far from him; very hysterical.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the Gang ambled in with noisy proposals in regard to a game of
+poker, penny ante, but the thought of cards bored him. Leaving them in
+possession, one of them smoking the Turk's best pipe, which the Turk
+had been so careless as to leave in sight, he strolled out on the
+street and over to the campus.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was a light in the faculty-room in the Academic Building, yet it
+was not a "first and third Thursday," dates on which the faculty
+regularly met. Therefore, it was a special meeting; therefore&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Promptly, without making any plans, Carl ran to the back of the
+building, shinned up a water-spout (humming "Just Before the Battle,
+Mother"), pried open a class-room window with his large jack-knife, of
+the variety technically known as a "toad-stabber" (changing his tune
+to "Onward, Christian Soldiers"), climbed in, tiptoed through the
+room, stopping often to listen, felt along the plaster walls to find
+the door, eased the door open, calmly sat down in the corridor, pulled
+off his shoes, said, "Ouch, it's cold on the feets!" slipped into
+another class-room in the front of the building, put on his shoes,
+crawled out of the window, walked along a limestone ledge one foot
+wide to a window of the faculty-room, and peeped in.</p>
+
+<p>All of the eleven assistant professors and full professors, except
+Frazer, were assembled, with President S. Alcott Wood in the chair,
+and the Greek professor addressing them, referring often to a
+red-leather-covered note-book.</p>
+
+<p>"Um! Making a report on Frazer's lecture," said Carl, clinging
+precariously to the rough faces of the stones. A gust swooped around
+the corner of the building. He swayed, gripped the stones more
+tightly, and looked down. He could not see the ground. It was
+thirty-five or forty feet down. "Almost fell," he observed. "Gosh! my
+hands are chilly!" As he peered in the window again he saw the Greek
+professor point directly at the window, while the whole gathering
+startled, turned, stared. A young assistant professor ran toward the
+door of the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Going to cut me off. Dog-gone it," said Carl. "They'll wait for me at
+the math.-room window. Hooray! I've started something."</p>
+
+<p>He carefully moved along the ledge to a point half-way between windows
+and waited, flat against the wall.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Again he glanced down from the high, windy, narrow ledge. "It 'd be a
+long drop.... My hands are cold.... I could slip. Funny, I ain't
+really much scared, though.... Say! Where'd I do just this before? Oh
+yes!" He saw himself as little Carl, lost with Gertie in the woods,
+caught by Bone Stillman at the window. He laughed out as he compared
+the bristly virile face of Bone with the pasty face of the young
+professor. "Seems almost as though I was back there doing the same
+thing right over. Funny. But I'm not quite as scared as I was then.
+Guess I'm growing up. Hel-lo! here's our cunning Spanish Inquisition
+rubbering out of the next window."</p>
+
+<p>The window of the mathematics class-room, next to the faculty-room,
+had opened. The young professor who was pursuing Carl peppered the
+night with violent words delivered in a rather pedagogic voice. "Well,
+sir! We have you! You might as well come and give yourself up."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was silent.</p>
+
+<p>The voice said, conversationally: "He's staying out there. I'll see
+who it is." Carl half made out a head thrusting itself from the
+window, then heard, in <i>sotto voce</i>, "I can't see him." Loudly again,
+the pursuing professor yapped: "Ah, I see you. You're merely wasting
+time, sir. You might just as well come here now. I shall let you stay
+there till you do." Softly: "Hurry back into the faculty-room and see
+if you can get him from that side. Bet it's one of the sneaking Frazer
+faction."</p>
+
+<p>Carl said nothing; did not budge. He peeped at the ledge above him. It
+was too far for him to reach it. He tried to discern the mass of the
+ground in the confusing darkness below. It seemed miles down. He did
+not know what to do. He was lone as a mateless hawk, there on the
+ledge, against the wall whose stones were pinchingly cold to the small
+of his back and his spread-eagled arms. He swayed slightly; realized
+with trembling nausea what would happen if he swayed too much.... He
+remembered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> that there was pavement below him. But he did not think
+about giving himself up.</p>
+
+<p>From the mathematics-room window came: "Watch him. I'm going out after
+him."</p>
+
+<p>The young professor's shoulders slid out of the window. Carl carefully
+turned his head and found that now a form was leaning from the
+faculty-room window as well.</p>
+
+<p>"Got me on both sides. Darn it! Well, when they haul me up on the
+carpet I'll have the pleasure of telling them what I think of them."</p>
+
+<p>The young professor had started to edge along the ledge. He was coming
+very slowly. He stopped and complained to some one back in the
+mathematics-room, "This beastly ledge is icy, I'm afraid."</p>
+
+<p>Carl piped: "Look out! Y're slipping!"</p>
+
+<p>In a panic the professor slid back into the window. As his heels
+disappeared through it, Carl dashed by the window, running sidewise
+along the ledge. While the professor was cautiously risking his head
+in the night air outside the window again, gazing to the left, where,
+he had reason to suppose, Carl would have the decency to remain, Carl
+was rapidly worming to the right. He reached the corner of the
+building, felt for the tin water-pipe, and slid down it, with his
+coat-tail protecting his hands. Half-way down, the cloth slipped and
+his hand was burnt against the corrugated tin. "Consid'able slide," he
+murmured as he struck the ground and blew softly on his raw palm.</p>
+
+<p>He walked away&mdash;not at all like a melodramatic hero of a
+slide-by-night, but like a matter-of-fact young man going to see some
+one about business of no great importance. He abstractedly brushed his
+left sleeve or his waistcoat, now and then, as though he wanted to
+appear neat.</p>
+
+<p>He tramped into the telephone-booth of the corner drug-store, called
+up Professor Frazer:</p>
+
+<p>"Hello? Professor Frazer?... This is one of your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> students in modern
+drama. I've just learned&mdash;I happened to be up in the Academic Building
+and I happened to find out that Professor Drood is making a report to
+the faculty&mdash;special meeting!&mdash;about your last lecture. I've got a
+hunch he's going to slam you. I don't want to butt in, but I'm awfully
+worried; I thought perhaps you ought to know.... Who? Oh, I'm just one
+of your students.... You're welcome. Oh, say, Professor, g-good luck.
+G'-by."</p>
+
+<p>Immediately, without even the excuse that some evil mind in the Gang
+had suggested it, he prowled out to the Greek professor's house and
+tied both the front and back gates. Now the fence of that yard was
+high and strong and provided with sharp pickets; and the professor was
+short and dignified. Carl regretted that he could not wait for the
+pleasure of seeing the professor fumble with the knots and climb the
+fence. But he had another errand.</p>
+
+<p>He walked to the house of Professor Frazer. He stood on the walk
+before it. His shoulders straightened, his heels snapped together, and
+he raised his arm in a formal salute.</p>
+
+<p>He had saluted the gentleness of Henry Frazer. He had saluted his own
+soul. He cried: "I will stick by him, as long as the Turk or any of
+'em. I won't let Omega Chi and the coach scare me&mdash;not the whole
+caboodle of them. I&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I don't <i>think</i> they can scare me...."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>he students of Plato were required to attend chapel every morning.
+President S. Alcott Wood earnestly gave out two hymns, and between
+them informed the Almighty of the more important news events of the
+past twenty-four hours, with a worried advisory manner which indicated
+that he felt something should be done about them at once.</p>
+
+<p>President Wood was an honest, anxious body, something like a small,
+learned, Scotch linen-draper. He was given to being worried and
+advisory and to sitting up till midnight in his unventilated library,
+grinding at the task of putting new wrong meanings into perfectly
+obvious statements in the Bible. He was a series of circles&mdash;round
+head with smooth gray hair that hung in a bang over his round
+forehead; round face with round red cheeks; absurdly heavy gray
+mustache that almost made a circle about his puerile mouth; round
+button of a nose; round heavy shoulders; round little stomach in a
+gray sack-suit; round dumplings of feet in congress shoes that were
+never quite fresh-blacked or quite dusty. A harassed, honorable,
+studious, ignorant, humorless, joke-popping, genuinely conscientious
+thumb of a man. His prayers were long and intimate.</p>
+
+<p>After the second hymn he would announce the coming social
+events&mdash;class prayer-meetings and lantern-slide lectures by
+missionaries. During the prayer and hymns most of the students hastily
+prepared for first-hour classes, with lists of dates inside their
+hymn-books; or they read tight-folded copies of the Minneapolis
+<i>Journal</i> or <i>Tribune</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> But when the announcements began all Plato
+College sat up to attention, for Prexy Wood was very likely to comment
+with pedantic sarcasm on student peccadillos, on cards and V-neck
+gowns and the unforgivable crime of smoking.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As he crawled to the bare, unsympathetic chapel, the morning after
+spying on the faculty-room, Carl looked restlessly to the open fields,
+sniffed at the scent of burning leaves, watched a thin stream of
+blackbirds in the windy sky. He sat on the edge of a pew, nervously
+jiggling his crossed legs.</p>
+
+<p>During the prayer and hymns a spontaneously born rumor that there
+would be something sensational in President Wood's announcements went
+through the student body. The president, as he gave out the hymns, did
+not look at the students, but sadly smoothed the neat green cloth on
+the reading-stand. His prayer, timid, sincere, was for guidance to
+comprehend the will of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>Carl felt sorry for him. "Poor man 's fussed. Ought to be! I'd be,
+too, if I tried to stop a ten-inch gun like Frazer.... He's singing
+hard.... Announcements, now.... What's he waiting for? Jiminy! I wish
+he'd spring it and get it over.... Suppose he said something about
+last night&mdash;me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>President Wood stood silent. His glance drifted from row to row of
+students. They moved uneasily. Then his dry, precise voice declaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"My friends, I have an unpleasant duty to perform this morning, but I
+have sought guidance in prayer, and I hope&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl was agonizing: "He does know it's me! He'll ball me out and fire
+me publicly!... Sit tight, Ericson; hold y' nerve; think of good old
+Turk." Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the
+eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> hated this
+place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In
+the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazer sat
+(infrequently). He could fancy Frazer there, pale and stern. "I'm glad
+I spied on 'em. Might have been able to put Frazer wise to something
+definite if I could just have overheard 'em."</p>
+
+<p>President Wood was mincing on:</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;and so, my friends, I hope that in devotion to the ideals of the
+Baptist Church we shall strive ever onward and upward in even our
+smallest daily concerns, <i>per aspera ad astra</i>, not in a spirit of
+materialism and modern unrest, but in a spirit of duty.</p>
+
+<p>"I need not tell you that there has been a great deal of rumor about
+the so-called 'faculty dissensions.' But let me earnestly beseech you
+to give me your closest attention when I assure you that there have
+been <i>no</i> faculty dissensions. It is true that we have found certain
+teachings rather out of harmony with the ideals of Plato College. The
+Word of God in the Bible was good enough for our fathers who fought to
+defend this great land, and the Bible is still good enough for us, I
+guess&mdash;and I cannot find anything in the Bible about such doctrines as
+socialism and anarchism and evolution. Probably most of you have been
+fortunate enough to not have wasted any time on this theory called
+'evolution.' If you don't know anything about it you have not lost
+anything. Absurd as it may seem, evolution says that we are all
+descended from monkeys! In spite of the fact that the Bible teaches us
+that we are the children of God. If you prefer to be the children of
+monkeys rather than of God, well, all I can say is, I don't!
+[Laughter.]</p>
+
+<p>"But the old fellow Satan is always busy going to and fro even in
+colleges, and in the unrestrained, overgrown, secularized colleges of
+the East they have actually been teaching this doctrine openly for
+many years. Indeed, I am told that right at the University of Chicago,
+though it is a Baptist institution, they teach this same silly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+twaddle of evolution, and I cannot advise any of you to go there for
+graduate work. But these scientific fellows that are too wise for the
+Bible fall into the pits they themselves have digged, sooner or later,
+and they have been so smart in discovering new things about evolution
+that they have contradicted almost everything that Darwin, who was the
+high priest of this abominable cult, first taught, and they have
+turned the whole theory into a hodge-podge of contradictions from
+which even they themselves are now turning in disgust. Indeed, I am
+told that Darwin's own son has come out and admitted that there is
+nothing to this evolution. Well, we could have told him that all
+along, and told his father, and saved all their time, for now they are
+all coming right back to the Bible. We could have told them in the
+first place that the Word of God definitely explains the origin of
+man, and that anybody who tried to find out whether we were descended
+from monkeys was just about as wise as the man who tried to make a
+silk purse out of a sow's ear."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was settled down in his pew, safe.</p>
+
+<p>President Wood was in his stride. "All this evolutionary fad becomes
+ridiculous, of course, when a mind that is properly trained in clear
+thinking by the diligent perusal of the classics strips it of its
+pseudo-scientific rags and shows it straight out from the shoulder, in
+the fire of common sense and sound religion. And here is the point of
+my disquisition:</p>
+
+<p>"On this selfsame evolution, this bombast of the self-pushing
+scientists, are founded <i>all</i> such un-Christian and un-American
+doctrines as socialism and anarchism and the lusts of feminism, with
+all their followers, such as Shaw and the fellow who tried to shoot
+Mr. Frick, and all the other atheists of the stripe that think so well
+of themselves that they are quite willing to overthrow the grand old
+institutions that our forefathers founded on the Constitution; and
+they want to set up instead&mdash;oh, they're<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> quite willing to tell us how
+to run the government! They want to set up a state in which all of us
+who are honest enough to do a day's work shall support the lazy
+rascals who aren't. Yet they are very clever men. They can pull the
+wool over your eyes and persuade you&mdash;if you let them&mdash;that a
+universal willingness to let the other fellow do the work while you
+paint pictures of flowers and write novels about the abominations of
+Babylon is going to evolute a superior race! Well, when you think they
+are clever, this Shaw and this fellow Wells and all of them that copy
+Robert G. Ingersoll, just remember that the cleverest fellow of them
+all is the old Satan, and that he's been advocating just such lazy
+doctrines ever since he stirred up rebellion and discontent in the
+Garden of Eden!</p>
+
+<p>"If these things are so, then the teachings of Professor Henry Frazer,
+however sincere he is, are not in accordance with the stand which we
+have taken here at Plato. My friends, I want you all to understand me.
+Certain young students of Plato appear to have felt that the faculty
+have not appreciated Professor Frazer. One of these students, I
+presume it was one of them, went so far as to attempt to spy on
+faculty meeting last night. Who that man is I have means of finding
+out at any time. But I do not wish to. For I cannot believe that he
+realized how dishonest was such sneaking.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish to assure the malcontents that I yield to no one in my
+admiration of Professor Frazer's eloquence and learning in certain
+subjects. Only, we have not found his doctrines quite consistent with
+what we are trying to do. They may be a lot more smart and new-fangled
+than what we have out here in Minnesota, and we may be a lot of old
+fogies, but we are not narrow, and we wish to give him just as much
+right of free speech&mdash;we wish&mdash;there is&mdash;uh&mdash;no slightest&mdash;uh&mdash;desire,
+in fact, to impose any authority on any one. But against any
+perversive doctrine we must in all honesty take a firm stand.</p>
+
+<p>"We carefully explained this to Professor Frazer, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span> permit me to
+inform those young men who have taken it upon themselves to be his
+champions, that they would do well to follow his example! For he quite
+agrees with us as to the need of keeping the Plato College doctrine
+consistent. In fact, he offered his resignation, which we reluctantly
+accepted, very, very reluctantly. It will take effect the first of the
+month, and, owing to illness in his family, he will not be giving any
+lectures before then. Students in his classes, by the way, are
+requested to report to the dean for other assignments.... And so you
+see how little there is to the cowardly rumors about 'faculty
+dissensions'!"</p>
+
+<p>"Liar, liar! Dear God, they've smothered that kind, straight Frazer,"
+Carl was groaning.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, my friends, I trust you understand our position, and&mdash;uh&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>President Wood drew a breath, slapped the reading-stand, and piped,
+angrily:</p>
+
+<p>"We have every desire to permit complete freedom of thought and speech
+among the students of Plato, but on my <i>word</i>, when it comes to a pass
+where a few students can cause this whole great institution to forget
+its real tasks and devote all its time to quarreling about a fad like
+socialism, then it's time to call a halt!</p>
+
+<p>"If there are any students here who, now that I have explained that
+Professor Frazer leaves us of his own free will, still persist in
+their stubborn desire to create trouble, and still feel that the
+faculty have not treated Professor Frazer properly, or that we have
+endeavored to coerce him, then let them stand up, right here and now,
+in chapel. I mean it! Let them stop this cowardly running to and fro
+and secret gossip. Let them stand right up before us, in token of
+protest, here&mdash;and&mdash;now! or otherwise hold their peace!"</p>
+
+<p>So well trained to the authority of schoolmasters were the students of
+Plato, including Carl Ericson, that they sat as uncomfortable as
+though they were individually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> accused by the plump pedant who was
+weakly glaring at them, his round, childish hand clutching the sloping
+edge of the oak reading-stand, his sack-coat wrinkled at the shoulders
+and sagging back from his low linen collar. Carl sighted back at
+Frazer's pew, hoping that he would miraculously be there to confront
+the dictator. The pew was empty as before. There was no one to protest
+against the ousting of Frazer for saying what he believed true.</p>
+
+<p>Then Carl was agitated to find that Carl Ericson, a back-yard boy, was
+going to rise and disturb all these learned people. He was frightened
+again. But he stood up, faced the president, affectedly folded his
+arms, hastily unfolded them and put his hands in his pockets, one foot
+before the other, one shoulder humped a little higher than the other.</p>
+
+<p>The whole audience was staring at him. He did not dare peep at them,
+but he could hear their murmur of amazement. Now that he was up he
+rather enjoyed defying them.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, young man, so you are going to let us know how to run Plato,"
+teetered the president. "I'm sure everybody will feel much obliged to
+you."</p>
+
+<p>Carl did not move. He was aware of Genie Linderbeck rising, to his
+left. No one else was up, but, with Genie's frail adherence, Carl
+suddenly desired to rouse every one to stand for Frazer and freedom.
+He glanced over at the one man whom he could always trust to follow
+him&mdash;the Turk. A tiny movement of Carl's lips, a covert up-toss of his
+head, warned the Turk to rise now.</p>
+
+<p>The Turk moved, started to rise, slowly, as though under force. He
+looked rather shamefaced. He uncrossed his legs and put his hands on
+the pew, on either side of his legs.</p>
+
+<p>"Shame!" trembled a girl's voice in the junior section.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down!" two or three voices of men softly snarled, with a rustle
+of mob-muttering.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Turk hastily crossed his legs and slumped down in his seat. Carl
+frowned at him imploringly, then angrily. He felt spiritually naked to
+ask support so publicly, but he <i>had</i> to get the Turk up. The Turk
+shook his head beseechingly. Carl could fancy him grunting, "Aw,
+thunder! I'd like to stand up, but I don't want to be a goat."</p>
+
+<p>Another man rose. "I'll be darned!" thought Carl. It was the one man
+who would be expected not to support the heretic Frazer&mdash;it was Carl's
+rustic ex-room-mate, Plain Smith. Genie was leaning against the pew in
+front of him, but Plain Smith bulked more immovable than Carl.</p>
+
+<p>No one joined the three. All through the chapel was an undertone of
+amazed comment and a constant low hissing of, "Sssssit down!"</p>
+
+<p>The president, facing them, looked strained. It occurred to Carl that
+S. Alcott Wood had his side of the question. He argued about the
+matter, feeling detached from his stolidly defiant body. Then he
+cursed the president for keeping them there. He wanted to sit down. He
+wanted to cry out....</p>
+
+<p>President Wood was speaking. "Is there any one else? Stand up, if
+there is. No one else? Very well, young men, I trust that you are now
+satisfied with your heroism, which we have all greatly appreciated, I
+am sure. [Laughter.] Chapel dismissed."</p>
+
+<p>Instantly a swirl of men surrounded Carl, questioning: "What j' do it
+for? Why didn't you keep still?"</p>
+
+<p>He pushed out through them. He sat blind through the first-hour quiz
+in physics, with the whole class watching him. The thought of the
+Turk's failure to rise kept unhappy vigil in his mind. The same
+sequence of reflections ran around like midnight mice in the wall:</p>
+
+<p>"Just when I needed him.... After all his talk.... And us so chummy,
+sitting up all hours last night. And then the Turk throws me down....
+When he'd said so many times he just wanted the chance to show how
+strong<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> he was for Frazer.... Damn coward! I'll go room with Genie. By
+gosh&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I got to be fair to the Turk. I don't suppose he could
+have done much real good standing up. Course it does make you feel
+kind of a poor nut, doing it. Genie looked&mdash;&mdash;Yes, by the Jim Hill!
+there you are. Poor little scrawny Genie&mdash;oh yes, sure, it was up to
+<i>him</i> to stand up. He wasn't afraid. And the Turk, the big stiff, he
+was afraid to.... Just when I needed him. After all our talk about
+Frazer, sitting up all hours&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Through the black whirlpool in his head pierced an irritated, "Mr.
+Ericson, I said! Have you gone to sleep? I understood you were
+excellent at standing up! What is your explanation of the phenomenon?"
+The professor of physics and mathematics&mdash;the same who had pursued
+Carl on the ledge&mdash;was speaking to him.</p>
+
+<p>Carl mumbled, sullenly, "Not prepared." The class sniggered. He
+devoted a moment to hating them, as pariahs hate, then through his
+mind went whirling again, "Just wait till I see the Turk!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_a.jpg" alt="A" width="44" height="50" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;notice from the president's office, commanding Carl's instant
+presence, was in his post-office box. He slouched into the
+waiting-room of the offices of the president and dean. He was an
+incarnate desire to say exactly what he thought to the round, woolly
+President Wood.</p>
+
+<p>Plain Albert Smith was leaving the waiting-room. He seized Carl's hand
+with his plowman's paw, and, "Good-by, boy," he growled. There was
+nothing gallant about his appearance&mdash;his blue-flannel shirt dusty
+with white fuzz, his wrinkled brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at
+which he kept fumbling with a seamy finger-nail of his left hand. But
+Carl's salute was a salute to the new king.</p>
+
+<p>"How d'you mean 'good-by,' Al?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've just resigned from Plato, Carl."</p>
+
+<p>"How'd you happen to do that? Did they summon you here?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. Just resigned," said Plain Smith. "One time when I was
+school-teaching I had a set-to with a school committee of farmers
+about teaching the kids a little botany. They said the three R's were
+enough. I won out, but I swore I'd stand up for any teacher that tried
+to be honest the way he seen it. I don't agree with Frazer about these
+socialists and all&mdash;fellow that's worked at the plow like I have knows
+a man wants to get ahead for his woman and himself, first of all, and
+let the walking-delegates go to work, too. But I think he's honest,
+all right, and, well, I stood up, and that means losing my
+scholarship. They won't try to fire me. Guess I'll mosey<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span> on to the U.
+of M. Can't probably live there as cheap as here, but a cousin of mine
+owns a big shoe-store and maybe I can get a job with him.... Boy, you
+were plucky to get up.... Glad we've got each other, finally. I feel
+as though you'd freed me from something. God bless you."</p>
+
+<p>To the dean's assistant, in the waiting-room, Carl grandly stated:
+"Ericson, 1908. I'm to see the president."</p>
+
+<p>"It's been arranged you're to see the dean instead. Sit down. Dean's
+engaged just now."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was kept waiting for a half-hour. He did not like the
+transference to the dean, who was no anxious old lamb like S. Alcott
+Wood, but a young collegiate climber, with a clipped mustache, a gold
+eye-glass chain over one ear, a curt voice, many facts, a spurious
+appreciation of music, and no mellowness. He was a graduate of the
+University of Chicago, and aggressively proud of it. He had "earned
+his way through college," which all tradition and all fiction
+pronounce the perfect manner of acquiring a noble independence and
+financial ability. Indeed, the blessing of early poverty is in general
+praised as the perfect training for acquiring enough wealth to save
+one's own children from the curse of early poverty. It would be safer
+to malign George Washington and the Boy Scouts, professional baseball
+and the Y. M. C. A., than to suggest that working one's way through
+college is not necessarily manlier than playing and dreaming and
+reading one's way through.</p>
+
+<p>Diffidently, without generalizing, the historian reports this fact
+about the dean; he had lost the graciousness of his rustic clergyman
+father and developed an itchingly bustling manner, a tremendous
+readiness for taking charge of everything in sight, by acquiring
+during his undergraduate days a mastery of all the petty ways of
+earning money, such as charging meek and stupid wealthy students too
+much for private tutoring, and bullying his classmates into
+patronizing the laundry whose agent he was.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>... The dean stuck his
+little finger far out into the air when drinking from a cup, and liked
+to be taken for a well-dressed man of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The half-hour of waiting gave Carl a feeling of the power of the
+authorities. And he kept seeing Plain Smith in his cousin's
+shoe-store, trying to "fit" women's shoes with his large red hands.
+When he was ordered to "step into the dean's office, now," he stumbled
+in, pulling at his soft felt hat.</p>
+
+<p>With his back to Carl, the dean was writing at a roll-top desk. The
+burnished top of his narrow, slightly bald head seemed efficient and
+formidable. Not glancing up, the dean snapped, "Sit down, young man."</p>
+
+<p>Carl sat down. He crumpled his hat again. He stared at a framed
+photograph, and moved his feet about, trying to keep them quiet.</p>
+
+<p>More waiting.</p>
+
+<p>The dean inspected Carl, over his shoulder. He still held his pen. The
+fingers of his left hand tapped his desk-tablet. He turned in his
+swivel-chair deliberately, as though he was now ready to settle
+everything permanently.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, young man, are you prepared to apologize to the president and
+faculty?"</p>
+
+<p>"Apologize? What for? The president said those that wanted to
+protest&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Now we won't have any blustering, if you please, Ericson. I haven't
+the slightest doubt that you are prepared to give an exhibition of
+martyrdom. That is why I asked the privilege of taking care of you,
+instead of permitting you to distress President Wood any further. We
+will drop all this posing, if you don't mind. I assure you that it
+doesn't make&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;the slightest impression on me, Ericson. Let's get right down to
+business. You know perfectly well that you have stirred up all the
+trouble you&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;could in regard to Mr. Frazer. And I think, I really think, that
+we shall either have to have your written apology and your promise to
+think a little more before you talk, hereafter, or else we shall have
+to request your resignation from college. I am sorry that we
+apparently can't run this college to suit you, Ericson, but as we
+can't, why, I'm afraid we shall have to ask you not to increase our
+inefficiency by making all the trouble you can. Wait now; let's not
+have any melodrama! You may as well pick up that hat again. It doesn't
+seem to impress me much when you throw it down, though doubtless it
+was ver-ee dramatically done, oh yes, indeed, ver-ee dramatic. See
+here. I know you, and I know your type, my young friend, and I
+haven't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Look here. Why do I get picked out as the goat, the one to apologize?
+Because I stood up first? When Prexy said to?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not at all. Say it's because you quite shamelessly made motions
+at others while you stood there, and did your best to disaffect men
+who hadn't the least desire to join in your trouble-making.... Now I'm
+very busy, young man, and I think this is all the time I shall waste
+on you. I shall expect to find your written&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Say, honest, dean," Carl suddenly laughed, "may I say just one thing
+before I get thrown out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. We have every desire to deal justly with you, and to
+always give&mdash;always to give you every opportunity&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I just wanted to say, in case I resign and don't see you again,
+that I admire you for your nerve. I wish I could get over feeling like
+a sophomore talking to a dean, and then I could tell you I hadn't
+supposed there was anybody could talk to me the way you have and get
+away with it. I'd always thought I'd punch their head off, and here
+you've had me completely buffaloed. It's wonderful! Honestly, it never
+struck me till just this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> second that there isn't any law that compels
+me to sit here and take all this. You had me completely hypnotized."</p>
+
+<p>"You know I might retort truthfully and say I am not accustomed to
+have students address me in quite this manner. I'm glad, however, to
+find that you are sensible enough not to make an amusing show of
+yourself by imagining that you are making a noble fight for freedom.
+By decision of the president and myself I am compelled to give you
+this one chance only. Unless I find your apology in my letter-box here
+by five this evening I shall have to suspend you or bring you up
+before the faculty for dismissal. But, my boy, I feel that perhaps,
+for all your mistaken notions, you do have a certain amount of
+courage, and I want to say a word&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The dean did say a word; in fact he said a large number of admirable
+words, regarding the effect of Carl's possible dismissal on his
+friends, his family, and, with an almost tearful climax, on his
+mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Now go and think it over; pray over it, unselfishly, my boy, and let
+me hear from you before five."</p>
+
+<p>Only&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The reason why Carl <i>did</i> visualize his mother, the reason why the
+Ericson kitchen became so clear to him that he saw his tired-faced
+mother reaching up to wind the alarm-clock that stood beside the ball
+of odd string on the shelf above the water-pail, the reason why he
+felt caved-in at the stomach, was that he knew he was going to leave
+Plato, and did not know where in the world he was going.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A time of quick action; of bursting the bonds even of friendship. He
+walked quietly into Genie Linderbeck's neat room, with its rose-hued
+comforter on a narrow brass bed, passe-partouted Copley prints, and a
+small oak table with immaculate green desk-blotter, and said
+good-by.... His hidden apprehension, the cold, empty feeling of his
+stomach, the nervous intensity of his motions, told<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> him that he was
+already on the long trail that leads to fortune and Bowery
+lodging-houses and death and happiness. Even while he was warning
+himself that he must not go, that he owed it to his "folks" to
+apologize and stay, he was stumbling into the bank and drawing out his
+ninety-two dollars. It seemed a great sum. While waiting for it he did
+sums on the back of a deposit-slip:</p>
+
+<table  summary="">
+<tr><td></td><td align="right">92.00</td><td>out of bank</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td align="right">2.27</td>
+<td> in pocket</td>
+<td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td align="right">about&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.10 </td>
+<td>at room</td>
+<td></td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td align="right">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td>
+<td></td>
+<td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">tot.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;94.37</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td></td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td>Owe Tailor</td><td align="right">1.45</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Turk</td><td align="right">.25</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td><td>To&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Mpls.</td><td align="right">3.05</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>To Chi. probably&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 15 to</td>
+<td align="right">18.00</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>.</td>
+<td>To N. Y&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 20 to</td>
+<td align="right">30.00</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td>To Europe (steerage)</td>
+<td align="right">40.00</td>
+<td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td><td align="right">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td>Total (about)</td><td align="right">92.75</td><td>&mdash;&mdash;would take me to Europe!</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>"Golly! I could go to Europe, to Europe! now, if I wanted to, and have
+maybe two plunks over, for grub on the railroad. But I'd have to allow
+something for tips, I guess. Maybe it wouldn't be as much as forty
+dollars for steerage. Ought to allow&mdash;&mdash;Oh, thunder! I've got enough
+to make a mighty good start seeing the world, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>On the street a boy was selling extras of the <i>Plato Weekly Times</i>,
+with the heading:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+PRESIDENT CRUSHES STUDENT<br />
+REBELLION</p>
+<p class="center">Plato Demonstration for Anarchist Handled<br />
+Without Gloves</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Carl read that he and two other students, "who are alleged to have
+been concerned in several student pranks," had attempted to break up a
+chapel meeting, but had been put to shame by the famous administrator,
+S. Alcott Wood. He had never seen his name in the press, except some
+three times in the local items of the <i>Joralemon Dynamite</i>. It looked
+so intimidatingly public that he tried to forget it was there. He
+chuckled when he thought of Plain Smith and Genie Linderbeck as
+"concerned in student pranks." But he was growing angry. He considered
+staying and fighting his opponents to the end. Then he told himself
+that he must leave Plato, after having announced to Genie that he was
+going.... He had made all of his decision except the actual deciding.</p>
+
+<p>He omitted his noonday dinner and tramped into the country, trying to
+plan how and where he would go. As evening came, cloudy and chill in a
+low wooded tract miles north of Plato, with dead boughs keening and
+the uneasy air threatening a rain that never quite came, the
+loneliness of the land seemed to befog all the possibilities of the
+future.... He wanted the lamp-lit security of his room, with the Turk
+and the Gang in red sweaters, singing ragtime; with the Frazer affair
+a bad dream that was forgotten. The world outside Plato would all be
+like these lowering woods and dreary swamps.</p>
+
+<p>He turned. He could find solace only in making his mind a blank.
+Sullen, dull, he watched the sunset, watched the bellying cumulus
+clouds mimic the Grand Ca&ntilde;on. He had to see the Grand Ca&ntilde;on! He
+would!... He had turned the corner. His clammy heart was warming. He
+was slowly coming to understand that he was actually free to take
+youth's freedom.</p>
+
+<p>He saw the vision of the America through which he might follow the
+trail like the pioneers whose spiritual descendant he was. How noble
+was the panorama that thrilled this one-generation American can be
+understood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span> only by those who have smelled our brown soil; not by the
+condescending gods from abroad who come hither to gather money by
+lecturing on our evil habit of money-gathering, and return to Europe
+to report that America is a land of Irish politicians, Jewish
+theatrical managers, and mining millionaires who invariably say, "I
+swan to calculate"; all of them huddled in unfriendly hotels or in
+hovels set on hopeless prairie. Not such the America that lifted
+Carl's chin in wonder&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Cities of tall towers; tawny deserts of the Southwest and the flawless
+sky of cornflower blue over sage-brush and painted butte; silent
+forests of the Northwest; golden China dragons of San Francisco; old
+orchards of New England; the oily Gulf of Mexico where tramp steamers
+puff down to Rio; a snow-piled cabin among somber pines of northern
+mountains. Elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere, beyond the sky-line, under
+larger stars, where men ride jesting and women smile. Names alluring
+to the American he repeated&mdash;Shenandoah, Santa Ynez, the Little Big
+Horn, Baton Rouge, the Great Smokies, Rappahannock, Arizona, Cheyenne,
+Monongahela, Androscoggin; ca&ntilde;on and bayou; sycamore and mesquite;
+Broadway and El Camino Real....</p>
+
+<p>He hurled along into Plato. He went to Mrs. Henkel's for supper. He
+smiled at the questions dumped upon him, and evaded answering. He took
+Mae Thurston aside and told her that he was leaving Plato. He wanted
+to call on Professor Frazer. He did not dare. From a pleasant
+gentleman drinking tea Frazer had changed to a prophet whom he
+revered.</p>
+
+<p>Carl darted into his room. The Turk was waiting for him. Carl cut
+short the Turk's apologies for not having supported Frazer, with the
+dreadful curt pleasantness of an alienated friend, and, as he began
+packing his clothes in two old suit-cases, insisted, "It's all
+right&mdash;was your biz whether you stood up in chapel or not." He hunted
+diligently through the back of the closet for a non-existent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> shoe, in
+order to get away from the shamefaced melancholy which covered the
+Turk when Carl presented him with all his books, his skees, and his
+pet hockey-stick. He prolonged the search because it had occurred to
+him that, as it was now eleven o'clock, and the train north left at
+midnight, the Minneapolis train at 2 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>, it might be well to decide
+where he was going when he went away. Well, Minneapolis and Chicago.
+Beyond that&mdash;he'd wait and see. Anywhere&mdash;he could go anywhere in all
+the world, now....</p>
+
+<p>He popped out of the closet cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>While the Turk mooned, Carl wrote short honest notes to Gertie, to his
+banker employer, to Bennie Rusk, whom he addressed as "Friend Ben." He
+found himself writing a long and spirited letter to Bone Stillman, who
+came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared.
+Frankly he wrote to his mother&mdash;his mammy he wistfully called her. To
+his father he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he
+stamped the letters, then glanced at the Turk. He was gay, mature,
+business-like, ready for anything. "I'll pull out in half an hour
+now," he chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>"Gosh!" sighed the Turk. "I feel as if I was responsible for
+everything. Oh, say, here's a letter I forgot to give you. Came this
+afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>The letter was from Gertie.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dear Carl</span>,&mdash;I hear that you <i>are</i> standing for that Frazer
+just as much as ever and really Carl I think you might
+consider other people's feelings a little and not be so  selfish&mdash;&mdash;</p></div>
+
+<p>Without finishing it, Carl tore up the letter in a fury. Then, "Poor
+kid; guess she means well," he thought, and made an imaginary bow to
+her in farewell.</p>
+
+<p>There was a certain amount of the milk of human-kindness in the frozen
+husk he had for a time become. But he must be blamed for icily
+rejecting the Turk's blundering attempts to make peace. He
+courteously&mdash;courtesy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> between these two!&mdash;declined the Turk's offer
+to help him carry his suit-cases to the station. That was like a slap.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-by. Hang on tight," he said, as he stooped to the heavy
+suit-cases and marched out of the door without looking back.</p>
+
+<p>By some providence he was saved from the crime of chilly
+self-righteousness. On the darkness of the stairs he felt all at once
+how responsive a chum the Turk had been. He dropped the suit-cases,
+not caring how they fell, rushed back into the room, and found the
+Turk still staring at the door. He cried:</p>
+
+<p>"Old man, I was&mdash;&mdash;Say, you yahoo, are you going to make me carry both
+my valises to the depot?"</p>
+
+<p>They rushed off together, laughing, promising to write to each other.</p>
+
+<p>The Minneapolis train pulled out, with Carl trying to appear
+commonplace. None of the sleepy passengers saw that the Golden Fleece
+was draped about him or that under his arm he bore the harp of
+Ulysses. He was merely a young man taking a train at a way-station.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Part_II" id="Part_II"></a>Part II</h2>
+
+<h2>THE ADVENTURE OF ADVENTURING</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>here are to-day in the mind of Carl Ericson many confused
+recollections of the purposeless wanderings which followed his leaving
+Plato College. For more than a year he went down, down in the social
+scale, down to dirt and poverty and association with the utterly tough
+and reckless. But day by day his young joy of wandering matured into
+an ease in dealing with whatever man or situation he might meet. He
+had missed the opportunity of becoming a respectable citizen which
+Plato offered. Now he did all the grubby things which Plato obviated
+that her sons might rise to a place in society, to eighteen hundred
+dollars a year and the possession of evening clothes and a knowledge
+of Greek. But the light danced more perversely in his eyes every day
+of his roving.</p>
+
+<p>The following are the several jobs for which Carl first applied in
+Chicago, all the while frightened by the roar and creeping shadows of
+the city:</p>
+
+<p>Tutoring the children of a millionaire brewer; keeping time on the
+Italian and Polack washers of a window-cleaning company; reporting on
+an Evanston newspaper; driving a taxicab, a motor-truck; keeping books
+for a suburban real-estate firm. He had it ground into him, as grit is
+ground into your face when you fall from a bicycle, that every one in
+a city of millions is too busy to talk to a stranger unless he sees a
+sound reason for talking. He changed the <i>Joralemon Dynamite's</i>
+phrase, "accept a position" to "get a job"&mdash;and he got a job, as
+packer in a department store big as the whole of Joralemon. Since the
+street throngs had already come to seem no more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span> personal and
+separable than the bricks in the buildings, he was not so much
+impressed by the crowds in the store as by the number of things for
+women to hang upon themselves. He would ramble in at lunch-time to
+stare at them and marvel, "You can't beat it!"</p>
+
+<p>From eight till twelve-thirty and from one till six or seven, during
+nearly two months, Carl stood in a long, brick-walled, stuffy room,
+inundated by floods of things to pack, wondering why he had ever left
+Plato to become the slave of a Swede foreman. The Great World, as he
+saw it through a tiny hole in one of the opaque wire-glass windows,
+consisted of three bars of a rusty fire-escape-landing against a
+yellow brick wall, with a smudge of black on the wall below the
+landing.</p>
+
+<p>Within two days he was calling the packing-room a prison. The
+ceaseless rattle of speckled gray wrapping-paper, the stamp of feet on
+the gray cement floor, the greasy gray hair of the packer next to him,
+the yellow-stained, cracked, gray wash-bowl that served for thirty
+men, such was his food for dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Because his muscles were made of country earth and air he distanced
+the packers from the slums, however. He became incredibly swift at
+nailing boxes and crates and smashing the heavy wrapping-paper into
+shape about odd bundles. The foreman promised to make Carl his
+assistant. But on the cold December Saturday when his elevation was
+due he glanced out of a window, and farewell all ambition as a packer.</p>
+
+<p>The window belonged to the Florida Bakery and Lunch Room, where Carl
+was chastely lunching. There was dirty sawdust on the floor, six pine
+tables painted red and adorned with catsup-bottles whose mouths were
+clotted with dried catsup, and a long counter scattered with bread and
+white cakes and petrified rolls. Behind the counter a snuffling,
+ill-natured fat woman in slippers handed bags of crullers to
+shrill-voiced children who came in with pennies. The tables were
+packed with over-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>worked and underpaid men, to whom lunch was merely a
+means of keeping themselves from feeling inconveniently empty&mdash;a state
+to which the leadlike viands of the Florida Lunch Room were a certain
+prevention.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was gulping down salty beef stew and bitter coffee served in
+handleless cups half an inch thick. Beside him, elbow jogging elbow,
+was a surly-faced man in overalls. The old German waiters shuffled
+about and bawled, "<i>Zwei</i> bif stew, <i>ein</i> cheese-cake." Dishes
+clattered incessantly. The sicky-sweet scent of old pastry, of
+coffee-rings with stony raisins and buns smeared with dried cocoanut
+fibers, seemed to permeate even the bitter coffee.</p>
+
+<p>Carl got down most of his beef stew, attacked and gave up a chunk of
+hard boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced
+out of the dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big,
+leisurely policeman, was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty,
+rosy-cheeked, smart of hat, impeccable of gloves, with fluffy white
+furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of a
+life bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman,
+she shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of winter, and
+skipped away.</p>
+
+<p>"Bet she'd be a peach to know.... Fat chance I'd have to meet her,
+wrapping up baby-carriages for the North Shore commuters all day! All
+day!... Well, guess I'm going to honorably discharge myself!"</p>
+
+<p>He left the job that afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>His satiny Norse cheeks shone as he raced home through a rising
+blizzard, after dinner at the Florida Lunch Room, where he had allowed
+himself a ten-cent dessert for celebration.</p>
+
+<p>But when he lolled in his hall bedroom, with his eyes attracted, as
+usual, to the three cracks in the blue-painted ceiling which made a
+rough map of Africa, when he visioned lands where there were lions and
+desert instead of department-store packages, his happiness wilted in
+face<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> of the fact that he had only $10.42, with $8.00 due him from the
+store the following Tuesday. Several times he subtracted the $3.00 he
+owed the landlady from $18.42, but the result persisted in being only
+$15.42. He could not make $15.42 appear a reasonable sum with which to
+start life anew.</p>
+
+<p>He had to search for a new job that evening. Only&mdash;he was so tired; it
+was so pleasant to lie there with his sore feet cooling against the
+wall, picturing a hunt in Africa, with native servants bringing him
+things to eat: juicy steaks and French-fried potatoes and gallons of
+ale (a repast which he may have been ignorant in assigning to the
+African jungles, but which seemed peculiarly well chosen, after a
+lunch-room dinner of watery corned-beef hash, burnt German-fried
+potatoes, and indigestible hot mince-pie). His thoughts drifted off to
+Plato. But Carl had a certain resoluteness even in these loose days.
+He considered the man&oelig;uvers for a new job. He desired one which
+would permit him to go to theaters with the girl in white furs whom he
+had seen that noon&mdash;the unknown fairy of his discontent.</p>
+
+<p>It may be noted that he took this life quite seriously. Though he did
+not suppose that he was going to continue dwelling in a hall bedroom,
+yet never did he regard himself as a collegian Haroun-al-Raschid on an
+amusing masquerade, pretending to be no better than the men with whom
+he worked. Carl was no romantic hero incog. He was a workman, and he
+knew it. Was not his father a carpenter? his father's best friend a
+tailor? Had he not been a waiter at Plato?</p>
+
+<p>But not always a workman. Carl had no conception of world-wide
+class-consciousness; he had no pride in being a proletarian. Though
+from Bone's musings and Frazer's lectures he had drawn a vague
+optimism about a world-syndicate of nations, he took it for granted
+that he was going to be rich as soon as he could.</p>
+
+<p>Job. He had to have a job. He got stiffly up from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> iron bed,
+painfully drew on his shoes, after inspecting the hole in the sole of
+the left shoe and the ripped seam at the back of the right. He pulled
+tight the paper-thin overcoat which he had bought at a second-hand
+dealer's shop, and dared a Chicago blizzard, with needles of snow
+thundering by on a sixty-mile gale. Through a street of unutterably
+drab stores and saloons he plowed to the Unallied Taxicab Company's
+garage. He felt lonely, cold, but he observed with ceaseless interest
+the new people, different people, who sloped by him in the dun web of
+the blizzard. The American marveled at a recently immigrated Slav's
+astrachan cap.</p>
+
+<p>He had hung about the Unallied garage on evenings when he was too poor
+to go to vaudeville. He had become decidedly friendly with the night
+washer, a youngster from Minneapolis. Trotting up to the washer, who
+was digging caked snow from the shoes of a car, he blurted:</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Coogan, I've beat my job at &mdash;&mdash;'s. How's chances for getting a
+taxi to drive? You know I know the game."</p>
+
+<p>"You? Driving a taxi?" stammered the washer. "Why, say, there was a
+guy that was a road-tester for the Blix Company and he's got a cousin
+that knows Bathhouse John, and that guy with all his pull has been
+trying to get on drivin' here for the last six months and ain't landed
+it, so you see about how much chance you got!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gosh! it don't look much like I had much chance, for a fact."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell you what I'll do, though. Why don't you get on at some
+automobile factory, and then you could ring in as a chauffeur, soon 's
+you got some recommends you could take to the Y. M. C. A. employment
+bureau." The washer gouged at a clot of ice with his heel, swore
+profusely, and went on: "Here. You go over to the Lodestar Motor
+Company's office, over on La Salle, Monday, and ask for Bill Coogan,
+on the sales end. He's me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> cousin, and you tell him to give you a card
+to the foreman out at the works, and I guess maybe you'll get a job,
+all right."</p>
+
+<p>Tuesday morning, after a severe questioning by the foreman, Carl was
+given a week's try-out without pay at the Lodestar factory. He proved
+to be one of those much-sought freaks in the world of mechanics, a
+natural filer. The uninspired filer, unaware of the niceties of the
+art, saws up and down, whereas the instinctive filer, like Carl, draws
+his file evenly across the metal, and the result fits its socket
+truly. So he was given welcome, paid twenty-five cents an hour, and
+made full member of exactly such a gang as he had known at Plato,
+after he had laughed away the straw boss who tried to make him go ask
+for a left-handed monkey-wrench. He roomed at a machinists'
+boarding-house, and enjoyed the furious discussions over religion and
+the question of air <i>versus</i> water cooling far more than he had ever
+enjoyed the polite jesting at Mrs. Henkel's.</p>
+
+<p>He became friendly with the foreman of the repair-shop, and was
+promised a "chance." While the driver who made the road-tests of the
+cars was ill Carl was called on as a substitute. The older workmen
+warned him that no one could begin road-testing so early and hold the
+job. But Carl happened to drive the vice-president of the firm. He
+discussed bass-fishing in Minnesota with the vice-president, and he
+was retained as road-tester, getting his chauffeur's license. Two
+months later, when he was helping in the overhauling of a car in the
+repair-shop, he heard a full-bodied man with a smart English overcoat
+and a supercilious red face ask curtly of the shop foreman where he
+could get a "crack shuffer, right away, one that can give the traffic
+cops something to do for their money."</p>
+
+<p>The foreman always stopped to scratch his chin when he had to think.
+This process gave Carl time to look up from his repairs and blandly
+remark: "That's me. Want to try me?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Half an hour later Carl was engaged at twenty-five dollars a week as
+the Ruddy One's driver. Before Monday noon he had convinced the Ruddy
+One that he was no servant, but a mechanical expert. He drove the
+Ruddy One to his Investments and Securities office in the morning, and
+back at five; to restaurants in the evening. Not infrequently, with
+the wind whooping about corners, he slept peacefully in the car till
+two in the morning, outside a caf&eacute;. And he was perfectly happy. He was
+at last seeing the Great World. As he man&oelig;uvered along State Street
+he rejoiced in the complications of the traffic and tooted his horn
+unnecessarily. As he waited before tall buildings, at noon, he gazed
+up at them with a superior air of boredom&mdash;because he was so boyishly
+proud of being a part of all this titanic life that he was afraid he
+might show it. He gloried in every new road, in driving along the Lake
+Shore, where the horizon was bounded not by unimaginative land, but by
+restless water.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Ruddy One's favorite roads began to be familiar to Carl, too
+familiar, and he so hated his sot of an employer that he caught
+himself muttering, while driving, "Thank the Lord I sit in front and
+don't have to see that chunk of raw beefsteak he calls a neck."</p>
+
+<p>While he waited for the fifth time before a certain expensive but not
+exclusive roadhouse, with the bouncing giggles of girls inside
+spoiling the spring night, he studied the background as once he had
+studied his father's woodshed. He was not, unfortunately, shocked by
+wine and women. But he was bored by box-trees. There was a smugly
+clipped box-tree on either side of the carriage entrance, the leaves
+like cheap green lacquer in the glare of the arc-light, which brought
+out all the artificiality of the gray-and-black cinder drive. He felt
+that five pilgrimages to even the best of box-trees were enough. It
+would be perfectly unreasonable for a free man to come here to stare
+at box-trees a sixth time. "All right," he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span> growled. "I guess
+my-wandering-boy-to-night is going to beat it again."</p>
+
+<p>While he drove to the garage he pondered: "Is it worth twenty-five
+plunks to me to be able to beat it to-night instead of waiting four
+days till pay-day? Nope. I'm a poor man."</p>
+
+<p>But at 5 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span> he was hanging about the railroad-yards at Hammond,
+recalling the lessons of youth in "flipping trains"; and at seven he
+was standing on the bumpers between two freight-cars, clinging to the
+brake-rod, looking out to the open meadows of Indiana, laughing to see
+farm-houses ringed with apple-blossoms and sweet with April morning.
+The cinders stormed by him. As he swung with the cars, on curves, he
+saw the treacherous wheels grinding beneath him. But to the
+chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck of the trucks he hummed,
+"Never turn back, never tur' back, never tur' back."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_a.jpg" alt="A" width="44" height="50" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;young hobo named Carl Ericson crawled from the rods of an N. &amp; W.
+freight-car at Roanoke, Virginia, on a May day, with spring at full
+tide and the Judas-trees a singing pink on the slopes of the Blue
+Ridge.</p>
+
+<p>"Hm!" grunted the young hobo. "I like these mountains. Guess I'll stay
+here awhile.... Virginia! Plantations and Civil War history and
+Richmond and everything, and me here!"</p>
+
+<p>A frowzy old hobo poked a somnolent head up from a pile of lumber near
+the tracks and yawned welcome to the recruit. "Hello, Slim. How's
+tricks?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty good. What's the best section to batter for a poke-out,
+Billy?"</p>
+
+<p>"To the right, over that way, and straight out."</p>
+
+<p>"Much 'bliged," said Slim&mdash;erstwhile Ericson. "Say, j' know of any
+jobs in this&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Any <i>whats</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Jobs."</p>
+
+<p>"Jobs? You looking for&mdash;&mdash;Say, you beat it. Gwan. Chase yourself. Gwan
+now; don't stand there. You ain't no decent 'bo. You're another of
+those Unfortunate Workmen that's spoiling the profesh." The veteran
+stared at Carl reprovingly, yet with a little sadness, too, at the
+thought of how bitterly he had been deceived in this young comrade,
+and his uncombed head slowly vanished amid the lumber.</p>
+
+<p>Carl grinned and started up-town. He walked into four restaurants. At
+noon, in white jacket, he was bustling about as waiter in the
+dining-room of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span> Waskahominie Hotel, which had "white service" as a
+feature.</p>
+
+<p>Within two days he was boon companion of a guest of the
+Waskahominie&mdash;Parker Heye, an actor famous from Cape Charles to
+Shockeysville, now playing heavies at Roanoke in the Great Riley Tent
+Show, Presenting a Popular Repertoire of Famous Melodramas under
+Canvas, Rain or Shine, Admittance Twenty-five Cents, Section Reserved
+for Colored People, the Best Show under Canvas, This Week Only.</p>
+
+<p>When Parker Heye returned from the theater Carl sat with him in a room
+which had calico-like wall-paper, a sunken bed with a comforter out of
+which oozed a bit of its soiled cotton entrails, a cracked
+water-pitcher on a staggering wash-stand, and a beautiful new cuspidor
+of white china hand-painted with pink moss-roses tied with narrow blue
+ribbon.</p>
+
+<p>Carl listened credulously to Heye's confidences as to how jealous was
+Riley, the actor-manager, of Heye's art, how Heye had "knocked them
+all down" in a stock company at Newport News, and what E. H. Sothern
+had said to him when they met in Richmond as guests of the Seven Pines
+Club.</p>
+
+<p>"Say," rasped Heye, "you're a smart young fellow, good-looking,
+ejucated. Why don't you try to get an engagement? I'll knock you down
+to Riley. The second juvenile 's going to leave on Saturday, and there
+ain't hardly time to get anybody from Norfolk."</p>
+
+<p>"Golly! that 'd be great!" cried Carl, who, like every human being
+since Eden, with the possible exceptions of Calvin and Richard
+Mansfield, had a secret belief that he could be a powerful actor.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll see what I can do for you," said Heye, at parting,
+alternately snapping his suspenders and scratching his head. Though he
+was in his stocking-feet and coat-less, though the back of his neck
+was a scraggle of hair, Parker Heye was preferable to the three Swiss
+waiters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span> snoring in the hot room under the eaves, with its door half
+open, opposite the half-open door of the room where negro chambermaids
+tumbled and snorted in uncouth slumber. Carl's nose wrinkled with
+bitter fastidiousness as he pulled off his clothes, sticky with heat,
+and glared at the swathed forms of the waiters. He was the aristocrat
+among proletarians, going back to His Own People&mdash;of the Great Riley
+Tent Show.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As second juvenile of the Tent Show, Carl received only twelve dollars
+a week, but Mr. Riley made him promises rich as the Orient beryl, and
+permitted him to follow the example of two of the bandsmen and pitch a
+cot on the trampled hay flooring of the dressing-room tent, behind the
+stage. There also Carl prepared breakfast on an alcohol-stove. The
+canvas creaked all night; negroes and small boys stuck inquisitive
+heads under the edge of the canvas. But it was worth it&mdash;to travel on
+again; to have his mornings free except for an hour's rehearsal; to
+climb to upland meadows of Virginia and Kentucky, among the pines and
+laurel and rhododendron; tramping up past the log cabins plastered
+with mud, where pickaninnies stared shyly, past glens shining with
+dogwood, and friendly streams. Once he sat for an hour on Easter Knob,
+gazing through a distant pass whose misty blue he pretended was the
+ocean. Once he heard there were moonshiners back in the hills. He
+talked to bearded Dunkards and their sunbonneted wives; and when he
+found a Confederate veteran he listened to the tale of the defense of
+Richmond, delighted to find that the Boys in Gray were not merely
+names in the history-books.</p>
+
+<p>Of all these discoveries he wrote to his mother, wishing that her
+weary snow-bleached life might know the Southern sun. And the first
+five dollars he saved he sent to her.</p>
+
+<p>But as soon as Carl became an actor Parker Heye grew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> jealous of him,
+and was gratingly contemptuous when he showed him how to make up,
+among the cheap actors jammed in the men's dressing-room, before a
+pine board set on two saw-horses, under the light of a flaring
+kerosene-torch. Carl came to hate Heye and his splotched face, his
+pale, large eyes and yellow teeth and the bang on his forehead, his
+black string tie that was invariably askew, his slovenly blue suit,
+his foppishly shaped tan button shoes with "bulldog" toes. Heye
+invariably jeered: "Don't make up so heavy.... Well, put a <i>little</i>
+rouge on your lips. What d'you think you are? A blooming red-lipped
+Venus?... Try to learn to walk across the stage as if you had <i>one</i>
+leg that wasn't wood, anyway.... It's customary to go to sleep when
+you're playing a listening r&ocirc;le, but don't snore!... Oh, you're a
+swell actor! Think of me swallering your story about having been t'
+college!... Don't make up your eyebrows so heavy, you fool.... Why you
+ever wanted to be an actor&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>The Great Riley agreed with all that Heye said, and marveled with Heye
+that he had ever tried an amateur. Carl found the dressing-room a
+hay-dusty hell. But he enjoyed acting in "The Widow's Penny," "Alabama
+Nell," "The Moonshiner's Daughter," and "The Crook's Revenge" far more
+than he had enjoyed picking phrases out of Shakespeare at a vaguely
+remembered Plato. Since, in Joralemon and Plato, he had been brought
+up on melodrama, he believed as much as did the audience in the plays.
+It was a real mountain cabin from which he fired wonderfully loud guns
+in "The Moonshiner's Daughter"; and when the old mountaineer cried,
+"They ain't going to steal mah gal!" Carl was damp at the eyes, and
+swore with real fervor the oath to protect the girl, sure that in the
+ravine behind the back-drop his bearded foe-men were lurking.</p>
+
+<p>"The Crook's Revenge" was his favorite, for he was cast as a young
+millionaire and wore evening clothes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> (second-hand). He held off a mob
+of shrieking gangsters, crouched behind an overturned table in a
+gambling-den. He coolly stroked the lovely hair of the ing&eacute;nue, Miss
+Evelyn L'Ewysse, with one hand, leveled a revolver with the other, and
+made fearless jests the while, to the infinite excitement of the
+audience, especially of the hyah-hyah-hyahing negroes, whose faces,
+under the flicker of lowered calcium-carbide lights, made a segregated
+strip of yellow-black polka-dotted with white eye-balls.</p>
+
+<p>When the people were before him, respectful to art under canvas, Carl
+could love them; but even the tiniest ragged-breeched darky was bold
+in his curiosity about the strolling players when they appeared
+outside, and Carl was self-conscious about the giggles and stares that
+surrounded him when he stopped on the street or went into a drug-store
+for the comfortable solace of a banana split. He was in a rage
+whenever a well-dressed girl peeped at him amusedly from a one-lunged
+runabout. The staring so flustered him that even the pride of coming
+from Chicago and knowing about motors did not prevent his feeling
+feeble at the knees as he tried to stalk by the grinning motored
+aristocracy. He would return to the show-tent, to hate the few tawdry
+drops and flats&mdash;the patch of green spattered with dirty white which
+variously simulated a daisy-field, a mountainside, and that part of
+Central Park directly opposite the Fifth Avenue residence of the
+millionaire counterfeiter, who, you remember, always comes out into
+the street to plot with his confederates. Carl hated with peculiar
+heartiness the anemic, palely varnished, folding garden bench, which
+figured now as a seat in the moonshiner's den, and now, with a cotton
+leopard-skin draped over it, as a fauteuil in the luxurious
+drawing-room of Mrs. Van Antwerp. The garden bench was, however,
+associated with his learning to make stage love to Miss Evelyn
+L'Ewysse.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was difficult to appear unconscious of fifty small boys all
+smacking their lips in unison, while he kissed the air one centimeter
+in front of Miss L'Ewysse's lips. But he learned the art. Indeed, he
+began to lessen that centimeter of safety.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Evelyn L'Ewysse (christened Lena Ludwig, and heir presumptive to
+one of the best delicatessens in Newport News) reveled in love-making
+on and off. Carl was attracted by her constantly, uncomfortably. She
+smiled at him in the wings, smoothed her fluffy blond hair at him, and
+told him in confidence that she was a high-school graduate, that she
+was used to much, oh, <i>much</i> better companies, and was playing under
+canvas for a lark. She bubbled: "<i>Ach</i>, Louie, say, ain't it hot!
+Honest, Mr. Ericson, I don't see how you stand it like you do.... Say,
+honest, that was swell business you pulled in the third act last
+night.... Say, I know what let's do&mdash;let's get up a swell act and get
+on the Peanut Circuit. We'd hit Broadway with a noise like seventeen
+marine bands.... Say, honest, Mr. Ericson, you do awful well for&mdash;&mdash;I
+bet you ain't no amachoor. I bet you been on before."</p>
+
+<p>He devoured it.</p>
+
+<p>One night, finding that Miss Evelyn made no comment on his holding her
+hand, he lured her out of the tent during a long wait, trembled, and
+kissed her. Her fingers gripped his shoulders agitatedly, plucked at
+his sleeve as she kissed him back. She murmured, "Oh, you hadn't ought
+to do that." But afterward she would kiss him every time they were
+alone, and she told him with confidential giggles of Parker Heye's
+awkward attempts to win her. Heye's most secret notes she read, till
+Carl seriously informed her that she was violating a trust. Miss
+Evelyn immediately saw the light and promised she would "never, never,
+never do anythin' like that again, and, honest, she hadn't realized
+she was doing anythin' dishon'able, but Heye is such an old pest";
+which was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> an excuse for her weeping on his shoulder and his kissing
+the tears away.</p>
+
+<p>All day he looked forward to their meetings. Yet constantly the law of
+the adventurer, which means the instinct of practical decency, warned
+him that this was no amour for him; that he must not make love where
+he did not love; that this good-hearted vulgarian was too kindly to
+tamper with and too absurd to love. Only&mdash;&mdash;And again his breath would
+draw in with swift exultation as he recalled how elastic were her
+shoulders to stroke.</p>
+
+<p>It was summer now, and they were back in Virginia, touring the Eastern
+Shore. Carl, the prairie-born, had been within five miles of the open
+Atlantic, though he had not seen it. Along the endless flat
+potato-fields, broken by pine-groves under whose sultry shadow negro
+cabins sweltered, the heat clung persistently. The show-tent was
+always filled with a stale scent of people.</p>
+
+<p>At the town of Nankiwoc the hotel was not all it might have been.
+Evelyn L'Ewysse announced that she was "good and sick of eating a
+vaudeville dinner with the grub acts stuck around your plate in a lot
+of birds' bath-tubs&mdash;little mess of turnips and a dab of spinach and a
+fried cockroach. And when it comes to sleeping another night on a bed
+like a gridiron, no&mdash;thank&mdash;<i>you</i>! And believe me, if I see that old
+rube hotel-keeper comb his whiskers at the hall hat-rack again&mdash;he
+keeps a baby comb in his vest pocket with a lead-pencil and a cigar
+some drummer gave him&mdash;if I have to watch him comb that alfalfa again
+I'll bite his ears off and get pinched by the S. P. C. A.!"</p>
+
+<p>With Mrs. Lubley, the old lady and complacent unofficial chaperon of
+the show, Eve was going to imitate Carl and the two bandsmen, and
+sleep in the dressing-room tent, over half of which was devoted to the
+women of the company.</p>
+
+<p>Every day Carl warned himself that he must go no farther, but every
+night as Eve and he parted, to sleep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> with only a canvas partition
+between them, he cursed the presence of the show chaperon, and of the
+two bandsmen, always distressingly awake and talking till after
+midnight.</p>
+
+<p>A hot June night. The whole company had been invited to a dance at the
+U. C. V. Hall; the two bandsmen were going; the chaperon&mdash;lively old
+lady with experience on the burlesque circuit&mdash;was gaily going. Carl
+and Eve were not. It had taken but one glance between them to decide
+that.</p>
+
+<p>They sat outside the silent tent, on a wardrobe trunk. What manner of
+night it was, whether starlit or sullen, Carl did not know; he was
+aware only that it was oppressive, and that Eve was in his arms in the
+darkness. He kissed her moist, hot neck. He babbled incoherently of
+the show people, but every word he said meant that he was palpitating
+because her soft body was against his. He knew&mdash;and he was sure that
+she knew&mdash;that when they discussed Heye's string tie and pretended to
+laugh, they were agitatedly voicing their intoxication.</p>
+
+<p>His voice unsteady, Carl said: "Jiminy! it's so hot, Eve! I'm going to
+take off this darn shirt and collar and put on a soft shirt. S-say,
+w-why don't you put on a kimono or something? Be so much cooler."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know as I ought to&mdash;&mdash;" She was frightened, awed at
+Bacchic madness. "D-do you think it would be all right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? Guess anybody's got a right to get cool&mdash;night like this.
+Besides, they won't be back till 4 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span> And you got to get cool. Come
+on."</p>
+
+<p>And he knew&mdash;and he was sure that she knew&mdash;that all he said was
+pretense. But she rose and said, nebulously, as she stood before him,
+ruffling his hair: "Well, I would like to get cool. If you think it's
+all right&mdash;&mdash;I'll put on something cooler, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>She went. Carl could hear a rustling in the women's end of the
+dressing-room tent. Fevered, he listened to it. Fevered, he changed to
+an outing-shirt, open at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span> throat. He ran out, not to miss a moment
+with her.... She had not yet come. He was too overwrought to heed a
+small voice in him, a voice born of snow-fields colored with sunset
+and trained in the quietudes of Henry Frazer's house, which insisted:
+"Go slow! Stop!" A louder voice throbbed like the pulsing of the
+artery in his neck, "She's coming!"</p>
+
+<p>Through the darkness her light garment swished against the long grass.
+He sprang up. Then he was holding her, bending her head back. He
+exulted to find that his gripping hand was barred from the smoothness
+of her side only by thin silk that glided and warmed under his
+fingers. She sat on his knees and snuggled her loosened hair
+tinglingly against his bare chest. He felt that she was waiting for
+him to go on.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he could not, would not, go on.</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest, we mustn't!" he mourned.</p>
+
+<p>"O Carl!" she sobbed, and stopped his words with clinging lips.</p>
+
+<p>He found himself waiting till she should finish the kiss that he might
+put an end to this.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps he was checked by provincial prejudices about chivalry. But
+perhaps he had learned a little self-control. In any case, he had
+stopped for a second to think, and the wine of love was gone flat. He
+wished she would release him. Also, her hair was tickling his ear. He
+waited, patiently, till she should finish the kiss.</p>
+
+<p>Her lips drew violently from his, and she accused, "You don't want to
+kiss me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Look here; I want to kiss you, all right&mdash;Lord&mdash;&mdash;" For a second his
+arms tightened; then he went on, cold: "But we'll both be good and
+sorry if we go too far. It isn't just a cowardly caution. It's&mdash;&mdash;Oh,
+you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, yes, yes, we mustn't go too far, Carl. But can't we just sit
+like this? O sweetheart, I am so tired! I want somebody to care for me
+a little. That isn't wicked, is it? I want you to take me in your arms
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span> hold me close, close, and comfort me. I want so much to be
+comforted. We needn't go any further, need we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh now, good Lord! Eve, look here: don't you know we can't go on and
+not go farther? I'm having a hard enough time&mdash;&mdash;" He sprang up,
+shakily lighting a cigarette. He stroked her hair and begged: "Please
+go, Eve. I guess I haven't got very good control over myself. Please.
+You make me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, yes, sure! Blame it on me! Sure! I made you let me put on a
+kimono! I'm leading your pure white shriveled peanut of a soul into
+temptation!... Don't you ever dare speak to me again! Oh,
+you&mdash;you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She flounced away.</p>
+
+<p>Carl caught her, in two steps. "See here, child," he said, gravely,
+"if you go off like this we'll both be miserable.... You remember how
+happy we were driving out to the old plantation at Powhasset?"</p>
+
+<p>"O Gawd! won't you men never say anything original? Remember it? Of
+course I remember it! What do you suppose I wore that little branch of
+laurel you picked for me, wore it here, here, at my breast, and I
+thought you'd <i>care</i> if I hid it here where there wasn't any grease
+paint, and you don't&mdash;you don't care&mdash;and we picnicked, and I sang all
+the time I put up those sandwiches and hid the grape-fruit in the
+basket to surprise you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"O darling Eve, I don't know how to say how sorry I am, so terribly
+sorry I've started things going! It is my fault. But can't you see
+I've got to stop it before it's too late, just for that reason? Let's
+be chums again."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. Her hand crept to his, slid over it, drew it up to
+her breast. She was swaying nearer to him. He pulled his hand free and
+fled to his tent.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps his fiercest gibe at himself was that he had had to play the
+r&ocirc;le of virgin Galahad rejecting love, which is praised in books and
+ridiculed in clubs. He mocked at his sincere desire to be fair to Eve.
+And between mockeries he strained to hear her moving beyond the
+canvas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> partition. He was glad when the bandsmen came larruping home
+from the dance.</p>
+
+<p>Next day she went out of her way to be chilly to him. He did not woo
+her friendship. He had resigned from the Great Riley Show, and he was
+going&mdash;going anywhere, so long as he kept going.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_h.jpg" alt="H" width="41" height="50" /></div>
+<p>e had been a jolly mechanic again, in denim overalls and jumper and a
+defiant black skull-cap with long, shiny vizor; the tender of the
+motor-boat fleet at an Ontario summer hotel. One day he had looked up,
+sweating and greasy, to see Howard Griffin, of Plato, parading past in
+white flannels. He had muttered: "I don't want Them to know I've just
+been bumming around. I'll go some place else. And I'll do something
+worth while." Now he was on the train for New York, meditating
+impersonally on his uselessness, considering how free of moss his
+rolling had kept him. He could think of no particularly masterful plan
+for accumulating moss. If he had not bought a ticket through to New
+York he would have turned back, to seek a position in one of the great
+automobile factories that now, this early autumn of 1906, were
+beginning to distinguish Detroit. Well, he had enough money to last
+for one week in New York. He would work in an automobile agency there;
+later he would go to Detroit, and within a few years be president of a
+motor company, rich enough to experiment with motor-boats and to laugh
+at Howard Griffin or any other Platonian.</p>
+
+<p>So he sketched his conquering entrance into New York. Unfortunately it
+was in the evening, and, having fallen asleep at Poughkeepsie, he did
+not awake till a brakeman shook his shoulder at the Grand Central
+Station. He had heard of the old Grand Union Hotel, and drowsily, with
+the stuffy nose and sandy eyes and unclean feeling about the teeth
+that overpower one who sleeps in a smoking-car, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> staggered across
+to the hotel and spent his first conquering night in filling a dollar
+room with vulgar sounds of over-weary slumber.</p>
+
+<p>But in the morning, when he stared along Forty-second Street; when he
+breakfasted at a Childs' restaurant, like a gigantic tiled bath-room,
+and realized that the buckwheat cakes were New York buckwheats; when
+he sighted the noble <i>Times</i> Building and struck out for Broadway (the
+magic name that promised marble palaces, even if it provided two-story
+shacks); when he bustled into a carburetor agency and demanded a
+job&mdash;then he found the gateway of wonder.</p>
+
+<p>But he did not find a job.</p>
+
+<p>Eight nights after his arrival he quietly paid his bill at the hotel;
+tipped a curly-headed bell-boy; checked his baggage, which consisted
+of a shirt, a razor, and an illustrated catalogue of automobile
+accessories; put his tooth-brush in his pocket; bought an evening
+paper in order to feel luxurious; and walked down to the Charity
+Organization Society, with ten cents in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>In the Joint Application Bureau, filled with desks and
+filing-cabinets, where poor men cease to be men and become Cases, Carl
+waited on a long bench till it was his turn to tell his troubles to a
+keen, kindly, gray-bearded man behind a roll-top desk. He asked for
+work. Work was, it seemed, the one thing the society could not give.
+He received a ticket to the Municipal Lodging House.</p>
+
+<p>This was not the hygienic hostelry of to-day, but a barracks on First
+Avenue. Carl had a chunk of bread with too much soda in it, and coffee
+with too little coffee in it, from a contemptuous personage in a white
+jacket, who, though his cuffs were grimy, showed plainly that he was
+too good to wait on bums. Carl leaned his elbows on the long scrubbed
+table and chewed the bread of charity sullenly, resolving to catch a
+freight next day and get out of town.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He slept in a narrow bunk near a man with consumption. The room reeked
+of disinfectants and charity.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The East Side of New York. A whirlwind of noise and smell and hovering
+shadows. The jargon of Jewish matrons in brown shawls and orthodox
+wigs, chaffering for cabbages and black cotton stockings and gray
+woolen undershirts with excitable push-cart proprietors who had beards
+so prophetic that it was startling to see a frivolous cigarette amid
+the reverend mane. The scent of fried fish and decaying bits of kosher
+meat, and hallways as damnably rotten of floor as they were profitable
+to New York's nicest circles. The tall gloom of six-story tenements
+that made a prison wall of dulled yellow, bristling with bedding-piled
+fire-escapes and the curious heads of frowzy women. A potpourri of
+Russian signs, Yiddish newspapers, synagogues with six-pointed gilt
+stars, bakeries with piles of rye bread crawling with caraway-seeds,
+shops for renting wedding finery that looked as if it could never fit
+any one, second-hand furniture-shops with folding iron beds, a filthy
+baby holding a baby slightly younger and filthier, mangy cats slinking
+from pile to pile of rubbish, and a withered geranium in a tin can
+whose label was hanging loose and showed rust-stains amid the dry
+paste on its back. Everywhere crowds of voluble Jews in dark clothes,
+and noisily playing children that catapulted into your legs. The
+lunger-blocks in which we train the victims of Russian tyranny to
+appreciate our freedom. A whirlwind of alien ugliness and foul smells
+and incessant roar and the deathless ambition of young Jews to know
+Ibsen and syndicalism. It swamped the courage of hungry Carl as he
+roamed through Rivington Street and Essex and Hester, vainly seeking
+jobs from shopkeepers too poor to be able to bathe.</p>
+
+<p>He felt that he, not these matter-of-fact crowds, was alien. He was
+hungry and tired. There was nothing heroic to do&mdash;just go hungry.
+There was no place<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span> where he could sit down. The benches of the tiny
+hard-trodden parks were full.... If he could sit down, if he could
+rest one little hour, he would be able to go and find freight-yards,
+where there would be the clean clang of bells and rattle of trucks
+instead of gabbled Yiddish. Then he would ride out into the country,
+away from the brooding shadows of this town, where there were no
+separable faces, but only a fog of ceaselessly moving crowds....</p>
+
+<p>Late that night he stood aimlessly talking to a hobo on a dirty corner
+of the Bowery, where the early September rain drizzled through the
+gaunt structure of the Elevated. He did not feel the hunger so much
+now, but he was meekly glad to learn from his new friend, the hobo,
+that in one more hour he could get food in the bread-line. He felt
+very boyish, and would have confided the fact that he was starving to
+any woman, to any one but this transcontinental hobo, the tramp royal,
+trained to scorn hunger. Because he was one of them he watched
+incuriously the procession of vagrants, in coats whose collars were
+turned up and fastened with safety-pins against the rain. The vagrants
+shuffled rapidly by, their shoulders hunched, their hands always in
+their trousers pockets, their shoe-heels always ground down and muddy.</p>
+
+<p>And incuriously he watched a saloon-keeper, whose face was plastered
+over with a huge mustache, come out and hang a sign, "Porter wanted in
+<span class="smcap">a.m.</span>," on the saloon door.</p>
+
+<p>As he slouched away to join the bread-line, a black deuce in the
+world's discard, Carl was wondering how he could get that imperial
+appointment as porter in a Bowery saloon. He almost forgot it while
+waiting in the bread-line, so occupied was he in hating two collegians
+who watched the line with that open curiosity which nice, clean,
+respectable young men suppose the poor never notice. He restrained his
+desire to go over and quote Greek at them, because they were ignorant
+and not to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> blame for being sure that they were of clay superior to
+any one in a bread-line. And partly because he had forgotten his
+Greek.</p>
+
+<p>He came back to the Bowery briskly, alone, with the manhood of a loaf
+of bread in him. He was going to get that job as porter. He planned
+his campaign as a politician plans to become a statesman. He slipped
+the sign, "Porter wanted in <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>," from its nail and hid it beneath
+his coat. He tramped the block all night and, as suspicious characters
+always do to avoid seeming suspicious, he begged a match from a
+policeman who was keeping an eye on him. The policeman chatted with
+him about baseball and advised him to keep away from liquor and
+missions.</p>
+
+<p>At 5 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span> Carl was standing at the saloon door. When the bartender
+opened it Carl bounced in, slightly dizzy, conscious of the slime of
+mud on his fraying trouser-ends.</p>
+
+<p>The saloon had an air of cheap crime and a floor covered with clotted
+sawdust. The bar was a slab of dark-brown wood, so worn that
+semicircles of slivers were showing. The nasty gutter was still filled
+with cigar-ends and puddles of beer and bits of free-lunch cheese.</p>
+
+<p>"I want that job as porter," said Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you do, do you? Well, you wait and see who else comes to get it."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody else is going to come."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know they ain't?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl drew the sign from beneath his coat and carefully laid it on the
+bar. "That's why."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you got nerve. You got the nerve of a Republican on Fourteenth
+Street, like the fellow says. You must want it. Well, all right, I
+guess you can have it if the boss don't kick."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was accepted by the "boss," who gave him a quarter and told him
+to go out and get a "regular feed." He hummed over breakfast. He had
+been accepted again by all men when he had been accepted by the
+proprietor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> of a Bowery saloon. He was going to hold this job, no
+matter what happened. The rolling stone was going to gather moss.</p>
+
+<p>For three months Carl took seriously the dirtiest things in the world.
+He worked sixteen hours a day for eight dollars a week, cleaning
+cuspidors, scrubbing the floor, scattering clean sawdust, cutting the
+more rotten portions off the free-lunch meat. As he slopped about with
+half-frozen, brittle rags, hoboes pushed him aside and spat on the
+floor he had just cleaned.</p>
+
+<p>Of his eight dollars a week he saved four. He rented an airshaft
+bedroom in the flat of a Jewish sweatshop worker for one dollar and
+seventy-five cents a week. It was occupied daytimes by a cook in an
+all-night restaurant, who had taken a bath in 1900 when at Coney
+Island on an excursion of the Pip O'Gilligan Association. The room was
+unheated, and every night during January Carl debated whether to go to
+bed with his shoes on or off.</p>
+
+<p>The sub-landlord's daughter was a dwarfish, blotched-faced, passionate
+child of fifteen, with moist eyes and very low-cut waists of coarse
+voile (which she pronounced "voyle"). She would stop Carl in the dark
+"railroad" hallway and, chewing gum rapidly, chatter about the
+aisleman at Wanamacy's, and what a swell time there would be at the
+coming ball of the Thomas J. Monahan Literary and Social Club, tickets
+twenty-five cents for lady and gent, including hat-check. She let Carl
+know that she considered him close-fisted for never taking her to the
+movies on Sunday afternoons, but he patted her head and talked to her
+like a big brother and kept himself from noticing that she had
+clinging hands and would be rather pretty, and he bought her a
+wholesome woman's magazine to read&mdash;not an entirely complete solution
+to the problem of what to do with the girl whom organized society is
+too busy to nourish, but the best he could contrive just then.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sundays, when he was free for part of the day, he took his book of
+recipes for mixed drinks to the reading-room of the Tompkins Square
+library and gravely studied them, for he was going to be a bartender.</p>
+
+<p>Every night when he staggered from the comparatively clean air of the
+street into the fetid chill of his room he asked himself why he&mdash;son
+of Northern tamaracks and quiet books&mdash;went on with this horrible
+imitation of living; and each time answered himself that, whether
+there was any real reason or not, he was going to make good on one job
+at least, and that the one he held. And admonished himself that he was
+very well paid for a saloon porter.</p>
+
+<p>If Carl had never stood in the bread-line, if he had never been
+compelled to clean a saloon gutter artistically, in order to keep from
+standing in that bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the
+commonplaceness for which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry
+Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know
+how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did
+not at the time feel that he was debased. He lived twenty-four hours a
+day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by
+the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to
+learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself was so
+much less desirable than driving a car or wandering through the
+moonlight with Eve L'Ewysse in days wonderful and lost that, to endure
+it, to conquer it, he had to develop a control over temper and speech
+and body which was to stay with him in windy mornings of daring.</p>
+
+<p>Within three months Carl had become assistant bar-keeper, and now he
+could save eight dollars a week. He bought a couple of motor magazines
+and went to one vaudeville show and kept his sub-landlord's daughter
+from running off with a cadet, wondering how soon she would do it in
+any case, and receiving a depressing insight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span> into the efficiency of
+society for keeping in the mire most of the people born there.</p>
+
+<p>Three months later, at the end of winter, he was ready to start for
+Panama.</p>
+
+<p>He was going to Panama because he had read in a Sunday newspaper of
+the Canal's marvels of engineering and jungle.</p>
+
+<p>He had avoided making friends. There was no one to give him farewell
+when he emerged from the muck. But he had one task to perform&mdash;to
+settle with the Saloon Snob.</p>
+
+<p>Petey McGuff was the name of this creature. He was an oldish and
+wicked man, born on the Bowery. He had been a heavy-weight
+prize-fighter in the days of John L. Sullivan; then he had met John,
+and been, ever since, an honest crook who made an excellent living by
+conducting a boxing-school in which the real work was done by
+assistants. He resembled a hound with a neat black bow tie, and he
+drooled tobacco-juice down his big, raw-looking, moist, bristly,
+too-masculine chin. Every evening from eleven to midnight Petey McGuff
+sat at the round table in the mildewed corner at the end of the bar,
+drinking old-fashioned whisky cocktails made with Bourbon, playing
+Canfield, staring at the nude models pasted on the milky surface of an
+old mirror, and teasing Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"Here, boy, come 'ere an' wipe off de whisky you spilled.... Come on,
+you tissy-cat. Get on de job.... You look like Sunday-school Harry.
+Mamma's little rosy-cheeked boy.... Some day I'm going to bust your
+beezer. Gawd! it makes me sick to sit here and look at dose
+goily-goily cheeks.... Come 'ere, Lizzie, an' wipe dis table again. On
+de jump, daughter."</p>
+
+<p>Carl held himself in. Hundreds of times he snarled to himself: "I
+<i>won't</i> hit him! I will make good on <i>this</i> job, anyway." He created a
+grin which he could affix easily.</p>
+
+<p>Now he was leaving. He had proven that he could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span> hold a job; had
+answered the unspoken criticisms from Plato, from Chicago garages,
+from the Great Riley Show. For the first time since he had deserted
+college he had been able to write to his father, to answer the grim
+carpenter's unspoken criticisms of the son who had given up his chance
+for an "education." And proudly he had sent to his father a little
+check. He had a beautiful new fifteen-dollar suit of blue serge at
+home. In his pocket was his ticket&mdash;steerage by the P. R. R. line to
+Colon&mdash;and he would be off for bluewater next noon. His feet danced
+behind the bar as he filled schooners of beer and scraped off their
+foam with a celluloid ruler. He saw himself in Panama, with a clean
+man's job, talking to cosmopolitan engineers against a background of
+green-and-scarlet jungle. And, oh yes, he was going to beat Petey
+McGuff that evening, and get back much of the belligerent self-respect
+which he had been drawing off into schooners with the beer.</p>
+
+<p>Old Petey rolled in at two minutes past eleven, warmed his hands at
+the gas-stove, poked disapprovingly at the pretzels on the free-lunch
+counter, and bawled at Carl: "Hey, keep away from dat cash-register!
+Wipe dem goilish tears away, will yuh, Agnes, and bring us a little
+health-destroyer and a couple matches."</p>
+
+<p>Carl brought a whisky cocktail.</p>
+
+<p>"Where's de matches, you tissy-cat?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl wiped his hands on his apron and beamed: "Well, so the old soak
+is getting too fat and lazy to reach over on the bar and get his own!
+You'll last quick now!"</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, is dat so!... For de love of Mike, d'yuh mean to tell me Lizzie
+is talking back? Whadda yuh know about dat! Whadda yuh know about dat!
+You'll get sick on us here, foist t'ing we know. Where was yuh
+hoited?"</p>
+
+<p>Petey McGuff's smile was absolutely friendly. It made Carl hesitate,
+but it had become one of the principles of cosmic ethics that he had
+to thump Petey, and he growled:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span> "I'll give you all the talking back
+you want, you big stiff. I'm getting through to-night. I'm going to
+Panama."</p>
+
+<p>"No, straight, is dat straight?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I said."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, dat's fine, boy. I been watching yuh, and I sees y' wasn't cut
+out to be no saloon porter. I made a little bet with meself you was
+ejucated. Why, y'r cuffs ain't even doity&mdash;not very doity. Course you
+kinda need a shave, but dem little blond hairs don't show much. I seen
+you was a gentleman, even if de bums didn't. You're too good t' be a
+rum-peddler. Glad y're going, boy, mighty glad. Sit down. Tell us
+about it. We'll miss yuh here. I was just saying th' other night to
+Mike here dere ain't one feller in a hundred could 'a' stood de
+kiddin' from an old he-one like me and kep' his mout' shut and grinned
+and said nawthin' to nobody. Dat's w'at wins fights. But, say, boy,
+I'll miss yuh, I sure will. I get to be kind of lonely as de boys drop
+off&mdash;like boozers always does. Oh, hell, I won't spill me troubles
+like an old tissy-cat.... So you're going to Panama? I want yuh to sit
+down and tell me about it. Whachu taking, boy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just a cigar.... I'll miss you, too, Petey. Tell you what I'll do.
+I'll send you some post-cards from Panama."</p>
+
+<p>Next noon as the S.S. <i>Panama</i> pulled out of her ice-lined dock Carl
+saw an old man shivering on the wharf and frantically waving
+good-by&mdash;Petey McGuff.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>he S.S. <i>Panama</i> had passed Watling's Island and steamed into
+story-land. On the white-scrubbed deck aft of the wheel-house Carl sat
+with his friends of the steerage&mdash;sturdy men all, used to open places;
+old Ed, the rock-driller, long, Irish, huge-handed, irate, kindly;
+Harry, the young mechanic from Cleveland. Ed and an oiler were
+furiously debating about the food aboard:</p>
+
+<p>"Aw, it's rotten, all of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Ed, how about the chicken they give the steerage on
+Sunday?"</p>
+
+<p>"Chicken? I didn't see no chicken. I see some sea-gull, though. No
+wonder they ain't no more sea-gulls following us. They shot 'em and
+cooked 'em on us."</p>
+
+<p>"Say," mused Harry, "makes me think of when I was ship-building in
+Philly&mdash;no, it was when I was broke in K. C.&mdash;and a guy&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl smiled in content, exulting in the talk of the men of the road,
+exulting in his new blue serge suit, his new silver-gray tie with no
+smell of the saloon about it, finger-nails that were growing pink
+again&mdash;and the sunset that made glorious his petty prides. A vast
+plane of unrippling plum-colored sea was set with mirror-like pools
+where floated tree-branches so suffused with light that the glad heart
+blessed them. His first flying-fish leaped silvery from silver sea,
+and Carl cried, almost aloud, "This is what I've been wanting all my
+life!"</p>
+
+<p>Aloud, to Harry: "Say, what's it like in Kansas? I'm going down
+through there some day." He spoke harshly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> But the real Carl was
+robed in light and the murmurous wake of evening, with the tropics
+down the sky-line.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Lying in his hot steerage bunk, stripped to his under-shirt, Carl
+peered through the "state-room" window to the swishing night sea,
+conscious of the rolling of the boat, of the engines shaking her, of
+bolts studding the white iron wall, of life-preservers over his head,
+of stokers singing in the gangway as they dumped the clinkers
+overboard. The <i>Panama</i> was pounding on, on, on, and he rejoiced,
+"This is just what I've wanted, always."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>They are creeping in toward the wharf at Colon. He is seeing Panama!
+First a point of palms, then the hospital, the red roofs of the I. C.
+C. quarters at Cristobal, and negroes on the sun-blistered wharf.</p>
+
+<p>At last he is free to go ashore in wonderland&mdash;a medley of Colon and
+Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like
+monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen
+in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads
+and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in
+lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of
+their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with
+silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched
+pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island
+pineapples. Carl gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French
+peasant laborers and indignant Irish foremen and German
+concessionaries with dueling scars and high collars. Gold Spanish
+signs and Spiggoty money and hotels with American cuspidors and
+job-hunters; tin roofs and arcades; shops open to the street in front,
+but mysterious within, giving glimpses of the canny Chinese
+proprietors smoking tiny pipes. Trains from towns along the Canal, and
+sometimes the black funeral-car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+Gambling-houses where it is considered humorous to play "Where Is My
+Wandering Boy To-night?" on the phonograph while wandering boys sit at
+poker; and less cleanly places, named after the various states. Negro
+wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddled tunes older than voodoo;
+Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green bananas; memories
+of the Spanish Main and Morgan's raid, of pieces of eight and
+cutlasses ho! Capes of cocoanut palms running into a welter of surf;
+huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases land-crabs scuttle
+with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist, still air, and
+suggests the corpses of disappeared men found half devoured.</p>
+
+<p>Then, for contrast, the transplanted North, with its seriousness about
+the Service; the American avenues and cool breezes of Cristobal, where
+fat, bald chiefs of the I. C. C. drive pompously with political guests
+who, in 1907, are still incredulous about the success of the military
+socialism of the Canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston,
+seated in Grand Rapids golden-oak rockers on the screened porches of
+bungalows, talk of hats, and children, and mail-orders, and cards, and
+The Colonel, and malarial fever, and Chautauqua, and the Culebra
+slide.</p>
+
+<p>Colon! A kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white,
+warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high
+endeavor of the Canal and whispers from the unknown Bush; drenched
+with sudden rain like escaping steam, or languid under the desert
+glare of the sky, where hangs a gyre of buzzards whose slow circles
+are stiller than death and calmer than wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord!" sighs Carl Ericson from Joralemon, "this is what I've wanted
+ever since I was a kid."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At Pedro Miguel, which the Canal employees always called "Peter
+McGill," he found work, first as an unofficial time-keeper; presently,
+after examinations, as a stationery engineer on the roll of the I. C.
+C. Within<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> a month he showed no signs of his Bowery experiences beyond
+a shallow hollow in his smooth cheeks. He lived in quarters like a
+college dormitory, communistic and jolly, littered with shoes and
+cube-cut tobacco and college banners; clean youngsters dropping in for
+an easy chat&mdash;and behind it all, the mystery of the Bush. His
+room-mate, a conductor on the P. R. R., was a globe-trotter, and
+through him Carl met the Adventurers, whom he had been questing ever
+since he had run away from Oscar Ericson's woodshed. There was a young
+engineer from Boston Tech., who swore every morning at 7.07 (when it
+rained boiling water as enthusiastically as though it had never done
+such a thing before) that he was going to Chihuahua, mining. There was
+Cock-eye Corbett, an ex-sailor, who was immoral and a Lancashireman,
+and knew more about blackbirding and copra and Kanakas, and the
+rum-holes from Nagasaki to Mombasa, than it is healthy for a civil
+servant to know.</p>
+
+<p>Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers,
+who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St.
+John's College, China, and a sub-contractor for railroad construction
+in Montana, and who was now a minor clerk in the cool, lofty offices
+of the Materials and Supplies Department, came over from Colon,
+relaxed in a tilted-back chair, and fingered the Masonic charm on his
+horsehair watch-guard, while he talked with the P. R. R. conductor and
+the others about ruby-hunting and the Relief of Peking, and Where is
+Hector Macdonald? and Is John Orth dead? and Shall we try to climb
+Chimborazo? and Creussot guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal
+lore. These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside
+information. The others drawled about various strange things which
+make a man discontented and bring him no good.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery
+and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an
+authority on motors for dirigibles,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span> about which he read in
+<i>Aeronautics</i> at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this
+time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown
+even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful
+machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a
+motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim
+had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines;
+lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his
+dirigible, and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous
+aeroplane; and in May, 1907, a sculptor named Delagrange flew over six
+hundred feet in France. Various crank inventors were "solving the
+problem of flight" every day. Man was fluttering on the edge of his
+earthy nest, ready to plunge into the air. Carl was able to make
+technical-sounding predictions which caught the imaginations of the
+restless children.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The adventurers kept moving. The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he
+was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed in
+Tahiti, whence he sent Carl one post-card, worded, "What price T. T.?"
+The engineer from Boston Tech. kept his oath about mining in
+Chihuahua. He got the appointment as assistant superintendent of the
+Tres Reyes mine&mdash;and he took Carl with him.</p>
+
+<p>Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and
+hill. He found rare days, purposeless and wonderful as the voyages of
+ancient Norse Ericsens; days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly
+balancing a .32-20 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack; the joy of
+repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons
+with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at
+night under an exhilarating splendor of stars. It never seemed to him
+that the machinery desecrated the mountains' stern grandeur.</p>
+
+<p>Stolen hours he gave to the building of box-kites with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> cambered
+wings, after rapturously learning, in the autumn of 1908, that in
+August a lanky American mechanic named Wilbur Wright had startled the
+world by flying an aeroplane many miles publicly in France; that
+before this, on July 4, 1908, another Yankee mechanic, Glenn Curtiss,
+had covered nearly a mile, for the <i>Scientific American</i> trophy, after
+a series of trials made in company with Alexander Graham Bell, J. A.
+D. McCurdy, "Casey" Baldwin, and Augustus Post.</p>
+
+<p>He might have gone on until death, dealing with excitable greasers and
+hysterical machinery, but for the coming of a new mine superintendent&mdash;one
+of those Englishmen, stolid, red-mustached, pipe-smoking, eye-brow-lifting,
+who at first seem beefily dull, but prove to have known every one from
+George Moore to Marconi. He inspected Carl hundreds of times, then told him
+that the period had come when he ought to attack a city, conquer it, build
+up a reputation cumulatively; that he needed a contrast to Platonians and
+Bowery bums and tropical tramps, and even to his beloved engineers.</p>
+
+<p>"You can do everything but order a <i>petit d&icirc;ner &agrave; deux</i>, but you must
+learn to do that, too. Go make ten thousand pounds and study Pall Mall
+and the boulevards, and then come back to us in Mexico. I'll be sorry
+to have you go&mdash;with your damned old silky hair like a woman's and
+your wink when Guittrez comes up here to threaten us&mdash;but don't let
+the hinterland enslave you too early."</p>
+
+<p>A month later, in January, 1909, aged twenty-three and a half, Carl
+was steaming out of El Paso for California, with one thousand dollars
+in savings, a beautiful new Stetson hat, and an ambition to build up a
+motor business in San Francisco. As the desert sky swam with orange
+light and a white-browed woman in the seat behind him hummed Musetta's
+song from "La Boh&egrave;me" he was homesick for the outlanders, whom he was
+deserting that he might stick for twenty years in one street and grub
+out a hundred thousand dollars.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_o.jpg" alt="O" width="49" height="50" /></div>
+<p>n a grassy side-street of Oakland, California, was "Jones &amp; Ericson's
+Garage: Gasoline and Repairs: Motor Cycles and Bicycles for Rent:
+Oakland Agents for Bristow Magnetos."</p>
+
+<p>It was perhaps the cleverest garage in Oakland and Berkeley for the
+quick repairing of motor-cycles; and newly wed owners of family
+runabouts swore that Carl Ericson could make a carburetor out of a
+tomato-can, and even be agreeable when called on for repairs at 2 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>
+He had doubled old Jones's business during the nine months&mdash;February
+to November, 1909&mdash;that they had been associated.</p>
+
+<p>Carl believed that he thought of nothing but work and the restaurants
+and theaters of civilization. No more rolling for him until he had
+gathered moss! He played that he was a confirmed business man. The
+game had hypnotized him for nearly a year. He whistled as he cleaned
+plugs, and glanced out at the eucalyptus-trees and the sunny road,
+without wanting to run away. But just to-day, just this glorious
+rain-cleansed November day, with high blue skies and sunlight on the
+feathery pepper-trees, he was going to sneak away from work and have a
+celebration all by himself.</p>
+
+<p>He was going down to San Mateo to see his first flying-machine!</p>
+
+<p>November, 1909. Bl&eacute;riot had crossed the English Channel; McCurdy had,
+in March, 1909, calmly pegged off sixteen miles in the "Silver Dart"
+biplane; Paulhan had gone eighty-one miles, and had risen to the
+incredible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span> height of five hundred feet, to be overshadowed by Orville
+Wright's sixteen hundred feet; Glenn Curtiss had won the Gordon
+Bennett cup at Rheims.</p>
+
+<p>California was promising to be in the van of aviation. She was
+remembering that her own Montgomery had been one of the pioneers. Los
+Angeles was planning a giant meet for January. A dozen cow-pasture
+aviators were taking credulous young reporters aside and confiding
+that next day, or next week, or at latest next month, they would
+startle the world by ascending in machines "on entirely new and
+revolutionary principles, on which they had been working for ten
+years." Sometimes it was for eight years they had been working. But
+always they remarked that "the model from which the machine will be
+built has flown perfectly in the presence of some of the most
+prominent men in the locality." These machines had a great deal to do
+with the mysterious qualities of gyroscopes and helicopters.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Dr. Josiah Bagby, the San Francisco physician and
+oil-burning-marine-engine magnate, had really brought three genuine
+Bl&eacute;riot monoplanes from France, with Carmeau, graduate of the Bl&eacute;riot
+school and licensed French aviator, for working pilot; and was
+experimenting with them at San Mateo, near San Francisco, where the
+grandsons of the Forty-niners play polo. It had been rumored that he
+would open a school for pilots and build Bl&eacute;riot-type monoplanes for
+the American market.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had lain awake for an hour the night before, picturing the wonder
+of flight that he hoped to see. He rose early, put on his politest
+garments, and informed grumpy old Jones that he was off for a
+frolic&mdash;he wasn't sure, he said, whether he would get drunk or get
+married. He crossed the bay, glad of the sea-gulls, the glory of Mt.
+Tamalpais, and San Francisco's hill behind fairy hill. He consumed a
+Pacific sund&aelig;, with a feeling of holiday, and hummed "Mandalay." On
+the trolley to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> San Mateo he read over and over the newspaper accounts
+of Bagby's monoplanes.</p>
+
+<p>Walking through San Mateo, Carl swung his cocky green hat and scanned
+the sky for aircraft. He saw none. But as he tramped out on the
+flying-field he began to run at the sight of two wide, cambered wings,
+rounded at the ends like the end of one's thumb, attached to a fragile
+long body of open framework. Men were gathered about it. A man with a
+short, crisp beard and a tight woolen toboggan-cap was seated in the
+body, the wings stretching on either side of him. He scratched his
+beard and gesticulated. A mechanic revolved the propeller, and the
+unmuffled motor burst out with a trrrrrrrr whose music rocked Carl's
+heart. Black smoke hurled back along the machine. The draught tore at
+the hair of two men crouched on the ground holding the tail. They let
+go. The monoplane ran forward along the ground, and suddenly was off
+it, a foot up, ten feet up&mdash;really flying. Carl could see the aviator
+calmly staring ahead, working his arms, as the machine turned and
+slipped away over distant trees.</p>
+
+<p>His first impression of an aeroplane in the air had nothing to do with
+birds or dragon-flies or the miracle of it, because he was completely
+absorbed in an impression of Carl Ericson, which he expressed after
+this wise:</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;am&mdash;going&mdash;to&mdash;be&mdash;an&mdash;aviator!"</p>
+
+<p>And later, "Yes, <i>that's</i> what I've always wanted."</p>
+
+<p>He joined the group in front of the hangar-tent. Workmen were
+hammering on wooden sheds back of it. He recognized the owner, Dr.
+Bagby, from his pictures: a lean man of sixty with a sallow
+complexion, a gray mustache like a rat-tail, a broad, black
+countrified slouch-hat on the back of his head, a gray sack-suit which
+would have been respectable but unfashionable at any period
+whatsoever. He looked like a country lawyer who had served two terms
+in the state legislature. His shoes were black, but not blackened, and
+had no toe-caps&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span> comfortable shoes of an oldish man. He was
+tapping his teeth with a thin corded forefinger and remarking in a
+monotonous voice to a Mexican youth plump and polite and well dressed,
+"Wel-l-l-l, Tony, I guess those plugs were better; I guess those plugs
+were better. Heh?" Bagby turned to the others, marveled at them as if
+trying to remember who they were, and said, slowly, "I guess those
+plugs were all right. Heh?"</p>
+
+<p>The monoplane was returning, for a time apparently not moving, like a
+black mark painted on the great blue sky; then soaring overhead, the
+sharply cut outlines clear as a pen-and-ink drawing; then landing,
+bouncing on the slightly uneven ground.</p>
+
+<p>As the French aviator climbed out, Dr. Bagby's sad face brightened and
+he suggested: "Those plugs went better, Munseer. Heh? I've been
+thinking. Maybe you been giving her too rich a mixture."</p>
+
+<p>While they were wiping the Gn&ocirc;me engine Carl shyly approached Dr.
+Bagby. He felt frightfully an outsider; wondered if he could ever be
+intimate with the magician as was the plump Mexican youth they called
+"Tony." He said "Uh" once or twice, and blurted, "I want to be an
+aviator."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," said Dr. Bagby, gently, glancing away from Carl to the machine.
+He went over, twanged a supporting-wire, and seemed to remember that some
+one had spoken to him. He returned to the fevered Carl, walking sidewise,
+staring all the while at the resting monoplane, so efficient, yet so quiet
+now and slender and feminine. "Yes, yes. So you'd like to be an aviator. So
+you'd like&mdash;like&mdash;&mdash;(Hey, boy, don't touch that!)&mdash;&mdash;to be an aviator. Yes,
+yes. They all would, m' boy. They all would. Well, maybe you can be, some
+day. Maybe you can be.... Some day."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean now. Right away. Heard you were going t' start a school. Want
+to join."</p>
+
+<p>"Hm, hm," sighed Dr. Bagby, tapping his teeth,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> jingling his heavy
+gold watch-chain, brushing a trail of cigar-ashes from a lapel, then
+staring abstractedly at Carl, who was turning his hat swiftly round
+and round, so flushed of cheek, so excited of eye, that he seemed
+twenty instead of twenty-four. "Yes, yes, so you'd like to join. Tst.
+But that would cost you five hundred dollars, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Right!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you go talk to Munseer about it; Munseer Carmeau. He is a very
+good aviator. He is a licensed aviator. He knows Henry Farman. He
+studied under Bl&eacute;riot. He is the boss here. I'm just the poor old
+fellow that stands around. Sometimes Munseer takes me up for a little
+ride in our machine; sometimes he takes me up; but he is the boss. He
+is the boss, my friend; you'll have to see him." And Dr. Bagby walked
+away, apparently much discouraged about life.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was not discouraged about life. He swore that now he would be an
+aviator even if he had to go to Dayton or Hammondsport or France.</p>
+
+<p>He returned to Oakland. He sold his share in the garage for $1,150.</p>
+
+<p>Before the end of January he was enrolled as a student in the Bagby
+School of Aviation and Monoplane Building.</p>
+
+<p>On an impulse he wrote of his wondrous happiness to Gertie Cowles, but
+he tore up the letter. Then proudly he wrote to his father that the
+lost boy had found himself. For the first time in all his desultory
+writing of home-letters he did not feel impelled to defend himself.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_c.jpg" alt="C" width="45" height="50" /></div>
+<p>rude were the surroundings where Carmeau turned out some of the best
+monoplane pilots America will ever see. There were two rude shed-hangars in
+which they kept the three imported Bl&eacute;riots&mdash;a single-seat racer of the
+latest type, a Bl&eacute;riot XII. passenger-carrying machine with the seat under
+the plane, and "P'tite Marie," the school machine, which they usually kept
+throttled down to four hundred or five hundred, but in which Carmeau made
+such spirited flights as the one Carl had first witnessed. Back of the
+hangars was the workshop, which had little architecture, but much
+machinery. Here the pupils were building two Bl&eacute;riot-type machines, and
+trying to build an eight-cylinder V motor. All these things had Bagby given
+for the good of the game, expecting no profit in return. He was one of the
+real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy
+of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings
+and become superman.</p>
+
+<p>His generosity did not extend to living-quarters. Most of the students
+lived at the hangars and dined on Hamburg sandwiches, fried eggs, and
+Mexican <i>enchiladas</i>, served at a lunch-wagon anchored near the field.
+That lunch-wagon was their club. Here, squatted on high stools,
+treating one another to ginger-ale, they argued over torque and angles
+of incidence and monoplanes <i>vs.</i> biplanes. Except for two unpopular
+aristocrats who found boarding-houses in San Mateo, they slept in the
+hangars, in their overalls, sprawled on mattresses covered with
+horse-blankets. It was bed at eight-thirty. At four or five Carmeau
+would crawl out, scratch his beard, start<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> a motor, and set every
+neighborhood dog howling. The students would gloomily clump over to
+the lunch-wagon for a ham-and-egg breakfast. The first flights began
+at dawn, if the day was clear. At eight, when the wind was coming up,
+they would be heard in the workshop, adjusting and readjusting,
+machining down bearings, testing wing strength, humming and laughing
+and busy; a life of gasoline and hammers and straining attempts to get
+balance exactly right; a happy life of good fellows and the
+achievements of machinery and preparation for daring the upper air; a
+life of very ordinary mechanics and of sheer romance!</p>
+
+<p>It is a grievous heresy that aviation is most romantic when the
+aviator is portrayed as a young god of noble rank and a collar high
+and spotless, carelessly driving a transatlantic machine of perfect
+efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man,
+the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically
+real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his
+infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ing&eacute;nue,
+should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar
+miles in the air and fulfil the dream of all the creeping ages.</p>
+
+<p>In English and American fiction there are now nearly as many
+aeroplanes as rapiers or roses. The fictional aviators are society
+amateurs, wearers of evening clothes, frequenters of The Club,
+journalists and civil engineers and lordlings and international agents
+and gentlemen detectives, who drawl, "Oh yes, I fly a bit&mdash;new
+sensation, y' know&mdash;tired of polo"; and immediately thereafter use the
+aeroplane to raid arsenals, rescue a maiden from robbers or a large
+ruby from its lawful but heathenish possessors, or prevent a Zeppelin
+from raiding the coast. But they never by any chance fly these
+machines before gum-chewing thousands for hire. In England they
+absolutely must motor from The Club to the flying-field in a "powerful
+Rolls-Royce car." The British aviators of fiction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> are usually from
+Oxford and Eton. They are splendidly languid and modest and smartly
+dressed in society, but when they condescend to an adventure or to a
+coincidence, they are very devils, six feet of steel and sinew, boys
+of the bulldog breed with a strong trace of humming-bird. Like their
+English kindred, the Americans take up aviation only for gentlemanly
+sport. And they do go about rescuing things. Nothing is safe from
+their rescuing. But they do not have Rolls-Royce cars.</p>
+
+<p>Carl and his class at Bagby's were not of this gilded race. Carl's
+flying was as sordidly real as laying brick for a one-story laundry in
+a mill-town. Therefore, being real, it was romantic and miraculous.</p>
+
+<p>Among Carl's class was Hank Odell, the senior student, tall, thin,
+hopelessly plain of face; a drawling, rough-haired, eagle-nosed
+Yankee, who grinned shyly and whose Adam's apple worked slowly up and
+down when you spoke to him; an unimaginative lover of dogs and
+machinery; the descendant of Lexington and Gettysburg and a flinty
+Vermont farm; an ex-fireman, ex-sergeant of the army, and ex-teamster.
+He always wore a khaki shirt&mdash;the wrinkles of which caught the grease
+in black lines, like veins&mdash;with black trousers, blunt-toed shoes, and
+a pipe, the most important part of his costume.</p>
+
+<p>There was the round, anxious, polite Mexican, Tony Beanno, called
+"Tony Bean"&mdash;wealthy, simple, fond of the violin and of fast motoring.
+There was the "school grouch," surly Jack Ryan, the chunky
+ex-chauffeur. There were seven nondescripts&mdash;a clever Jew from
+Seattle, two college youngsters, an apricot-rancher's son, a circus
+acrobat who wanted a new line of tricks, a dull ensign detailed by the
+navy, and an earnest student of aerodynamics, aged forty, who had
+written marvelously dull books on air-currents and had shrinkingly
+made himself a fair balloon pilot. The navy ensign and the student
+were the snobs who lived away from the hangars, in boarding-houses.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was Lieutenant Forrest Haviland, detailed by the army&mdash;Haviland
+the perfect gentle knight, the well-beloved, the nearest approach to
+the gracious fiction aviator of them all, yet never drawling in
+affected modesty, never afraid of grease; smiling and industrious and
+reticent; smooth of hair and cameo of face; wearing khaki
+riding-breeches and tan puttees instead of overalls; always a
+gentleman, even when he tried to appear a workman. He pretended to be
+enthusiastic about the lunch-wagon, and never referred to his three
+generations of army officers. But most of the others were shy of him,
+and Jack Ryan, the "school grouch," was always trying to get him into
+a fight.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, there was Carl Ericson, who slowly emerged as star of them
+all. He knew less of aerodynamics than the timid specialist, less of
+practical mechanics than Hank Odell; but he loved the fun of daring
+more. He was less ferocious in competition than was Jack Ryan, but he
+wasted less of his nerve. He was less agile than the circus acrobat,
+but knew more of motors. He was less compactly easy than Lieutenant
+Haviland, but he took better to overalls and sleeping in hangars and
+mucking in grease&mdash;he whistled ragtime while Forrest Haviland hummed
+MacDowell.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Carl's earliest flights were in the school machine, "P'tite Marie,"
+behind Carmeau, the instructor. Reporters were always about, talking
+of "impressions," and Carl felt that he ought to note his impressions
+on his first ascent, but all that he actually did notice was that it
+was hard to tell at what instant they left the ground; that when they
+were up, the wind threatened to crush his ribs and burst his nostrils;
+that there must be something perilously wrong, because the machine
+climbed so swiftly; and, when they were down, that it had been worth
+waiting a whole lifetime for the flight.</p>
+
+<p>For days he merely flew with the instructor, till he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span> himself
+managing the controls. At last, his first flight by himself.</p>
+
+<p>He had been ordered to try a flight three times about the aerodrome at
+a height of sixty feet, and to land carefully, without pancaking&mdash;"and
+be sure, Monsieur, be veree sure you do not cut off too high from the
+ground," said Carmeau.</p>
+
+<p>It was a day when five reporters had gathered, and Carl felt very much
+in the limelight, waiting in the nacelle of the machine for the time
+to start. The propeller was revolved, Carl drew a long breath and
+stuck up his hand&mdash;and the engine stopped. He was relieved. It had
+seemed a terrific responsibility to go up alone. He wouldn't, now, not
+for a minute or two. He knew that he had been afraid. The engine was
+turned over once more&mdash;and once more stopped. Carl raged, and never
+again, in all his flying, did real fear return to him. "What the deuce
+is the matter?" he snarled. Again the propeller was revolved, and this
+time the engine hummed sweet. The monoplane ran along the ground, its
+tail lifting in the blast, till the whole machine seemed delicately
+poised on its tiptoes. He was off the ground, his rage leaving him as
+his fear had left him.</p>
+
+<p>He exulted at the swiftness with which a distant group of trees shot
+at him, under him. He turned, and the machine mounted a little on the
+turn, which was against the rules. But he brought her to even keel so
+easily that he felt all the mastery of the man who has finally learned
+to be natural on a bicycle. He tilted up the elevator slightly and
+shot across a series of fields, climbing. It was perfectly easy. He
+would go up&mdash;up. It was all automatic now&mdash;cloche toward him for
+climbing; away from him for descent; toward the wing that tipped up,
+in order to bring it down to level. The machine obeyed perfectly. And
+the foot-bar, for steering to right and left, responded to such light
+motions of his foot. He grinned exultantly. He wanted to shout.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the barometer and discovered that he was up to two
+hundred feet. Why not go on?</p>
+
+<p>He sailed out across San Mateo, and the sense of people below, running
+and waving their hands, increased his exultation. He curved about at
+the end, somewhat afraid of his ability to turn, but having all the
+air there was to make the turn in, and headed back toward the
+aerodrome. Already he had flown five miles.</p>
+
+<p>Half a mile from the aerodrome he realized that his motor was
+slackening, missing fire; that he did not know what was the matter;
+that his knowledge had left him stranded there, two hundred feet above
+ground; that he had to come down at once, with no chance to choose a
+landing-place and no experience in gliding. The motor stopped
+altogether.</p>
+
+<p>The ground was coming up at him too quickly.</p>
+
+<p>He tilted the elevator, and rose. But, as he was volplaning, this cut
+down the speed, and from a height of ten feet above a field the
+machine dropped to the ground with a flat plop. Something gave
+way&mdash;but Carl sat safe, with the machine canted to one side.</p>
+
+<p>He climbed out, cold about the spine, and discovered that he had
+broken one wheel of the landing-chassis.</p>
+
+<p>All the crowd from the flying-field were running toward him, yelling.
+He grinned at the foolish sight they made with their legs and arms
+strewn about in the air as they galloped over the rough ground.
+Lieutenant Haviland came up, panting: "All right, o' man? Good!" He
+seized Carl's hand and wrung it. Carl knew that he had a new friend.</p>
+
+<p>Three reporters poured questions on him. How far had he flown? Was
+this really his first ascent by himself? What were his sensations? How
+had his motor stopped? Was it true he was a mining engineer, a wealthy
+motorist?</p>
+
+<p>Hank Odell, the shy, eagle-nosed Yankee, running up as jerkily as a
+cow in a plowed field, silently patted Carl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> on the shoulder and began
+to examine the fractured landing-wheel. At last the instructor, M.
+Carmeau.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had awaited M. Carmeau's praise as the crown of his long flight.
+But Carmeau pulled his beard, opened his mouth once or twice, then
+shrieked: "What the davil you t'ink you are? A millionaire that we
+build machines for you to smash them? I tole you to fly t'ree time
+around&mdash;you fly to Algiers an' back&mdash;you t'ink you are another Farman
+brother&mdash;you are a damn fool! Suppose your motor he stop while you fly
+over San Mateo? Where you land? In a well? In a chimney? <i>Hein?</i> You
+know naut'ing yet. Next time you do what I tal' you. <i>Zut!</i> That was a
+flight, a flight, you make a flight, that was fine, fine, you make the
+heart to swell. But nex' time you break the chassis and keel yourself,
+<i>nom d'un tonnerre</i>, I scol' you!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl was humble. But the <i>Courier</i> reporter spread upon the front page
+the story of "Marvelous first flight by Bagby student," and predicted
+that a new Curtiss was coming out of California. Under a half-tone ran
+the caption, "Ericson, the New Hawk of the Birdmen."</p>
+
+<p>The camp promptly nicknamed him "Hawk." They used it for plaguing him
+at first, but it survived as an expression of fondness&mdash;Hawk Ericson,
+the cheeriest man in the school, and the coolest flier.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_n.jpg" alt="N" width="42" height="50" /></div>
+<p>ot all their days were spent in work. There were mornings when the
+wind would not permit an ascent and when there was nothing to do in
+the workshop. They sat about the lunch-wagon wrangling endlessly, or,
+like Carl and Forrest Haviland, wandered through fields which were all
+one flame with poppies.</p>
+
+<p>Lieutenant Haviland had given up trying to feel comfortable with the
+naval ensign student, who was one of the solemn worthies who clear
+their throats before speaking, and then speak in measured terms of
+brands of cigars and weather. Gradually, working side by side with
+Carl, Haviland seemed to find him a friend in whom to confide. Once or
+twice they went by trolley to San Francisco, to explore Chinatown or
+drop in on soldier friends of Haviland at the Presidio.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>From the porch of a studio on Telegraph Hill, in San Francisco, they
+were looking down on the islands of the bay, waiting for the return of
+an artist whom Haviland knew. Inarticulate dreamers both, they
+expressed in monosyllables the glory of bluewater before them, the
+tradition of R. L. S. and Frank Norris, the future of aviation. They
+gave up the attempt to explain the magic of San Francisco&mdash;that
+city-personality which transcends the opal hills and rare amber
+sunlight, festivals, and the transplanted Italian hill-town of
+Telegraph Hill, liners sailing out for Japan, and memories of the
+Forty-niners. It was too subtle a spirit, too much of it lay in human
+life with the passion of the Riviera linked to the strength<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span> of the
+North, for them to be able to comprehend its spell.... But regarding
+their own ambitions to do, they became eloquent.</p>
+
+<p>"I say," hesitated Haviland, "why is it I can't get in with most of
+the fellows at the camp the way you can? I've always been chummy
+enough with the fellows at the Point and at posts."</p>
+
+<p>"Because you've been brought up to be afraid to be anything but a
+gentleman."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't think it's that. I can get fond as the deuce of some of
+the commonest common soldiers&mdash;and, Lord! some of them come from the
+Bowery and all sorts of impossible places."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but you always think of them as 'common.' They don't think of
+each other that way. Suppose I'd worked&mdash;&mdash;Well, just suppose I'd been
+a Bowery bartender. Could you be loafing around here with me? Could
+you go off on a bat with Jack Ryan?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, maybe not. Maybe working with Jack Ryan is a good thing for me.
+I'm getting now so I can almost stand his stories! I envy you,
+knocking around with all sorts of people. Oh, I <i>wish</i> I could call
+Ryan 'Jack' and feel easy about it. I can't. Perhaps I've got a little
+of the subaltern snob some place in me."</p>
+
+<p>"You? You're a prince."</p>
+
+<p>"If you've elevated me to a princedom, the least I can do is to invite
+you down home for a week-end&mdash;down to the San Spirito Presidio. My
+father's commandant there."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'd like to, but&mdash;&mdash;I haven't got a dress-suit."</p>
+
+<p>"Buy one."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I could do that, but&mdash;&mdash;Oh, rats! Forrest, I've been knocking
+around so long I feel shy about my table manners and everything. I'd
+probably eat pie with my fingers."</p>
+
+<p>"You make me so darn tired, Hawk. You talk about my having to learn to
+chum with people in overalls. You've got to learn not to let people in
+evening clothes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span> put anything over on you. That's your difficulty from
+having lived in the back-country these last two or three years. You
+have an instinct for manners. But I did notice that as soon as you
+found out I was in the army you spent half the time disliking me as a
+militarist, and the other half expecting me to be haughty&mdash;Lord knows
+what over. It took you two weeks to think of me as Forrest Haviland.
+I'm ashamed of you! If you're a socialist you ought to think that
+anything you like belongs to you."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a new kind of socialism."</p>
+
+<p>"So much the better. Me and Karl Marx, the economic inventors.... But
+I was saying: if you act as though things belong to you people will
+apologize to you for having borrowed them from you. And you've <i>got</i>
+to do that, Hawk. You're going to be one of the best-known fliers in
+the country, and you'll have to meet all sorts of big guns&mdash;generals
+and Senators and female climbers that work the peace societies for
+social position, and so on, and you've got to know how to meet
+them.... Anyway, I want you to come to San Spirito."</p>
+
+<p>To San Spirito they went. During the three days preceding, Carl was
+agonized at the thought of having to be polite in the presence of
+ladies. No matter how brusquely he told himself, "I'm as good as
+anybody," he was uneasy about forks and slang and finger-nails, and
+looked forward to the ordeal with as much pleasure as a man about to
+be hanged, hanged in a good cause, but thoroughly.</p>
+
+<p>Yet when Colonel Haviland met them at San Spirito station, and Carl
+heard the kindly salutation of the gracious, fat, old Indian-fighter,
+he knew that he had at last come home to his own people&mdash;an impression
+that was the stronger because the house of Oscar Ericson had been so
+much house and so little home. The colonel was a widower, and for his
+only son he showed a proud affection which included Carl. The three of
+them sat in state, after dinner, on the porch of Quarters No. 1,
+smoking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> cigars and looking down to a spur of the Santa Lucia
+Mountains, where it plunged into the foam of the Pacific. They talked
+of aviation and eugenics and the Ben&eacute;t-Mercier gun, of the post
+doctor's sister who had come from the East on a visit, and of a
+riding-test, but their hearts spoke of affection.... Usually it is a
+man and a woman that make home; but three men, a stranger one of them,
+talking of motors on a porch in the enveloping dusk, made for one
+another a home to remember always.</p>
+
+<p>They stayed over Monday night, for a hop, and Carl found that the
+officers and their wives were as approachable as Hank Odell. They did
+not seem to be waiting for young Ericson to make social errors. When
+he confessed that he had forgotten what little dancing he knew, the
+sister of the post doctor took him in hand, retaught him the waltz,
+and asked with patent admiration: "How does it feel to fly? Don't you
+get frightened? I'm terribly in awe of you and Mr. Haviland. I know I
+should be frightened to death, because it always makes me dizzy just
+to look down from a high building."</p>
+
+<p>Carl slipped away, to be happy by himself, and hid in the shadow of
+palms on the porch, lapped in the flutter of pepper-trees. The
+orchestra began a waltz that set his heart singing. He heard a girl
+cry: "Oh, goody! the 'Blue Danube'! We must go in and dance that."</p>
+
+<p>"The Blue Danube." The name brought back the novels of General Charles
+King, as he had read them in high-school days; flashed the picture of
+a lonely post, yellow-lighted, like a topaz on the night-swathed
+desert; a rude ball-room, a young officer dancing to the "Blue
+Danube's" intoxication; a hot-riding, dusty courier, hurling in with
+news of an Apache outbreak; a few minutes later a troop of cavalry
+slanting out through the gate on horseback, with a farewell burning
+the young officer's lips.... He was in just such an army story, now!</p>
+
+<p>The scent of royal climbing-roses enveloped Carl as that picture
+changed into others. San Spirito Presidio became<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> a vast military
+encampment over which Hawk Ericson was flying.... From his monoplane
+he saw a fairy town, with red roofs rising to a tower of fantastic
+turrets. (That was doubtless the memory of a magazine-cover painted by
+Maxfield Parrish.)... He was wandering through a poppy-field with a
+girl dusky of eyes, soft black of hair, ready for any jaunt....
+Pictures bright and various as tropic shells, born of music and peace
+and his affection for the Havilands; pictures which promised him the
+world. For the first time Hawk Ericson realized that he might be a
+Personage instead of a back-yard boy.... The girl with twilight eyes
+was smiling.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The Bagby camp broke up on the first of May, with all of them, except
+one of the nondescript collegians and the air-current student, more or
+less trained aviators. Carl was going out to tour small cities, for
+the George Flying Corporation. Lieutenant Haviland was detailed to the
+army flying-camp.</p>
+
+<p>Parting with Haviland and kindly Hank Odell, with Carmeau and
+anxiously polite Tony Bean, was as wistful as the last night of senior
+year. Till the old moon rose, sad behind tulip-trees, they sat on
+packing-boxes by the larger hangar, singing in close harmony "Sweet
+Adeline," "Teasing," "I've Been Working on the Railroad."... "Hay-ride
+classics, with barber-shop chords," the songs are called, but tears
+were in Carl's eyes as the minors sobbed from the group of comrades
+who made fun of one another and were prosaic and pounded their heels
+on the packing-boxes&mdash;and knew that they were parting to face death.
+Carl felt Forrest Haviland's hand on one shoulder, then an awkward pat
+from tough Jack Ryan's paw, as Tony Bean's violin turned the plaintive
+half-light into music, and broke its heart in the "Moonlight Sonata."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_y.jpg" alt="&quot;Y" width="55" height="50" /></div>
+<p>uh, piston-ring burnt off and put the exhaust-valve on the blink.
+That means one cylinder out of business," growled Hawk Ericson. "I
+could fly, maybe, but I don't like to risk it in this wind. It was bad
+enough this morning when I tried it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, this hick town 's going to be the death of us, all right&mdash;and
+Riverport to-morrow, with a contract nice as pie, if we can only get
+there," groaned his manager, Dick George, a fat man with much muscle
+and more diamonds. "Listen to that crowd. Yelling for blood. Sounds
+like a bunch of lumber-jacks with the circus slow in starting."</p>
+
+<p>The head-line feature of the Onamwaska County spring fair was "Hawk
+Ericson, showing the most marvelous aerial feats of the ages with the
+scientific marvels of aviation, in his famous French Bl&eacute;riot
+flying-machine, the first flying-machine ever seen in this state, no
+balloon or fake, come to Onamwaska by the St. L. &amp; N." The spring fair
+was usually a small gathering of farmers to witness races and new
+agricultural implements, but this time every road for thirty-five
+miles was dust-fogged with buggies and democrat wagons and small
+motor-cars. Ten thousand people were packed about the race-track.</p>
+
+<p>It was Carl's third aviation event. A neat, though not imposing
+figure, in a snug blue flannel suit, with his cap turned round on his
+head, he went to the flap of the rickety tent which served as his
+hangar. A fierce cry of "Fly! Fly! Why don't he fly?" was coming from
+the long black lines edging the track, and from the mound of people on
+the small grand stand; the pink blur of their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span> faces turned toward
+him&mdash;him, Carl Ericson; all of them demanding <i>him</i>! The five meek
+police of Onamwaska were trotting back and forth, keeping them behind
+the barriers. Carl was apprehensive lest this ten-thousandfold demand
+drag him out, make him fly, despite a wind that was blowing the flags
+out straight, and whisking up the litter of newspapers and
+cracker-jack boxes and pink programs. While he stared out, an official
+crossing the track fairly leaned up against the wind, which seized his
+hat and sailed it to the end of the track.</p>
+
+<p>"Some wind!" Carl grunted, stolidly, and went to the back of the
+silent tent, to reread the local papers' accounts of his arrival at
+Onamwaska. It was a picturesque narrative of the cheering mob
+following him down the street ("Gee! that was <i>me</i> they followed!"),
+crowding into the office of the Astor House and making him autograph
+hundreds of cards; of girls throwing roses ("Humph! geraniums is more
+like it!") from the windows.</p>
+
+<p>"A young man," wrote an enthusiastic female reporter, "handsome as a
+Greek god, but honestly I believe he is still in his twenties; and he
+is as slim and straight as a soldier, flaxen-haired and
+rosy-cheeked&mdash;the birdman, the god of the air."</p>
+
+<p>"Handsome as a Greek&mdash;&mdash;" Carl commented. "I look like a Minnesota
+Norwegian, and that ain't so bad, but handsome&mdash;&mdash;Urrrrrg!... Sure
+they love me, all right. Hear 'em yell. Oh, they love me like a dog
+does a bone.... Saint Jemima! talk about football rooting.... Come on,
+Greek god, buck up."</p>
+
+<p>He glanced wearily about the tent, its flooring of long, dry grass
+stained with ugly dark-blue lubricating-oil, under the tan light
+coming through the canvas. His manager was sitting on a suit-case,
+pretending to read a newspaper, but pinching his lower lip and
+consulting his watch, jogging his foot ceaselessly. Their temporary
+mechanic, who had given up trying to repair the lame valve, squatted
+with bent head, biting his lip, harkening<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span> to the blood-hungry mob.
+Carl's own nerves grew tauter and tauter as he saw the manager's
+restless foot and the mechanic's tension. He strolled to the
+monoplane, his back to the tent-opening.</p>
+
+<p>He started as the manager exclaimed: "Here they come! After us!"</p>
+
+<p>Outside the tent a sound of running.</p>
+
+<p>The secretary of the fair, a German hardware-dealer with an
+automobile-cap like a yachting-cap, panted in, gasping: "Come quick!
+They won't wait any longer! I been trying to calm 'em down, but they
+say you got to fly. They're breaking over the barriers into the track.
+The p'lice can't keep 'em back."</p>
+
+<p>Behind the secretary came the chairman of the entertainment committee,
+a popular dairyman, who was pale as he demanded: "You got to play
+ball, Mr. Ericson. I won't guarantee what 'll happen if you don't play
+ball, Mr. Ericson. You got to make him fly, Mr. George. The crowd 's
+breaking&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Behind him charged a black press of people. They packed before the
+tent, trying to peer in through the half-closed tent-opening, like a
+crowd about a house where a policeman is making an arrest. Furiously:</p>
+
+<p>"Where's the coward? Fake! Bring 'im out! Why don't he fly? He's a
+fake! His flying-machine's never been off the ground! He's a
+four-flusher! Run 'im out of town! Fake! Fake! Fake!"</p>
+
+<p>The secretary and chairman stuck out deprecatory heads and coaxed the
+mob. Carl's manager was an old circus-man. He had removed his collar,
+tie, and flashy diamond pin, and was diligently wrapping the thong of
+a black-jack about his wrist. Their mechanic was crawling under the
+side of the tent. Carl caught him by the seat of his overalls and
+jerked him back.</p>
+
+<p>As Carl turned to face the tent door again the manager ranged up
+beside him, trying to conceal the black-jack in his hand, and casually
+murmuring, "Scared, Hawk?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Nope. Too mad to be scared."</p>
+
+<p>The tent-flap was pulled back. Tossing hands came through. The
+secretary and chairman were brushed aside. The mob-leader, a
+red-faced, loud-voiced town sport, very drunk, shouted, "Come out and
+fly or we'll tar and feather you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yuh, come on, you fake, you four-flusher!" echoed the voices.</p>
+
+<p>The secretary and chairman were edging back into the tent, beside
+Carl's cowering mechanic.</p>
+
+<p>Something broke in Carl's hold on himself. With his arm drawn back,
+his fist aimed at the point of the mob-leader's jaw, he snarled: "You
+can't make me fly. You stick that ugly mug of yours any farther in and
+I'll bust it. I'll fly when the wind goes down&mdash;&mdash;You would, would
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>As the mob-leader started to advance, Carl jabbed at him. It was not a
+very good jab. But the leader stopped. The manager, black-jack in
+hand, caught Carl's arm, and ordered: "Don't start anything! They can
+lick us. Just look ready. Don't say anything. We'll hold 'em till the
+cops come. But nix on the punch."</p>
+
+<p>"Right, Cap'n," said Carl.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strain to stand motionless, facing the crowd, not answering
+their taunts, but he held himself in, and in two minutes the yell
+came: "Cheese it! The cops!" The mob unwillingly swayed back as
+Onamwaska's heroic little band of five policemen wriggled through it,
+requesting their neighbors to desist.... They entered the tent and,
+after accepting cigars from Carl's manager, coldly told him that Carl
+was a fake, and lucky to escape; that Carl would better "jump right
+out and fly if he knew what was good for him." Also, they nearly
+arrested the manager for possessing a black-jack, and warned him that
+he'd better not assault any of the peaceable citizens of beautiful
+Onamwaska....</p>
+
+<p>When they had coaxed the mob behind the barriers, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span> announcing that
+Ericson would now go up, Carl swore: "I won't move! They can't make
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>The secretary of the fair, who had regained most of his courage, spoke
+up, pertly, "Then you better return the five hundred advance, pretty
+quick sudden, or I'll get an attachment on your fake flying-machine!"</p>
+
+<p>"You go&mdash;&mdash;Nix, nix, Hawk, don't hit him; he ain't worth it. You go to
+hell, brother," said the manager, mechanically. But he took Carl
+aside, and groaned: "Gosh! we got to do something! It's worth two
+thousand dollars to us, you know. Besides, we haven't got enough cash
+in our jeans to get out of town, and we'll miss the big Riverport
+purse.... Still, suit yourself, old man. Maybe I can get some money by
+wiring to Chicago."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, let's get it over!" Carl sighed. "I'd love to disappoint
+Onamwaska. We'll make fifteen thousand dollars this month and next,
+anyway, and we can afford to spit 'em in the eye. But I don't want to
+leave you in a hole.... Here you, mechanic, open up that tent-flap.
+All the way across.... No, not like <i>that</i>, you boob!... So.... Come
+on, now, help me push out the machine. Here you, Mr. Secretary, hustle
+me a couple of men to hold her tail."</p>
+
+<p>The crowd rose, the fickle crowd, scenting the promised blood, and
+applauded as the monoplane was wheeled upon the track and turned to
+face the wind. The mechanic and two assistants had to hold it as a
+dust-filled gust caught it beneath the wings. As Carl climbed into the
+seat and the mechanic went forward to start the engine, another squall
+hit the machine and she almost turned over sidewise.</p>
+
+<p>As the machine righted, the manager ran up and begged: "You never in
+the world can make it in this wind, Hawk. Better not try it. I'll wire
+for some money to get out of town with, and Onamwaska can go soak its
+head."</p>
+
+<p>"Nope. I'm gettin' sore now, Dick.... Hey you,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span> mechanic: hurt that
+wing when she tipped?... All right. Start her. Quick. While it's
+calm."</p>
+
+<p>The engine whirred. The assistants let go the tail. The machine
+labored forward, but once it left the ground it shot up quickly. The
+head-wind came in a terrific gust. The machine hung poised in air for
+a moment, driven back by the gale nearly as fast as it was urged
+forward by its frantically revolving propeller.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was as yet too doubtful of his skill to try to climb above the
+worst of the wind. If he could only keep a level course&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He fought his way up one side of the race-track. He crouched in his
+seat, meeting the sandy blast with bent head. The parted lips which
+permitted him to catch his breath were stubborn and hard about his
+teeth. His hands played swiftly, incessantly, over the control as he
+brought her back to even keel. He warped the wings so quickly that he
+balanced like an acrobat sitting rockingly on a tight-wire. He was too
+busy to be afraid or to remember that there was a throng of people
+below him. But he was conscious that the grand stand, at the side of
+the track, half-way down, was creeping toward him.</p>
+
+<p>More every instant did he hate the clamor of the gale and the stream
+of minute drops of oil, blown back from the engine, that spattered his
+face. His ears strained for misfire of the engine, if it stopped he
+would be hurled to earth. And one cylinder was not working. He forgot
+that; kept the cloche moving; fought the wind with his will as with
+his body.</p>
+
+<p>Now, he was aware of the grand stand below him. Now, of the people at
+the end of the track. He flew beyond the track, and turned. The whole
+force of the gale was thrown behind him, and he shot back along the
+other side of the race-track at eighty or ninety miles an hour.
+Instantly he was at the end; then a quarter of a mile beyond the
+track, over plowed fields, where upward<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span> currents of warm air
+increased the pitching of the machine as he struggled to turn her
+again and face the wind.</p>
+
+<p>The following breeze was suddenly retarded and he dropped forty feet,
+tail down.</p>
+
+<p>He was only forty feet from the ground, falling straight, when he got
+back to even keel and shot ahead. How safe the nest of the nacelle
+where he sat seemed then! Almost gaily he swung her in a great
+wavering circle&mdash;and the wind was again in his face, hating him,
+pounding him, trying to get under the wings and turn the machine
+turtle.</p>
+
+<p>Twice more he worked his way about the track. The conscience of the
+beginner made him perform a diffident Dutch roll before the grand
+stand, but he was growling, "And that's all they're going to get.
+See?"</p>
+
+<p>As he soared to earth he looked at the crowd for the first time. His
+vision was so blurred with oil and wind-soreness that he saw the
+people only as a mass and he fancied that the stretch of slouch-hats
+and derbies was a field of mushrooms swaying and tilted back. He was
+curiously unconscious of the presence of women; he felt all the
+spectators as men who had bawled for his death and whom he wanted to
+hammer as he had hammered the wind.</p>
+
+<p>He was almost down. He cut off his motor, glided horizontally three
+feet above the ground, and landed, while the cheers cloaked even the
+honking of the parked automobiles.</p>
+
+<p>Carl's manager, fatly galloping up, shrilled, "How was it, old man?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it was pretty windy," said Carl, crawling down and rubbing the
+kinks out of his arms. "But I think the wind 's going down. Tell the
+announcer to tell our dear neighbors that I'll fly again at five."</p>
+
+<p>"But weren't you scared when she dropped? You went down so far that
+the fence plumb hid you. Couldn't see you at all. Ugh! Sure thought
+the wind had you. Weren't you scared then? You don't look it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Then? Oh! Then. Oh yes, sure, I guess I was scared, all right!...
+Say, we got that seat padded so she's darn comfortable now."</p>
+
+<p>The crowd was collecting. Carl's manager chuckled to the president of
+the fair association, "Well, that was some flight, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he went down the opposite side of the track pretty fast, but why
+the dickens was he so slow going up my side? My eyes ain't so good now
+that it does me any good if a fellow speeds up when he's a thousand
+miles away. And where's all these tricks in the air&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That," murmured Carl to his manager, "is the i-den-ti-cal man that
+stole the blind cripple's crutch to make himself a toothpick."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>he great Belmont Park Aero Meet, which woke New York to aviation, in
+October, 1910, was coming to an end. That clever new American flier,
+Hawk Ericson, had won only sixth place in speed, but he had won first
+prize in duration, by a flight of nearly six hours, driving round and
+round and round the pylons, hour on hour, safe and steady as a train,
+never taking the risk of sensational banking, nor spiraling like
+Johnstone, but amusing himself and breaking the tedium by keeping an
+eye out on each circuit for a fat woman in a bright lavender top-coat,
+who stood out in the dark line of people that flowed beneath. When he
+had descended&mdash;acclaimed the winner&mdash;thousands of heads turned his way
+as though on one lever; the pink faces flashing in such October
+sunshine as had filled the back yard of Oscar Ericson, in Joralemon,
+when a lonely Carl had performed duration feats for a sparrow. That
+same shy Carl wanted to escape from the newspaper-men who came running
+toward him. He hated their incessant questions&mdash;always the same: "Were
+you cold? Could you have stayed up longer?"</p>
+
+<p>Yet he had seen all New York go mad over aviation&mdash;rather, over news
+about aviation. The newspapers had spread over front pages his name
+and the names of the other fliers. Carl chuckled to himself, with
+bashful awe, "Gee! can you beat it?&mdash;that's <i>me</i>!" when he beheld
+himself referred to in editorial and interview and picture-caption as
+a superman, a god. He heard crowds rustle, "Look, there's Hawk
+Ericson!" as he walked along the barriers. He heard cautious
+predictions from fellow-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>fliers, and loud declarations from outsiders,
+that he was the coming cross-country champion. He was introduced to
+the mayor of New York, two Cabinet members, an assortment of Senators,
+authors, bank presidents, generals, and society rail-birds. He
+regularly escaped from them&mdash;and their questions&mdash;to help the
+brick-necked Hank Odell, from the Bagby School, who had entered for
+the meet, but smashed up on the first day, and ever since had been
+whistling and working over his machine and encouraging Carl, "Good
+work, bud; you've got 'em all going."</p>
+
+<p>With vast secrecy and a perception that this was twice as stirring as
+steadily buzzing about in his Bl&eacute;riot, he went down to the Bowery and,
+in front of the saloon where he had worked as a porter four years
+before, he bought a copy of the <i>Evening World</i> because he knew that
+on the third page of it was a large picture of him and a signed
+interview by a special-writer. He peered into the saloon windows to
+see if Petey McGuff was there, but did not find him. He went to the
+street on which he had boarded in the hope that he might do something
+for the girl who had been going wrong. The tenement had been torn
+down, with blocks of others, to make way for a bridge-terminal, and he
+saw the vision of the city's pitiless progress. This quest of old
+acquaintances made him think of Joralemon. He informed Gertie Cowles
+that he was now "in the aviation game, and everything is going very
+well." He sent his mother a check for five hundred dollars, with
+awkward words of affection.</p>
+
+<p>A greater spiritual adventure was talking for hours, over a small
+table in the basement of the Brevoort, to Lieutenant Forrest Haviland,
+who was attending the Belmont Park Meet as spectator. Theirs was the
+talk of tried friends; droning on for a time in amused comment, rising
+to sudden table-pounding enthusiasms over aviators or explorers, with
+exclamations of, "Is that the way it struck you, too? I'm awfully glad
+to hear you say that,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span> because that's just the way I felt about it."
+They leaned back in their chairs and played with spoons and
+reflectively broke up matches and volubly sketched plans of controls,
+drawing on the table-cloth.</p>
+
+<p>Carl took the sophisticated atmosphere of the Brevoort quite for
+granted. Why <i>shouldn't</i> he be there! And after the interest in him at
+the meet it did not hugely abash him to hear a group at a table behind
+him ejaculate: "I think that's Hawk Ericson, the aviator! Yes, sir,
+that's&mdash;who&mdash;it&mdash;is!"</p>
+
+<p>Finally the gods gave to Carl a new mechanic, a prince of mechanics,
+Martin Dockerill. Martin was a tall, thin, hatchet-faced,
+tousle-headed, slow-spoken, irreverent Irish-Yankee from Fall River;
+the perfect type of American aviators; for while England sends out its
+stately soldiers of the air, and France its short, excitable geniuses,
+practically all American aviators and aviation mechanics are either
+long-faced and lanky, like Martin Dockerill and Hank Odell, or slim,
+good-looking youngsters of the college track-team type, like Carl and
+Forrest Haviland.</p>
+
+<p>Martin Dockerill ate pun'kin pie with his fingers, played "Marching
+through Georgia" on the mouth-organ, admired burlesque-show women in
+sausage-shaped pink tights, and wore balbriggan socks that always
+reposed in wrinkles over the tops of his black shoes with frayed
+laces. But he probably could build a very decent motor in the dark,
+out of four tin cans and a crowbar. In A.D. 1910 he still believed in
+hell and plush albums. But he dreamed of wireless power-transmission.
+He was a Free and Independent American Citizen who called the Count de
+Lesseps, "Hey, Lessup." But he would have gone with Carl aeroplaning
+to the South Pole upon five minutes' notice&mdash;four minutes to devote to
+the motor, and one minute to write, with purple indelible pencil, a
+post-card to his aunt in Fall River. He was precise about only two
+things&mdash;motor-timing and calling himself a "mechanician," not a
+"mechanic." He became very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span> friendly with Hank Odell; helped him
+repair his broken machine, went with him to vaudeville, or stood with
+him before the hangar, watching the automobile parties of pretty girls
+with lordly chaperons that came to call on Grahame-White and Drexel.
+"Some heart-winners, them guys, but I back my boss against them and
+ev'body else, Hank," Martin would say.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The meet was over; the aviators were leaving. Carl had said farewell
+to his new and well-loved friends, the pioneers of aviation&mdash;Latham,
+Moisant, Leblanc, McCurdy, Ely, de Lesseps, Mars, Willard, Drexel,
+Grahame-White, Hoxsey, and the rest. He was in the afterglow of the
+meet, for with Titherington, the Englishman, and Tad Warren, the
+Wright flier, he was going to race from Belmont Park to New Haven for
+a ten-thousand-dollar prize jointly offered by a New Haven millionaire
+and a New York newspaper. At New Haven the three competitors were to
+join with Tony Bean (of the Bagby School) and Walter MacMonnies
+(flying a Curtiss) in an exhibition meet.</p>
+
+<p>Enveloped in baggy overalls over the blue flannel suit which he still
+wore when flying, Carl was directing Martin Dockerill in changing his
+spark-plugs, which were fouled. About him, the aviators were having
+their machines packed, laughing, playing tricks on one another&mdash;boys
+who were virile men; mechanics in denim who stammered to the
+reporters, "Oh, well, I don't know&mdash;&mdash;" yet who were for the time more
+celebrated than Roosevelt or Harry Thaw or Bernard Shaw or Champion
+Jack Johnson.</p>
+
+<p>Before 9.45 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>, when the race to New Haven was scheduled to start,
+the newspaper-men gathered; but there were not many outsiders. Carl
+felt the lack of the stimulus of thronging devotees. He worked
+silently and sullenly. It was "the morning after." He missed Forrest
+Haviland.</p>
+
+<p>He began to be anxious. Could he get off on time?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Exactly at 9.45 Titherington made a magnificent start in his Henry
+Farman biplane. Carl stared till the machine was a dot in the clouds,
+then worked feverishly. Tad Warren, the second contestant, was testing
+out his motor, ready to go. At that moment Martin Dockerill suggested
+that the carburetor was dirty.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll fly with her the way she is," Carl snapped, shivering with the
+race-fever.</p>
+
+<p>A cub reporter from the City News Association piped, like a
+fox-terrier, "What time 'll you get off, Hawk?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ten sharp."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I mean what time will you really get off!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl did not answer. He understood that the reporters were doubtful
+about him, the youngster from the West who had been flying for only
+six months. At last came the inevitable pest, the familiarly
+suggestive outsider. A well-dressed, well-meaning old bore he was; a
+complete stranger. He put his podgy hand on Carl's arm and puffed:
+"Well, Hawk, my boy, give us a good flight to-day; not but what you're
+going to have trouble. There's something I want to suggest to you. If
+you'd use a gyroscope&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, beat it!" snarled Carl. He was ashamed of himself&mdash;but more angry
+than ashamed. He demanded of Martin, aside: "All right, heh? Can I fly
+with the carburetor as she is? Heh?"</p>
+
+<p>"All right, boss. Calm down, boss, calm down."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Hawk, I don't want to butt in. You can have old Martin for
+a chopping-block any time you want to cut wood. But if you don't calm
+down you'll get so screwed up mit nerves that you won't have any
+control. Aw, come on, boss, speak pretty! Just keep your shirt on and
+I'll hustle like a steam-engine."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, maybe you're right. But these assistant aviators in the crowd
+get me wild.... All right? Hoorray. Here goes.... Say, don't stop for
+anything after I get off.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span> Leave the boys to pack up, and you hustle
+over to Sea Cliff for the speed-boat. You ought to be in New Haven
+almost as soon as I am."</p>
+
+<p>Calmer now, he peeled off his overalls, drew a wool-lined leather
+jacket over his coat, climbed into the cockpit, and inspected the
+indicators. As he was testing the spark Tad Warren got away.</p>
+
+<p>Third and last was Carl. The race-fever shook him.</p>
+
+<p>He would try to save time. Like the others, he had planned to fly from
+Belmont Park across Long Island to Great Neck, and cross Long Island
+Sound where it was very narrow. He studied his map. By flying across
+to the vicinity of Hempstead Harbor and making a long diagonal flight
+over water, straight over to Stamford, he would increase the factor of
+danger, but save many miles; and the specifications of the race
+permitted him to choose any course to New Haven. Thinking only of the
+new route, taking time only to nod good-by to Martin Dockerill and
+Hank Odell, he was off, into the air.</p>
+
+<p>As the ground dropped beneath him and the green clean spaces and
+innumerous towns of Long Island spread themselves out he listened to
+the motor. Its music was clear and strong. Here, at least, the wind
+was light.</p>
+
+<p>He would risk the long over-water flight&mdash;very long they thought it in
+1910.</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes he sighted the hills about Roslyn and began to climb,
+up to three thousand feet. It was very cold. His hands were almost
+numb on the control. He descended to a thousand feet, but the machine
+jerked like a canoe shooting rapids, in the gust that swept up from
+among the hills. The landscape rose swiftly at him over the ends of
+the wings, now on one side, now on the other, as the machine rolled.</p>
+
+<p>His arms were tired with the quick, incessant wing-warping. He rose
+again. Then he looked at the Sound, and came down to three hundred
+feet, lest he lose his way. For the Sound was white with fog.... No
+wind out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span> there!... Water and cloud blurred together, and the sky-line
+was lost in a mass of somber mist, which ranged from filmy white to
+the cold dead gray of old cigar-ashes. He wanted to hold back, not
+dash out into that danger-filled twilight. But already he was roaring
+over gray-green marshes, then was above fishing-boats that were slowly
+rocking in water dully opaque as a dim old mirror. He noted two men on
+a sloop, staring up at him with foolish, gaping, mist-wet faces.
+Instantly they were left behind him. He rose, to get above the fog.
+Even the milky, sulky water was lost to sight.</p>
+
+<p>He was horribly lonely, abominably lonely.</p>
+
+<p>At five hundred feet altitude he was not yet entirely above the fog.
+Land was blotted out. Above him, gray sky and thin writhing filaments
+of vapor. Beneath him, only the fog-bank, erupting here and there like
+the unfolding of great white flowers as warm currents of air burst up
+through the mist-blanket.</p>
+
+<p>Completely solitary. All his friends were somewhere far distant, in a
+place of solid earth and sun-warmed hangars. The whole knowable earth
+had ceased to exist. There was only slatey void, through which he was
+going on for ever. Or perhaps he was not moving. Always the same coil
+of mist about him. He was horribly lonely.</p>
+
+<p>He feared that the fog was growing thicker. He studied his compass
+with straining eyes. He was startled by a gull's plunging up through
+the mist ahead of him, and disappearing. He was the more lonely when
+it was gone. His eyebrows and cheeks were wet with the steam. Drops of
+moisture shone desolately on the planes. It was an unhealthy shine. He
+was horribly lonely.</p>
+
+<p>He pictured what would happen if the motor should stop and he should
+plunge down through that flimsy vapor. His pontoonless frail monoplane
+would sink almost at once.... It would be cold, swimming. How long
+could he keep up? What chance of being found? He didn't want to fall.
+The cockpit seemed so safe, with its familiar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> watch and map-stand and
+supporting-wires. It was home. The wings stretching out on either side
+of him seemed comfortingly solid, adequate to hold him up. But the
+body of the machine behind him was only a framework, not even
+inclosed. And cut in the bottom of the cockpit was a small hole for
+observing the earth. He could see fog through it, in unpleasant
+contrast to the dull yellow of the cloth sides and bottom. Not before
+had it daunted him to look down through that hole. Now, however, he
+kept his eyes away from it, and, while he watched the compass and
+oil-gauge, and kept a straight course, he was thinking of how nasty it
+would be to drop, drop down <i>there</i>, and have to swim. It would be
+horribly lonely, swimming about a wrecked monoplane, hearing steamers'
+fog-horns, hopeless and afar.</p>
+
+<p>As he thought that, he actually did hear a steamer hoarsely whistling,
+and swept above it, irresistibly. He started; his shoulders drooped.</p>
+
+<p>More than once he wished that he could have seen Forrest Haviland
+again before he started. He wished with all the poignancy of man's
+affection for a real man that he had told Forrest, when they were
+dining at the Brevoort, how happy he was to be with him. He was
+horribly lonely.</p>
+
+<p>He cursed himself for letting his thoughts become thin and damp as the
+vapor about him. He shrugged his shoulders. He listened thankfully to
+the steady purr of the engine and the whir of the propeller. He
+<i>would</i> get across! He ascended, hoping for a glimpse of the shore.
+The fog-smothered horizon stretched farther and farther away. He was
+unspeakably lonely.</p>
+
+<p>Through a tear in the mist he saw sunshine reflected from houses on a
+hill, directly before him, perhaps one mile distant. He shouted. He
+was nearly across. Safe. And the sun was coming out.</p>
+
+<p>Two minutes later he was turning north, between the water and a town
+which his map indicated as Stamford.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span> The houses beneath him seemed
+companionable; friendly were the hand-waving crowds, and
+factory-whistles gave him raucous greeting.</p>
+
+<p>Instantly, now that he knew where he was, the race-fever caught him
+again. Despite the strain of crossing the Sound, he would not for
+anything have come down to rest. He began to wonder how afar ahead of
+him were Titherington and Tad Warren.</p>
+
+<p>He spied a train running north out of Stamford, swung over above it,
+and raced with it. The passengers leaned out of the windows, trainmen
+hung perilously from the opened doors of vestibuled platforms, the
+engineer tooted his frantic greetings to a fellow-mechanic who, above
+him in the glorious bird, sent telepathic greetings which the engineer
+probably never got. The engineer speeded up; the engine puffed out
+vast feathery plumes of dull black smoke. But he drew away from the
+train as he neared South Norwalk.</p>
+
+<p>He was ascending again when he noted something that seemed to be a
+biplane standing in a field a mile away. He came down and circled the
+field. It was Titherington's Farman biplane. He hoped that the kindly
+Englishman had not been injured. He made out Titherington, talking to
+a group about the machine. Relieved, he rose again, amused by the
+ant-hill appearance as hundreds of people, like black bugs, ran toward
+the stalled biplane, from neighboring farms and from a trolley-car
+standing in the road.</p>
+
+<p>He should not have been amused just then. He was too low. Directly
+before him was a hillside crowned with trees. He shot above the trees,
+cold in the stomach, muttering, "Gee! that was careless!"</p>
+
+<p>He sped forward. The race-fever again. Could he pass Tad Warren as he
+had passed Titherington? He whirled over the towns, shivering but
+happy in the mellow, cool October air, far enough from the water to be
+out of what fog the brightening sun had left. The fields<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span> rolled
+beneath him, so far down that they were turned into continuous and
+wonderful masses of brown and gold. He sang to himself. He liked
+Titherington; he was glad that the Englishman had not been injured;
+but it was good to be second in the race; to have a chance to win a
+contest which the whole country was watching; to be dashing into a
+rosy dawn of fame. But while he sang he was keeping a tense lookout
+for Tad Warren. He had to pass him!</p>
+
+<p>With the caution of the Scotchlike Norwegian, he had the cloche
+constantly on the jiggle, with ceaseless adjustments to the wind,
+which varied constantly as he passed over different sorts of terrain.
+Once the breeze dropped him sidewise. He shot down to gain momentum,
+brought her to even keel, and, as he set her nose up again, laughed
+boisterously.</p>
+
+<p>Never again would he be so splendidly young, never again so splendidly
+sure of himself and of his medium of expression. He was to gain
+wisdom, but never to have more joy of the race.</p>
+
+<p>He was sure now that he was destined to pass Tad Warren.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was ever brighter; the horizon ever wider, rimming the
+saucer-shaped earth. When he flew near the Sound he saw that the fog
+had almost passed. The water was gentle and colored like pearl,
+lapping the sands, smoking toward the radiant sky. He passed over
+summer cottages, vacant and asleep, with fantastic holiday roofs of
+red and green. Gulls soared like flying sickles of silver over the
+opal sea. Even for the racer there was peace.</p>
+
+<p>He made out a mass of rock covered with autumn-hued trees to the left,
+then a like rock to the right. "West and East Rock&mdash;New Haven!" he
+cried.</p>
+
+<p>The city mapped itself before him like square building-blocks on a
+dark carpet, with railroad and trolley tracks like flashing
+spider-webs under the October noon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So he had arrived, then&mdash;and he had not caught Tad Warren. He was
+furious.</p>
+
+<p>He circled the city, looking for the Green, where (in this day before
+the Aero Club of America battled against over-city flying) he was to
+land. He saw the Yale campus, lazy beneath its elms, its towers and
+turrets dreaming of Oxford. His anger left him.</p>
+
+<p>He plunged down toward the Green&mdash;and his heart nearly stopped. The
+spectators were scattered everywhere. How could he land without
+crushing some one? With trees to each side and a church in front, he
+was too far down to rise again. His back pressed against the back of
+the little seat, and seemed automatically to be trying to restrain him
+from this tragic landing.</p>
+
+<p>The people were fleeing. In front there was a tiny space. But there
+was no room to sail horizontally and come down lightly. He shut off
+his motor and turned the monoplane's nose directly at the earth. She
+struck hard, bounced a second. Her tail rose, and she started, with
+dreadful deliberateness, to turn turtle. With a vault Carl was out of
+the cockpit and clear of the machine as she turned over.</p>
+
+<p>Oblivious of the clamorous crowd which was pressing in about him,
+cutting off the light, replacing the clean smell of gasoline and the
+upper air by the hot odor of many bodies, he examined the monoplane
+and found that she had merely fractured the propeller and smashed the
+rudder.</p>
+
+<p>Some one was fighting through the crowd to his side&mdash;Tony Bean&mdash;Tony
+the round, polite Mexican from the Bagby School. He was crying:
+"<i>Hombre</i>, what a landing! You have saved lives.... Get out of the
+way, all you people!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl grinned and said: "Good to see you, Tony. What time did Tad
+Warren get here? Where's&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He ees not here yet."</p>
+
+<p>"What? Huh? How's that? Do I win? That&mdash;&mdash;Say, gosh! I hope he hasn't
+been hurt."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you win."</p>
+
+<p>A newspaper-man standing beside Tony said: "Warren had to come down at
+Great Neck. He sprained his shoulder, but that's all."</p>
+
+<p>"That's good."</p>
+
+<p>"But you," insisted Tony, "aren't you badly jarred, Hawk?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit."</p>
+
+<p>The gaping crowd, hanging its large collective ear toward the two
+aviators, was shouting: "Hoorray! He's all right!"&mdash;As their voices
+rose Carl became aware that all over the city hundreds of
+factory-whistles and bells were howling their welcome to him&mdash;the
+victor.</p>
+
+<p>The police were clearing a way for him. As a police captain touched a
+gold-flashing cap to him, Carl remembered how afraid of the police
+that hobo Slim Ericson had been.</p>
+
+<p>Tony and he completed examination of the machine, with Tony's
+mechanician, and sent it off to a shop, to await Martin Dockerill's
+arrival by speed-boat and racing-automobile. Carl went to receive
+congratulations&mdash;and a check&mdash;from the prize-giver, and a reception by
+Yale officials on the campus. Before him, along his lane of passage,
+was a kaleidoscope of hands sticking out from the wall of
+people&mdash;hands that reached out and shook his own till they were sore,
+hands that held out pencil and paper to beg for an autograph, hands of
+girls with golden flowers of autumn, hands of dirty, eager, small
+boys&mdash;weaving, interminable hands. Dizzy with a world peopled only by
+writhing hands, yet moved by their greeting, he made his way across
+the Green, through Phelps Gateway, and upon the campus. Twisting his
+cap and wishing that he had taken off his leather flying-coat, he
+stood upon a platform and heard officials congratulating him.</p>
+
+<p>The reception was over. But the people did not move. And he was very
+tired. He whispered to a professor:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span> "Is that a dormitory, there
+behind us? Can I get into it and get away?"</p>
+
+<p>The professor beckoned to one of the collegians, and replied, "I
+think, Mr. Ericson, if you will step down they will pass you into
+Vanderbilt Courtyard&mdash;by the gate back of us&mdash;and you will be able to
+escape."</p>
+
+<p>Carl trusted himself to the bunch of boys forming behind him, and
+found himself rushed into the comparative quiet of a Tudor courtyard.
+A charming youngster, hatless and sleek of hair, cried, "Right this
+way, Mr. Ericson&mdash;up this staircase in the tower&mdash;and we'll give 'em
+the slip."</p>
+
+<p>From the roar of voices to the dusky quietude of the hallway was a
+joyous escape. Suddenly Carl was a youngster, permitted to see Yale, a
+university so great that, from Plato College, it had seemed an
+imperial myth. He stared at the list of room-occupants framed and hung
+on the first floor. He peeped reverently through an open door at a
+suite of rooms.</p>
+
+<p>He was taken to a room with a large collection of pillows, fire-irons,
+Morris chairs, sets of books in crushed levant, tobacco-jars and
+pipes&mdash;a restless and boyish room, but a real haven. He stared out
+upon the campus, and saw the crowd stolidly waiting for him. He
+glanced round at his host and waved his hand deprecatingly, then tried
+to seem really grown up, really like the famous Hawk Ericson. But he
+wished that Forrest Haviland were there so that he might marvel: "Look
+at 'em, will you! Waiting for <i>me!</i> Can you beat it? Some start for my
+Yale course!"</p>
+
+<p>In a big chair, with a pipe supplied by the youngster, he shyly tried
+to talk to a senior in the great world of Yale (he himself had not
+been able to climb to seniorhood even in Plato), while the awed
+youngster shyly tried to talk to the great aviator.</p>
+
+<p>He had picked up a Yale catalogue and he vaguely ruffled its pages,
+thinking of the difference between its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span> range of courses and the petty
+inflexible curriculum of Plato. Out of the pages leaped the name
+"Frazer." He hastily turned back. There it was: "Henry Frazer, A.M.,
+Ph.D., Assistant Professor in English Literature."</p>
+
+<p>Carl rejoiced boyishly that, after his defeat at Plato, Professor
+Frazer had won to victory. He forgot his own triumph. For a second he
+longed to call on Frazer and pay his respects. "No," he growled to
+himself, "I've been so busy hiking that I've forgotten what little
+book-learnin' I ever had. I'd like to see him, but&mdash;&mdash;By gum! I'm
+going to begin studying again."</p>
+
+<p>Hidden away in the youngster's bedroom for a nap, he dreamed
+uncomfortably of Frazer and books. That did not keep him from making a
+good altitude flight at the New Haven Meet that afternoon, with his
+hastily repaired machine and a new propeller. But he thought of new
+roads for wandering in the land of books, as he sat, tired and sleepy,
+but trying to appear bright and appreciative, at the big dinner in his
+honor&mdash;the first sacrificial banquet to which he had been
+subjected&mdash;with earnest gentlemen in evening clothes, glad for an
+excuse to drink just a little too much champagne; with mayors and
+councilmen and bankers; with the inevitable stories about the man who
+was accused of stealing umbrellas and about the two skunks on a fence
+enviously watching a motor-car.</p>
+
+<p>Equally inevitable were the speeches praising Carl's flight as a
+"remarkable achievement, destined to live forever in the annals of
+sport and heroism, and to bring one more glory to the name of our fair
+city."</p>
+
+<p>Carl tried to appear honored, but he was thinking: "Rats! I'll live in
+the annals of nothin'! Curtiss and Brookins and Hoxsey have all made
+longer flights than mine, in this country alone, and they're aviators
+I'm not worthy to fill the gas-tanks of.... Gee! I'm sleepy! Got to
+look polite, but I wish I could beat it.... Let's see. Now look here,
+young Carl; starting in to-morrow, you begin to read oodles of books.
+Let's see. I'll start out with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span> Forrest's favorites. There's <i>David
+Copperfield</i>, and that book by Wells, <i>Tono-Bungay</i>, that's got aerial
+experiments in it, and <i>Jude the Ob&mdash;, Obscure</i>, I guess it is, and
+<i>The Damnation of Theron Ware</i> (wonder what he damned), and
+<i>McTeague</i>, and <i>Walden</i>, and <i>War and Peace</i>, and <i>Madame Bovary</i>,
+and some Turgenev and some Balzac. And something more serious. Guess
+I'll try William James's book on psychology."</p>
+
+<p>He bought them all next morning. His other belongings had been suited
+to rapid transportation, and Martin Dockerill grumbled, "That's a
+swell line of baggage, all right&mdash;one tooth-brush, a change of socks,
+and ninety-seven thousand books."</p>
+
+<p>Two nights later, in a hotel at Portland, Maine, Carl was plowing
+through the Psychology. He hated study. He flipped the pages angrily,
+and ran his fingers through his corn-colored hair. But he sped on,
+concentrated, stopping only to picture a day when the people who
+honored him publicly would also know him in private. Somewhere among
+them, he believed, was the girl with whom he could play. He would meet
+her at some aero race, and she would welcome him as eagerly as he
+welcomed her.... Had he, perhaps, already met her? He walked over to
+the writing-table and scrawled a note to Gertie Cowles&mdash;regarding the
+beauty of the Yale campus.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>(<i>Editor's Note</i>: The following pages are extracts from a diary kept
+by Mr. C. O. Ericson in a desultory fashion from January, 1911, to the
+end of April, 1912. They are reprinted quite literally. Apparently Mr.
+Ericson had no very precise purpose in keeping his journal. At times
+it seems intended as <i>materia</i> for future literary use; at others, as
+comments for his own future amusement; at still others, as a sort of
+long letter to be later sent to his friend, Lieut. Forrest Haviland,
+U.S.A. I have already referred to them in my <i>Psycho-Analysis of the
+Subconscious with Reference to Active Temperaments</i>, but here reprint
+them less for their appeal to us as a scientific study of reactions
+than as possessing, doubtless, for those interested in pure narrative,
+a certain curt expression of somewhat unusual exploits, however
+inferior is their style to a more critical thesis on the adventurous.)</p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_m.jpg" alt="M" width="75" height="50" /></div>
+<p><i>ay 9</i>, (<i>1911</i>). Arrived at Mineola flying field, N. Y. to try out
+new Bagby monoplane I have bought. Not much accomodation here yet.
+Many of us housed in tents. Not enough hangars. We sit around and tell
+lies in the long grass at night, like a bunch of kids out camping.
+Went over and had a beer at Peter McLoughlin's today, that's where
+Glenn Curtiss started out from to make his first flight for Sci. Amer.
+cup.</p>
+
+<p>Like my new Bagby machine better than Bl&eacute;riot in many respects, has
+non-lifting tail, as should all modern machines. Rudder and elevator a
+good deal like the Nieuport. One passenger. Roomy cockpit and enclosed
+fuselage. Bl&eacute;riot control. Nearer streamline than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span> any American plane
+yet. Span, 33.6 ft., length 24, chord of wing at fuselage 6&acute; 5&acute;&acute;.
+Chauviere propeller, 6&acute; 6&acute;&acute;, pitch 4&acute; 5&acute;&acute;. Dandy new Gn&ocirc;me engine, 70
+h.p., should develop 60 to 80 m.p.h.</p>
+
+<p>Martin Dockerill my mechanician is pretty cute. He said to me to-day
+when we were getting work-bench up, "I bet a hat the spectators all
+flock here, now. Not that you're any better flier than some of the
+other boys, but you got the newest plane for them to write their names
+on."</p>
+
+<p>Certainly a scad of people butting in. Come in autos and motor cycles
+and on foot, and stand around watching everything you do till you want
+to fire a monkey wrench at them.</p>
+
+<p>Hank Odell has joined the Associated Order of the Pyramid and just now
+he is sitting out in front of his tent talking to some of the Grand
+Worthy High Mighties of it I guess&mdash;fat old boy with a yachting cap
+and a big brass watch chain and an Order of Pyramid charm big as your
+thumb, and a tough young fellow with a black sateen shirt and his hat
+on sideways with a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Since I wrote the above a party of sports, the women in fade-away
+gowns made to show their streamline forms came butting in, poking
+their fingers at everything, while the slob that owned their car
+explained everything wrong. "This is a biplane," he says, "you can see
+there's a plane sticking out on each side of the place where the
+aviator sits, it's a new areoplane (that's the way he pronounced it),
+and that dingus in front is a whirling motor." I was sitting here at
+the work-bench, writing, hot as hell and sweaty and in khaki pants and
+soft shirt and black sneakers, and the Big Boss comes over to me and
+says, "Where is Hawk Ericson, my man." "How do I know," I says. "When
+will he be back," says he, as though he was thinking of getting me
+fired p. d. q. for being fresh. "Next week. He ain't come yet."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He gets sore and says, "See here, my man, I read in the papers to-day
+that he has just joined the flying colony. Permit me to inform you
+that he is a very good friend of mine. If you will ask him, I am quite
+sure that he will remember Mr. Porter Carruthers, who was introduced
+to him at the Belmont Park Meet. Now if you will be so good as to show
+the ladies and myself about&mdash;&mdash;" Well, I asked Hawk, and Hawk seemed
+to be unable to remember his friend Mr. Carruthers, who was one of the
+thousand or so people recently introduced to him, but he told me to
+show them about, which I did, and told them the Gn&ocirc;me was built radial
+to save room, and the wires overhead were a frame for a little roof
+for bad weather, and they gasped and nodded to every fool thing I
+said, swallowed it hook line and sinker till one of the females showed
+her interest by saying "How fascinating, let's go over to the Garden
+City Hotel, Porter, I'm dying for a drink." I hope she died for it.</p>
+
+<p><i>May 10</i>: Up at three, trying out machine. Smashed landing chassis in
+coming down, shook me up a little. Interesting how when I rose it was
+dark on the ground but once up was a little red in the east like smoke
+from a regular fairy city.</p>
+
+<p>Another author out to-day bothering me for what he called "copy."</p>
+
+<p>Must say I've met some darn decent people in this game though. To-day
+there was a girl came out with Billy Morrison of the N. Y. Courier,
+she is an artist but crazy about outdoor life, etc. Named Istra Nash,
+a red haired girl, slim as a match but the strangest face, pale but it
+lights up when she's talking to you. Took her up and she was not
+scared, most are.</p>
+
+<p><i>May 11</i>: Miss Istra Nash came out by herself. She's thinking quite
+seriously about learning to fly. She sat around and watched me work,
+and when nobody was looking smoked a cigarette. Has recently been in
+Europe, Paris, London, etc.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Somehow when I'm talking to a woman like her I realize how little I
+see of women with whom I can be really chummy, tho I meet so many
+people at receptions etc. sometimes just after I have been flying
+before thousands of people I beat it to my hotel and would be glad for
+a good chat with the night clerk, of course I can bank on Martin
+Dockerill to the limit but when I talk to a person like Miss Nash I
+realize I need some one who knows good art from bad. Though Miss Nash
+doesn't insist on talking like a high-brow, indeed is picking up
+aviation technologies very quickly. She talks German like a native.</p>
+
+<p>Think Miss Nash is perhaps older than I am, perhaps couple of years,
+but doesn't make any difference.</p>
+
+<p>Reading a little German to-night, almost forgot what I learned of it
+in Plato.</p>
+
+<p><i>May 14, Sunday</i>: Went into town this afternoon and went with Istra to
+dinner at the Lafayette. She told me all about her experiences in
+Paris and studying art. She is quite discontented here in N. Y. I
+don't blame her much, it must have been bully over in Paree. We sat
+talking till ten. Like to see Vedrines fly, and the Louvre and the gay
+grisettes too by heck! Istra ought not to drink so many cordials, nix
+on the booze you learn when you try to keep in shape for flying,
+though Tad Warren doesn't seem to learn it. After ten we went to
+studio where Istra is staying on Washington Sq. several of her friends
+there and usual excitement and fool questions about being an aviator,
+it always makes me feel like a boob. But they saw Istra and I wanted
+to be alone and they beat it.</p>
+
+<p>This is really dawn but I'll date it May 14, which is yesterday. No
+sleep for me to-night, I'm afraid. Going to fly around NY in aerial
+derby this afternoon. Must get plenty sleep now.</p>
+
+<p><i>May 15</i>: Won derby, not much of an event though. Struck rotten
+currents over Harlem River, machine rolled like a whale-back.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Istra out here to-morrow. Glad. But after last night afraid I'll get
+so I depend on her, and the aviator that keeps his nerve has to be
+sort of a friendless cuss some ways.</p>
+
+<p><i>May 16</i>: Istra came out here. Seems very discontented. I'm afraid
+she's the kind to want novelty and attention incessantly, she seems to
+forget that I'm pretty busy.</p>
+
+<p><i>May 17</i>: Saw Istra in town, she forgot all her discontent and her
+everlasting dignity and danced for me then came over and kissed me,
+she is truly a wonder, can hum a French song so you think you're among
+the peasants, but she expects absolute devotion and constant amusing
+and I must stick to my last if a mechanic like me is to amount to
+anything.</p>
+
+<p><i>May 18</i>: Istra out here, she sat around and looked bored, wanted to
+make me sore, I think. When I told her I had to leave to-morrow
+morning for Rochester and couldn't come to town for dinner etc. she
+flounced home. I'm sorry, I'm mighty sorry; poor kid she's always
+going to be discontented wherever she is, and always getting some one
+and herself all wrought up. She always wants new sensations yet
+doesn't want to work, and the combination isn't very good. It'd be
+great if she really worked at her painting, but she usually stops her
+art just this side of the handle of a paint-brush.</p>
+
+<p>Curious thing is that when she'd gone and I sat thinking about her I
+didn't miss her so much as Gertie Cowles. I hope I see Gertie again
+some day, she is a good pal.</p>
+
+<p>Istra wanted me to name my new monoplane Babette, because she says it
+looks "cunning" which the Lord knows it don't, it may look efficient
+but not cunning. But I don't think I'll name it anything, tho she says
+that shows lack of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>People especially reporters are always asking me this question, do
+aviators have imagination? I'm not sure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> I know what imagination is.
+It's like this stuff about "sense of humor." Both phrases are pretty
+bankrupt now. A few years ago when I was running a car I would make
+believe I was different people, like a king driving through his
+kingdom, but when I'm warping and banking I don't have time to think
+about making believe. Of course I do notice sunsets and so on a good
+deal but that is not imagination. And I do like to go different
+places; possibly I take the imagination out that way&mdash;I guess
+imagination is partly wanting to be places where you aren't&mdash;well, I
+go when I want to, and I like that better.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway darned if I'll give my monoplane a name. Tad Warren has been
+married to a musical comedy soubrette with ringlets of red-brown hair
+(Istra's hair is quite bright red, but this woman has dark red hair,
+like the color of California redwood chips, no maybe darker) and she
+wears a slimpsy bright blue dress with the waist-line nearly down to
+her knees, and skirt pretty short, showing a lot of ankle, and a kind
+of hat I never noticed before, must be getting stylish now I guess,
+flops down so it almost hides her face like a basket. She's a typical
+wife for a 10 h.p. aviator with exhibition fever. She and Tad go joy
+riding almost every night with a bunch of gasoline and alcohol sports
+and all have about five cocktails and dance a new Calif. dance called
+the Turkey Trot. This bunch have named Tad's new Wright "Sammy," and
+they think it's quite funny to yell "Hello Sammy, how are you, come
+have a drink."</p>
+
+<p>I guess I'll call mine a monoplane and let it go at that.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>July 14</i>: Quebec. Lost race Toronto to Quebec. Had fair chance to win
+but motor kept misfiring, couldn't seem to get plugs that would work,
+and smashed hell out of elevator coming down on tail when landing
+here. Glad Hank Odell won, since I lost. Hank has designed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span> new
+rocker-arm for Severn motor valves. All of us invited to usual big
+dinner, never did see so many uniforms, also members of Canadian
+parliament. I don't like to lose a race, but thunder it doesn't bother
+me long. Good filet of sole at dinner. Sat near a young lieutenant,
+leftenant I suppose it is, who made me think of Forrest Haviland. I
+miss Forrest a lot. He's doing some good flying for the army, flying
+Curtiss hydro now, and trying out muffler for military scouting. What
+I like as much as anything about him is his ease, I hope I'm learning
+a little of it anyway. This stuff is all confused but must hustle off
+to reception at summer school of Royal College for Females. Must send
+all this to old Forrest to read some day&mdash;if you ever see this,
+Forrest, hello, dear old man, I thought about you when I flew over
+military post.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: Big reception, felt like an awful nut, so shy I didn't hardly
+dare look up off the ground. After the formal reception I was taken
+around the campus by the Lady President, nice old lady with white hair
+and diamond combs in it. What seemed more than a million pretty girls
+kept dodging out of doorways and making snapshots of me. Good thing
+I've been reading quite a little lately, as the Lady Principal (that
+was it, not Lady President) talked very high brow. She asked me what I
+thought of this "terrible lower class unrest." Told her I was a
+socialist and she never batted an eye&mdash;of course an aviator is
+permitted to be a nut. Wonder if I am a good socialist as a matter of
+fact, I do know that most governments, maybe all, permit most children
+to never have a chance, start them out by choking them with dirt and
+T.B. germs, but how can we make international solidarity seem
+practical to the dub average voters, <i>how</i>!</p>
+
+<p>Letter from Gertie to-night, forwarded here. She seems sort of bored
+in Joralemon, but is working hard with Village Improvement Committee
+of woman's club for rest room for farmers' wives, also getting up P.E.
+Sunday<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> school picnic. Be good for Istra if she did common nice things
+like that, since she won't really get busy with her painting, but how
+she'd hate me for suggesting that she be what she calls "burjoice."
+Guess Gertie is finding herself. Hope yours truly but sleepy is
+finding himself too. How I love my little bed!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<h4>(THE DIARY OF MR. ERICSON, CONTINUED.&mdash;EDITOR)</h4>
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_a1.jpg" alt="A" width="61" height="50" /></div>
+
+<p><i>UGUST 20</i>, (<i>1911, as before</i>): Big Chicago meet over. They sure did
+show us a good time. Never saw better meet. Won finals in duration
+to-day. Also am second in altitude, but nix on the altitude again, I'm
+pretty poor at it. I'm no Lincoln Beachey! Don't see how he breathes.
+His 11,578 ft. was <i>some</i> climb.</p>
+
+<p>Tomorrow starts my biggest attempt, by far; biggest distance flight
+ever tried in America, and rather niftier than even the European
+Circuit and British Circuit that Beaumont has won.</p>
+
+<p>To fly as follows: Chicago to St. Louis to Indianapolis to Columbus to
+Washington to Baltimore to Philadelphia to Atlantic City to New York.
+The New York Chronicle in company with papers along line gives prize
+of $40,000. Ought to help bank account if win, in spite of big
+expenses to undergo. Now have $30,000 stowed away, and have sent
+mother $3,000.</p>
+
+<p>To fly against my good old teacher M. Carmeau, and Tony Bean, Walter
+MacMonnies, M. Beaufort the Frenchman, Tad Warren, Billy Witzer, Chick
+Bannard, Aaron Solomons and other good men. Special NY Chronicle
+reporter, fellow named Forbes, assigned to me, and he hangs around all
+the time, sort of embarrassing (hurray, spelled it right, I guess) but
+I'm getting used to the reporters.</p>
+
+<p>Martin Dockerill has an ambition! He said to me to-day, "Say, Hawk, if
+you win the big race you got to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> give me five plunks for my share and
+then by gum I'm going to buy two razor-strops." "What for?" I said.
+"Oh I bet there ain't anybody else in the world that owns <i>two</i>
+razor-strops!"</p>
+
+<p>Not much to say about banquet, lots of speeches, good grub.</p>
+
+<p>What tickles me more than anything is my new flying garments&mdash;not
+clothes but <i>garments</i>, by heck! I'm going to be a regular little old
+aviator in a melodrama. I've been wearing plain suits and a cap, same
+good old cap, always squeegee on my head. But for the big race I've
+got riding breeches and puttees and a silk shirt and a tweed Norfolk
+jacket and new leather coat and French helmet with both felt and
+springs inside the leather&mdash;this last really valuable. The real stage
+aviator, that's me. Watch the photographers fall for it. I bet Tad
+Warren's Norfolk jacket is worth $10,000 a year to him!</p>
+
+<p>I pretended to Martin that I was quite serious about the clothes, the
+garments I mean. I dolled myself all up last night and went swelling
+into my hangar and anxiously asked Martin if he didn't like the
+get-up, and he nearly threw a fit. "Good Lord," he groans, "you look
+like an aviator on a Ladies Home Journal cover, guaranteed not to
+curse, swear or chaw tobacco. What's become of that girl you was
+kissing, last time I seen you on the cover?"</p>
+
+<p><i>August 25</i>: Not much time to write diary on race like this, it's just
+saw wood all the time or lose.</p>
+
+<p>Bad wind to-day. Sometimes the wind don't bother me when I am flying,
+and sometimes, like to-day, it seems as though the one thing in the
+whole confounded world is the confounded wind that roars in your ears
+and makes your eyes water and sneaks down your collar to chill your
+spine and goes scooting up your sleeves, unless you have gauntlets,
+and makes your ears sting. Roar, roar, roar, the wind's worse than the
+noisiest old cast-iron tin-can Vrenskoy motor. You want to duck your
+head and get<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span> down out of it, and Lord it tires you so&mdash;aviation isn't
+all "brilliant risks" and "daring dives" and that kind of
+blankety-blank circus business, not by a long shot it ain't, lots of
+it is just sticking there and bucking the wind like a taxi driver
+speeding for a train in a storm. Tired to-night and mad.</p>
+
+<p><i>September 5</i>: New York! I win! Plenty smashes but only got jarred. I
+beat out Beaufort by eight hours, and Aaron Solomons by nearly a day.
+Carmeau's machine hopelessly smashed in Columbus, but he was not hurt,
+but poor Tad Warren <i>killed</i> crossing Illinois.</p>
+
+<p><i>September 8</i>: Had no time to write about my reception here in New
+York till now.</p>
+
+<p>I've been worrying about poor Tad Warren's wife, bunch of us got
+together and made up a purse for her. Nothing more pathetic than these
+poor little women that poke down the cocktails to keep excited and
+then go to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>I don't believe I was very decent to Tad. Sitting here alone in a
+hotel room, it seems twice as lonely after the fuss and feathers these
+last few days, a fellow thinks of all the rotten things he ever did.
+Poor old Tad. Too late now to cheer him up. Too late. Wonder if they
+shouldn't have called off race when he was killed.</p>
+
+<p>Wish Istra wouldn't keep calling me up. Have I <i>got</i> to be rude to
+her? I'd like to be decent to her, but I can't stand the cocktail
+life. Lord, that time she danced, though.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Tad was [See <a href="#NOTE">Transcriber's note.</a>]</p>
+
+<p>Oh hell, to get back to the reception. It was pretty big. Parade of
+the Aero Club and Squadron A, me in an open-face hack, feeling like a
+boob while sixty leven billion people cheered. Then reception by
+mayor, me delivering letter from mayor of Chicago which I had cutely
+sneaked out in Chicago and mailed to myself here, N. Y. general
+delivery, so I wouldn't lose it on the way. Then biggest dinner I've
+ever seen, must have been a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> thousand there, at the Astor, me very
+natty in a new dress suit (hey bo, I fooled them, it was ready-made
+and cost me just $37.50 and fitted like my skin.)</p>
+
+<p>Mayor, presidents of boroughs of NY, district attorney, vice president
+of U.S., lieut. governor of NY, five or six senators, chief of
+ordnance, U.S.A., arctic explorers and hundreds like that, but most of
+all Forrest Haviland whom I got them to stick right up near me.
+Speeches mostly about me, I nearly rubbed the silver off my flossy new
+cigarette case keeping from looking foolish while they were telling
+about me and the future of aviation and all them interesting subjects.</p>
+
+<p>Forrest and I sneaked off from the reporters next afternoon, had quiet
+dinner down in Chinatown.</p>
+
+<p>We have a bully plan. If we can make it and if he can get leave we
+will explore the headwaters of the Amazon with a two-passenger Curtiss
+flying boat, maybe next year.</p>
+
+<p>Now the reception fans have done their darndest and all the excitement
+is over including the shouting and I'm starting for Newport to hold a
+little private meet of my own, backed by Thomas J. Watersell, the
+steel magnate, and by to-morrow night NY will forget me. I realized
+that after the big dinner. I got on the subway at Times Square, jumped
+quick into the car just as the doors were closing, and the guard
+yapped at me, "What are you trying to do, Billy, kill yourself?" He
+wasn't spending much time thinking about famous Hawk Ericson, and I
+got to thinking how comfortable NY will manage to go on being when
+they no longer read in the morning paper whether I dined with the
+governor, or with Martin Dockerill at Bazoo Junction Depot Lunch
+Counter.</p>
+
+<p>They forget us quick. And already there's a new generation of
+aviators. Some of the old giants are gone, poor Moisant and Hoxsey and
+Johnstone and the rest killed, and there's coming along a bunch of
+youngsters that can fly enough to grab the glory, and they spread<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span> out
+the glory pretty thin. They go us old fellows except Beachey a few
+better on aerial acrobatics, and that's what the dear pee-pul like.
+(For a socialist I certainly do despise the pee-pul's <i>taste</i>!) I
+won't do any flipflops in the air no matter what the county fair
+managers write me. Somehow I'd just as soon be alive and exploring the
+Amazon with old Forrest as dead after "brilliant feats of fearless
+daring." Go to it, kids, good luck, only test your supporting wires,
+and don't try to rival Lincoln Beachey, he's a genius.</p>
+
+<p>Glad got a secretary for a couple days to handle all this mail.
+Hundreds of begging letters and mash notes from girls since I won the
+big prize. Makes me feel funny! One nice thing out of the mail&mdash;letter
+from the Turk, Jack Terry, that I haven't seen since Plato. He didn't
+graduate, his old man died and he is assistant manager of quite a good
+sized fisheries out in Oregon, glad to hear from him again. Funny, I
+haven't thought of him for a year.</p>
+
+<p>I feel lonely and melancholy to-night in spite of all I do to cheer
+up. Let up after reception etc. I suppose. I feel like calling up
+Istra, after all, but mustn't. I ought to hit the hay, but I couldn't
+sleep. Poor Tad Warren.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>The following words appear at the bottom of a page, in a faint, fine
+handwriting unlike Mr. Ericson's usual scrawl.&mdash;The Editor</i>):</p>
+
+<p>Whatever spirits there be, of the present world or the future, take
+this prayer from a plain man who knows little of monism or trinity or
+logos, and give to Tad another chance, as a child who never grew up.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>September 11</i>: Off to Kokomo, to fly for Farmers' Alliance.</p>
+
+<p>Easy meet here (Newport, R.I.) yesterday, just straight flying and
+passenger carrying. Dandy party given for me after it, by Thomas J.
+Watersell, the steel man. Have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> read of such parties. Bird party, in a
+garden, Watersell has many acres in his place and big house with a
+wonderful brick terrace and more darn convenient things than I ever
+saw before, breakfast room out on the terrace and swimming pool and
+little gardens one outside of each guest room, rooms all have private
+doors, house is mission style built around patio. All the Newport
+swells came to party dressed as birds, and I had to dress as a hawk,
+they had the costume all ready, wonder how they got my measurements.
+Girls in the dance of the birds. Much silk stockings, very pretty. At
+end of dance they were all surrounding me in semi-circle I stood out
+on lawn beside Mrs. Watersell, and they bowed low to me, fluttering
+their silk wings and flashing out many colored electric globes
+concealed in wings and looked like hundreds of rainbow colored
+fireflies in the darkness. Just then the big lights were turned on
+again and they let loose hundreds of all kinds of birds, and they flew
+up all around me, surprised me to death. Then for grub, best
+sandwiches I ever ate.</p>
+
+<p>Felt much flattered by it all, somehow did not feel so foolish as at
+banquets with speeches.</p>
+
+<p>After the party was all over, quite late, I went with Watersell for a
+swim in his private pool. Most remarkable thing I ever saw. He said
+everybody has Roman baths and Pompei baths and he was going to go them
+one better, so he has an Egyptian bath, the pool itself like the
+inside of an ancient temple, long vista of great big green columns and
+a big idol at the end, and the pool all in green marble with lights
+underneath the water and among the columns, and the water itself just
+heat of air, so you can't tell where the water leaves off and the air
+above it begins, hardly, and feel as though you were swimming in air
+through a green twilight. Darndest sensation I ever felt, and the idol
+and columns sort of awe you.</p>
+
+<p>I enjoyed the swim and the room they gave me, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span> I had lost my
+tooth-brush and that kind of spoiled the end of the party.</p>
+
+<p>I noticed Watersell only half introduced his pretty daughter to me,
+they like me as a lion but&mdash;&mdash;And yet they seem to like me personally
+well enough, too. If I didn't have old Martin trailing along, smoking
+his corn-cob pipe and saying what he thinks, I'd die of loneliness
+sometimes on the hike from meet to meet. Other times have jolly
+parties, but I'd like to sit down with the Cowleses and play poker and
+not have to explain who I am.</p>
+
+<p>Funny&mdash;never used to feel lonely when I was bumming around on freights
+and so on, not paying any special attention to anybody.</p>
+
+<p><i>October 23</i>: I wonder how far I'll ever get as an aviator? The
+newspapers all praise me as a hero. Hero, hell! I'm a pretty steady
+flier but so would plenty of chauffeurs be. This hero business is
+mostly bunk, it was mostly chance my starting to fly at all. Don't
+suppose it is all accident to become as great a flier as Garros or
+Vedrines or Beachey, but I'm never going to be a Garros, I guess. Like
+the man that can jump twelve feet but never can get himself to go any
+farther.</p>
+
+<p><i>December 1</i>: Carmeau killed yesterday, flying at San Antone. Motor
+backfire, machine caught fire, burned him to death in the air. He was
+the best teacher I could have had, patient and wise. I can't write
+about him. And I can't get this insane question out of my mind: Was
+his beard burned? I remember just how it looked, and think of that
+when all the time I ought to remember how clever and darn decent he
+was. Carmeau will never show me new stunts again.</p>
+
+<p>And Ely killed in October, Cromwell Dixon gone&mdash;the plucky youngster,
+Professor Montgomery, Nieuport, Todd Shriver whom Martin Dockerill and
+Hank Odell liked so much, and many others, all dead, like Moisant. I
+don't think I take any undue risks, but it makes me stop and think.
+And Hank Odell with a busted shoulder. Captain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span> Paul Beck once told me
+he believed it was mostly carelessness, these accidents, and he
+certainly is a good observer, but when I think of a careful
+constructor like Nieuport&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Punk money I'm making. Thank heaven there will be one more good year
+of the game, 1912, but I don't know about 1913. Looks like the
+exhibition game would blow up then&mdash;nearly everybody that wants to has
+seen an aeroplane fly once, now, and that's about all they want, so
+good bye aviation, except for military use and flying boats for
+sportsmen. At least good bye during a slump of several years.</p>
+
+<p>Hope to thunder Forrest and I will be able to make our South American
+hike, even if it costs every cent I have. That will be something like
+it, seeing new country instead of scrapping with fair managers about
+money.</p>
+
+<p><i>December 22</i>: Hoorray! Christmas time at sea! Quite excite to smell
+the ocean again and go rolling down the narrow gangways between the
+white state-room doors. Off for a month's flying in Brazil and
+Argentine, with Tony Bean. Will look up data for coming exploration of
+Amazon headwaters. Martin Dockerill like a regular Beau Brummel in new
+white flannels, parading the deck, making eyes at pretty Greaser
+girls. It's good to be <i>going</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Feb. 22, 1912</i>: Geo. W's birthday. He'd have busted that no-lie
+proviso if he'd ever advertised an aero meet.</p>
+
+<p>Start of flight New Orleans to St. Louis. Looks like really big times,
+old fashioned jubilee all along the road and lots of prizes, though
+take a chance. Only measly little $2,500 prize guaranteed, but vague
+promises of winnings at towns all along, where stop for short
+exhibitions. Each of contestants has to fly at scheduled towns for
+percentage of gate receipts.</p>
+
+<p><i>Feb. 23</i>: What a rotten flight to-day. Small crowd out to see me off.
+No sooner up than trouble with plugs. Wanted to land, but nothing but
+bayous, rice fields, cane<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> breaks, and marshes. Farmer shot at my
+machine. Soon motor stopped on me and had to come down awhooping on a
+small plowed field. Smashed landing gear and got an awful jar. Nothing
+serious though. It was two hours before a local blacksmith and I
+repaired chassis and cleaned plugs. I started off after coaching three
+scared darkies to hold the tail, while the blacksmith spun the
+propeller. He would give it a couple of bats, then dodge out of the
+way too soon, while I sat there and tried not to look mad, which by
+gum I was plenty mad. Landed in this bum town, called &mdash;&mdash;, fourth in
+the race, and found sweet (?) refuge in this chills and fever hotel.
+Wish I was back in New Orleans. Cheer up, having others ahead of me in
+the race just adds a little zip to it. Watch me to-morrow. And I'm not
+the only hard luck artist. Aaron Solomons busted propeller and nearly
+got killed.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later.</i> Cable. Tony Bean is dead. Killed flying. My god, Tony,
+impossible to think of him as dead, just a few days ago we were flying
+together and calling on senoritas and he playing the fiddle and
+laughing, always so polite, like he used to fiddle us into good nature
+when we got discouraged at Bagby's school. Seems like it was just
+couple minutes ago we drove in his big car through Avenida de Mayo and
+everybody cheered him, he was hero of Buenos Aires, yet he treated me
+as the Big Chief. Cablegram forwarded from New Orleans, dated
+yesterday, "Beanno killed fell 200 feet."</p>
+
+<p>And to-morrow I'll have to be out and jolly the rustic meet managers
+again. Want to go off some place and be quiet and think. Wish I could
+get away, be off to South America with Forrest.</p>
+
+<p><i>February 24</i>: Rotten luck continues. Back in same town again! Got up
+yesterday and motor misfired, had to make quick landing in a bayou and
+haul out machine myself aided by scared kids. Got back here and found
+gasoline pipe fouled, small piece of tin stuck in it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Martin feels as bad as I do at Tony's death, tho he doesn't say much
+of anything. "Gosh, and Tony such a nice little cuss," was about all
+he said, but he looked white around the gills.</p>
+
+<p><i>Feb. 25</i>: Another man has dropped out, I am third but still last in
+the race. Race fever got me to-day, didn't care for anything but
+winning, got off to a good start, then took chances, machine wobbled
+like a board in the surf. Am having some funny kind of chicken creole
+I guess it is for lunch, writing this in hotel dining room.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: Passed Aaron Solomons, am now second in the race, landed here
+just three hours behind Walter MacMonnies. Three letters forwarded
+here, from Forrest, he is flying daily at army aviation camp, also
+from Gertie Cowles, she and her mother are in Minneapolis, attending a
+week of grand opera, also to my surprise short note from Jack Ryan,
+the grouch, saying he has given up flying and gone back into motor
+business.</p>
+
+<p>There won't be much more than money to pay expenses on this trip.</p>
+
+<p>Tomorrow I'll show them some real flying.</p>
+
+<p><i>Later</i>: Telegram from a St. L. newspaper. Sweet business. Says that
+promoters of race have not kept promise to remove time limit as they
+promised. Doubt if either Walter MacMonnies or I can finish in time
+set.</p>
+
+<p><i>Feb. 26</i>: Bad luck continues but made fast flight after two forced
+descents, one of them had to make difficult landing, plane down on
+railroad track, avoiding telegraph wires, and get machine off track as
+could hear train coming, awful job. Nerves not very good. Once when up
+at 200 ft. heighth from which Tony Bean fell, I saw his face right in
+air in front of me and jumped so I jerked the stuffings out of control
+wires.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>March 15</i>: Just out of hospital, after three weeks there, broken leg
+still in splints. Glad Walter MacM<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span> got thru in time limit, got prize.
+Too week and shaky write much, shoulder still hurts.</p>
+
+<p><i>March 18</i>: How I came to fall (fall that broke my leg, three weeks
+ago) Was flying over rough country when bad gust came thru hill
+defile. Wing crumpled. Up at 400 ft. Machine plunged forward then
+sideways. Gosh, I thought, I'm gone, but will live as long as I can,
+even a few seconds more, and kept working with elevator, trying to
+right her even a little. Ground coming up fast. Must have jumped, I
+think. Landed in marsh, that saved my life, but woke up at doctor's
+house, leg busted and shoulder bad, etc. Machine shot to pieces, but
+Martin Dockerill has it pretty well repaired. He and the doc and I
+play poker every day, Martin always wins with his dog-gone funeral
+face no matter tho he has an ace full.</p>
+
+<p><i>March 24</i>: Leg all right, pretty nearly. Rigged up steering bar so I
+can work it with one foot. Flew a mile to-day, went not badly. Hope to
+fly at Springfield, Ill. meet next week. Will be able to make Brazil
+trip with Forrest Haviland all right. The dear old boy has been
+writing to me every day while I've been on the bum. Newspapers have
+made a lot of my flying so soon again, several engagements and now
+things look bright again. Reading lots and chipper as can be.</p>
+
+<p><i>March 25</i>: Forrest Haviland is dead He was killed to-day.</p>
+
+<p><i>March 27</i>: Disposed of monoplane by telegraph. Got Martin job with
+Sunset Aviation Company.</p>
+
+<p><i>March 28</i>: Started for Europe.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>May 8, Paris</i>: Forrest and I would have met to-day in New York to
+perfect plans for Brazil trip.</p>
+
+<p><i>May 10</i>: Am still trying to answer letter from Forrest's father.
+Can't seem to make it go right. If I could have seen Forrest again.
+But maybe they were right,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span> holding funeral before I could get there.
+Captain Faber says Forrest was terribly crushed, falling from 1700 ft.
+I wish I didn't keep on thinking of plans for our Brazil trip, then
+remembering we won't make it after all. I don't think I will fly till
+fall, anyway, though I feel stronger now after rest in England,
+Titherington has beautiful place in Devonshire. England seems to stick
+to biplane, can't make them see monoplane. Don't think I shall fly
+before fall. To-day I would have been with Forrest Haviland in New
+York, I think he could have got leave for Brazil trip. We would taken
+Martin. Tony promised to meet us in Rio. I like France but can't get
+used to language, keep starting to speak Spanish. Maybe I'll fly here
+in France but certainly not for some time, though massage has fixed me
+all O.K. Am studying French. Maybe shall bicycle thru France. Mem.:
+Write to Colonel Haviland when I can.</p>
+
+<p><i>Must</i> when I can.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Part_III" id="Part_III"></a>Part III</h2>
+
+<h2>THE ADVENTURE OF LOVE</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_i.jpg" alt="I" width="15" height="50" /></div>
+<p>n October, 1912, a young man came with an enthusiastic letter from
+the president of the Aero Club to old Stephen VanZile, vice-president
+and general manager of the VanZile Motor Corporation of New York. The
+young man was quiet, self-possessed, an expert in regard to motors,
+used to meeting prominent men. He was immediately set to work at a
+tentative salary of $2,500 a year, to develop the plans of what he
+called the "Touricar"&mdash;an automobile with all camping accessories,
+which should enable motorists to travel independent of inns, add the
+joy of camping to the joy of touring, and&mdash;a feature of nearly all
+inventions&mdash;add money to the purse of the inventor.</p>
+
+<p>The young man was Carl Ericson, whom Mr. VanZile had seen fly at New
+Orleans during the preceding February. Carl had got the idea of the
+Touricar while wandering by motor-cycle through Scandinavia and
+Russia.</p>
+
+<p>He was, at this time, twenty-seven years old; not at all remarkable in
+appearance nor to be considered handsome, but so clean, so well
+bathed, so well set-up and evenly tanned, that one thought of the
+swimming, dancing, tennis-playing city men of good summer resorts, an
+impression enhanced by his sleek corn-silk hair and small, pale
+mustache. His clothes came from London, his watch-chain was a thin
+line of platinum and gold, his cigarette-case of silver engraved in
+inconspicuous bands&mdash;a modest and sophisticated cigarette-case, which
+he had possessed long enough to forget that he had it. He was
+apparently too much the easy, well-bred, rather inexperienced Yale or
+Princeton man (not Harvard; there was a tiny twang in his voice, and
+he sometimes murmured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span> "Gee!") to know much about life or work, as
+yet, and his smooth, rosy cheeks made it absurdly evident that he had
+not been away from the college insulation for more than two years.</p>
+
+<p>But when he got to work with draftsman and stenographers, when a curt
+kindliness filled his voice, he proved to be concentrated, unafraid of
+responsibility, able to keep many people busy; trained to something
+besides family tradition and the collegians' na&iuml;ve belief that it
+matters who wins the Next Game.</p>
+
+<p>His hands would have given away the fact that he had done things. They
+were large, broad; the knuckles heavy; the palms calloused by
+something rougher than oar and tennis-racket. The microscopic traces
+of black grease did not for months quite come out of the cracks in his
+skin. And two of his well-kept but thick nails had obviously been
+smashed.</p>
+
+<p>The men of the same rank as himself in the office, captains and first
+lieutenants of business, said that he "simply ate up work." They
+fancied, with the eager old-womanishness of office gossip, that he had
+a "secret sorrow," for, though he was pleasant enough, he kept very
+much to himself. The cause of his retirement from aviation was the
+theme of many romantic legends. They did not know precisely what it
+was he had done in the pre-historic period of a year before, but they
+treated him with reverence instead of the amused aloofness with which
+an office usually waits to see whether a new man will prove to be a
+fool or a "grouch," a clown or a good fellow. The stenographers and
+filing-girls and telephone-girls followed with yearning eyes the
+hero's straight back. The girl who discovered, in an old <i>New York
+Chronicle</i> lining a bureau drawer, an interview with Carl, became very
+haughty over its possession and lent it only to her best lady friends.
+The older women, who knew that Carl had had a serious accident,
+whispered in cloak-room confidences, "Poor fellow, and so brave about
+it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Yet all the while Carl's china-blue eyes showed no trace of pain nor
+sorrow nor that detestable appeal for sympathy called "being brave
+about his troubles."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There were many thoughtful features which fitted the Touricar for use
+in camping&mdash;extra-sized baggage-box whose triangular shape made the
+car more nearly streamline, special folding silk tents, folding
+aluminum cooking-utensils, electric stove run by current from the car,
+electric-battery light attached to a curtain-rod. But the distinctive
+feature, the one which Carl could patent, was the means by which a bed
+was made up inside the car as Pullman seats are turned into berths.
+The back of the front seat was hinged, and dropped back to horizontal.
+The upholstery back of the back seat could be taken out and also
+placed on the horizontal. With blankets spread on the level space thus
+provided, with the extra-heavy top and side curtains in place, and the
+electric light switched on, tourists had a refuge cleaner than a
+country hotel and safer than a tent....</p>
+
+<p>The first Touricar was being built. Carl was circularizing a list of
+possible purchasers, and corresponding with makers of camping goods.</p>
+
+<p>Because he was not office-broken he did not worry about the risks of
+the new enterprise. The stupid details of affairs had, for him, a
+soul&mdash;the Adventure of Business.</p>
+
+<p>To be consulted by draftsmen and shop foremen; to feel that if he
+should not arrive at 8.30 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span> to the second the most important part
+of all the world's business would be halted and stenographers loll in
+expensive idleness; to have the chief, old VanZile, politely anxious
+as to how things were going; to plan ways of making a million dollars
+and not have the plans seem fantastic&mdash;all these made it interesting
+to overwork, and hypnotized Carl into a feeling of responsibility
+which was less spectacular than flying before thousands, but more in
+accordance with the spirit of the time and place.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Inside the office&mdash;busy and reaching for success. Outside the
+office&mdash;frankly bored.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was a dethroned prince. He had been accustomed to a more than
+royal court of admirers. Now he was a nobody the moment he went twenty
+feet from his desk. He was forgotten. He did not seek out the many
+people he had met when he was an aviator and a somebody. He believed,
+perhaps foolishly, that they liked him only as a personage, not as a
+person. He sat lonely at dinner, in cheap restaurants with stains on
+the table-cloths, for he had put much of his capital into the new
+Touricar Company, mothered by the VanZile Corporation; and aeroplanes,
+accessories, traveling-expenses, and the like had devoured much of his
+large earnings at aviation before he had left the game.</p>
+
+<p>In his large, shabby, fairly expensive furnished room on Seventy-fifth
+Street he spent unwilling evenings, working on Touricar plans, or
+reading French&mdash;French technical motor literature, light novels,
+Balzac, anything.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to keep in physical form, and, much though the routine and
+silly gestures of gymnasium exercises bored him, he took them three
+times a week. He could not explain the reason, but he kept his
+identity concealed at the gymnasium, giving his name as "O. Ericson."</p>
+
+<p>Even at the Aero Club, where scores knew him by sight, he was a
+nobody. Aviation, like all pioneer arts, must look to the men who are
+doing new things or planning new things, not to heroes past. Carl was
+often alone at lunch at the club. Any group would have welcomed him,
+but he did not seek them out. For the first time he really saw the
+interior decorations of the club. In the old days he had been much too
+busy talking with active comrades to gaze about. But now he stared for
+five minutes together at the stamped-leather wall-covering of the
+dining-room. He noted, much too carefully for a happy man, the
+trophies of the lounging-room. But at one corner he never glanced. For
+here was a framed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span> picture of the forgotten Hawk Ericson, landing on
+Governor's Island, winner of the flight from Chicago to New York....
+Such a beautiful swoop!...</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt of the fact that he disliked the successful new
+aviators, and did so because he was jealous of them. He admitted the
+fact, but he could not put into his desire to be a good boy
+one-quarter of the force that inspired his resentment at being a
+lonely man and a nobody. But, since he knew he was envious, he was
+careful not to show it, not to inflict it upon others. He was gracious
+and added a wrinkle between his brows, and said "Gosh!" and "ain't"
+much less often.</p>
+
+<p>He had few friends these days. Death had taken many; and he was wary
+of lion-hunters, who in dull seasons condescend to ex-lions and
+dethroned princes. But he was fond of a couple of Aero Club men, an
+automobile ex-racer who was a selling-agent for the VanZile
+Corporation, and Charley Forbes, the bright-eyed, curly-headed, busy,
+dissipated little reporter who had followed him from Chicago to New
+York for the <i>Chronicle</i>. Occasionally one of the men with whom he had
+flown&mdash;Hank Odell or Walter MacMonnies or Lieutenant Rutledge of the
+navy&mdash;came to town, and Carl felt natural again. As for women, the
+only girl whom he had known well in years, Istra Nash, the painter,
+had gone to California to keep house for her father till she should
+have an excuse to escape to New York or Europe again.</p>
+
+<p>Inside the office&mdash;a hustling, optimistic young business man. For the
+rest of the time&mdash;a dethroned prince. Such was Carl Ericson in
+November, 1912, when a letter from Gertrude Cowles, which had pursued
+him all over America and Europe, finally caught him:</p>
+
+<p class="f2">&mdash;&mdash; West 157th St.</p>
+
+<p class="f2"><span class="smcap">New York</span>.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><span class="smcap">Carl dear</span>,&mdash;Oh such excitement, we have come to <i>New York</i> to live!
+Ray has such a good position with a big NY real estate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span> co. &amp; Mama &amp; I
+are going to make a home for him even if it's only just a flat (but
+it's quite a big one &amp; looks out on the duckiest old house that must
+have been adorning Harlem for heaven knows how long,) &amp; our house has
+all modern conveniences, elevator &amp; all.</p>
+
+<p>Think, Carl, I'm going to study dancing at Madame Vashkowska's
+school&mdash;she was with the Russian ballet &amp; really is almost as
+wonderful a dancer as Isadora Duncan or Pavlova. Perhaps I'll teach
+all these ducky new dances to children some day. I'm just terribly
+excited to be here, like the silliest gushiest little girl in the
+world. And I do hope so much you will be able to come to NY &amp; honor us
+with your presence at dinner, famous aviator&mdash;our Carl &amp; we are so
+<i>proud</i> of you&mdash;if you will still remember simple people like us do
+come <i>any time</i>. Wonder where you will be when this reaches you.</p>
+
+<p>I read in the papers that your accident isn't serious but I am
+worried, oh Carl you must take care of yourself.</p>
+</div>
+<p class="f5">Yours as ever,</p>
+
+<p class="f2"><span class="smcap">Gertie</span>.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>P.S. Mama sends her best regards, so does Ray, he has a black mustache
+now, we tease him about it dreadfully.</p>
+</div>
+<p class="f6">G.</p>
+
+<p>One minute after reading the letter, in his room, Carl was standing on
+the chaste black-and-white tiles of the highly respectable
+white-arched hall down-stairs asking Information for the telephone
+number of &mdash;&mdash; West 157th Street, while his landlord, a dry-bearded
+goat of a physician who had failed in the practise of medicine and was
+now failing in the practise of rooming-houses, listened from the front
+of the hall.</p>
+
+<p>Glad to escape from the funereally genteel house, Carl hastily changed
+his collar and tie and, like the little boy Carl whom Gertie had
+known, dog-trotted to the subway, which was going to take him Home.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_b.jpg" alt="B" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>efore the twelve-story Bendingo Apartments, Carl scanned the rows of
+windows which pierced the wall like bank-swallows' nests in a bold
+cliff.... One group of those windows was home&mdash;Joralemon and memories,
+Gertie's faith and understanding.... It was she who had always
+understood him.... In anticipation he loitered through the big,
+marble-and-stucco, rug and rubber-tree, negro hallboy and Jew tenant
+hallway.... What would the Cowleses be like, now?</p>
+
+<p>Gertie met him in the coat-smelling private hall of the Cowles
+apartment, greeted him with both hands clasping his, and her voice
+catching in, "Oh, <i>Carl</i>, it's so good to see you!" Behind Gertie was
+a swishing, stiff-backed Mrs. Cowles, piping in a high, worn voice:
+"Mr. Ericson! A friend from home! And such a famous friend!"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie drew him into the living-room. He looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>He found, not a girl, but a woman of thirty, plump, solid, with the
+tiniest wrinkles of past unhappiness or ennui at the corners of her
+mouth; but her eyes radiant with sweetness, and her hair appealingly
+soft and brown above her wide, calm forehead. She was gowned in
+lavender cr&ecirc;pe de Chine, with panniers of satin elaborately sprinkled
+with little bunches of futurist flowers; long jet earrings; a low-cut
+neck that hinted of a comfortable bosom. Eyes shining, hands firm on
+his arm, voice ringing, she was unaffectedly glad to see him&mdash;her
+childhood playmate, whom she had not beheld for seven years.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles was waiting for them to finish their greetings. Carl was
+startled to find Mrs. Cowles smaller than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span> he had remembered, her hair
+nearly white and not perfectly matched, her face crisscrossed with
+wrinkles deeper than her age justified. But her old disapproval of
+Carl, son of a carpenter and cousin of a "hired girl," was gone. She
+even laughed mildly, like a kitten sneezing. And from a room somewhere
+beyond Ray shouted:</p>
+
+<p>"Be right there in a second, old man. Crazy to have a look at you."</p>
+
+<p>Carl did not really see the living-room, their background. Indeed, he
+never really saw it. There was nothing to see&mdash;chairs and a table and
+pictures of meadows and roses. It was comfortable, however, and had
+conveniences&mdash;a folding card-table, a cribbage-board, score-pads for
+whist and five hundred; a humidor of cigars; a large Morris chair and
+an ugly but well-padded couch of green tufted velvetine.</p>
+
+<p>They sat about in chairs, talking.</p>
+
+<p>Ray came in, slapped Carl on the back, roared: "Well, here's the
+stranger! Holy Mike! have you got a mustache, too? Better shave it off
+before Gert starts kidding you about it. Have a cigar?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl felt at home for the first time in a year; for the first time
+talked easily.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Gertie, tell me about my folks, and Bone Stillman."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I saw your father just before we left, Carl. You know he still
+does quite a little business. We got your mother to join the Nautilus
+Club&mdash;she doesn't go very often; but she had a nice paper about 'Java
+and Its Products,' and she helps us a lot with the rest-room. I
+haven't seen Mr. Stillman for a long, long time. Ray, what has&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Ray: "Why, I think old Bone's off on some expedition 'r other. Fellow
+told me Bone was some kind of a forest ranger or mine inspector, or
+some darn thing, up in the Big Woods. He must be pretty well along
+toward seventy now, at that."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Carl: "So dad's getting along well. His letters aren't very
+committal.... Oh, say, Gertie, what ever became of Ben Rusk? I've lost
+track of him entirely."</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "Why, didn't you know? He went to Rush Medical College. They
+say he did splendidly there; he stood awfully well in his classes, and
+now he's in practise with his father, home."</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Rush?"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "Yes, you know, in Chi&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Oh yes, sure; in Chicago; sure, I remember now; I saw it when I
+was there one time. Why! That's the school his father went to, wasn't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>Ray: "Yes, sure, that's the one."</p>
+
+<p>The point seemed settled.</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Well, well, so Ben <i>did</i> study medicine, after&mdash;&mdash;Oh, <i>say</i>,
+how's Adelaide Benner?"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "Why, you'll see her! She's coming to New York in just a
+couple of weeks to stay with us till she gets settled. Just think,
+she's to have a whole year here, studying domestic science, and then
+she's to have a perfectly dandy position teaching in the Fargo High
+School. I'm not supposed to tell&mdash;you mustn't breathe a <i>word</i> of
+it&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles (interrupting): "Adelaide is a good girl....Ray! Don't
+tilt your chair!"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "Yes, <i>isn't</i> she, mamma.... Well, I was just saying: between
+you and me, Carl, she is to have the position in Fargo all ready and
+waiting for her, though of course they can't announce it publicly,
+with all the cats that would like to get it, and all. Isn't that
+fine?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Certainly is.... 'Member the time we had the May party at
+Adelaide's, and all I could get for my basket was rag babies and May
+flowers? Gee, but I felt out of it!"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "We did have some good parties, <i>didn't</i> we!"</p>
+
+<p>Ray: "Don't call that much of a good party for Carl!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span> Ring off, Gert;
+you got the wrong number that time, all right!"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie (flushing): "Oh, I <i>didn't</i> mean&mdash;&mdash;But we did have some good
+times. Oh, Carl, will you <i>ever</i> forget the time you and I ran away
+when we were just babies?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "I'll never forget&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles: "I'll never forget that time! My lands! I thought I
+should die, I was so frightened."</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "You've forgiven me now, though, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles: "My dear boy, of course I have!" (She wiped away a few
+tears with a gentlewoman handkerchief of lace and thin linen. Carl
+crossed the room and kissed her pale-veined, silvery old hand.
+Abashed, he subsided on the couch, and, trying to look as though he
+hadn't done it&mdash;&mdash;)</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Ohhhhh <i>say</i>, whatever did become of&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I can't think of
+his name&mdash;&mdash;Oh, <i>you</i> know&mdash;&mdash;I know his name well as I do my own, but
+it's slipped me, just for the moment&mdash;&mdash;You know, he ran the
+billiard-parlor; the son of the&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>(From Mrs. Cowles, a small, disapproving sound; from Ray, a grin of
+knowing naughtiness and a violent head-shake.)</p>
+
+<p>Gertie (gently): "Yes.... He&mdash;has left Joralemon.... Klemm, you mean."</p>
+
+<p>Carl (hastily, wondering what Eddie Klemm had done): "Oh, I see....
+Have there been many changes in Joralemon?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles: "Do you write to your father and mother, Carl? You ought
+to."</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Oh yes, I write to them quite often, now, though for a time I
+didn't."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles: "I'm glad, my boy. It's pretty good, after all, to have
+home folks that you can depend on, isn't it? When I first went to
+Joralemon, I thought it was a little pokey, but now I'm older, and
+I've been there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span> so long and all, that I'm almost afraid of New York,
+and I declare I do get real lonely for home sometimes. I'd be glad to
+see Dr. Rusk&mdash;Ben's father, I mean, the old doctor&mdash;driving by, though
+of course you know I lived in Minneapolis a great many years, and I do
+feel I ought to take advantage of the opportunities here, and I've
+thought quite seriously about taking up French again, it's so long
+since I've studied it&mdash;&mdash;You ought to study it; you will find it
+cultivates the mind. And you must be sure to write often to your
+mother; there's nothing you can depend on like a mother's love, my
+boy."</p>
+
+<p>Ray: "Say, look here, Carl, I want to hear something about all this
+aviation. How does it feel to fly, anyway? I'd be scared to death;
+it's funny, I can't look off the top of a sky-scraper without feeling
+as though I wanted to jump. Gosh! I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "Now you just let Carl tell us when he gets ready, you big,
+bad brother! Carl wants to hear all about Home first.... All these
+years!... You were asking about the changes. There haven't been so
+very many. You know it's a little slow there. Oh, of course, I almost
+forgot; why, you haven't been in Joralemon since they built up what
+used to be Tubbs's pasture."</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Not the old pasture by the lake? Well, well! Is that a fact!
+Why, gee! I used to snare gophers there!"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "Oh yes. Why, you simply wouldn't <i>know</i> it, Carl, it's so
+much changed. There must be a dozen houses on it, now. Why, there's
+cement walks and everything, and Mr. Upham has a house there, a real
+nice one, with a screened-in porch and everything.... Of course you
+know they've put in the sewer now, and there's lots of modern
+bath-rooms, and almost everybody has a Ford. We would have bought one,
+but planning to come away so soon&mdash;&mdash;Oh yes, and they've added a
+fire-escape to the school-house."</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Well, well!... Oh, say, Ray, how is Howard Griffin getting
+along?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Ray: "Why, Howard's graduated from Chicago Law School, and he's
+practising in Denver. Doing pretty well, I guess; settled down and got
+quite some real-estate holdings.... Have 'nother cigar, old man?...
+Say, speaking of Plato, of course you know they ousted old S. Alcott
+Woodski from the presidency, for heresy, something about baptism; and
+the dean succeeded him.... Poor old cuss, he wasn't as mean as the
+dean, anyway.... Say, Carl, I've always thought they gave you a pretty
+raw deal there&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie (interrupting): "Perfectly dreadful!... Ray, <i>don't</i> put your
+feet on that couch; I brushed it thoroughly, just this morning.... It
+was simply terrible, Carl; I've always said that if Plato couldn't
+appreciate her greatest son&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles (sleepily): "Outrageous.... And don't put your feet on
+that chair, Ray."</p>
+
+<p>Ray: "Oh, leave my feet alone!... Everybody knew you were dead right
+in standing up for Prof Frazer. You remember how I roasted all the
+fellows in Omega Chi when they said you were nutty to boost him? And
+when you stood up in Chapel&mdash;&mdash;Lord! that was nervy."</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "Indeed you were right, and now you've got so famous I
+guess&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl: "Oh, I ain't so&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles: "I was simply amazed.... Children, if you don't mind, I'm
+afraid I must leave you. Mr. Ericson, I'm so ashamed to be sleepy so
+early. When we lived in Minneapolis, before Mr. Cowles passed beyond,
+he was a regular night-hawk, and we used to sit&mdash;sit&mdash;" (a yawn)&mdash;"sit
+up till all hours. But to-night&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Gertie: "Oh, must you go so soon? I was just going to make Carl a
+rarebit. Carl has never seen one of my rarebits."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowles: "Make him one by all means, my dear, and you young people
+sit up and enjoy yourselves just as long as you like. Good night,
+all.... Ray, will you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span> please be sure and see that that window is
+fastened before you go to bed? I get so nervous when&mdash;&mdash;Mr. Ericson,
+I'm very proud to think that one of our Joralemon boys should have
+done so well. Sometimes I wonder if the Lord ever meant men to
+fly&mdash;what with so many accidents, and you know aviators often do get
+killed and all. I was reading the other day&mdash;such a large
+percentage&mdash;&mdash;But we have been so proud that you should lead them all,
+I was saying to a lady on the train that we had a friend who was a
+famous aviator, and she was so interested to find that we knew you.
+Good night."</p>
+
+<p>They had the Welsh rarebit, with beer, and Carl helped to make it.
+Gertie summoned him into the scoured kitchen, saying, with a beautiful
+casualness, as she tied an apron about him:</p>
+
+<p>"We can't afford a hired girl (I suppose I should say a 'maid'),
+because mamma has put so much of our money into Ray's business, so you
+mustn't expect anything so very grand. But you'd like to help,
+wouldn't you? You're to chop the cheese. Cut it into weenty cubes."</p>
+
+<p>Carl did like to help. He boasted that he was the "champion
+cheese-chopper of Harlem and the Bronx, one-thirty-three ringside,"
+while Gertie was toasting crackers, and Ray was out buying bottles of
+beer in a newspaper. It all made Carl feel more than ever at home....
+It was good to be with people of such divine understanding that they
+knew what he meant when he said, "I suppose there <i>have</i> been worse
+teachers than Prof Larsen&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>When the rabbit lay pale in death, a saddening <i>d&eacute;b&acirc;cle</i> of hardened
+cheese, and they sat with their elbows on the Modified Mission
+dining-table, Gertie exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Ray, you <i>must</i> do that new stunt of yours for Carl. It's
+screamingly funny, Carl."</p>
+
+<p>Ray rose, had his collar and tie off in two jocund jerks, buttoned his
+collar on backward, cheerily turned his waistcoat back side foremost,
+lengthened his face to an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span> expression of unctuous sanctimoniousness,
+and turned about&mdash;transformed in one minute to a fair imitation of a
+stage curate. With his hands folded, Ray droned, "Naow, sistern, it
+behooveth us heuh in St. Timothee's Chutch," while Carl pounded the
+table in his delight at seeing old Ray, the broad-shouldered, the
+lady-killer, the capable business man, drop his eyes and yearn.</p>
+
+<p>"Now you must do a stunt!" shrieked Ray and Gertie; and Carl
+hesitatingly sang what he remembered of Forrest Haviland's foolish
+song:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I went up in a balloon so big<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The people on the earth they looked like a pig,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like a mice, like a katydid, like flieses and like fleasen."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Then, without solicitation, Gertie decided to dance "Gather the Golden
+Sheaves," which she had learned at the school of Mme. Vashkowska, late
+(though not very late) of the Russian ballet.</p>
+
+<p>She explained her work; outlined the theory of sensuous and esthetic
+dancing; mentioned the backgrounds of Bakst and the glories of
+Nijinsky; told her ambition to teach the New Dancing to children. Carl
+listened with awe; and with awe did he gaze as Gertie gathered the
+Golden Sheaves&mdash;purely hypothetical sheaves in a field occupying most
+of the living-room.</p>
+
+<p>After the stunts Ray delicately vanished. It was not so much that he
+statedly went off to bed as that, presently, he was not there. Gertie
+and Carl were snugly alone, and at last he talked&mdash;of Forrest Haviland
+and Tony Bean, of flying and falling, of excited crowds and the
+fog-filled air-lanes.</p>
+
+<p>In turn she told of her ambition to do something modern and urban. She
+had hesitated between dancing and making exotic jewelry; she was glad
+she had chosen the former; it was so human; it put one in touch with
+People.... She had recently gone to dinner with real Bohemians,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
+spirits of fire, splendidly in contrast with the dull plodders of
+Joralemon. The dinner had been at a marvelous place on West Tenth
+Street&mdash;very foreign, every one drinking wine and eating spaghetti and
+little red herrings, and the women fearlessly smoking cigarettes&mdash;some
+of them. She had gone with a girl from Mme. Vashkowska's school, a
+glorious creature from London, Nebraska, who lived with the most
+fascinating girls at the Three Arts Club. They had met an artist with
+black hair and languishing eyes, who had a Yankee name, but sang
+Italian songs divinely, upon the slightest pretext, so bubbling was he
+with <i>joie de vivre</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was alarmed. "Gosh!" he protested, "I hope you aren't going to
+have much to do with the long-haired bunch.... I've invented a name
+for them&mdash;'the Hobohemians.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no-o! I don't take them seriously at all. I was just glad to go
+once."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course some of them are clever."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, aren't they clever!"</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't think they last very well."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, I'm sure they don't last well. Oh no, Carl, I'm too old and
+fat to be a Bohemian&mdash;a Hobohemian, I mean, so&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense! You look so&mdash;oh, thunder! I don't know just how to express
+it&mdash;well, so <i>real</i>! It's wonderfully comfortable to be with you-all
+again. I don't mean you're just the 'so good to her mother' sort, you
+understand. But I mean you're dependable as well as artistic."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, indeed, I won't take them too seriously. Besides, I suppose lots
+of the people that go to Bohemian restaurants aren't really artists at
+all; they just go to see the artists; they're just as bromidic as can
+be&mdash;&mdash;Don't you hate bromides? Of course I want to see some of that
+part of life, but I think&mdash;&mdash;Oh, don't you think those artists and all
+are dreadfully careless about morals?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she breathed, reflectively. "No, I keep up with my church and
+all&mdash;indeed I do. Oh, Carl, you must come to our church&mdash;St. Orgul's.
+It's too sweet for anything. It's just two blocks from here; and it
+isn't so far up here, you know, not with the subway&mdash;not like
+commuting. It has the <i>loveliest</i> chapel. And the most wonderful
+reredos. And the services are so inspiring and high-church; not like
+that horrid St. Timothy's at home. I do think a church service ought
+to be beautiful. Don't you? It isn't as though we were like a lot of
+poor people who have to have their souls saved in a mission.... What
+church do you attend? You <i>will</i> come to St. Orgul's some time, won't
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Be glad to&mdash;&mdash;Oh, say, Gertie, before I forget it, what is Semina
+doing now? Is she married?"</p>
+
+<p>Apropos of this subject, Gertie let it be known that she herself was
+not betrothed.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had not considered that question; but when he was back in his
+room he was glad to know that Gertie was free.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At the Omega Chi Delta Club, Carl lunched with Ray Cowles. Two nights
+later, Ray and Gertie took Carl and Gertie's friend, the glorious
+creature from London, Nebraska, to the opera. Carl did not know much
+about opera. In other words, being a normal young American who had
+been water-proofed with college culture, he knew absolutely nothing
+about it. But he gratefully listened to Gertie's clear explanation of
+why Mme. Vashkowska preferred Wagner to Verdi.</p>
+
+<p>He had, in the mean time, received a formal invitation for a party to
+occur at Gertie's the coming Friday evening.</p>
+
+<p>Thursday evening Gertie coached him in a new dance, the turkey trot.
+She also gave him a lesson in the Boston, with a new dip invented by
+Mme. Vashkowska, which was certain to sweep the country, because, of
+course,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span> Vashkowska was the only genuinely qualified <i>ma&icirc;tresse de
+danse</i> in America.</p>
+
+<p>It was a beautiful evening. Home! Ray came in, and the three of them
+had coffee and thin sandwiches. At Gertie's suggestion, Ray again
+turned his collar round and performed his "clergyman stunt." While the
+impersonation did not, perhaps, seem so humorous as before, Carl was
+amused; and he consented to sing the "I went up in a balloon so big"
+song, so that Ray might learn it and sing it at the office.</p>
+
+<p>It was captivating to have Gertie say, quietly, as he left: "I hope
+you'll be able to come to the party a little early to-morrow, Carl.
+You know we count on you to help us."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>he party was on at the Cowles flat.</p>
+
+<p>People came. They all set to it, having a party, being lively and gay,
+whether they wanted to or not. They all talked at once, and had
+delicious shocks over the girl from London, Nebraska, who, having
+moved to Washington Place, just a block or two from ever so many
+artists, was now smoking a cigarette and, wearing a gown that was
+black and clinging. It was no news to her that men had a tendency to
+become interested in her ankles. But she still went to church and was
+accepted by quite the nicest of the St. Orgul's set, to whom Gertie
+had introduced her.</p>
+
+<p>She and Gertie were the only thoroughly qualified representatives of
+Art, but Beauty and Gallantry and Wit were common. The conspirators in
+holding a party were, on the male side:</p>
+
+<p>An insurance adjuster, who was a frat-brother to Carl and Ray, though
+he came from Melanchthon College. A young lawyer, ever so jolly, with
+a banjo. A bantling clergyman, who was spoken of with masculine
+approval because he smoked a pipe and said charmingly naughty things.
+Johnson of the Homes and Long Island Real Estate Company, and his
+brother, of the Martinhurst Development Company. Four older men,
+ranging from thin-haired to very bald, who had come with their wives
+and secretly looked at their watches while they talked brightly with
+one another's wives. Five young men whom Carl could not tell apart, as
+they all had smooth hair and eye-glasses and smart dress-shirts and
+obliging<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span> smiles and complimentary references to his aviating. He gave
+up trying to remember which was which.</p>
+
+<p>It was equally hard to remember which of the women Gertie knew as a
+result of her girlhood visit to New York, which from their membership
+in St. Orgul's Church, which from their relation to Minnesota. They
+all sat in rows on couches and chairs and called him "You wicked man!"
+for reasons none too clear to him. He finally fled from them and
+joined the group of young men, who showed an ill-bred and disapproved
+tendency to sneak off into Ray's room for a smoke. He did not,
+however, escape one young woman who stood out from the <i>m&ecirc;l&eacute;e</i>&mdash;a
+young woman with a personality almost as remarkable as that of the
+glorious creature from London, Nebraska. This was the more or less
+married young woman named Dorothy, and affectionately called
+"Tottykins" by all the St. Orgul's group. She was of the kind who look
+at men appraisingly, and expect them to come up, be unduly familiar,
+and be crushed. She had seven distinct methods of getting men to say
+indiscreet things, and three variations of reply, of which the
+favorite was to remark with well-bred calmness: "I'm afraid you have
+made a slight error, Mr. Uh&mdash;&mdash; I didn't quite catch your name?
+Perhaps they failed to tell you that I attend St. Orgul's evvvv'ry
+Sunday, and have a husband and child, and am not at all, really, you
+know. I hope that there has been nothing I said that has given you the
+idea that I have been looking for a flirtation."</p>
+
+<p>A thin, small female with bobbed hair was Tottykins, who kept her
+large husband and her fat, white grub of an infant somewhere in the
+back blocks. She fingered a long, gold, religious chain with her
+square, stubby hand, while she gazed into men's eyes with what she
+privately termed "daring frankness."</p>
+
+<p>Tottykins the fair; Tottykins the modern; Tottykins who had read
+<i>Three Weeks</i> and nearly all of a wicked novel in French, and wore a
+large gold cross; Tottykins<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span> who worked so hard in her little flat
+that she had to rest all of every afternoon and morning; Tottykins the
+advanced and liberal&mdash;yet without any of the extremes of socialists
+and artists and vegetarians and other ill-conditioned persons who do
+not attend St. Orgul's; Tottykins the firmly domestic, whose husband
+grew more worried every year; Tottykins the intensely cultured and
+inquisitive about life, the primitively free and pervasively original,
+who announced in public places that she wanted always to live like the
+spirit of the Dancing Bacchante statue, but had the assistant rector
+of St. Orgul's in for coffee, every fourth Monday evening.</p>
+
+<p>Tottykins beckoned Carl to a corner and said, with her manner of
+amused condescension, "Now you sit right down here, Hawk Ericson, and
+tell me <i>all</i> about aviation."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was not vastly sensitive. He had not disliked the nice young men
+with eye-glasses. Not till now did he realize how Tottykins's shrill
+references to the Dancing Bacchante and the Bacchanting of her
+mud-colored Dutch-fashioned hair had bored him. Ennui was not, of
+course, an excuse; but it was the explanation of why he answered in
+this wise (very sweetly, looking Tottykins in the eyes and patting her
+hand with a brother-like and altogether maddening condescension):</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, that isn't the way, Dorothy. It's quite <i>pass&eacute;</i> to ask me to
+tell you all about aviation. That isn't done, not in 1912. Oh
+Dor-o-thy! Oh no, no! No-o! No, no. First you should ask me if I'm
+afraid when I'm flying. Oh, always begin that way. Then you say that
+there's a curious fact about you&mdash;when you're on a high building and
+just look down once, then you get so dizzy that you want to jump.
+Then, after you've said that&mdash;&mdash;Let's see. You're a church member,
+aren't you? Well then, next you'd say, 'Just how does it feel to be up
+in an aeroplane?' or if you don't say that then you've simply got to
+say, 'Just how does it feel to fly, anyway?' But if you're just
+<i>terribly</i> interested, Dorothy, you might ask<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span> about biplanes <i>versus</i>
+monoplanes, and 'Do I think there'll ever be a flight across the
+Atlantic?' But whatever you do, Dorothy, don't fail to ask me if I'll
+give you a free ride when I start flying again. And we'll fly and
+fly&mdash;&mdash;Like birds. You know. Or like the Dancing Bacchante.... That's
+the way to talk about aviation.... And now you tell me <i>all</i> about
+babies!"</p>
+
+<p>"Really, I'm afraid babies is rather a big subject to tell all about!
+At a party! Really, you <i>know</i>&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>That was the only time Carl was not bored at the party. And even then
+he had spiritual indigestion from having been rude.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest of the time:</p>
+
+<p>Every one knew everybody else, and took Carl aside to tell him that
+everybody was "the most conscientious man in our office, Ericson; why,
+the Boss would trust him with anything." It saddened Carl to hear the
+insurance adjuster boom, "Oh you Tottykins!" across the room, at
+ten-minute intervals, like a human fog-horn on the sea of ennui.</p>
+
+<p>They were all so uniformly polite, so neat-minded and church-going and
+dull. Nearly all the girls did their hair and coquetries one exactly
+like another. Carl is not to be pitied. He had the pleasure of
+martyrdom when he heard the younger Johnson tell of Martinhurst, the
+Suburb Beautiful. He believed that he had reached the nadir of
+boredom. But he was mistaken.</p>
+
+<p>After simple and pleasing refreshments of the wooden-plate and
+paper-napkin school, Gertie announced: "Now we're going to have some
+stunts, and you're each to give one. I know you all can, and if
+anybody tries to beg off&mdash;my, what will happen&mdash;&mdash;! My brother has a
+new one&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>For the third time that month, Carl saw Ray turn his collar round and
+become clerical, while every one rustled with delight, including the
+jolly bantling clergyman.</p>
+
+<p>And for the fourth time he saw Gertie dance "Gather<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span> the Golden
+Sheaves." She appeared, shy and serious, in bloomers and flat
+dancing-shoes, which made her ample calves bulge the more; she started
+at sight of the harvest moon (and well she may have been astonished,
+if she did, indeed, see a harvest moon there, above the gilded buffalo
+horns on the unit bookcase), rose to her toes, flapped her arms, and
+began to gather the sheaves to her breast, with enough plump and
+panting energy to enable her to gather at least a quarter-section of
+them before the whistle blew.</p>
+
+<p>It was not only esthetic, but Close to the Soil.</p>
+
+<p>Then, to banjo accompaniment, the insurance adjuster sighed for his
+old Kentucky home, which Carl judged to have been located in Brooklyn.
+The whole crowd joined in the chorus and&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, with a shock that made him despise himself for the cynical
+superiority which he had been enjoying, Carl remembered that Forrest
+Haviland, Tony Bean, Hank Odell, even surly Jack Ryan and the alien
+Carmeau, had sung "My Old Kentucky Home" on their last night at the
+Bagby School. He felt their beloved presences in the room. He had to
+fight against tears as he too joined in the chorus.... "Then weep no
+more, my lady."... He was beside a California poppy-field. The
+blossoms slumbered beneath the moon, and on his shoulder was the hand
+of Forrest Haviland....</p>
+
+<p>He had repented. He became part of the group. He spoke kindly to
+Tottykins. But presently Tottykins postponed her well-advertised
+return to her husband and baby, and gave a ten-minute dramatic recital
+from Byron; and the younger Johnson sang a Swiss mountaineer song with
+yodels.</p>
+
+<p>Gertie looked speculatively at Carl twice during this offering. He knew
+that the gods were plotting an abominable thing. She was going to call upon
+him for the "stunt" which had been inescapably identified with him, the
+song, "I went up in a balloon so big." He met the crisis heroically. He
+said loudly, as the shaky strains of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span> Swiss ballad died on the midnight
+mountain air of 157th Street (while the older men concealed yawns and
+applauded, and the family in the adjoining flat rapped on the radiator):
+"I'm sorry my throat 's so sore to-night. Otherwise I'd sing a song I
+learned from a fellow in California&mdash;balloon s' big."</p>
+
+<p>Gertie stared at him doubtfully, but passed to a kitten-faced girl
+from Minnesota, who was quite ready to give an imitation of a child
+whose doll has been broken. Her "stunt" was greeted with, "Oh, how
+cun-ning! Please do it again!"</p>
+
+<p>She prepared to do it again. Carl made hasty motions of departure,
+pathetically holding his throat.</p>
+
+<p>He did not begin to get restless till he had reached Ninety-sixth
+Street and had given up his seat in the subway to a woman who
+resembled Tottykins. He wondered if he had not been at the Old Home
+long enough. At Seventy-second Street, on an inspiration that came as
+the train was entering the station, he changed to a local and went
+down to Fifty-ninth Street. He found an all-night garage, hired a
+racing-car, and at dawn he was driving furiously through Long Island,
+a hundred miles from New York, on a roadway perilously slippery with
+falling snow.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_c.jpg" alt="C" width="45" height="50" /></div>
+<p>arl wished that Adelaide Benner had never come from Joralemon to
+study domestic science. He felt that he was a sullen brute, but he
+could not master his helpless irritation as he walked with Adelaide
+and Gertie Cowles through Central Park, on a snowy Sunday afternoon of
+December. Adelaide assumed that one remained in the state of mind
+called Joralemon all one's life; that, however famous he might be, the
+son of Oscar Ericson was not sufficiently refined for Miss Cowles of
+the Big House on the Hill, though he might improve under Cowles
+influences. He was still a person who had run away from Plato! But
+that assumption was far less irritating than one into which Adelaide
+threw all of her faded yearning&mdash;that Gertie and he were in love.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide kept repeating, with coy slyness: "Isn't it too bad you two
+have me in the way!" and: "Don't mind poor me. Auntie will turn her
+back any time you want her to."</p>
+
+<p>And Gertie merely blushed, murmuring, "Don't be a silly."</p>
+
+<p>At Eightieth Street Adelaide announced: "Now I must leave you
+children. I'm going over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I do love
+to see art pictures. I've always wanted to. Now be as good as you can,
+you two."</p>
+
+<p>Gertie was mechanical about replying. "Oh, don't run away, Addy dear."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, you two will miss an old maid like me terribly!" And Adelaide
+was off, a small, sturdy, undistinguished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span> figure, with an unyielding
+loyalty to Gertie and to the idea of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Carl looked at her bobbing back (with wrinkles in her cloth jacket
+over the shoulders) as she melted into the crowd of glossy fur-trimmed
+New-Yorkers. He comprehended her goodness, her devotion. He sighed,
+"If she'd only stop this hinting about Gertie and me&mdash;&mdash;" He was
+repentant of his irritation, and said to Gertie, who was intimately
+cuddling her arm into his: "Adelaide's an awfully good kid. Sorry she
+had to go."</p>
+
+<p>Gertie jerked her arm away, averted her profile, grated: "If you miss
+her so much, perhaps you'd better run after her. Really, I wouldn't
+interfere, not for <i>worlds</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, hello, Gertie! What seems to be the matter? Don't I detect a
+chill in the atmosphere? So sorry you've gone and gotten refined on
+me. I was just going to suggest some low-brow amusement like tea at
+the Casino."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you ought to know a lady doesn't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, now, Gertie dear, not 'lady.'"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you're a bit nice, Carl Ericson, I don't, to be making
+fun of me when I'm serious. And why haven't you been up to see us?
+Mamma and Ray have spoken of it, and you've only been up once since my
+party, and then you were&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, please let's not start anything. Sorry I haven't been able to get
+up oftener, but I've been taking work home. You know how it is&mdash;you
+know when you get busy with your dancing-school&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I meant to tell you. I'm through, just <i>through</i> with Vashkowska
+and her horrid old school. She's a cat and I don't believe she ever
+had anything to do with the Russian ballet, either. What do you think
+she had the effrontery to tell me? She said that I wasn't practising
+and really trying to learn anything. And I've been working myself
+into&mdash;&mdash;Really, my nerves were in such a shape, I would have been in
+danger of a nervous breakdown if I had kept on. Tottykins told me how
+she had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span> a nervous breakdown, and had me see her doctor, such a dear,
+Dr. St. Claire, so refined and sympathetic, and he told me I was right
+in suspecting that nobody takes Vashkowska seriously any more, and,
+besides, I don't think much of all this symbolistic dancing, anyway,
+and at last I've found out what I really want to do. Oh, Carl, it's so
+wonderful! I'm studying ceramics with Miss Deitz, she's so wonderful
+and temperamental and she has the dearest studio on Gramercy Park. Of
+course I haven't made anything yet, but I know I'm going to like it so
+much, and Miss Deitz says I have a natural taste for vahzes and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Huh? Oh yes, vases. I get you."</p>
+
+<p>"(Don't be vulgar.)&mdash;&mdash;I'm going to go down to her studio and work
+every other day, and she doesn't think you have to work like a
+scrubwoman to succeed, like that horrid Vashkowska did. Miss Deitz has
+a temperament herself. And, oh, Carl, she says that 'Gertrude' isn't
+suited to me (and 'Gertie' certainly isn't!) and she calls me
+'Eltruda.' Don't you think that's a sweet name? Would you like to call
+me 'Eltruda,' sometimes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Gertie, I don't want to butt in, and I'm guessing at it,
+but looks to me as though one of these artistic grafters was working
+you. What do you know about this Deitz person? Has she done anything
+worth while? And honestly, Gertie&mdash;&mdash;By the way, I don't want to be
+brutal, but I don't think I could stand 'Eltruda.' It sounds like
+'Tottykins.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Now really, Carl&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait a second. How do you know you've got what you call a
+temperament? Go to it, and good luck, if you can get away with it. But
+how do you know it isn't simply living in a flat and not having any
+work to do <i>except</i> developing a temperament? Why don't you try
+working with Ray in his office? He's a mighty good business man. This
+is just a sugges&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Now really, this is&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Gertie, the thing I've always admired about you is your
+wholesomeness and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"'Wholesome!' Oh, that word! As Miss Deitz was saying just the other
+day, it's as bad&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But you are wholesome, Gertie. That is, if you don't let New York
+turn your head; and if you'd use your ability on a real job, like
+helping Ray, or teaching&mdash;yes, or really sticking to your ceramics or
+dancing, and leave the temperament business to those who can get away
+with it. No, wait. I know I'm butting in; I know that people won't go
+and change their natures because I ask them to; but you see you&mdash;and
+Ray and Adelaide&mdash;you are the friends I depend on, and so I hate to
+see&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Carl dear, you might let me talk," said Gertie, in tones of
+maddening sweetness. "As I think it over, I don't seem to recall that
+you've been an authority on temperament for so very long. I seem to
+remember that you weren't so terribly wonderful in Joralemon! I'm glad
+to be the first to honor what you've done in aviation, but I don't
+know that that gives you the right to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Never said it did!" Carl insisted, with fictitious good humor.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;assume that you are an authority on temperament and art. I'm
+afraid that your head has been just a little turned by&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, hell.... Oh, I'm sorry. That just slipped."</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>shouldn't</i> have slipped, you know. I'm <i>afraid</i> it can't be
+passed over so <i>easily</i>." Gertie might have been a bustling Joralemon
+school-teacher pleasantly bidding the dirty Ericson boy, "Now go and
+wash the little hands."</p>
+
+<p>Carl said nothing. He was bored. He wished that he had not become
+entangled in their vague discussion of "temperament."</p>
+
+<p>Even more brightly Gertie announced: "I'm afraid you're not in a very
+good humor this afternoon. I'm sorry that my plans don't interest you.
+Of course, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span> should be very temperamental if I expected you to
+apologize for cursing and swearing, so I think I'll just leave you
+here, and when you feel better&mdash;&mdash;" She was infuriatingly cheerful.
+"&mdash;&mdash;I should be pleased to have you call me up. Good-by, Carl, and I
+hope that your walk will do you good."</p>
+
+<p>She turned into a footpath; left him muttering in tones of youthful
+injury, "Jiminy! I've done it now!"</p>
+
+<p>He was in Joralemon.</p>
+
+<p>A victoria drove by with a dowager who did not seem to be humbly
+courting the best set in Joralemon. A grin lightened Carl's face. He
+chuckled: "By golly! Gertie handled it splendidly! I'm to call up and
+be humble, and then&mdash;bing!&mdash;the least I can do is to propose and be
+led to the altar and teach a Sunday-school class at St. Orgul's for
+the rest of my life! Come hither, Hawk Ericson, let us hold council.
+Here's the way Gertie will dope it out, I guess. ('Eltruda!') I'll
+dine in solitary regret for saying 'hell'&mdash;&mdash;No. First I'm to walk
+down-town, alone and busy repenting, and then I'll feed alone, and by
+eight o'clock I'll be so tired of myself that I'll call up and beg
+pretty. Rats! It's rotten mean to dope it out like that, but just the
+same&mdash;&mdash;Me that have done what I've done&mdash;worried to death over one
+accidental 'hell'!... Hey there, you taxi!"</p>
+
+<p>Grandly he rode through the Park, and in an unrepentant manner bowed
+to every pretty woman he saw, to the disapproval of their silk-hatted
+escorts.</p>
+
+<p>He forgot the existence of Gertie Cowles and the Old Home Folks.</p>
+
+<p>But he really could not afford a taxicab, and he had to make up for it
+by economy. At seven-thirty he gloomily entered Miggleton's
+Restaurant, on Forty-second Street, the least unbearable of the
+"Popular Prices&mdash;Tables for Ladies" dens, and slumped down at a table
+near the window. There were few diners. Carl was as much a stranger as
+on the morning when he had first invaded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> New York, to find work with
+an automobile company, and had passed this same restaurant; still was
+he a segregated stranger, despite the fact that, two blocks away, in
+the Aero Club, two famous aviators were agreeing that there had never
+been a more consistently excellent flight in America than Hawk
+Ericson's race from Chicago to New York.</p>
+
+<p>Carl considered the delights of the Cowles flat, Ray's stories about
+Plato and business, and the sentimental things Gertie played on the
+guitar. He suddenly determined to go off some place and fly an
+aeroplane; as suddenly knew that he was not yet ready to return to the
+game. He read the <i>Evening Telegram</i> and cheerlessly peered out of the
+window at the gray snow-veil which shrouded Forty-second Street.</p>
+
+<p>As he finished his dessert and stirred his coffee he stared into a
+street-car stalled in a line of traffic outside. Within the car, seen
+through the snow-mist, was a girl of twenty-two or three, with satiny
+slim features and ash-blond hair. She was radiant in white-fox furs.
+Carl craned to watch. He thought of the girl who, asking a direction
+before the Florida Lunch Room in Chicago, had inspired him to become a
+chauffeur.</p>
+
+<p>The girl in the street-car was listening to her companion, who was a
+dark-haired girl with humor and excitement about life in her face,
+well set-up, not tall, in a smartly tailored coat of brown pony-skin
+and a small hat that was all lines and no trimming. Both of them
+seemed amused, possibly by the lofty melancholy of a traffic policeman
+beside the car, who raised his hand as though he had high ideals and a
+slight stomach-ache. The dark-haired girl tapped her round knees with
+the joy of being alive.</p>
+
+<p>The street-car started. Carl was already losing in the city jungle the
+two acquaintances whom he had just made. The car stopped again, still
+blocked. Carl seized his coat, dropped a fifty-cent piece on the
+cashier's desk, did not wait for his ten cents change, ran across the
+street<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> (barely escaping a taxicab), galloped around the end of the
+car, swung up on the platform.</p>
+
+<p>As he took a seat opposite the two girls he asked himself just what he
+expected to do now. The girls were unaware of his existence. And why
+had he hurried? The car had not started again. But he studied his
+unconscious conquests from behind his newspaper, vastly content.</p>
+
+<p>In the unnatural quiet of the stalled car the girls were irreverently
+discussing "George." He heard enough to know that they were of the
+rather smart, rather cultured class known as "New-Yorkers"&mdash;they might
+be Russian-American princesses or social workers or ill-paid
+governesses or actresses or merely persons with one motor-car and a
+useful papa in the family.</p>
+
+<p>But in any case they were not of the kind he could pick up.</p>
+
+<p>The tall girl of the ash-blond hair seemed to be named Olive, being
+quite unolive in tint, while her livelier companion was apparently
+christened Ruth. Carl wearied of Olive's changeless beauty as quickly
+as he did of her silver-handled umbrella. She merely knew how to
+listen. But the less spectacular, less beautiful, less languorous,
+dark-haired Ruth was born a good comrade. Her laughter marked her as
+one of the women whom earth-quake and flood and child-bearing cannot
+rob of a sense of humor; she would have the inside view, the
+sophisticated understanding of everything.</p>
+
+<p>The car was at last free of the traffic. It turned a corner and
+started northward. Carl studied the girls.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth was twenty-four, perhaps, or twenty-five. Not tall, slight enough
+to nestle, but strong and self-reliant. She had quantities of
+dark-brown hair, crisp and glinty, though not sleek, with eyebrows
+noticeably dark and heavy. Her smile was made irresistible by her
+splendidly shining teeth, fairly large but close-set and white; and
+not only the corners of her eyes joined in her smile, but even her
+nose, her delicate yet piquant nose, which could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span> quiver like a
+deer's. When she laughed, Carl noted, Ruth had a trick of lifting her
+heavy lids quickly, and surprising one with a glint of blue eyes where
+brown were expected. Her smooth, healthy, cream-colored skin was rosy
+with winter, and looked as though in summer it would tan evenly,
+without freckles. Her chin was soft, but without a dimple, and her
+jaws had a clean, boyish leanness. Her smooth neck and delicious
+shoulders were curved, not fatly, but with youth and happiness. They
+were square, capable shoulders, with no mid-Victorian droop about
+them. Her waist was slender naturally, not from stays. Her short but
+not fat fingers were the ideal instruments for the piano. Slim were
+her crossed feet, and her unwrinkled pumps (foolish footgear for a
+snowy evening) seemed eager to dance.</p>
+
+<p>There was no hint of the coquette about her. Physical appeal this Ruth
+had, but it was the allure of sunlight and meadows, of tennis and a
+boat with bright, canted sails, not of boudoir nor garden
+dizzy-scented with jasmine. She was young and clean, sweet without
+being sprinkled with pink sugar; too young to know much about the
+world's furious struggle; too happy to have realized its inevitable
+sordidness; yet born a woman who would not always wish to be
+"protected," and round whom all her circle of life would center....</p>
+
+<p>So Carl inarticulately mused, with the intentness which one gives to
+strangers in a quiet car, till he laughed, "I feel as if I knew her
+like a book." The century's greatest problem was whether he would
+finally prefer her to Olive, if he knew them. If he could speak to
+them&mdash;&mdash;But that was, in New York, more difficult than beating a
+policeman or getting acquainted with the mayor. He would lose them.</p>
+
+<p>Already they were rising, going out.</p>
+
+<p>He couldn't let them be lost. He glanced out of the window, sprang up
+with an elaborate pretense that he had come to his own street. He
+followed them out, still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span> conning head-lines in his paper. His grave
+absorption said, plain that all might behold, that he was a
+respectable citizen to whom it would never occur to pursue strange
+young women.</p>
+
+<p>His new friends had been close to him in the illuminated car, but they
+were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar
+street-crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a
+street-sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the
+Fifties. As they turned east on Fifty-blankth Street he stopped under
+the street-light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it
+the address of that dear old friend, living on Fifty-blankth, on whom
+he was going to call. This was to convince the policeman of the
+perfect purity of his intentions. The fact that there was no policeman
+nearer than the man on fixed post a block away did not lessen Carl's
+pleasure in the make-believe. He industriously inspected the
+house-numbers as he followed the quickly moving girls, and frequently
+took out his watch. Nothing should make him late in calling on that
+dear old friend.</p>
+
+<p>Not since Adam glowered at the intruder Eve has a man been so darkly
+uninterested in two charmers. He stared clear through them; he looked
+over their heads; he observed objects on the other side of the street.
+He indignantly told the imaginary policemen who stopped him that he
+hadn't even seen the girls till this moment; that he was the victim of
+a plot.</p>
+
+<p>The block through which the cavalcade was passing was lined with
+shabby-genteel brownstone houses, with high stoops and haughty dark
+doors, and dressmakers' placards or doctors' cards in the windows.
+Carl was puzzled. The girls seemed rather too cheerful to belong in
+this decayed and gloomy block, which, in the days when horsehair
+furniture and bankers had mattered, had seemed imposing. But the girls
+ascended the steps of a house which was typical of the row, except
+that five<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span> motor-cars stood before it. Carl, passing, went up the
+steps of the next house and rang the bell.</p>
+
+<p>"What a funny place!" he heard one of the girls&mdash;he judged that it was
+Ruth&mdash;remark from the neighboring stoop. "It looks exactly like Aunt
+Emma when she wears an Alexandra bang. Do we go right up? Oughtn't we
+to ring? It ought to be the craziest party&mdash;anarchists&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"A party, eh?" thought Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;ought to ring, I suppose, but&mdash;&mdash;Yes, there's sure to be all
+sorts of strange people at Mrs. Hallet's&mdash;&mdash;" said the voice of the
+other girl, then the door closed upon both of them.</p>
+
+<p>And an abashed Carl realized that a maid had opened the door of the
+house at which he himself had rung, and was glaring at him as he
+craned over to view the next-door stoop.</p>
+
+<p>"W-where&mdash;&mdash;Does Dr. Brown live here?" he stuttered.</p>
+
+<p>"No, 'e don't," the maid snapped, closing the door.</p>
+
+<p>Carl groaned: "He don't? Dear old Brown? Not live here? Huh? What
+shall I do?"</p>
+
+<p>In remarkably good spirits he moved over in front of the house into
+which Ruth and Olive had gone. People were coming to the party in twos
+and threes. Yes. The men were in evening clothes. He had his
+information.</p>
+
+<p>Swinging his stick up to a level with his shoulder at each stride, he
+raced to Fifty-ninth Street and the nearest taxi-stand. He was whirled
+to his room. He literally threw his clothes off. He shaved hastily,
+singing, "Will You Come to the Ball," from "The Quaker Girl," and
+slipped into evening clothes and his suavest dress-shirt. Seizing
+things all at once&mdash;top-hat, muffler, gloves, pocketbook,
+handkerchief, cigarette-case, keys&mdash;and hanging them about him as he
+fled down the decorous stairs, he skipped to the taxicab and started
+again for Fifty-blankth Street.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At the house of the party he stopped to find on the letter-box in the
+entry the name "Mrs. Hallet," mentioned by Olive. There was no such
+name. He tried the inner door. It opened. He cheerily began to mount
+steep stairs, which kept on for miles, climbing among slate-colored
+walls, past empty wall-niches with toeless plaster statues. The
+hallways, dim and high and snobbish, and the dark old double doors,
+scowled at him. He boldly returned the scowl. He could hear the
+increasing din of a talk-party coming from above. When he reached the
+top floor he found a door open on a big room crowded with shrilly
+chattering people in florid clothes. There was a hint of brassware and
+paintings and silken Turkish rugs.</p>
+
+<p>But no sight of Ruth or Olive.</p>
+
+<p>A maid was bobbing to him and breathing, "That way, please, at the end
+of the hall." He went meekly. He did not dare to search the clamorous
+crowd for the girls, as yet.</p>
+
+<p>He obediently added his hat and coat and stick to an
+uncomfortable-looking pile of wraps writhing on a bed in a small room
+that had a Copley print of Sargent's "Prophets," a calendar, and an
+unimportant white rocker.</p>
+
+<p>It was time to go out and face the party, but he had stage-fright.
+While climbing the stairs he had believed that he was in touch with
+the two girls, but now he was separated from them by a crowd, farther
+from them than when he had followed them down the unfriendly street.
+And not till now did he quite grasp the fact that the hostess might
+not welcome him. His glowing game was becoming very dull-toned. He
+lighted a cigarette and listened to the beating surf of the talk in
+the other room.</p>
+
+<p>Another man came in. Like all the rest, he gave up the brilliant idea
+of trying to find an unpre&euml;mpted place for his precious newly ironed
+silk hat, and resignedly dumped it on the bed. He was a passable man,
+with a gentlemanly mustache and good pumps. Carl knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span> that fact
+because he was comparing his own clothes and deciding that he had none
+the worst of it. But he was relieved when the waxed mustache moved a
+couple of times, and its owner said, in a friendly way: "Beastly
+jam!... May I trouble you for a match?"</p>
+
+<p>Carl followed him out to the hostess, a small, busy woman who made a
+business of being vivacious and letting the light catch the fringes of
+her gold hair as she nodded. Carl nonchalantly shook hands with her,
+bubbling: "So afraid couldn't get here. My play&mdash;&mdash;But at last&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He was in a panic. But the hostess, instead of calling for the police,
+gushed, "<i>So</i> glad you <i>could</i> come!" combining a kittenish mechanical
+smile for him with a glance over his shoulder at the temporary butler.
+"I want you to meet Miss Moeller, Mr.&mdash;uh&mdash;Mr&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I knew you'd forget it!" Carl was brotherly and protecting in his
+manner. "Ericson, Oscar Ericson."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course. How stupid of me! Miss Moeller, want you to meet Mr.
+Oscar Ericson&mdash;you know&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"S' happy meet you, Miss Mmmmmmm," said Carl, tremendously well-bred
+in manner. "Can we possibly go over and be clever in a corner, do you
+think?"</p>
+
+<p>He had heard Colonel Haviland say that, but his manner gave it no
+quotation-marks.</p>
+
+<p>Presumably he talked to Miss Moeller about something usual&mdash;the snow
+or the party or Owen Johnson's novels. Presumably Miss Moeller had
+eyes to look into and banalities to look away from. Presumably there
+was something in the room besides people and talk and rugs hung over
+the bookcases. But Carl never knew. He was looking for Ruth. He did
+not see her.</p>
+
+<p>Within ten minutes he had man&oelig;uvered himself free of Miss Moeller
+and was searching for Ruth, his nerves quivering amazingly with the
+fear that she might already have gone.</p>
+
+<p>How would he ever find her? He could scarce ask the hostess, "Say,
+where's Ruth?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She was nowhere in the fog of people in the big room.... If he could
+find even Olive....</p>
+
+<p>Strolling, nodding to perfectly strange people who agreeably nodded
+back under the mistaken impression that they were glad to see him, he
+systematically checked up all the groups. Ruth was not among the
+punch-table devotees, who were being humorous and amorous over
+cigarettes; not among the Caustic Wits exclusively assembled in a
+corner; not among the shy sisters aligned on the davenport and
+wondering why they had come; not in the general maelstrom in the
+center of the room.</p>
+
+<p>He stopped calmly to greet the hostess again, remarking, "You look so
+beautifully sophisticated to-night," and listened suavely to her
+fluttering remarks. He was the picture of the cynical cityman who has
+to be nowhere at no especial time. But he was not cynical. He had to
+find Ruth!</p>
+
+<p>He escaped and, between the main room and the dining-room, penetrated
+a small den filled with witty young men, old stories, cigarette-smoke,
+and siphons. Then he charged into the dining-room, where there were
+candles and plate much like silver&mdash;and Ruth and Olive at the farther
+end.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_h.jpg" alt="H" width="41" height="50" /></div>
+<p>e wanted to run forward, take their hands, cry, "At last!" He seemed
+to hear his voice wording it. But, not glancing at them again, he
+established himself on a chair by the doorway between the two rooms.</p>
+
+<p>It was safe to watch the two girls in this Babel, where words swarmed
+and battled everywhere in the air. Ruth was in a brown velvet frock
+whose golden tones harmonized with her brown hair. She was being
+enthusiastically talked at by a man to whom she listened with a
+courteously amused curiosity. Carl could fancy her nudging Olive, who
+sat beside her on the Jacobean settee and was attended by another
+talking-man. Carl told Ruth (though she did not know that he was
+telling her) that she had no right to be "so blasted New-Yorkishly
+superior and condescending," but he admitted that she was scarcely to
+blame, for the man made kindergarten gestures and emitted conversation
+like air from an exploded tire.</p>
+
+<p>The important thing was that he heard the man call her "Miss Winslow."</p>
+
+<p>"Great! Got her name&mdash;Ruth Winslow!"</p>
+
+<p>Watching the man's lips (occasionally trying to find an excuse for
+eavesdropping, and giving up the quest because there was no excuse),
+he discovered that Ruth was being honored with a thrilling account of
+aviation. The talking-man, it appeared, knew a great deal about the
+subject. Carl heard through a rift in the cloud of words that the man
+had once actually flown, as a passenger with Henry Odell! For five
+minutes on end, judging by the motions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span> with which he steered a
+monoplane through perilous abysses, the reckless spirit kept flying
+(as a passenger). Ruth Winslow was obviously getting bored, and the
+man showed no signs of volplaning as yet. Olive's man departed, and
+Olive was also listening to the parlor aviator, who was unable to see
+that a terrific fight was being waged by the hands of the two girls in
+the space down between them. It was won by Ruth's hand, which got a
+death-grip on Olive's thumb, and held it, to Olive's agony, while both
+girls sat up straight and beamed propriety.</p>
+
+<p>Carl walked over and, smoothly ignoring the pocket entertainer, said:
+"So glad to see you, Miss Winslow. I think this is my dance?"</p>
+
+<p>"Y-yes?" from Miss Winslow, while the entertainer drifted off into the
+flotsam of the party. Olive went to join a group about the hostess,
+who had just come in to stir up mirth and jocund merriment in the
+dining-room, as it had settled down into a lower state of exhilaration
+than the canons of talk-parties require.</p>
+
+<p>Said Carl to Ruth, "Not that there's any dancing, but I felt you'd get
+dizzy if you climbed any higher in that aeroplane."</p>
+
+<p>Ruth tried to look haughty, but her dark lashes went up and her
+unexpected blue eyes grinned at him boyishly.</p>
+
+<p>"Gee! she's clever!" Carl was thinking. Since, to date, her only
+remark had been "Y-yes?" he may have been premature.</p>
+
+<p>"That was a bully strangle hold you got on Miss Olive's hand, Miss
+Winslow."</p>
+
+<p>"You saw our hands?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps.... Tell me a good way to express how superior you and I are
+to this fool party and its noise. Isn't it a fool party?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid it really is."</p>
+
+<p>"What's the purpose of it, anyway? Do the people have to come here and
+breathe this air, I wonder? I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span> asked several people that, and I'm
+afraid they think I'm crazy."</p>
+
+<p>"But you are here? Do you come to Mrs. Salisbury's often?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never been before. Never seen a person here in my life before&mdash;except
+you and Miss Olive. Came on a bet. Chap bet I wouldn't dare come
+without being invited. I came. Bowed to the hostess and told her I was
+so sorry my play-rehearsals made me late, and she was <i>so</i> glad I
+could come, <i>after all</i>&mdash;you know. She's never seen me in her life."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh? Are you a dramatist?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was&mdash;in the other room. But I was a doctor out in the hall and a
+sculptor on the stairs, so I'm getting sort of confused myself&mdash;as
+confused as you are, trying to remember who I am, Miss Winslow. You
+really don't remember me at all? Tea at&mdash;wasn't it at the Vanderbilt?
+or the Plaza?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, that must have been&mdash;&mdash;I was trying to remember&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Carl grinned. "The chap who introduced me to you called me 'Mr.
+Um-m-m,' because he didn't remember my name, either. So you've never
+heard it. It happens to be Ericson.... I'm on a mission. Serious one.
+I'm planning to go out and buy a medium-sized bomb and blow up this
+bunch. I suspect there's poets around."</p>
+
+<p>"I do too," sighed Ruth. "I understand that Mrs. Salisbury always has
+seven lawyers and nineteen advertising men and a dentist and a poet
+and an explorer at her affairs. Are you the poet or the explorer?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm the dentist. I think&mdash;&mdash;You don't happen to have done any
+authoring, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, nothing except an epic poyem on Jonah and the Whale, which I
+wrote at the age of seven. Most of it consisted of a conversation
+between them, while Jonah was in the Whale's stomach, which I think
+showed agility on the part of the Whale."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Then maybe it's safe to say what I think of authors&mdash;and more or less
+of poets and painters and so on. One time I was in charge of some
+mechanical investigations, and a lot of writers used to come around
+looking for what they called 'copy.' That's where I first got my
+grouch on them, and I've never really got over it; and coming here
+to-night and hearing the littery talk I've been thinking how these
+authors have a sort of an admiration trust. They make authors the
+heroes of their stories and so on, and so they make people think that
+writing is sacred. I'm so sick of reading novels about how young Bill,
+as had a pure white soul, came to New York and had an 'orrible time
+till his great novel was accepted. Authors seem to think they're the
+only ones that have ideals. Now I'm in the automobile business, and I
+help to make people get out into the country&mdash;bet a lot more of them
+get out because of motoring than because of reading poetry about
+spring. But if I claimed a temperament because I introduce the
+motorist's soul to the daisy, every one would die laughing."</p>
+
+<p>"But don't you think that art is the&mdash;oh, the object of civilization
+and that sort of thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do <i>not</i>! Honestly, Miss Winslow, I think it would be a good stunt
+to get along without any art at all for a generation, and see what we
+miss. We probably need dance music, but I doubt if we need opera.
+Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays
+'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good
+shoes so much more than it needs opera&mdash;or war or fiction. I'd like to
+see all the shoemakers get together and refuse to make any more shoes
+till people promised to write reviews about them, like all these
+book-reviews. Then just as soon as people's shoes began to wear out
+they'd come right around, and you'd read about the new masterpieces of
+Mr. Regal and Mr. Walkover and Mr. Stetson."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! I can imagine it. 'This laced boot is one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span> the most vital and
+gripping and wholesome shoes of the season.' And probably all the
+young shoemakers would sit around caf&eacute;s, looking quizzical and
+artistic. But don't you think your theory is dangerous, Mr. Ericson?
+You give me an excuse for being content with being a commonplace
+Upper-West-Sider. And aren't authors better than commonplaceness?
+You're so serious that I almost suspect you of having started to be an
+author yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"Really not. As a matter of fact, I'm the kiddy in patched overalls
+you used to play with when you kept house in the willows."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course! In the Forest of Arden! And you had a toad that you
+traded for my hair-ribbon."</p>
+
+<p>"And we ate bread and milk out of blue bowls!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes!" she agreed, "blue bowls with bunny-rabbits painted on them."</p>
+
+<p>"And giants and a six-cylinder castle, with warders and a donjon keep.
+And Jack the Giant-killer. But certainly bunnies."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really like bunnies?" Her voice caressed the word.</p>
+
+<p>"I like them so much that when I think of them I know that there's one
+thing worse than having a cut-rate literary salon, and that's to be
+too respectable&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Too Upper-West-Side!"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;to dare to eat bread and milk out of blue bowls."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I think I shall have to admit you to the Blue Bowl League, Mr.
+Ericson. Speaking of which&mdash;&mdash;Tell me, who did introduce us, you and
+me? I feel so apologetic for not remembering."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you may. Life has no mysteries left except<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span> Olive's coiffure and
+your beautiful shirt.... Does one talk about shirts at a second
+meeting?"</p>
+
+<p>"Apparently one does."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes.... To-night, I <i>must</i> have a mystery.... Do you swear, as a man
+of honor, that you are at this party dishonorably, uninvited?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do, princess."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Anarchists?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! And the only nice lovable crank I've found&mdash;except you, with
+your vulgar prejudice against the whole race of authors&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?'"</p>
+
+<p>"Look. Olive Dunleavy seems distressed. The number of questions I
+shall have to answer about you!... Well, Olive and I felt very low in
+our minds to-day. We decided that we were tired of select
+associations, and that we would seek the Primitive, and maybe even
+Life in the Raw. Olive knows a woman mountain-climber who always says
+she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We
+expected to have raw-meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the
+Savage Woman gave us Suchong and deviled-chicken sandwiches and pink
+cakes and Nabiscos, and told us how well her son<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span> 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&mdash;&mdash;Dear me, I'm telling you too
+much about myself, O Man of Mystery! It isn't quite done, I'm afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Please, Miss Winslow! In the name of the&mdash;what was it&mdash;Order of the
+Blue Bowl?" He was making a mental note that Olive's last name was
+Dunleavy.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I've done some settlement work&mdash;&mdash;Did you ever do any, by any
+chance?"</p>
+
+<p>"I once converted a Chinaman to Lutheranism; I think that was my
+nearest approach," said Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;she
+was sure he was the wild, dying remnant of a noble race or something.
+But even she was disappointed in Chinatown.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;perhaps
+Oxford&mdash;and he said, 'May I sugges' ladies velly nize China dinner?'
+He suggested chow-main&mdash;we thought it would be either birds' nests or
+rats' tails, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span> it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous
+sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like
+ourselves, except for a Jap, with his cunnin' Sunday tie, and his
+little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky.
+And he was reading <i>The Presbyterian</i>!... 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&mdash;you're probably the man who won the Indianapolis
+motor-race or discovered electricity or something."</p>
+
+<p>Through her narrative, her eyes had held his, but now she glanced
+about, noted Olive, and seemed uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I'm nothing so interesting," he said; "but I have wanted
+to see new places and new things&mdash;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&mdash;wherever there was&mdash;I've looked for a job. And&mdash;&mdash;Well, I
+haven't lost anything by it."</p>
+
+<p>"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
+<i>and</i> Son right in the family&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;One doesn't merely <i>go</i> without
+having an objective, or an excuse for going, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"I do," declared Carl. "But&mdash;&mdash;May I be honest?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>Intimacy was about them. They were two travelers from a far land, come
+together in the midst of strangers.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span> time, and because a chap that was going to Brazil with me
+died suddenly."</p>
+
+<p>"To Brazil? Exploring?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Really, we're not a bit afraid to go home alone."</p>
+
+<p>"I won't tease, but&mdash;&mdash;May I come to your house for tea, some time?"</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated. It came out with a rush. "Yes. Do come up. N-next
+Sunday, if you'd like."</p>
+
+<p>She bobbed her head to Olive and rose.</p>
+
+<p>"And the address?" he insisted.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash; West Ninety-second Street.... Good night. I have enjoyed the
+blue bowl."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>As he reached home he thought again of his sordid parting with Gertie
+in the Park&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_l.jpg" alt="L" width="37" height="50" /></div>
+<p>ike a country small boy waiting for the coming of his city cousin,
+who will surely have new ways of playing Indians, Carl prepared to see
+Ruth Winslow and her background. What was she? Who? Where? He pictured
+her as dwelling in everything from a millionaire's imitation ch&acirc;teau,
+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?</p>
+
+<p>Monday he could think of nothing but the joy of having discovered a
+playmate. The secret popped out from behind everything he did. Tuesday
+he was worried by finding himself unable to remember whether Ruth's
+hair was black or dark brown. Yet he could visualize Olive's
+ash-blond. Why? Wednesday afternoon, when he was sleepy in the office
+after eating too much beefsteak and kidney pie, drinking too much
+coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes, at lunch with Mr. VanZile,
+when he was tortured by the desire to lay his head on his arms and
+yield to drowsiness, he was suddenly invaded by a fear that Ruth was
+snobbish. It seemed to him that he ought to do something about it
+immediately.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At 3.30 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>, Sunday, he was already incased in funereal
+morning-clothes and warning himself that he must not arrive at Miss
+Winslow's before five. His<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>At ten minutes to four he sternly jerked on his coat and walked far
+north of Ninety-second Street, then back.</p>
+
+<p>He arrived at a quarter to five, but persuaded himself that this was a
+smarter hour of arrival than five.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth Winslow's home proved to be a rather ordinary
+three-story-and-basement gray stone dwelling, with heavy Russian net
+curtains at the broad, clear-glassed windows of the first floor, and
+an attempt to escape from the stern drabness of the older type of New
+York houses by introducing a box-stoop and steps with a carved stone
+balustrade, at the top of which perched a meek old lion of 1890, with
+battered ears and a truly sensitive stone nose. A typical house of the
+very well-to-do yet not wealthy "upper middle class"; a house
+predicating one motor-car, three not expensive maids, brief European
+tours, and the best preparatory schools and colleges for the sons.</p>
+
+<p>A maid answered the door and took his card&mdash;a maid in a frilly apron
+and black uniform&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>For all the stone lion in front, this was quite the old-line
+English-basement house, with the inevitable front<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span> and back
+parlors&mdash;though here they were modified into drawing-room and
+dining-room. The walls of the hall were decked with elaborate,
+meaningless scrolls in plaster bas-relief, echoed by raised circles on
+the ceiling just above the hanging chandelier, which was expensive and
+hideous, a clutter of brass and knobby red-and-blue glass. The floor
+was of hardwood in squares, dark and richly polished, highly
+self-respecting&mdash;a floor that assumed civic responsibility from a
+republican point of view, and a sound conservative business
+established since 1875 or 1880. By the door was a huge Japanese vase,
+convenient either for depositing umbrellas or falling over in the
+dark. Then, a long mirror in a dull-red mahogany frame, and a table of
+mahogany so refined that no one would ever dream of using it for
+anything more useful than calling-cards. It might have been the table
+by the king's bed, on which he leaves his crown on a little purple
+cushion at night. Solid and ostentatious.</p>
+
+<p>The drawing-room, to the left, was dark and still and unsympathetic
+and expensive; a vista of brocade-covered French-gilt chairs and a
+marquetry table and a table of onyx top, on which was one book bound
+in ooze calf, and one vase; cream-colored heavy carpet and a crystal
+chandelier; fairly meretricious paintings of rocks, and thatched
+cottages, and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of
+them in large gilt frames protected by shadow-boxes. In a corner was a
+cabinet of gilt and glass, filled with Dresden-china figurines and toy
+tables and a carven Swiss musical powder-box. The fireplace was of
+smooth, chilly white marble, with an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece,
+and a fire-screen painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses,
+making silken unreal love and scandalously neglecting silky unreal
+sheep. By the hearth were shiny fire-irons which looked as though they
+had never been used. The whole room looked as though it had never been
+used&mdash;except during the formal calls of overdressed matrons with
+card-cases and prejudices.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span> The one human piece of furniture in the
+room, a couch soft and slightly worn, on which lovers might have sat
+and small boys bounced, was trying to appear useless, too, under its
+row of stiff satin cushions with gold cords.... Well-dusted chairs on
+which no one wished to sit; expensive fireplace that never shone;
+prized pictures with less imagination than the engravings on a
+bond&mdash;that drawing-room had the soul of a banker with side-whiskers.</p>
+
+<p>Carl by no means catalogued all the details, but he did get the effect
+of ingrowing propriety. It is not certain that he thought the room in
+bad taste. It is not certain that he had any artistic taste whatever;
+or that his attack upon the pretensions of authors had been based on
+anything more fundamental than a personal irritation due to having met
+blatant camp-followers of the arts. And it is certain that one of his
+reactions as he surveyed the abject respectability of that room was a
+slight awe of the solidity of social position which it represented,
+and which he consciously lacked. But, whether from artistic instinct
+or from ignorance, he was sure that into the room ought to blow a
+sudden great wind, with the scent of forest and snow. He shook his
+head when the maid returned, and he followed her up-stairs. Surely a
+girl reared here would never run away and play with him.</p>
+
+<p>He heard lively voices from the library above. He entered a room to be
+lived in and be happy in, with a jolly fire on the hearth and friendly
+people on a big, brown davenport. Ruth Winslow smiled at him from
+behind the Colonial silver and thin cups on the tea-table, and as he
+saw her light-filled eyes, saw her cock her head gaily in welcome, he
+was again convinced that he had found a playmate.</p>
+
+<p>A sensation of being pleasantly accepted warmed him as she cried, "So
+glad&mdash;&mdash;" and introduced him, gave him tea and a cake with nuts in it.
+From a wing-chair<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span> Carl searched the room and the people. There were
+two paintings&mdash;a pale night sea and an arching Japanese bridge under
+slanting rain, both imaginative and well-done. There was a mahogany
+escritoire, which might have been stiff but was made human by
+scattered papers on the great blotter and books crammed into the
+shelves. Other books were heaped on a table as though people had been
+reading them. Later he found how amazingly they were assorted&mdash;the
+latest novel of Robert Chambers beside H. G. Wells's <i>First and Last
+Things</i>; a dusty expensive book on Italian sculpture near a cheap
+reprint of <i>Dodo</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The chairs were capacious, the piano a workmanlike upright, not
+dominating the room, but ready for music; and in front of the fire was
+an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering
+in his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the
+room. They were New-Yorkers and, unlike over half of the population,
+born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody
+and remembers when Fourteenth Street was the shopping-center. Olive
+Dunleavy was shinily present, her ash-blond hair in a new coiffure.
+She was arguing with a man of tight morning-clothes and a high-bred
+face about the merits of "Parsifal," which, Olive declared, no one
+ever attended except as a matter of conscience.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Georgie," she said, "issa Georgie, you shall have your
+opera&mdash;and you shall jolly well have it alone, too!" Olive was vivid
+about it all, but Carl saw that she was watching him, and he was shy
+as he wondered what Ruth had told her.</p>
+
+<p>Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, a clear-faced, slender, well-bathed
+boy of twenty-six, with too high a forehead, with discontent in his
+face and in his thin voice, carelessly well-dressed in a soft-gray
+suit and an impressionistic tie, was also inspecting Carl, while
+talking to a pretty, commonplace, finishing-school-finished girl. Carl
+instantly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span> disliked Philip Dunleavy, and was afraid of his latent
+sarcasm.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, Carl felt more and more that beneath the friendliness with
+which he was greeted there was no real welcome as yet, save possibly
+on the part of Ruth. He was taken on trial. He was a Mr. Ericson, not
+any Mr. Ericson in particular.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl
+himself was part of a hash-group&mdash;an older woman who seemed to know
+Rome and Paris better than New York, and might be anything from a
+milliner to a mondaine; a keen-looking youngster with tortoise-shell
+spectacles; finally, Ruth's elder brother, Mason J. Winslow, Jr., a
+tall, thin, solemn, intensely well-intentioned man of thirty-seven,
+with a long, clean-shaven face, and a long, narrow head whose growing
+baldness was always spoken of as a result of his hard work. Mason J.
+Winslow, Jr., spoke hesitatingly, worried over everything, and stood
+for morality and good business. He was rather dull in conversation,
+rather kind in manner, and accomplished solid things by
+unimaginatively sticking at them. He didn't understand people who did
+not belong to a good club.</p>
+
+<p>Carl contributed a few careful platitudes to a frivolous discussion of
+whether it would not be advisable to solve the woman-suffrage question
+by taking the vote away from men and women both and conferring it on
+children. Mason Winslow ambled to the big table for a cigarette, and
+Carl pursued him. While they stood talking about "the times are bad,"
+Carl was spying upon Ruth, and the minute her current group wandered
+off to the davenport he made a dash at the tea-table and got there
+before Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, who was obviously
+man&oelig;uvering like himself. Philip gave him a covert "Who are you,
+fellow?" glance, took a cake, and retired.</p>
+
+<p>From his wicker chair facing Ruth's, Carl said, gloomily, "It isn't
+done."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Ruth, "I know it, but still some very smart people are
+doing it this season."</p>
+
+<p>"But do you think the woman that writes 'What the man will wear' in
+the theater programs would stand for it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not," gravely considered Ruth, "if there were black stitching on the
+dress-glove. Yet there is some authority for frilled shirts."</p>
+
+<p>"You think it might be considered then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will not come between you and your haberdasher, Mr. Ericson."</p>
+
+<p>"This is a foolish conversation. But since you think the better
+classes do it&mdash;gee! it's getting hard for me to keep up this kind of
+'Dolly Dialogue.' What I wanted to do was to request you to give me
+concisely but fully a sketch of 'Who is Miss Ruth Winslow?' and save
+me from making any pet particular breaks. And hereafter, I warn you,
+I'm going to talk like my cousin, the carpet-slipper model."</p>
+
+<p>"Name, Ruth Winslow. Age, between twenty and thirty. Father, Mason
+Winslow, manufacturing contractor for concrete. Brothers, Mason
+Winslow, Jr., whose poor dear head is getting somewhat bald, as you
+observe, and Bobby Winslow, ne'er-do-weel, who is engaged in
+subverting discipline at medical school, and who dances divinely. My
+mother died three years ago. I do nothing useful, but I play a good
+game of bridge and possess a voice that those as know pronounce
+passable. I have a speaking knowledge of French, a reading knowledge
+of German, and a singing knowledge of Italian. I am wearing an
+imported gown, for which the House of Winslow will probably never pay.
+I live in this house, and am Episcopalian&mdash;not so much High Church as
+highly infrequent church. I regard the drawing-room down-stairs as the
+worst example of late-Victorian abominations in my knowledge, but I
+shall probably never persuade father to change it because Mason thinks
+it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span> sacred to the past. My ambition in life is to be catty to the
+Newport set after I've married an English diplomat with a divine
+mustache. Never having met such a personage outside of <i>Tatler</i> and
+<i>Vogue</i>, I can't give you very many details regarding him. Oh yes, of
+course, he'll have to play a marvelous game of polo and have a ch&acirc;teau
+in Proven&ccedil;e and also a ranch in Texas, where I shall wear
+riding-breeches and live next to Nature and have a Chinese cook in
+blue silk. I think that's my whole history. Oh, I forgot. I play at
+the piano and am very ignorant, and completely immersed in the worst
+traditions of the wealthy Micks of the Upper West Side, and I always
+pretend that I live here instead of on the Upper East Side because
+'the air is better.'"</p>
+
+<p>"What is this Upper West Side? Is it a state of mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed it is not. It's a state of pocketbook. The Upper West Side is
+composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in
+society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue.
+You know everybody and went to school with everybody and played in the
+Park with everybody, and mostly your papa is in wholesale trade and
+haughty about people in retail. You go to Europe one summer and to the
+Jersey coast the next. All your clothes and parties and weddings and
+funerals might be described as 'elegant.' That's the Upper West Side.
+Now the dread truth about you.... Do you know, after the unscrupulous
+way in which you followed up a mere chance introduction at a tea
+somewhere, I suspect you to be a well-behaved young man who leads an
+entirely blameless life. Or else you'd never dare to jump the fence
+and come and play in my back yard when all the other boys politely
+knock at the front door and get sent home."</p>
+
+<p>"Me&mdash;well, I'm a wage-slave of the VanZile Motor people, in charge of
+the Touricar department. Age, twenty-eight&mdash;almost. Habits, all
+bad.... No, I'll tell you. I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span> one of those stern, silent men of
+granite you read about, and only my man knows the human side of me,
+because all the guys on Wall Street tremble in me presence."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but then how can you belong to the Blue Bowl Sodality?"</p>
+
+<p>"Um, Yes&mdash;&mdash;I've got it. You must have read novels in which the stern,
+silent man of granite has a secret tenderness in his heart, and he
+keeps the band of the first cigar he ever smoked in a little safe in
+the wall, and the first dollar he ever made in a frame&mdash;that's me."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course! The cigar was given him by his flaxen-haired sweetheart
+back in Jenkins Corners, and in the last chapter he goes back and
+marries her."</p>
+
+<p>"Not always, I hope!" Of what Carl was thinking is not recorded.
+"Well, as a matter of fact, I've been a fairly industrious young man
+of granite the last few months, getting out the Touricar."</p>
+
+<p>"What is a Touricar? It sounds like an island inhabited by cannibals,
+exports hemp and cocoanut, see pink dot on the map, nor' by nor'east
+of Mogador."</p>
+
+<p>Carl explained.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm terribly interested," said Ruth. (But she made it sound as though
+she really was.) "I think it's so wonderful.... I want to go off
+tramping through the Berkshires. I'm so tired of going to the same old
+places."</p>
+
+<p>"Some time, when you're quite sure I'm an estimable young Y. M. C. A.
+man, I'm going to try to persuade you to come out for a real tramp."</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to be considering the idea, not seriously, but&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Philip Dunleavy eventuated.</p>
+
+<p>For some time Philip had been showing signs of interest in Ruth and
+Carl. Now he sauntered to the table, begged for another cup of tea,
+said agreeable things in regard to putting orange marmalade in tea,
+and calmly established himself. Ruth turned toward him.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had fancied that there was, for himself, in Ruth's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span> voice,
+something more friendly, in her infectious smile something more
+intimate than she had given the others, but when she turned precisely
+the same cheery expression upon Philip, Carl seemed to have lost
+something which he had trustingly treasured for years. He was the more
+forlorn as Olive Dunleavy joined them, and Ruth, Philip, and Olive
+discussed the engagement of one Mary Meldon. Olive recalled Miss
+Meldon as she had been in school days at the Convent of the Sacred
+Heart. Philip told of her flirtations at the old Long Beach Hotel.</p>
+
+<p>The names of New York people whom they had always known; the names of
+country clubs&mdash;Baltusrol and Meadow Brook and Peace Waters; the names
+of streets, with a sharp differentiation between Seventy-fourth Street
+and Seventy-fifth Street; Durland's Riding Academy, the Rink of a
+Monday morning, and other souvenirs of a New York childhood; the score
+of the last American polo team and the coming dances&mdash;these things
+shut Carl out as definitely as though he were a foreigner. He was
+lonely. He disliked Phil Dunleavy's sarcastic references. He wanted to
+run away.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth seemed to realize that Carl was shut out. Said she to Phil
+Dunleavy: "I wish you could have seen Mr. Ericson save my life last
+Sunday. I had an experience."</p>
+
+<p>"What was that?" asked the man whom Olive called "Georgie," joining
+the tea-table set.</p>
+
+<p>The whole room listened as Ruth recounted the trip to Chinatown, Mrs.
+Salisbury's party, and the hero who had once been a passenger in an
+aeroplane.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout she kept turning toward Carl. It seemed to reunite him to
+the company. As she closed, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"The thing that amused me about the parlor aviator was his laying down
+the law that the Atlantic will be crossed before the end of 1913, and
+his assumption that we'll all have aeroplanes in five years. I know
+from my own business, the automobile business, about how much such
+prophecies are worth."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think the Atlantic will be crossed soon?" asked the
+keen-looking man with the tortoise-shell spectacles.</p>
+
+<p>Phil Dunleavy broke in with an air of amused sophistication: "I think
+the parlor aviator was right. Really, you know, aviation is too
+difficult a subject for the layman to make any predictions
+about&mdash;either what it can or can't do."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," admitted Carl; and the whole room breathed. "Oh yes."</p>
+
+<p>Dunleavy went on in his thin, overbred, insolent voice, "Now I have it
+on good authority, from a man who's a member of the Aero Club, that
+next year will be the greatest year aviation has ever known, and that
+the Wrights have an aeroplane up their sleeve with which they'll cross
+the Atlantic without a stop, during the spring of 1914 at the very
+latest."</p>
+
+<p>"That's unfortunate, because the aviation game has gone up completely
+in this country, except for hydro-aeroplaning and military aviation,
+and possibly it never will come back," said Carl, a hint of pique in
+his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"What is your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring
+round on his slender left little finger and the whole room waited,
+testing this positive-spoken outsider.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Carl saw Ruth's head drop an inch, and her eyes close<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But see here&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;because I happen to <i>be</i> Hawk Ericson."</p>
+
+<p>"What a chump I am!" groaned the man in tortoise-shell spectacles. "Of
+course! I remember your picture, now."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing the jam.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a>CHAPTER XXX</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_a.jpg" alt="A" width="44" height="50" /></div>
+<p>t home, early that evening, Carl's doctor-landlord gave him the
+message that a Miss Gertrude Cowles had called him up, but had
+declined to leave a number. The landlord's look indicated that it was
+no fault of his if Carl had friends who were such fools that they
+didn't leave their numbers. Carl got even with him by going out to the
+corner drug-store to telephone Gertie, instead of giving him a chance
+to listen.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello?" said Gertie over the telephone. "Oh, hello, Carl; I just
+called up to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I
+thought perhaps you might like to come up if you haven't anything
+better to do."</p>
+
+<p>Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole
+evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Dunleavy and
+English-basement houses with cream-colored drawing-rooms. But he went
+up to Gertie's.</p>
+
+<p>They were all there&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at
+home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic
+science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top
+of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a
+cockroach with a ruler.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Yet his stiffness of attitude disappeared when Gertie had read the
+letter from Joralemon and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy: "I
+can just see them out sleighing. Sometimes I wish I was out there.
+Honest, Carl, for all the sea and the hills here, don't you wish
+sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooded
+bluff over a lake?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;fellow was trying to define the
+different sorts of terrain&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<p>"'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their
+promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in
+small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long grasses
+shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for
+hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the
+forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral to grave
+saints of the open; all these I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span> 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.'</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;like the guy in Kipling that always got sick
+of reading the same page too long."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span> were delightful
+surprises; his impression of Gertie was stable as the Rockies.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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 <i>Chronicle</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>When he called for Ruth he expected such a gay girl as had poured tea.
+He was awed to find her a <i>grande dame</i> in black velvet, more
+dignified, apparently inches taller, and in a vice-regally bad temper.
+As they drove off she declared:</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry I'm in such a villainous temper. I hadn't a single pair of
+decent white gloves, and I tore some old black Spanish lace on the
+gown I was going to wear, and my entire family, whom God
+unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, clustered about my door
+while I was dressing and bawled in queries about laundry and other
+horribly vulgar things."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had planned to go to the Ritz for after-theater supper, but Ruth
+and Olive persuaded him to take them to the caf&eacute; of the Rector's of
+that time; for, they said, they had never been in a Broadway caf&eacute;, and
+they wanted to see the famous actors with their make-ups off.</p>
+
+<p>At the table Carl carried Ruth off in talk, like a young Lochinvar out
+of the Middle West. Around them was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span> the storm of highballs and brandy
+and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar-smoke,
+shirt-fronts, white shoulders, and drab waiters; yet here was a quiet
+refuge for the eternal force of life....</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the 'nice things
+of life,' but I do get tired of being nice. Especially when I have a
+bad temper, as I had to-night. I'm not at all imprisoned in a harem,
+and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been
+brought up to look at things that aren't 'like the home life of our
+dear Queen' as impossible, and I'm quite sure that father believes
+that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be
+rich. But I've been reading; and I've made&mdash;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&mdash;that the little
+mousey clerk may be a hero, and the hero may be a nobody&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;I remember a cook I used to talk to on
+my way down to Panama once&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>("Panama! How I'd like to go there!")</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;and he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but generally do you find very much&mdash;oh, courtesy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span> and that sort
+of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself 'the
+better class'?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't? Why, I thought&mdash;the way you spoke&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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
+<i>take</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>So they talked, boy and girl, wondering together what the world really
+is like.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;Olive and I sit up half the night when she comes to my house,
+and when we're not talking about the new neglig&eacute;es 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?&mdash;Dear me, I split that poor infinitive right
+down his middle."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;what is it?&mdash;oh,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
+syndicalism&mdash;and really studied them, would you do it? Make each other
+study?"</p>
+
+<p>"Love to."</p>
+
+<p>"Does Dunleavy think much?"</p>
+
+<p>She raised her eyebrows a bit, but hesitated. "Oh yes&mdash;no, I don't
+suppose he does. Or anyway, mostly about the violin. He played a lot
+when he was in Yale."</p>
+
+<p>Thus was Carl encouraged to be fatuous, and he said, in a manner which
+quite dismissed Phil Dunleavy: "I don't believe he's very deep.
+Ra-ther light, I'd say."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyebrows had ascended farther. "Do you think so? I'm sorry."</p>
+
+<p>"Why sorry?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he's always been rather a friend of mine. Olive and Phil and I
+roller-skated together at the age of eight."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And I shall probably&mdash;marry&mdash;Phil&mdash;some day before long." She turned
+abruptly to Charley Forbes with a question.</p>
+
+<p>Lost, already lost, was the playmate; a loss that disgusted him with
+life. He beat his spirit, cursed himself as a clumsy mechanic. He
+listened to Olive only by self-compulsion. It was minutes before he
+had the ability and the chance to say to Ruth:</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me&mdash;in the name of the Blue Bowl. Mr. Dunleavy was rather
+rude to me, and I've been just as rude&mdash;and to you! And without his
+excuse. For he naturally would want to protect you from a wild aviator
+coming from Lord knows where."</p>
+
+<p>"You are forgiven. And Phil <i>was</i> rude. And you're not a
+Lord-knows-where, I'm sure."</p>
+
+<p>Almost brusquely Carl demanded: "Come for a long tramp with me, on the
+Palisades. Next Saturday, if you can and if it's a decent day.... You
+said you liked to run away.... And we can be back before dinner, if
+you like."</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;let me think it over. Oh, I <i>would</i> like to. I've always wanted
+to do just that&mdash;think of it, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span> Palisades just opposite, and I
+never see them except for a walk of half a mile or so when I stay with
+a friend of mine, Laura Needham, at Winklehurst, up on the Palisades.
+My mother never approved of a wilder wilderness than Central Park and
+the habit&mdash;&mdash;I've never been able to get Olive to explore. But it
+isn't conventional to go on long tramps with even the nicest new
+Johnnies, is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know. You'll say, 'Who makes the convention?' and of course there's
+no answer but 'They.' But They are so all-present. They&mdash;&mdash;Oh yes,
+yes, yes, I will go! But you will let me get back by dinner-time,
+won't you? Will you call for me about two?... And can you&mdash;&mdash;I wonder
+if a hawk out of the windy skies can understand how daring a dove out
+of Ninety-second Street feels at going walking on the Palisades?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXI" id="CHAPTER_XXXI"></a>CHAPTER XXXI</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span> exactly 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.</p>
+
+<p>Then Carl spoke of his religion&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;Lieutenant
+Haviland&mdash;and the very bad Carl that lived in Joralemon?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's&mdash;&mdash;I'm glad&mdash;&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"I have an idea. I wonder if we dare&mdash;&mdash;I have a friend, sort of a
+distant cousin, who married her a husband<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span> at 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."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't think of anything I'd rather do. But do you dare impose a
+perfectly strange man on her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I know her so well that she's told me what kind of a tie her
+husband had on when he proposed."</p>
+
+<p>"Let's do it!"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, hello! Is Mrs. Needham there?... Hello!... Oh, hel-<i>lo</i>, 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span> so
+you can go right ahead and have the Biddy get ready for us.... All
+right; that <i>is</i> good 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&mdash;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&mdash;oh,
+I can't give you his name. He's&mdash;&mdash;" She glanced at Carl appraisingly,
+"&mdash;&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl made the kitten chase the mouse furiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I'll tell you about him some time.... Good-by, Laura dear."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
+pure-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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Happy. But hungry!</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Needham should have been graciously absent by the time they
+reached her house&mdash;a suburban residence with a large porch. But, as
+they approached, Ruth cried:</p>
+
+<p>"'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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Big chief," whispered Carl, "the redskins are upon us! But old Brown
+Barrel shall make many an one bite the dust!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, silly.... Oh, it's just the maid. See, she's looking at the
+clock and wondering why we don't get here."</p>
+
+<p>"But maybe Mrs. Needham 's in the other room."</p>
+
+<p>"No. Because the maid's sniffing around&mdash;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 dissipation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span> you can get out of
+chewing gum, if you live in Winklehurst."</p>
+
+<p>They had rung the door-bell on the porch by now.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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...."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Miss Winslow. Coming. <i>Am</i> I ready for dinner? Watch me!"</p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>Her glance&mdash;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&mdash;her glance and all her manner trusted him,
+the outlaw. It was not as an outsider, but as her comrade that he
+answered:</p>
+
+<p>"Golly! have we a family, too? I always forget. So sorry. But you
+know&mdash;get so busy at the office&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I <i>think</i> we have one. I'll go look in the nursery and make
+sure, but I'm almost positive&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Oh weh!</i> I knew I should have a cruel husband who&mdash;&mdash;Joy! I think
+the maid is prowling about and trying to listen. 'Shhh! The story
+Laura will get out of her!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I mean
+from her room?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Carl insisted that, as suburbanites, they had to play<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span> cards, 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:</p>
+
+<p>"All the while we've been playing cards&mdash;and playing the still more
+dangerous game of being married&mdash;I've been thinking how glad I am to
+know about your life. Somehow&mdash;&mdash;I wonder if you have told so very
+many?"</p>
+
+<p>"Practically no one."</p>
+
+<p>"I do&mdash;&mdash;I'm really not fishing for compliments, but I do want to be
+found understanding&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There's never been any one so understanding."</p>
+
+<p>Silent then. Carl glanced about the modern room. Ruth's eyes followed.
+She nodded as he said:</p>
+
+<p>"But it's really an old farm-house out in the hills where the snow is
+deep; and there's logs in the fireplace."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and rag carpets."</p>
+
+<p>"And, oh, Ruth, listen, a bob-sled with&mdash;&mdash;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.'"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;your galley was the aeroplane.... 'Mrs.
+Eric&mdash;&mdash;'" 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"I am ver-ee cold!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure you won't, Carl."</p>
+
+<p>"And&mdash;oh&mdash;you won't let Phil Dunleavy keep you from running away, not
+for a while yet?"</p>
+
+<p>"M-maybe not."</p>
+
+<p>The sky had cleared. She tilted up her chin and adored the
+stars&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;" 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Like sword-points, those stars are," he said, then&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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 front<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span> of 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&mdash;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 &amp; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXII" id="CHAPTER_XXXII"></a>CHAPTER XXXII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_f.jpg" alt="F" width="35" height="50" /></div>
+<p>or a week&mdash;the week before Christmas&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When he called, Sunday evening, he found Gertie alone, reading a
+love-story in a woman's magazine.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm so glad you came," she said. "I was getting quite lonely." She
+was as gratefully casual as ever.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Say, Gertie, I've got a plan. Wouldn't you like to go for some good
+long hikes in the country?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes; that would be fine when spring comes."</p>
+
+<p>"No; I mean now, in the winter."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him heavily. "Why, isn't it pretty cold, don't you
+think?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;or the
+sporting page&mdash;in a familiar newspaper. He merely became mildly
+contentious and made questioning noises in his throat as she went on:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Rats; it isn't so very cold, not if you walk fast."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, maybe; anyway, I guess it would be nice to explore some."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; let's."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;Bronx Park&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"N-n-n-now!" she clucked in a patronizing way. "We mustn't ask New
+York to give us wilderness, you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span> know! I'm afraid that would be a
+little too much to ask of it! Don't you think so yourself!"</p>
+
+<p>Carl groaned to himself, "I won't be mothered!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;embroidered, pat&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;what about our tramp? If you know some place that is better than
+Bronx Park, we might try it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;uh&mdash;yes&mdash;why, sure; we'll have to, some time."</p>
+
+<p>"And, Carl, you're coming up to have your Christmas turkey with us,
+aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to, a lot, but darn it, I've accepted 'nother invitation."</p>
+
+<p>That was absolutely untrue, and Carl was wondering why he had lied,
+when the storm broke.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Carl stared, twisting his watch-chain with nervous fingers, wanting to
+flee.</p>
+
+<p>It was raw woman, with all the proprieties of Joralemon and St.
+Orgul's cut away, who spoke, her voice constantly rising:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Carl&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;Gertie&mdash;oh&mdash;gee!&mdash;thunder!" whimpered a dismayed youth. A more
+mature Hawk Ericson struggled to life and soothed her: "Gertie, honey,
+I didn't mean&mdash;&mdash;Listen&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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 new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span> things to do together&mdash;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&mdash;oh! so many different new things together&mdash;it would have
+been so sweet, so sweet&mdash;&mdash;We were good friends at first, and then
+you&mdash;you didn't want to come here any more and&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I couldn't help
+seeing it; more and more and more and <i>more</i> I'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&mdash;&mdash;And then it seemed like you just went away from me again."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Gertie, you didn't seem&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;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'&mdash;oh, Carl dear,
+indeed you needn't call me that or anything you don't like&mdash;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&mdash;oh, I wanted you to come, so much, and you didn't even
+'phone&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;But it never was you. It never rang at all...."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;throb-throb-throb in the
+death-still air.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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,
+<i>anybody</i> would 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&mdash;-"</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, no!"</p>
+
+<p>"But why don't&mdash;Carl, why don't you&mdash;why can't you care more now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I do care! You're one of the bulliest pals I have, you and
+Ray."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And Ray!"</p>
+
+<p>She flung his hand away and sat bolt up, angry.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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 &eacute;lite 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 the <i>nicest</i>
+people before you'd ever stirred a foot out of Joralemon! You
+were&mdash;&mdash;Oh, please forgive me, Carl; I didn't mean to be snippy; I
+just don't know what to think of myself&mdash;and I did used to think I was
+a lady, and here I am practically up and telling you and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;they all expressed to him her
+lack of humor and fancy and venturesomeness. She was crystallized<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span> in
+his mind as a good friend with a plain soul and sisterly tendencies.
+Awkwardly he said:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"But why must we be just friends?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;Gee!
+that sounds affected. I mean: I've got to sort of start in now all
+over, finding where I'm at."</p>
+
+<p>"But why must we be just friends, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, child. It's hard to tell; I guess I didn't know till now what
+it does mean, but there's a girl&mdash;&mdash;Wait; listen. There's a girl&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"It's&mdash;&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;Oh, please go now."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I will. Goodnight."</p>
+
+<p>"Good night, Gertie. God bless you."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"God&mdash;help&mdash;me&mdash;to&mdash;be&mdash;worthy&mdash;of&mdash;her!"</p>
+
+<p>Nothing more did he say, in words, yet he was changed for ever.</p>
+
+<p>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 ate <i>Wiener Schnitzel</i> and shot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span> dice 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXXIII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_f.jpg" alt="F" width="35" height="50" /></div>
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Cal had lied.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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 for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span> days: Might he permissibly have sent her a
+Christmas present?</p>
+
+<p>He went to bed at ten o'clock&mdash;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, "<i>Oh Tannenbaum, oh
+Tannenbaum, wie gr&uuml;n sind deine Bl&auml;tter.</i>"... 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Day before Xmas &amp; all thru the Mansion<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Maids with Turkey are Stirring&mdash;Please Pardon the Scansion.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dear Playmate</span>,&mdash;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 &amp; 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 you <i>are</i> in 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, &amp; won't you please give the Touricar a pair of warm
+little slippers from</p></div>
+
+<p class="f2"><span class="smcap">Ruth Gaylord Winslow.</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>P.S. Mrs. Tirrell has sent me an angel miniature Jap garden,
+with a tiny pergola &amp; real dwarf trees &amp; a bridge that you
+expect an Alfred Noyes lantern on, &amp; Oh Carl, an issa
+goldfish in a pool!</p></div>
+
+<p class="f6"><span class="smcap">Miss R. Winslow.</span></p>
+
+<p>"'&mdash;&mdash;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 you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span> know 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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 influences<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span> lately." She called him neither "Carl" nor "Mr.
+Ericson" nor anything else, and he dared not venture on Ruth.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On his next call there was a lively Ruth who invited him up to the
+library, read extracts from Stephen Leacock's <i>Nonsense Novels</i>;
+turned companionably serious, and told him how divided were her
+sympathies between her father&mdash;the conscientiously worried
+employer&mdash;and a group of strikers in his factory. She made coffee in a
+fantastic percolator, and played D&eacute;bussy 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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 Westchester<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span>
+Hills, as Carl wished, the coming Saturday&mdash;the first Saturday in
+February, 1913. Carl won.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, to-day is beautiful as&mdash;as&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>The skees <i>were</i> unmanageable.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A rabbit hopped away among the trees beyond them, and Carl, following
+its trail, read to her the forest hieroglyphics&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The setting sun was overclouded, now; the air sharp;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"And maybe a mounted policeman and a lost girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Saying which," remarked Ruth, "the brave young man undid his pack and
+disclosed to the admiring eyes of the hungry lass&mdash;meaning me,
+especially the 'hungry'&mdash;the wonders of his pack, which she had been
+covertly eying amid all the perils of the afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"And from the pack the brave young hero, whose new Norfolk jacket she
+admired such a lot&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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 then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span> the
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear," she wailed, "aside from the vulgarity of the thing&mdash;you
+know that no one ever admits to a real interest in food&mdash;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: '<i>Es war Weinachtsabend. Tiefer Schnee lag am Boden.
+Durch das Wald kam ein armes M&auml;dchen das weinte bitterlich.</i>' 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&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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 the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span> mass 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."</p>
+
+<p>"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's <i>la belle aventure</i>! 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&mdash;just terribly happy."</p>
+
+<p>"You do trust me, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know I do.... Yet when I realize that I really don't know you at
+all&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then here's my room, with a work-bench and a bed nine feet long that
+I can lose myself in."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care. If you appreciated me you'd carry them on your back, if
+necessary."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll think it over, but&mdash;&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"Glorious! I'll give up my terrace. Though I do think I was w'eedled
+into it."</p>
+
+<p>"Seriously, Ruth, wouldn't you like to have such a place, back in the
+wilderness?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;sailing and
+sailing, hour after<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span> hour. And you could smell the pine needles and
+sit there and look way off&mdash;&mdash;Would you like it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I can't tell you how much!"</p>
+
+<p>"Have to go there some day."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;&mdash;Course I'm
+terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help wading right in and
+wanting to talk to everybody about everything."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell you how sorry I am we must leave our house in the
+wilds."</p>
+
+<p>"You really have enjoyed it?" He was cleaning the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span> last of the dishes
+with snow, and packing them away. "Do you know," he said, cautiously,
+"I always used to feel that a girl&mdash;you say you aren't in society, but
+I mean a girl like you&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;aside
+from the tactlessness of the thing&mdash;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 that <i>no</i> man&mdash;mind you, no one at
+all&mdash;could possibly marry on less than fifteen thousand dollars a
+year. Simply proved it beyond a question."</p>
+
+<p>"That lets me out."</p>
+
+<p>"Phil said that no one could possibly live on the West Side&mdash;of course
+the fact that he and I are both living on the West Side doesn't
+count&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>"He's right. Fawncy! Only three maids. Might as well be dead."</p>
+
+<p>The pack was ready, now; he was swinging it to his back and preparing
+to stamp out the fire. But he dropped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span> his burden and faced her in the
+low firelight. "Ruth, you won't make up your mind to marry Phil till
+you're <i>sure</i>, will you? You'll play with me awhile, won't you? Can't
+we explore a few more&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"But seriously, you will&mdash;&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You <i>won't</i> let Phil lock you up for a while?"</p>
+
+<p>"No.... Mustn't we be going?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you for letting the outlaw come to your party. The fire's out.
+Come."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>Her voice betrayed that he was suddenly a stranger to her.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"I can just make out the tree now."</p>
+
+<p>"Right. Now for it."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me carry my skees."</p>
+
+<p>"No, you just watch your feet." His voice was pleasant, quiet, not too
+intimate. "Don't try to guide yourself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span> by your eyes. Let your feet
+find the safe ground. Your eyes will fool you in the dark."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it did hurt, and I know you're sorry, and there's nothing you
+can do."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Road's right up there, blessed," he cried, cheerily.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I can't&mdash;&mdash;Yes, I will&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He dropped the skees, put one arm about her shoulders and one about
+her knees, and almost before she had finished crying, "Oh no, <i>please</i>
+don't carry me!" he was half-way up the slope. He set her down safe by
+the road.</p>
+
+<p>They caught the 8.09 train with two minutes to spare. Its warmth and
+the dingy softness of the plush seats seemed palatial.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXXIV</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_w.jpg" alt="W" width="69" height="50" /></div>
+<p>hile scientists seek germs that shall change the world, while war
+comes or winter takes earth captive, even while love visibly flowers,
+a power, mighty as any of these, lashes its human pack-train on the
+dusty road to futility. The Day's Work is the name of that power.</p>
+
+<p>All these days of first love Carl had the office for lowering
+background. The warm trust of Ruth's hand on a Saturday did not make
+plans for the Touricar any the less pressing on a Monday. The tyranny
+of nine to five is stronger, more insistent, in every department of
+life, than the most officious oligarchy. Inspectors can be bribed,
+judges softened, and recruiting sergeants evaded, but only the grace
+of God will turn 3.30 into 5.30. And Mr. Ericson of the Touricar
+Company, a not vastly important employee of the mothering VanZile
+Corporation, was not entitled to go home at 3.30, as a really rational
+man would have done when the sun gold-misted the windows and suggested
+skating.</p>
+
+<p>No longer was business essentially an adventure to Carl. Doubtless he
+would have given it up and have gone to Palm Beach to fly a hydro for
+Bagby, Jr., had there been no Ruth. Bagby wrote that he was coming
+North, to prepare for the spring's experiments; wouldn't Carl consider
+joining him?</p>
+
+<p>Carl was now, between his salary and his investment in the Touricar
+Company, making about four thousand dollars a year, and saving nearly
+half of it, against the inevitable next change in his life, whatever
+that should be. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span> would probably climb to ten thousand dollars in
+five years. The Touricar was promising success. Several had been
+ordered at the Automobile Show; the Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia
+agents of the company reported interest. For no particular reason,
+apparently, Milwaukee had taken them up first; three Milwaukee people
+had ordered cars.... An artist was making posters with beautiful
+gipsies and a Touricar and tourists whose countenances showed lively
+appreciation of the efforts of the kind Touricar manufacturers to
+please and benefit them. But the head salesman of the company laughed
+at Carl when he suggested that the Touricar might not only bring them
+money, but really take people off to a larger freedom:</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care a hang where they go with the thing as long as they pay
+for it. You can't be an idealist and make money. You make the money
+and then you can have all the ideals you want to, and give away some
+hospitals and libraries."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>They walked and talked, Ruth and Carl. They threaded the
+Sunday-afternoon throng on upper Broadway, where on every clear Sunday
+all the apartment-dwellers (if they have remembered to have their
+trousers pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation) promenade
+like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting
+apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two
+blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and
+hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the
+Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they
+scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat,
+and were thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause
+makes honest friendship; but hating the same people makes alliances so
+delightful that one can sit up late nights, talking.</p>
+
+<p>At the opening of the flying season Carl took her to the Hempstead
+Plains Aviation Field, and, hearing his explanations,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span> she at last
+comprehended emotionally that he really was an aviator.</p>
+
+<p>They tramped through Staten Island; they had tea at the Manhattan.
+Carl dined with Ruth and her father; once he took her brother, Mason,
+to lunch at the Aero Club.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth was ill in March; not with a mysterious and romantic malady, but
+with grippe, which, she wrote Carl, made her hate the human race, New
+York, charity, and Shakespeare. She could not decide whether to go to
+Europe, or to die in a swoon and be buried under a mossy headstone.</p>
+
+<p>He answered that he would go abroad for her; and every day she
+received tokens bearing New York post-marks, yet obviously coming from
+foreign parts: a souvenir card from the Pir&aelig;us, stating that Carl was
+"visiting cousin T. Demetrieff Philopopudopulos, and we are enjoying
+our drives so much. Dem. sends his love; wish you could be with us";
+an absurd string of beads from Port Sa&iuml;d and a box of Syrian sweets; a
+Hindu puzzle guaranteed to amuse victims of the grippe, and
+gold-fabric slippers of China; with long letters nonchalantly relating
+encounters with outlaws and wrecks and new varieties of disease.</p>
+
+<p>He called on her before her nose had quite lost the grippe or her
+temper the badness.</p>
+
+<p>Phil Dunleavy was there, lofty and cultured in evening clothes,
+apparently not eager to go. He stayed till ten minutes to ten, and, by
+his manner of cold surprise when Carl tried to influence the
+conversation, was able to keep it to the Kreisler violin recitals, the
+architecture of St. John the Divine's, and Whitney's polo, while Carl
+tried not to look sulky, and man&oelig;uvered to get out the excellent
+things he was prepared to say on other topics; not unlike the small
+boy who wants to interrupt whist-players and tell them about his new
+skates. When Phil was gone Ruth sighed and said, belligerently:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Poor Phil, he has to work so hard, and all the people at his office,
+even the firm, are just as common as they can be; common as the
+children at my beastly old settlement-house."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean by 'common'?" bristled Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"Not of our class."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean by 'our class'?"</p>
+
+<p>And the battle was set.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth refused to withdraw "common." Carl recalled Abraham Lincoln and
+Golden-Rule Jones and Walt Whitman on the subject of the Common
+People, though as to what these sages had said he was vague. Ruth
+burst out:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you can talk all you like about theories, but just the same, in
+real life most people are common as dirt. And just about as admissible
+to Society. It's all very fine to be good to servants, but you would
+be the first to complain if I invited the cook up here."</p>
+
+<p>"Give her and her children education for three generations&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She was perfectly unreasonable, and right in most of the things she
+said. He was perfectly unreasonable, and right in all of the things he
+said. Their argument was absurdly hot, and hurt them pathetically. It
+was difficult, at first, for Carl to admit that he was at odds with
+his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would
+soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not
+to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen
+minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he
+remembering the fact that she was a result of city life; she the fact
+that he wasn't a product of city life.</p>
+
+<p>And a fact which neither of them realized, save subconsciously, was in
+the background: Carl himself had come in a few years from Oscar
+Ericson's back yard to Ruth Winslow's library&mdash;he had made the step
+naturally, as only an American could, but it was a step.</p>
+
+<p>She was loftily polite. "I'm afraid you can't quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span> understand what
+the niceties of life mean to people like Phil. I'm sorry he won't give
+them up to the first truck-driver he meets, but I'm afraid he won't,
+and occasionally it's necessary to face facts! Niceties of the kind he
+has gr&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Nice!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"Really&mdash;&mdash;" Her heavy eyebrows arched in a frown.</p>
+
+<p>"If you're going to get 'nice' on me, of course you'll have to be
+condescending, and that's one thing I won't permit."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid you'll find that one has to permit a great many things.
+Sometimes, apparently, I must permit great rudeness."</p>
+
+<p>"Have I been rude? Have&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Very."</p>
+
+<p>He could endure no more. "Good night!" he growled, and was gone.</p>
+
+<p>He was frightened to find himself out of the house; the door closed
+between them; no going back without ringing the bell. He couldn't go
+back. He walked a block, slow, incredulous. He stood hesitant before
+the nearest corner drug-store, shivering in the March wind, wondering
+if he dared go into the store and telephone her. He was willing to
+concede anything. He planned apt phrases to use. Surely everything
+would be made right if he could only speak to her. He pictured himself
+crossing the drug-store floor, entering the telephone-booth, putting
+five cents in the slot. He stared at the red-and-green globes in the
+druggist's window; inspected a display of soaps, and recollected the
+fact that for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving-soap
+and had had to use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a
+shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I
+<i>must</i> try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for
+thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that
+soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span> and angel, for
+while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he
+sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went
+into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. There was no
+sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly
+ice-cream soda, and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank
+it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he
+knew not what.</p>
+
+<p>He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her.
+But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into
+defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his
+top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of
+"niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go
+anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and
+comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the
+results of losing his job, or of being robbed of his interests in the
+Touricar. He glanced interestedly at a pretty girl; recklessly went
+into a cigar-store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again.</p>
+
+<p>As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went
+over every word Ruth or he had said, and when he reached his room he
+sat deep in an arm-chair, like a hurt animal crouching, his coat still
+on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged, his legs
+straight out before him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he
+disconsolately contemplated a photograph of Forrest Haviland in
+full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau among tangled ties,
+stray cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff-buttons, and a
+haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and
+gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not
+know how the play would end.</p>
+
+<p>But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in
+earnest.</p>
+
+<p>Forrest's portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no
+picture of Ruth, that he wanted one.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span> Next time he saw her he would
+ask her.... Then he remembered.</p>
+
+<p>He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over gloweringly, and
+chewed it without lighting it, the right corner of his mouth vicious
+in appearance. But his tone was plaintive as he mourned, "How did it
+all start, anyway?"</p>
+
+<p>He drew off his top-coat and shoes, and put on his shabby though once
+expensive slippers. Slowly. He lay on his bed. He certainly did not
+intend to go to sleep&mdash;but he awoke at 2 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>, dressed, the light
+burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and
+dry-mouthed&mdash;a victim of all the woes since tall Troy burned. He
+shucked off his clothes as you shuck an ear of corn.</p>
+
+<p>When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual, greeting a shining new
+day, till he realized that it was not a shining day; it was an ominous
+day; everything was wrong. That something had happened&mdash;really
+had&mdash;was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His chief reaction
+was not repentance nor dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to
+unwish the whole affair. "Hang it!" he groaned.</p>
+
+<p>Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth. "Poor
+kid! it was rotten to row with her, her completely all in with the
+grippe."</p>
+
+<p>At three in the afternoon he telephoned to her house. "Miss Ruth," he
+was informed, "was asleep; she was not very well."</p>
+
+<p>Would the maid please ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ericson when she woke?</p>
+
+<p>Certainly the maid would.</p>
+
+<p>But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him
+call again, for days, and Ruth never called him.</p>
+
+<p>He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing
+himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance,
+on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She
+was with Phil<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span> Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily,
+oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of Carl Ericson.</p>
+
+<p>That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train; stood there
+alone, due at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, but suddenly not
+wishing to go, not wishing to go anywhere nor do anything, friendless,
+bored, driftwood in the city.</p>
+
+<p>So easily had the Hawk swooped down into her life, coming by chance,
+but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>For three days he planned in a headachy way to make an end of his job
+and join Bagby, Jr., in his hydroaeroplane experiments. He pictured
+the crowd that would worship him. He told himself stories unhappy and
+long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure
+that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever
+displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without
+cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he
+called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.</p>
+
+<p>"May I come up to-night?" he said, urgently.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said. That was all.</p>
+
+<p>When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed
+that she had wanted to telephone to him.</p>
+
+<p>Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:</p>
+
+<p>"I was grouchy&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I was beastly&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm honestly sorry&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"'ll you forgive&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What was it all about?"</p>
+
+<p>"Really, I do&mdash;not&mdash;know!"</p>
+
+<p>"I agree with lots of the things you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I agree with you, but just at the time&mdash;you know."</p>
+
+<p>Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span> arm lightly about
+her shoulders&mdash;lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every
+thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the
+smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her
+coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to
+care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished.
+Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual
+scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.</p>
+
+<p>She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz.
+It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano-lamp they were
+silent, happy. He merely touched her hand, when he went, but he sang
+his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman.</p>
+
+<p>"I've found her again; it isn't merely play, now!" he kept repeating.
+"And I've learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it's
+as though I'd learned a new language. Gee! I'm happy!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXV" id="CHAPTER_XXXV"></a>CHAPTER XXXV</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_o.jpg" alt="O" width="49" height="50" /></div>
+<p>n an April Saturday morning Carl rose with a feeling of spring. He
+wanted to be off in the Connecticut hills, among the silvery-gray
+worm-fences, with larks rising on the breeze and pools a-ripple and
+yellow crocus-blossoms afire by the road, where towns white and sleepy
+woke to find the elms misted with young green. Would there be any
+crocuses out as yet? That was the only question worth solving in the
+world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The staid brownstone houses of
+the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over
+them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the
+automobile district past Central Park, sniffing wistfully at the damp
+grass, pale green amid old gray; marveling how a bare patch of brown
+earth, without a single blade of grass, could smell so stirringly of
+coming spring. A girl on Broadway was selling wild violets, white and
+purple, and in front of wretched old houses down a side-street, in the
+negro district, a darky in a tan derby and a scarlet tie was caroling:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Mandy, in de spring<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">De mocking-birds do sing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An' de flowers am so sweet along de ol' bayou&mdash;&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Above the darky's head, elevated trains roared on the Fifty-third
+Street trestle, and up Broadway streaked a stripped motor-car, all
+steel chassis and grease-mottled board seat and lurid odor of
+gasoline. But sparrows splashed in the pools of sunshine; in a lull
+the darky's voice came again, chanting passionately, "In de spring,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span>
+spring, <i>spring</i>!" and Carl clamored: "I've <i>got</i> to get out to-day.
+Terrible glad it's a half-holiday. Wonder if I dare telephone to
+Ruth?"</p>
+
+<p>At a quarter to three they were rollicking down the "smart side" of
+Fifth Avenue. One could see that they were playmates, by her dancing
+steps and his absorption in her. He bent a little toward her, quick to
+laugh with her.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth was in a frock of flowered taffeta. "I won't wait till Easter to
+show off my spring clothes. It isn't done any more," she said. "It's
+as stupid as Bobby's not daring to wear a straw hat one single day
+after September fifteenth. Is an aviator brave enough to wear his
+after the fifteenth?... Think! I didn't know you then&mdash;last September.
+I can't understand it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I knew you, blessed, because I was sure spring was coming again,
+and that distinctly implied Ruth."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the Spirit of Spring.
+Last Wednesday, when I lost my marquise ring, I was the spirit of
+vitriol, but now&mdash;&mdash;I'm a poet. I've thought it all out and decided
+that I shall be the American Sappho. At any moment I am quite likely
+to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb and indite
+several stanzas on the back of a calling-card, while the crowd galumps
+around me in an awed ring.... I feel like kidnapping you and making
+you take me aeroplaning, but I'll compromise. You're to buy me a book
+and take me down to the Maison &Eacute;pinay for tea, and read me poetry
+while I yearn over the window-boxes and try to look like Nicollette.
+Buy me a book with spring in it, and a princess, and a sky like
+this&mdash;cornflower blue with bunny-rabbit clouds."</p>
+
+<p>At least a few in the Avenue's flower-garden of pretty d&eacute;butantes in
+pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots
+were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder who they all are; they look like an aristocracy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span> useless
+but made of the very best materials," said Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"They're like maids of honor and young knights, disguised in modern
+costumes! They're charming!"</p>
+
+<p>"Charmingly useless," insisted our revolutionary, but he did not sound
+earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything less
+great than joy and life; a day for shameless luxuriating in the sun,
+and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted
+silk were silver things and jade; satin gowns and shoe-buckles of
+rhinestones. The sleek motor-cars whisked by in an incessant line; the
+traffic policemen nodded familiarly to hansom-drivers; pools on the
+asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze
+tasted of spring.</p>
+
+<p>Carl bought for her Yeats's poems, tucked it under his arm, and they
+trotted off. In Madison Square they saw a gallant and courtly old man
+with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and
+a smile of unquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissus in his
+buttonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs and smiled to see
+one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to
+build for himself and his sparrow bride a bungalow in the foot-hills
+of the Metropolitan Tower.</p>
+
+<p>"I love that old man!" exclaimed Ruth. "I do wish we could pick him up
+and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, 'I prithee, sir,
+of thy good will come thou forthfaring with two vagabonds who do quest
+high and low the land of Nowhere.' Something like that. Go on, Carl,
+be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of
+Arcadia. Go ask him."</p>
+
+<p>"Afraid to. Besides, he might monopolize you."</p>
+
+<p>"He'll go with us, without his knowing it, anyway. Isn't it strange
+how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without
+even speaking to them?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span> You know them the rest of your life and play
+games with them."</p>
+
+<p>The Maison &Eacute;pinay you must quest long, but great is your reward if you
+find it. Here is no weak remembrance of a lost Paris, but a
+French-Canadian's desire to express what he believes Paris must be;
+therefore a super-Paris, all in brown velvet and wicker tables, and at
+the back a long window edged with boxes red with geraniums, looking to
+a back-yard garden where rose-beds lead to a dancing-faun terminal in
+a shrine of ivy.</p>
+
+<p>They sipped grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had
+the place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of
+benison; and Carl read from Yeats.</p>
+
+<p>He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew
+and misty mere and the fluttering wings of Love till now.</p>
+
+<p>His hand rested on her gloved hand.... Tony the waiter
+re-re-rearranged the serving-table.... When Ruth broke the spell with,
+"You aren't very reverent with perfectly clean gloves," they chattered
+like blackbirds at sunset.</p>
+
+<p>Carl discovered that, being a New-Yorker, she knew part of it as
+intimately as though it were a village, and nothing about the rest.
+She had taught him Fifth Avenue; told him the history of the invasion
+by shops, the social differences between East and West; pointed out
+the pictures of friends in photographers' wall-cases. Now he taught
+her the various New Yorks he had discovered in lonely rambles.
+Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford
+quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation
+dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of
+Italian <i>tables d'h&ocirc;te</i>, clerks, social-workers, and radical
+magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground;
+lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian
+lodgers live on streets<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span> named for kings, in wooden houses with
+gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights. From the same small-paned
+windows where frowsy Italian women stared down upon Ruth, Ruth's
+ancestors had leaned out to greet General George Washington.</p>
+
+<p>On an open wharf near Tenth Street they were bespelled by April. The
+Woolworth Tower, to the south, was an immortal shaft of ivory and gold
+against an unwinking blue sky, challenging the castles and cathedrals
+of the Old World, and with its supreme art dignifying the commerce
+which built and uses it. The Hudson was lustrous with sun, and a sweet
+wind sang from unknown Jersey hills across the river. Moored to the
+wharf was a coal-barge, with a tiny dwelling-cabin at whose windows
+white curtains fluttered. Beside the cabin was a garden tended by the
+bargeman's comely white-browed wife; a dozen daisies and geraniums in
+two starch-boxes.</p>
+
+<p>Forging down the river a scarred tramp steamer, whose rusty sides the
+sun turned to damask rose, bobbed in the slight swell, heading for
+open sea, with the British flag a-flicker and men chanting as they
+cleared deck.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish we were going off with her&mdash;maybe to Singapore or Nagasaki,"
+Carl said, slipping his arm through hers, as they balanced on the
+stringpiece of the wharf, sniffing like deer at the breeze, which for
+a moment seemed to bear, from distant burgeoning woods, a shadowy hint
+of burning leaves&mdash;the perfume of spring and autumn, the eternal
+wander-call.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes!" Ruth mused; "and moonlight in Java, and the Himalayas on the
+horizon, and the Vale of Cashmir."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm glad we have this. Blessed, it's a day planned for lovers
+like us."</p>
+
+<p>"Carl!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Lovers. Courting. In spring. Like all lovers."</p>
+
+<p>"Really, Carl, even spring doesn't quite let me forget the
+<i>convenances</i> are home waiting."</p>
+
+<p>"We're not lovers?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, we&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you enjoy to-day, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And you'd rather be loafing on a dirty wharf, looking at a tramp
+steamer, than taking tea at the Plaza?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, just now, perhaps&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And you're protesting because you feel it's proper to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And you really trust me so much that you're having difficulty in
+seeming alarmed?"</p>
+
+<p>"Really&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And you'd rather play around with me than any of the Skull and Bones
+or Hasty Pudding men you know? Or foreign diplomats with spade
+beards?"</p>
+
+<p>"At least they wouldn't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes they would, if you'd let them, which you wouldn't.... So, to
+sum up, then, we <i>are</i> lovers and it's spring and you're glad of it,
+and as soon as you get used to it you'll be glad I'm so frank. Won't
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will not be bullied, Carl! You'll be having me married to you
+before I can scream for help, if I don't start at once."</p>
+
+<p>"Probably."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed you will not! I haven't the slightest intention of letting you
+get away with being masterful."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know, blessed; these masterful people bore me, too. But aren't
+we modern enough so we can discuss frankly the question of whether I'd
+better propose to you, some day?"</p>
+
+<p>"But, boy, what makes you suppose that I have any information on the
+subject? That I've ever thought of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I credit you with having a reasonable knowledge that there are such
+things as marriage."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I'm very confused. You've bullied me into such a
+defensive position that my instinct is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span> to deny everything. If you
+turned on me suddenly and accused me of wearing gloves I'd indignantly
+deny it."</p>
+
+<p>"Meantime, not to change the subject, I'd better be planning and
+watching for a suitable day for proposing, don't you think? Consider
+it. Here's this young Ericson&mdash;some sort of a clerk, I believe&mdash;no,
+don't <i>think</i> he's a university man&mdash;&mdash;You know; discuss it clearly.
+Think it might be better to propose to-day? I ask your advice as a
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Carl dear, I think not to-day. I'm sorry, but I really don't
+think so."</p>
+
+<p>"But some time, perhaps?"</p>
+
+<p>"Some time, perhaps!" Then she fled from him and from the subject.</p>
+
+<p>They talked, after that, only of the sailors that loafed on West
+Street, but in their voices was content.</p>
+
+<p>They crossed the city, and on Brooklyn Bridge watched the suburbanites
+going home, crowding surface-car and elevated. From their perch on the
+giant spider's web of steel, they saw the Long Island Sound steamers
+below them, passing through a maelstrom of light on waves that
+trembled like quicksilver.</p>
+
+<p>They found a small Italian restaurant, free of local-color hounds and
+what Carl called "hobohemians," and discovered <i>fritto misto</i> and
+Chianti and <i>zabaglione</i>&mdash;a pale-brown custard flavored like honey and
+served in tall, thin, curving glasses&mdash;while the fat proprietress, in
+a red shawl and a large brooch, came to ask them, "Everyt'ing
+all-aright, eh?" Carl insisted that Walter MacMonnies, the aviator,
+had once tried out a motor that was exactly like her, including the
+Italian accent. There was simple and complete bliss for them in the
+dingy pine-and-plaster room, adorned with fly-specked calendars and
+pictures of Victor Emmanuel and President McKinley, copies of the
+<i>Bolletino Della Sera</i> and large vinegar bottles.</p>
+
+<p>The theater was their destination, but they first loitered up
+Broadway, shamelessly stopping to stare at shop<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span> windows, pretending
+to be Joe the shoe-clerk and Becky the cashier furnishing a Bronx
+flat. Whether it was anything but a game to Ruth will never be known;
+but to Carl there was a hidden high excitement in planning a
+flower-box for the fire-escape.</p>
+
+<p>Apropos of nothing, she said, as they touched elbows with the
+sweethearting crowd: "You were right. I'm sorry I ever felt superior
+to what I called 'common people.' People! I love them all.
+It's&mdash;&mdash;Come, we must hurry. I hate to miss that one perfect second
+when the orchestra is quiet and the lights wink at you and the
+curtain's going up."</p>
+
+<p>During the second act of the play, when the heroine awoke to love,
+Carl's hand found hers.</p>
+
+<p>And it must have been that night when, standing between the inner and
+outer doors of her house, Carl put his arms about her, kissed her
+hair, timidly kissed her sweet, cold cheek, and cried, "Bless you,
+dear." But, for some reason, he does not remember when he did first
+kiss her, though he had looked forward to that miracle for weeks. He
+does not understand the reason; but there is the fact. Her kisses were
+big things to him, yet possibly there were larger psychological
+changes which occulted everything else, at first. But it must have
+been on that night that he first kissed her. For certainly it was when
+he called on her a week later that he kissed her for the second time.</p>
+
+<p>They had been animated but decorous, that evening a week later. He had
+tried to play an improvisation called "The Battle of San Juan Hill,"
+with a knowledge of the piano limited to the fact that if you struck
+alternate keys at the same time, there appeared not to be a discord.</p>
+
+<p>"I must go now," he said, slowly, as though the bald words had a
+higher significance. She tried to look at him, and could not. His arms
+circled her, with frightened happiness. She tilted back her head, and
+there was the ever-new surprise of blue irises under dark brows.
+Uplifted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span> wonder her eyes spoke. His head drooped till he kissed her
+lips. The two bodies clamored for each other. But she unwound his
+arms, crying, "No, no, no!"</p>
+
+<p>He was enfolded by a sensation that they had instantly changed from
+friendly strangers to intimate lovers, as she said: "I don't
+understand it, Carl. I've never let a man kiss me like that. Oh, I
+suppose I've flirted, like most girls, and been kissed sketchily at
+silly dances. But this&mdash;&mdash;Oh, Carl, Carl dear, don't ever kiss me
+again till&mdash;oh, not till I <i>know</i>. Why, I'm scarcely acquainted with
+you! I do know how dear you are, but it appals me when I think of how
+little background you have for me. Dear, I don't want to be sordid and
+spoil this moment, but I do know that when you're gone I'll be a
+coward and remember that there are families and things, and want to
+wait till I know how they like you, at the very least. Good night, and
+I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Good night, dear blessed. I know."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[342]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXXVI</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>here were, as Ruth had remarked, families.</p>
+
+<p>When Carl was formally invited to dine at the Winslows', on a night
+late in April, his only anxiety was as to the condition of his
+dinner-coat. He arrived in a state of easy briskness, planning apt and
+sensible remarks about the business situation for Mason and Mr.
+Winslow. As the maid opened the door Carl was wondering if he would be
+able to touch Ruth's hand under the table. He had an anticipatory
+fondness for all of the small friendly family group which was about to
+receive him.</p>
+
+<p>And he was cast into a den of strangers, most of them comprised in the
+one electric person of Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow was the general-commanding in whatsoever
+group she was placed by Providence (with which she had strong
+influence). At a White House reception she would pleasantly but firmly
+have sent the President about his business, and have taken his place
+in the receiving line. Just now she sat in a pre-historic S chair,
+near the center of the drawing-room, pumping out of Phil Dunleavy most
+of the facts about his chiefs' private lives.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Emma had the soul of a six-foot dowager duchess, and should have
+had an eagle nose and a white pompadour. Actually, she was of medium
+height, with a not unduly maternal bosom, a broad, commonplace face,
+hair the color of faded grass, a blunt nose with slightly enlarged
+pores, and thin lips that seemed to be a straight line when seen from
+in front, but, seen in profile, puffed out like a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[343]</a></span> fish's. She had a
+habit of nodding intelligently even when she was not listening, and
+another habit of rubbing her left knuckles with the fingers of her
+right hand. Not imposing in appearance was Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow,
+but she was born to discipline a court.</p>
+
+<p>An impeccable widow was she, speaking with a broad A, and dressed
+exquisitely in a black satin evening gown.</p>
+
+<p>By such simple-hearted traits as being always right about unimportant
+matters and idealistically wrong about important matters, politely
+intruding into everything, being earnest about the morality of the
+poor and auction bridge and the chaperonage of nice girls, possessing
+a working knowledge of Wagner and Rodin, wearing fifteen-dollar
+corsets, and believing on her bended knees that the Truegates and
+Winslows were the noblest families in the Social Register, Aunt Emma
+Truegate Winslow had persuaded the whole world, including even her
+near-English butler, that she was a superior woman. Family tradition
+said that she had only to raise a finger to get into really smart
+society. Upon the death of Ruth's mother, Aunt Emma had taken it as
+one of her duties, along with symphony concerts and committees, to
+rear Ruth properly. She had been neglecting this duty so far as to
+permit the invasion of a barbarian named Ericson only because she had
+been in California with her young son, Arthur. Just now, while her
+house was being opened, she was staying at the Winslows', with Arthur
+and a peculiarly beastly Japanese spaniel named Taka-San.</p>
+
+<p>She was introduced at Carl, she glanced him over, and passed him on to
+Olive Dunleavy, all in forty-five seconds. When Carl had recovered
+from a sensation of being a kitten drowned in a sack, he said
+agreeable things to Olive, and observed the situation in the
+drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>Phil was marked out for Aunt Emma's favors; Mr. Winslow sat in a
+corner, apparently crushed, with restorative conversation administered
+by Ruth; Mason Winslow was haltingly attentive to a plain,
+well-dressed, amiable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a></span> girl named Florence Crewden, who had
+prematurely gray hair, the week-end habit, and a weakness for baby
+talk. Ruth's medical-student brother, Bobby Winslow, was not there.
+The more he saw of Bobby's kind Aunt Emma, the more Carl could find it
+in his heart to excuse Bobby for having escaped the family dinner.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had an uncomfortable moment when Aunt Emma and Mr. Winslow asked
+him questions about the development of the Touricar. But before he
+could determine whether he was being deliberately inspected by the
+family the ordeal was over.</p>
+
+<p>As they went in to dinner, Mr. Winslow taking in Aunt Emma like a
+small boy accompanying the school principal, Ruth had the chance to
+whisper: "My Hawk, be good. Please believe I'm not responsible. It's
+all Aunt Emma's doing, this dreadfully stately family dinner. Don't
+let her bully you. I'm frightened to death and&mdash;&mdash;Yes, Phil, I'm
+coming."</p>
+
+<p>The warning did not seem justified in view of the attractive
+table&mdash;candles, cut glass, a mound of flowers on a beveled mirror,
+silvery linen, and grape-fruit with champagne. Carl was at one side of
+Aunt Emma, but she seemed more interested in Mr. Winslow, at the end
+of the table; and on his other side Carl had a safe companion in Olive
+Dunleavy. Across from him were Florence Crewden, Phil, and Ruth&mdash;Ruth
+shimmering in a gown of yellow satin, which broke the curves of her
+fine, flushed shoulders only by a narrow band.</p>
+
+<p>The conversation played with people. Florence Crewden told, to
+applause and laughter, of an exploratory visit to the College of the
+City of New York, and her discovery of a strange race, young Jews
+mostly, who went to college to study, and had no sense of the nobility
+of "making" fraternities.</p>
+
+<p>"Such outsiders!" she said. "Can't you imagine the sort of a party
+they'd have&mdash;they'd all stand around and discuss psychology and
+dissecting puppies and Greek<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span> roots! Phil, I think it would be a
+lovely punishment for you to have to join them&mdash;to work in a
+laboratory all day and wear a celluloid collar."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know their sort; 'greasy grinds' we used to call them; there
+were plenty of them in Yale," condescended Phil.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe they wear celluloid collars&mdash;if they do&mdash;because they're poor,"
+protested Ruth.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child," sniffed Aunt Emma, "with collars only twenty-five
+cents apiece? Don't be silly!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Winslow declared, with portly timidity, "Why, Em, my collars don't
+cost me but fifteen&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Mason dear, let's not discuss it at dinner.... Tell me, all of you,
+the scandal I've missed by going to California. Which reminds me; did
+I tell you I saw that miserable Amy Baslin, you remember, that married
+the porter or the superintendent or something in her father's factory?
+I saw her and her husband at Pasadena, and they seemed to be happy. Of
+course Amy would put the best face she could on it, but they must have
+been miserably unhappy&mdash;such a sad affair, and she could have married
+quite decently."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean by 'decently'?" Ruth demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Carl was startled. He had once asked Ruth the same question about the
+same phrase.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Emma revolved like a gun-turret getting Ruth's range, and
+remarked, calmly: "My dear child, you know quite well what I mean.
+Don't, I beg of you, bring any socialistic problems to dinner till you
+have really learned something about them.... Now I want to hear all
+the nice scandals I have missed."</p>
+
+<p>There were not many she had missed; but she kept the conversation
+sternly to discussions of people whose names Carl had never heard.
+Again he was obviously an Outsider. Still ignoring Carl, Aunt Emma
+demanded of Ruth and Phil, sitting together opposite her:</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about the good times you children have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span> having, Ruthie.
+I am so glad that Phil and you finally went to the William Truegates'.
+And your letter about the Beaux Arts festival was charming, Ruthie. I
+quite envied you and Phil."</p>
+
+<p>The dragon continued talking to Ruth, while Carl listened, in the
+interstices of his chatter to Olive:</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you haven't been giving all your time and beauty-sleep doing
+too much of that settlement work, Ruthie&mdash;and Heaven only knows what
+germs you will get there&mdash;of course I should be the first to praise
+any work for the poor, ungrateful and shiftless though they are&mdash;what
+with my committees and the Truegate Temperance Home for Young Working
+Girls&mdash;it's all very well to be sympathetic with them, but when it
+comes to a settlement-house, and Heaven knows I have given them all
+the counsel and suggestions I could, though some of the professional
+settlement workers are as pert as they can be, and I really do believe
+some of them think they are trying to end poverty entirely, just as
+though the Lord would have sent poverty into the world if He didn't
+have a very good reason for it&mdash;you will remember the Bible says, 'The
+poor you always have with you,' and as Florence Barclay says in her
+novels, which may seem a little sentimental, but they are of such a
+good moral effect, you can't supersede the Scriptures even in the most
+charming social circles. To say nothing of the blessings of poverty,
+I'm sure they're much happier than we are, with our onerous duties,
+I'm sure that if any of these ragamuffin anarchists and socialists and
+anti-militarists want to take over my committees they are welcome, if
+they'll take over the miserable headaches and worried hours they give
+me, trying to do something for the poor, they won't even be clean but
+even in model tenements they will put coal in the bath-tubs. And so I
+do hope you haven't just been wearing yourself to a bone working for
+ungrateful dirty little children, Ruthie."</p>
+
+<p>"No, auntie dear, I've been quite as discreet as any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span> Winslow should
+be. You see, I'm selfish, too. Aren't I, Carl?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, very."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Emma seemed to remember, then, that some sort of a man, whose
+species she didn't quite know, sat next to her. She glanced at Carl,
+again gave him up as an error in social judgment, and went on:</p>
+
+<p>"No, Ruthie, not selfish so much as thoughtless about the duties of a
+family like ours&mdash;and I was always the first to say that the Winslows
+are as fine a stock as the Truegates. And I am going to see that you
+go out more the rest of this year, Ruthie. I want you and Phil to plan
+right now to attend the Charity League dances next season. You must
+learn to concentrate your attention&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Auntie dear, please leave my wickedness till the next time we&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child, now that I have the chance to get all of us
+together&mdash;I'm sure Mr. Ericson will pardon the rest of us our little
+family discussions&mdash;I want to take you and Master Phil to task
+together. You are both of you negligent of social duties&mdash;duties they
+are, Ruthie, for man was not born to serve alone&mdash;though Phil is far
+better than you, with your queer habits, and Heaven only knows where
+you got them, neither your father nor your dear sainted mother was
+slack or selfish&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Dear auntie, let's admit that I'm a black sheep with a little black
+muzzle and a habit of butting all sorts of ash-cans; and let Phil go
+on his social way rejoicing."</p>
+
+<p>Ruth was jaunty, but her voice was strained, and she bit her lip with
+staccato nervousness when she was not speaking. Carl ventured to face
+the dragon.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Winslow, I'm sure Ruth has been better than you think; she has
+been learning all these fiendishly complicated new dances. You know a
+poor business man like myself finds them&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Aunt Emma, "I am sure she will always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[348]</a></span> remember that she
+is a Winslow, and must carry on the family traditions, but sometimes I
+am afraid she gets under bad influences, because of her good nature."
+She said it loudly. She looked Carl in the eye.</p>
+
+<p>The whole table stopped talking. Carl felt like a tramp who has kicked
+a chained bulldog and discovers that the chain is broken.</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to be good; not make a scene. He noticed with intense
+indignation that Phil was grinning. He planned to get Phil off in a
+corner, not necessarily a dark corner, and beat him. He wanted to
+telegraph Ruth; dared not. He realized, in a quarter-second, that he
+must have been discussed by the Family, and did not like it.</p>
+
+<p>Every one seemed to be waiting for him to speak. Awkwardly he said,
+wondering all the while if she meant what her tone said she meant, by
+"bad influences":</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but&mdash;&mdash;Just going to say&mdash;&mdash;I believe settlement work is a good
+influence&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't discuss&mdash;&mdash;" Ruth was groaning, when Aunt Emma sternly
+interrupted:</p>
+
+<p>"It is good of you to take up the cudgels, Mr. Ericson, and please
+don't misjudge me&mdash;of course I realize that I am only a silly old
+woman and that my passion to see the Winslows keep to their fine
+standards is old-fashioned, but you see it is a hobby of mine that
+I've devoted years to, and you who haven't known the Winslows so very
+long&mdash;&mdash;" Her manner was almost courteous.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's so," Carl mumbled, agreeably, just as she dropped the
+courtesy and went on:</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;you can't judge&mdash;in fact (this is nothing personal, you know) I
+don't suppose it's possible for Westerners to have any idea how
+precious family ideals are to Easterners. Of course we're probably
+silly about them, and it's splendid, your wheat-lands, and not caring
+who your grandfather was; but to make up for those things we do have
+to protect what we have gained through the generations."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[349]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Carl longed to stand up, to defy them all, to cry: "If you mean that
+you think Ruth has to be protected against me, have the decency to say
+so." Yet he kept his voice gentle:</p>
+
+<p>"But why be narrowed to just a few families in one's interests? Now
+this settlement&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"One isn't narrowed. There are plenty of <i>good</i> families for Ruth to
+consider when it comes time for my little girl to consider alliances
+at all!" Aunt Emma coldly stated.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>will</i> shut up!" he told himself. "I will shut up. I'll see this
+dinner through, and then never come near this house again." He tried
+to look casual, as though the conversation was safely finished. But
+Aunt Emma was waiting for him to go on. In the general stillness her
+corsets creaked with belligerent attention. He played with his fork in
+a "Well, if that's how you feel about it, perhaps it would be better
+not to discuss it any further, my dear madam," manner, growing every
+second more flushed, embarrassed, sick, angry; trying harder every
+second to look unconcerned.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Emma hawked a delicate and ladylike hawk in her patrician throat,
+prefatory to a new attack. Carl knew he would be tempted to retort
+brutally.</p>
+
+<p>Then from the door of the dining-room whimpered the high voice of an
+excited child:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mamma, oh, Cousin Ruthie, nurse says Hawk Ericson is here! I want
+to see him!"</p>
+
+<p>Every one turned toward a boy of five or six, round as a baby chicken,
+in his fuzzy miniature pajamas, protectingly holding a cotton monkey
+under his arm, sturdy and shy and defiant.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Arthur!" "Why, my son!" "Oh, the darling baby!" from the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here, Arthur, and let's hear your troubles before nurse nabs
+you, old son," said Phil, not at all condescendingly, rising from the
+table, holding out his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no! You just let me go! I want to see Hawk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[350]</a></span> Ericson. Is that Hawk
+Ericson?" demanded the son of Aunt Emma, pointing at Carl.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sweetheart," said Ruth, softly, proudly.</p>
+
+<p>Running madly about the end of the table, Arthur jumped at Carl's lap.</p>
+
+<p>Carl swung him up and inquired, "What is it, old man?"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you Hawk Ericson?"</p>
+
+<p>"At your commands, cap'n."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Emma rose and said, masterfully, "Come, little son, now you've
+seen Mr. Ericson it's up to beddie again, up&mdash;to&mdash;beddie."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no; please no, mamma! I've never seen a' aviator before, not in
+all my life, and you promised me 'cross your heart, at Pasadena you
+did, I could see one."</p>
+
+<p>Arthur's face showed signs of imminent badness.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you may stay for a while, then," said Aunt Emma, weakly,
+unconscious that her sway had departed from her, while the rest of the
+table grinned, except Carl, who was absorbed in Arthur's ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to be a' aviator, too; I think a' aviator is braver than
+anybody. I'd rather be a' aviator than a general or a policeman or
+anybody. I got a picture of you in my scrap-book&mdash;you got a funny hat
+like Cousin Bobby wears when he plays football in it. Shall I get you
+the picture in my scrap-book?... Honest, will you give me another?"</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Emma made one more attempt to coax Arthur up to bed, but his
+Majesty refused, and she compromised by scolding his nurse and sending
+up for his dressing-gown, a small, blue dressing-gown on which yellow
+ducks and white bunny-rabbits paraded proudly.</p>
+
+<p>"Like our blue bowl!" Carl remarked to Ruth.</p>
+
+<p>Not till after coffee in the drawing-room would Arthur consent to go
+to bed. This real head of the Emma Winslow family was far too much
+absorbed in making Carl tell of his long races, and "Why does a
+flying-machine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[351]</a></span> fly? What's a wind pressure? Why does the wind shove
+up? Why is the wings curved? Why does it want to catch the wind?" The
+others listened, including even Aunt Emma.</p>
+
+<p>Carl went home early. Ruth had the opportunity to confide:</p>
+
+<p>"Hawk dear, I can't tell you how ashamed I am of my family for
+enduring anybody so rude and opinionated as Aunt Emma. But&mdash;it's all
+right, now, isn't it?... No, no, don't kiss me, but&mdash;dear dreams,
+Hawk."</p>
+
+<p>Phil's voice, from behind, shouted: "Oh, Ericson! Just a second."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was not at all pleased. He remembered that Phil had listened with
+obvious amusement to his agonized attempt to turn Aunt Emma's attacks.</p>
+
+<p>Said Phil, while Ruth disappeared: "Which way you going? Walk to the
+subway with you. You win, old man. I admire your nerve for facing Aunt
+Emma. What I wanted to say&mdash;&mdash;I hope to thunder you don't think I was
+in any way responsible for Mrs. Winslow's linking me and Ruth that way
+and&mdash;&mdash;Oh, you understand. I admire you like the devil for knowing
+what you want and going after it. I suppose you'll have to convince
+Ruth yet, but, by Jove! you've convinced me! Glad you had Arthur for
+ally. They don't make kiddies any better. God! if I could have a son
+like that&mdash;&mdash;I turn off here. G-good luck, Ericson."</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks a lot, Phil."</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks. Good night, Carl."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[352]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXXVII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_l.jpg" alt="L" width="37" height="50" /></div>
+<p>ong Beach, on the first hot Sunday of May, when motorists come out
+from New York, half-ready to open asphalt hearts to sea and sky.
+Carl's first sight of it, save from an aeroplane, and he was mad-happy
+to find real shore so near the city.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth and he were picnicking, vulgar and unashamed, among the dunes at
+the end of the long board-walk, like the beer-drinking, pickle-eating
+parties of fishermen and the family groups with red table-cloths,
+grape-basket lunches, and colored Sunday supplements. Ruth declared
+that she preferred them to the elegant loungers who were showing off
+new motor-coats on the board-walk. But Carl and she had withdrawn a
+bit from the crowds, and in the dunes had made a nest, with a book and
+a magazine and a box of chocolates and Carl's collapsible lunch-kit.</p>
+
+<p>Not New York only, but all of Ruth's relatives were forgot. Aunt Emma
+Truegate Winslow was a myth of the dragon-haunted past. Here all was
+fresh color and free spaces looking to open sea. Behind the dunes,
+with their traceries of pale grass, reveled the sharp, unshadowed
+green of marshes, and an inland bay that was blue as bluing, a
+startling blue, bordered by the emerald marshes. To one side&mdash;afar,
+not troubling their peace&mdash;were the crimson roofs of fantastic houses,
+like chalets and California missions and villas of the Riviera, with
+gables and turrets of red tiles.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[353]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Before their feet was the cream-colored beach, marked by ridges of
+driftwood mixed with small glistening shells, long ranks of
+pale-yellow seaweed, and the delicate wrinkles in the sand that were
+the tracks of receding waves. The breakers left the beach wet and
+shining for a moment, like plates of raw-colored copper, making one
+cry out with its flashing beauty. Then, at last, the eyes lifted to
+unbroken bluewater&mdash;nothing between them and Europe save rolling waves
+and wave-crests like white plumes. The sea was of a diaphanous blue
+that shaded through a bold steel blue and a lucent blue enamel to a
+rich ultramarine which absorbed and healed the office-worn mind. The
+sails of tacking sloops were a-blossom; sea-gulls swooped; a tall
+surf-fisherman in red flannel shirt and shiny black hip-boots strode
+out into the water and cast with a long curve of his line; cumulus
+clouds, whose pure white was shaded with a delicious golden tone, were
+baronial above; and out on the sky-line the steamers raced by.</p>
+
+<p>Round them was the warm intimacy of the dune sands; beyond was
+infinite space calling to them to be big and unafraid.</p>
+
+<p>Talking, falling into silences touched with the mystery of sun and
+sea, they confessed youth's excited wonder about the world; Carl
+sitting cross-legged, rubbing his ankles, a springy figure in blue
+flannel and a daring tie; while Ruth, in deep-rose linen, her throat
+bright and bare, lay with her chin in her hands, a flush beneath the
+gentle brown of her cheeks, her white-clad ankles crossed under her
+skirt, slender against the gray sand, thoughtful of eye, lost in
+happiness.</p>
+
+<p>"Some day," Carl was musing, "your children and mine will say, 'You
+certainly lived in the most marvelous age in the world.' Think of it.
+They talk about the romance of the Crusades and the Romans and all
+that, but think of the miracles we've seen already, and we're only
+kids. Aviation and the automobile and wireless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[354]</a></span> and moving pictures
+and electric locomotives and electric cooking and the use of radium
+and the X-ray and the linotype and the submarine and the labor
+movement&mdash;the I. W. W. and syndicalism and all that&mdash;not that I know
+anything about the labor movement, but I suppose it's the most
+important of all. And Metchnikoff and Ehrlich. Oh yes, and a good
+share of the development of the electric light and telephone and the
+phonograph.... Golly! In just a few years!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Ruth added, "and Montessori's system of education&mdash;that's what
+I think is the most important.... See that sail-boat, Hawk! Like a
+lily. And the late-afternoon gold on those marshes. I think this salt
+breeze blows away all the bad Ruth.... Oh! Don't forget the attempts
+to cure cancer and consumption. So many big things starting right now,
+while we're sitting here."</p>
+
+<p>"Lord! what an age! Romance&mdash;why, there's more romance in a wireless
+spark&mdash;think of it, little lonely wallowing steamer, at night, out in
+the dark, slamming out a radio like forty thousand tigers
+spitting&mdash;and a man getting it here on Long Island. More romance than
+in all the galleons that ever sailed the purple tropics, which they
+mostly ain't purple, but dirty green. Anything 's possible now. World
+cools off&mdash;a'right, we'll move on to some other planet. It gets me
+going. Don't have to believe in fairies to give the imagination a job,
+to-day. Glad I've been an aviator; gives me some place in it all,
+anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad, too, Hawk, terribly glad."</p>
+
+<p>The sun was crimsoning; the wind grew chilly. The beach was scattered
+with camp-fires. Their own fire settled into compact live coals which,
+in the dusk of the dune-hollow, spread over the million bits of quartz
+a glow through which pirouetted the antic sand-fleas. Carl's cigarette
+had the fragrance that comes only from being impregnated with the
+smoke of an outdoor fire. The waves were lyric, and a group at the
+next fire crooned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[355]</a></span> "Old Black Joe." The two lovers curled in their
+nest. Hand moved toward hand.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth whispered: "It's sweet to be with all these people and their
+fires.... Will I really learn not to be supercilious?"</p>
+
+<p>"Honey! You&mdash;supercilious? Democracy&mdash;&mdash; Oh, the dickens! let's not
+talk about theories any more, but just about Us!"</p>
+
+<p>Her hand, tight-coiled as a snail-shell, was closed in his.</p>
+
+<p>"Your hand is asleep in my hand's arms," he whispered. The ball of his
+thumb pressed her thumb, and he whispered once more: "See. Now our
+hands are kissing each other&mdash;we&mdash;we must watch them better.... Your
+thumb is like a fairy." Again his thumb, hardened with file and wrench
+and steering-wheel, touched hers. It was startlingly like a kiss of
+real lips.</p>
+
+<p>Lightly she returned the finger-kiss, answering diffidently, "Our
+hands are mad&mdash;silly hands to think that Long Beach is a tropical
+jungle."</p>
+
+<p>"You aren't angry at them?"</p>
+
+<p>"N-no."</p>
+
+<p>He cradled her head on his shoulder, his hand gripping her arm till
+she cried, "You hurt me." He kissed her cheek. She drew back as far as
+she could. Her hand, against his chest, held him away for a minute.
+Her defense suddenly collapsed, and she was relaxed and throbbing in
+his arms. He slipped his fingers under her chin, and turned up her
+face till he could kiss her lips. He had not known the kiss of man and
+woman could be so long, so stirring. Yet at first he was disappointed.
+This was, after all, but a touch&mdash;just such a touch as finger against
+finger. But her lips grew more intense against his, returning and
+taking the kiss; both of them giving and receiving at once.</p>
+
+<p>Wondering at himself for it, Carl thought of other things. He was
+amazed that, while their lips were hot together, he worried as to what
+train Ruth ought to take,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[356]</a></span> after dinner. Yet, with such thoughts
+conferring, he was in an ecstasy beyond sorrow; praying that to her,
+as to him, there was no pain but instead a rapture in the sting of her
+lips, as her teeth cut a little into them.... A kiss&mdash;thing that the
+polite novels sketch as a second's unbodied bliss&mdash;how human it was,
+with teeth and lips to consider; common as eating&mdash;and divine as
+martyrdom. His lips were saying to her things too vast and extravagant
+for a plain young man to venture upon in words:</p>
+
+<p>"Lady, to you I chant my reverence and faith everlasting, in such
+unearthly music as the angels use when with lambent wings they salute
+the marching dawn." Such lyric tributes, and an emotion too subtle to
+fit into any words whatever, his lips were saying....</p>
+
+<p>Then she was drawing back, rending the kiss, crying, "You're almost
+smothering me!"</p>
+
+<p>With his arms easily about her, but with her weight against his
+shoulder, they and their love veiled from the basket-parties by the
+darkness, he said, quiveringly: "See, my arms are a little house for
+you, just as my hand was a little house for your hand, once. My arms
+are the walls, and your head and mine together are the roof."</p>
+
+<p>"I love the little house."</p>
+
+<p>"No. Say, 'I love <i>you</i>."'</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Say it."</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Please&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Hawk dear, I couldn't even if&mdash;just now, I do want to say it, but
+I want to be fair. I am terribly happy to be in the house of Hawk's
+arms. I'm not afraid in it, even out here on the dark dunes&mdash;which
+Aunt Emma wouldn't&mdash;somehow&mdash;approve! But I do want to be fair to you,
+and I'm afraid I'm not, when I let you love me this way. I don't want
+to hurt you. Ever. Perhaps it's egotistical of me, but I'm afraid you
+would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[357]</a></span> hurt if I let you kiss me and then afterward I decided I
+didn't love you at all."</p>
+
+<p>"But can't you, some day&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know, I don't <i>know</i>! I'm not sure I know what love is.
+I'm not sure it's love that makes me happy (as I really am) when you
+kiss me. Perhaps I'm just curious, and experimenting. I was quite
+conscious, when you kissed me then; quite conscious and curious; and
+once I caught myself wondering for half a second what train we'd take.
+I was ashamed of that, but I wasn't ashamed of taking mental notes and
+learning what these 'kisses,' that we mention so glibly, really are.
+Just experimenting, you see. And if you were <i>too</i> serious about our
+kiss, it wouldn't be at all fair to you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad you're frank, blessed, and I guess I understand pretty well
+how you feel, but, after all, I'm fairly simple about such things.
+Blessed, blessed, I don't really know a thing but 'I love you.'"</p>
+
+<p>His arms were savage again; he kissed her, kissed her lips, kissed the
+hollow of her throat. Then he lifted her from the ground and would not
+set her down till she had kissed him back.</p>
+
+<p>"You frightened me a lot, then," she said. "Did the child want to
+impress Ruth with his mighty strength? Well, she shall be impressed.
+Hawk, I do hope&mdash;I do hate myself for not knowing my mind. I will try
+not to experiment. I want you to be happy. I do want to be honest with
+you. If I'm honest, will you try not to be too impatient till I do
+know just what I want?... Oh, I'm sick of the modern lover! I talk and
+talk about love; it seems as though we'd lost the power to be simple,
+like the old ballads. Or weren't the ballad people really simple,
+either? You say you are; so I think you will have to run away with
+me.... But not till after dinner! Come."</p>
+
+<p>The moon was rising. Swinging hands, they tramped toward the
+board-walk. The crunch of their feet in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[358]</a></span> sand was the rhythmic
+spell of a magician, which she broke when she sighed:</p>
+
+<p>"Should I have let you kiss me, out here in the wilds? Will you
+respect me after it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Princess, you're all the respect there is in the world."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems so strange. We were absorbed in war and electricity and
+then&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Love is war and electricity, or else it's dull, and I don't think we
+two 'll ever get dull&mdash;if you do decide you can love me. We'll wander:
+cabin in the Rockies, with forty mountains for our garden fence, and
+an eagle for our suburban train."</p>
+
+<p>"And South Sea islands silhouetted at sunset!... Look! That moon!... I
+always imagine it so clearly when I hear Hawaiian singers on the
+Victrola&mdash;and a Hawaiian beach, with fireflies in the jungle behind
+and a phosphorescent sea in front and native girls dancing in
+garlands."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! And Paris boulevards and a mysterious castle in the Austrian
+mountains, with a hidden treasure in dark, secret dungeons, and heavy
+iron armor; and then, bing! a brand-new prairie town in Saskatchewan
+or Dakota, with brand-new sunlight on the fresh pine shacks, and
+beyond the town the plains with brand-new grass rolling."</p>
+
+<p>"But seriously, Hawk, would you want to go to all those places, if you
+were married? Would you, practically? You know, even rich
+globe-trotters go to the same sorts of places, mostly. And we wouldn't
+even be rich, would we?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, just comfortable; maybe five thousand a year."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, would you really want to keep on going, and take your wife? Or
+would you settle down like the rest, and spend money so you could keep
+in shape to make money to spend to keep in shape?"</p>
+
+<p>"Seriously I would keep going&mdash;if I had the right girl to go with me.
+It would be mighty important which one, though, I guess&mdash;and by that I
+mean you. Once,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[359]</a></span> when I quit flying, I thought that maybe I'd stop
+wandering and settle down, maybe even marry a Joralemon kind of a
+girl. But I was meant to hike for the hiking's sake.... Only, not
+alone any more. I <i>need</i> you.... We'd go and go. No limit.... And we
+wouldn't just go places, either; we'd be different things. We'd be
+Connecticut farmers one year, and run a mine in Mexico the next, and
+loaf in Paris the next, if we had the money."</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes you almost tempt me to like you."</p>
+
+<p>"Like me now!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not now, but&mdash;&mdash; Here's the board-walk."</p>
+
+<p>"Where's those steps? Oh yes. Gee! I hate to leave the water without
+having had a swim. Wish we'd had one. Dare you to go wading!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, ought I to, do you think? Wading would be silly. And nice."</p>
+
+<p>"Course you oughtn't. Come on. Don't you remember how the sand feels
+between your toes?"</p>
+
+<p>The moon brooded upon the lulled waves, and quested among the ridges
+of driftwood for pearly shells. The pools left by the waves were
+enticing. Ruth retreated into the shelter of the board-walk and came
+shyly out, clutching her skirts, her feet and ankles silver in the
+light.</p>
+
+<p>"The sand does feel good, but uh! it's getting colder and colder!" she
+wailed, as she cautiously advanced into the water. "I'll think up
+punishments for you. You've not only caused me to be cold, but you've
+made me abominably self-conscious."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be self-conscious, blessed. We are just children exploring." He
+splashed out, coat off, trousers rolled to the knee above his thin,
+muscular legs, galloping along the edge of the water like a large
+puppy, while she danced after him.</p>
+
+<p>They were stilled to the persuasive beauty of the night. Music from
+the topaz jeweled hotels far down the beach wove itself into the peace
+on land and sea. A fish lying on shore was turned by the moon into
+ivory with carven scales.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[360]</a></span> Before them, reaching to the ancient towers
+of England and France and the islands of the sea, was the whispering
+water. A tenderness that understood everything, made allowance for
+everything in her and in himself, folded its wings round him as he
+scanned her that stood like a slender statue of silver&mdash;dark hair
+moon-brightened, white arms holding her skirts, white legs round which
+the spent waves sparkled with unworldly fire. He waded over to her and
+timidly kissed the edge of her hair.</p>
+
+<p>She rubbed her cheek against his. "Now we must run," she said. She
+quickly turned back to the shadow of the board-walk, to draw on her
+stockings and shoes, kneeling on the sand like the simple maid of the
+ballads which she had been envying.</p>
+
+<p>They tramped along the board-walk, with heels clicking like castanets,
+conscious that the world was hushed in night's old enchantment.</p>
+
+<p>As they had answered to companionship with the humble picnic-parties
+among the dunes, so now they found it amusing to dine among the
+semi-great and the semi-motorists at the Nassau. Ruth had a distinct
+pleasure when T. Wentler, horse-fancier, aviation enthusiast,
+president of the First State Bank of Sacramento, came up, reminded
+Carl of their acquaintanceship at the Oakland-Berkeley Aero Meet, and
+begged Ruth and Carl to join him, his wife, and Senator Leeford, for
+coffee.</p>
+
+<p>As they waited for their train, quiet after laughter, Ruth remarked:
+"It was jolly to play with the Personages. You haven't seen much of
+the frivolous side of me. It's pretty important. You don't know how
+much soul satisfaction I get out of dancing all night and playing
+tennis with flanneled oafs and eating <i>marrons glac&eacute;s</i> and chatting in
+a box at the opera till I spoil the entire evening for all the German
+music-lovers, and talking to all the nice doggies from the Tennis and
+Racquet Club whenever I get invited to Piping Rock or Meadow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[361]</a></span> Brook or
+any other country club that has ancestors. I want you to take
+warning."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you really miss Piping Rock much to-day?".</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;but I might to-morrow, and I might get horribly bored in our
+cabin in the Rockies and hate the stony old peaks, and long for tea
+and scandal in a corner at the Ritz."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we'd hike on to San Francisco; have tea at the St. Francis or
+the Fairmont or the Palace; then beat it for your Hawaii and fireflies
+in the bush."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, but suppose, just suppose we were married, and suppose the
+Touricar didn't go so awfully well, and we had to be poor, and
+couldn't go running away, but had to stick in one beastly city flat
+and economize! It's all very well to talk of working things out
+together, but think of not being able to have decent clothes, and
+going to the movies every night&mdash;ugh! When I see some of the girls who
+used to be so pretty and gay, and they went and married poor men&mdash;now
+they are so worn and tired and bedraggled and perambulatorious, and
+they worry about Biddies and furnaces and cabbages, and their hair is
+just scratched together, with the dubbest hats&mdash;I'd rather be an idle
+rich."</p>
+
+<p>"If we got stuck like that, I'd sell out and we'd hike to the mountain
+cabin, anyway, say go up in the Santa Lucias, and keep wild bees."</p>
+
+<p>"And probably get stung&mdash;in the many subtle senses of that word. And
+I'd have to cook and wash. That would be fun <i>as</i> fun, but to have to
+do it&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ruth, honey, let's not worry about it now, anyhow. I don't believe
+there's much danger. And don't let's spoil this bully day."</p>
+
+<p>"It has been sweet. I won't croak any more."</p>
+
+<p>"There's the train coming."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[362]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXXVIII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_w.jpg" alt="W" width="69" height="50" /></div>
+<p>hile the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and
+stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as
+unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in
+the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening
+called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to
+go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires. Carl tried to bring her
+coolness. He ate only poached eggs on toast or soup and salad for
+dinner, that he might not be torpid. He gave her moss-roses with drops
+of water like dew on the stems. They sat out on the box-stoop&mdash;the
+unfriendly New York street adopting for a time the frank
+neighborliness of a village&mdash;and exclaimed over every breeze. They
+talked about the charm of forty degrees below zero. That is,
+sometimes. Their favorite topic was themselves.</p>
+
+<p>She still insisted that she was not in love with him; hooted at the
+idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to
+some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were
+engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the
+windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to
+sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till
+his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into
+his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into
+warm slumber in the familiarity of his arms. Yet he dared not kiss her
+throat, as he had done at Long Beach.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[363]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As lovers do, Carl had thought intently of her warning that she did
+care for clothes, dancing, country clubs. Ruth would have been
+caressingly surprised had she known the thought and worried
+conscientiousness he gave to the problem of planning "parties" for
+her. Ideas were always popping up in the midst of his work, and never
+giving him rest till he had noted them down on memo.-papers. He
+carried about, on the backs of envelopes, such notes as these:</p>
+
+<p class="p1">
+Join country clb take R dances there?<br />
+Basket of fruit for R<br />
+Invite Mason W lunch<br />
+Orgnze Tcar tour NY to SF<br />
+Newspaper men on tour probly Forbes<br />
+Rem Walter's new altitude 16,954<br />
+R to Astor Roof<br />
+Rem country c<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>He did get a card to the Peace Waters Country Club and take Ruth to a
+dance there. She seemed to know every other member, and danced
+eloquently. He took her to the Josiah Bagbys' for dinner; to the
+first-night of a summer musical comedy. But he was still the stranger
+in New York, and "parties" are not to be had by tipping waiters and
+buying tickets. Half of the half-dozen affairs which they attended
+were of her inspiration; he was invited to go yachting at Larchmont,
+motoring, swimming on Long Island, with friends of herself and her
+brothers.</p>
+
+<p>One evening that strikes into Carl's memories of those days of the
+<i>pays du tendre</i> is the evening on which Phil Dunleavy insisted on
+celebrating a Yale baseball victory by taking them to dinner in the
+oak-room of the Ritz-Carlton, under whose alabaster lights, among the
+cosmopolites, they dined elaborately and smoked slim, imported
+cigarettes. The thin music of violins took them into the lonely gray
+groves of the Land of Wandering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[364]</a></span> Tunes, till Phil began to talk,
+disclosing to them a devotion to beauty, a satirical sense of humor,
+and a final acceptance of Carl as his friend.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred other "parties" Carl planned, while dining alone at inferior
+restaurants. A hundred times he took a ten-cent dessert instead of an
+exciting fifteen-cent strawberry shortcake, to save money for those
+parties. (Out of such sordid thoughts of nickel coins is built a love
+enduring, and even tolerable before breakfast coffee.)</p>
+
+<p>Yet always to him their real life was in simple jaunts out of doors,
+arranged without considering other people. Her father seemed glad of
+that. He once said to Carl (giving him a cigar), "You children had
+better not let Aunt Emma know that you are enjoying yourselves as you
+want to! How is the automobile business going?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It would be pleasant to relate that Carl was inspired by love to put
+so much of that celebrated American quality "punch" into his work that
+the Touricar was sweeping the market. Or to picture with quietly
+falling tears the pathos of his business failure at the time when he
+most needed money. As a matter of fact, the Touricar affairs were
+going as, in real life, most businesses go&mdash;just fairly well. A few
+cars were sold; there were prospects of other sales; the VanZile
+Corporation neither planned to drop the Touricar, nor elected our
+young hero vice-president of the corporation.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In June Gertrude Cowles and her mother left for Joralemon. Carl had,
+since Christmas, seen them about once a month. Gertie had at first
+represented an unhappy old friend to whom he had to be kind. Then, as
+she seemed never to be able to give up the desire to see him tied
+down, whether by her affection or by his work, Carl came to regard her
+as an irritating foe to the freedom which he prized the more because
+of the increasing bondage of the office. The last stage was pure
+indifference<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[365]</a></span> to her. Gertie was either a chance for simple sweetness
+which he failed to take, or she was a peril which he had escaped,
+according to one's view of her; but in any case he had missed&mdash;or
+escaped&mdash;her as a romantic hero escapes fire, flood, and plot. She
+meant nothing to him, never could again. Life had flowed past her as,
+except in novels with plots, most lives do flow past temporary and
+fortuitous points of interest.... Gertie was farther from him now than
+those dancing Hawaiian girls whom Ruth and he hoped some day to see.
+Yet by her reaching out for his liberty Gertie had first made him
+prize Ruth.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The 1st of July, 1913, Ruth left for the Patton Kerrs' country house
+in the Berkshires, near Pittsfield. Carl wrote to her every day. He
+told her, apropos of Touricars and roof-gardens and aviation records
+and Sunday motor-cycling with Bobby Winslow, that he loved her; he
+even made, at the end of his letters, the old-fashioned lines of
+crosses to represent kisses. Whenever he hinted how much he missed
+her, how much he wanted to feel her startle in his arms, he wondered
+what she would read out of it; wondered if she would put the letter
+under her pillow.</p>
+
+<p>She answered every other day with friendly letters droll in their
+descriptions of the people she met. His call of love she did not
+answer&mdash;directly. But she admitted that she missed their playtimes;
+and once she wrote to him, late on a cold Berkshire night, with a
+black rain and wind like a baying bloodhound:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is so still in my room &amp; so wild outside that I am
+frightened. I have tried to make myself smart in a blue silk
+dressing gown &amp; a tosh lace breakfast cap, &amp; I will write
+neatly with a quill pen from the Mayfair, but just the same
+I am a lonely baby &amp; I want you here to comfort me. Would
+you be too shocked to come? I would put a Navajo blanket on
+my bed &amp; a papier mach&eacute; Turkish dagger &amp; head of Othello
+over my bed &amp; pretend it was a cozy corner, that is of
+course if they still have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[366]</a></span> papier mach&eacute; ornaments, I suppose
+they still live in Harlem &amp; Brooklyn. We would sit <i>very</i>
+quietly in two wicker chairs on either side of my fireplace
+&amp; listen to the swollen brook in the ravine just below my
+window. But with no Hawk here the wind keeps wailing that
+Pan is dead &amp; that there won't ever again be any sunshine on
+the valley. Dear, it really <i>isn't</i> safe to be writing like
+this, after reading it you will suppose that it's just you
+that I am lonely for, but of course I'd be glad for Phil or
+Puggy Crewden or your nice solemn Walter MacMonnies or <i>any</i>
+suitor who would make foolish noises &amp; hide me from the
+wind's hunting. Now I will seal this up &amp; <i>NOT</i> send it in
+the morning.</p></div>
+
+<p class="f2">Your playmate Ruth</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Here is one small kiss on the forehead but remember it is
+just because of the wind &amp; rain.</p></div>
+
+<p>Presumably she did mail the letter. At least, he received it.</p>
+
+<p>He carried her letters in the side-pocket of his coat till the
+envelopes were worn at the edges and nearly covered with smudged
+pencil-notes about things he wanted to keep in mind and would, of
+course, have kept in mind without making notes. He kept finding new
+meanings in her letters. He wanted them to indicate that she loved
+him; and any ambiguous phrase signified successively that she loved,
+laughed at, loathed, and loved him. Once he got up from bed to take
+another look at a letter and see whether she had said, "I hope you had
+a dear good time at the Explorers' Club dinner," or "I hope you had a
+good time, dear."</p>
+
+<p>Carl was entirely sincere in his worried investigation of her state of
+mind. He knew that both Ruth and he had the instability as well as the
+initiative of the vagabond. As quickly as they had claimed each other,
+so quickly could either of them break love's alliance, if bored. Carl
+himself, being anything but bored, was as faithfully devoted as the
+least enterprising of moral young men, He forgot Gertie, did not write
+to Istra Nash the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[367]</a></span> artist, and when the VanZile office got a new
+telephone-girl, a tall, languorous brunette with shadowy eyes and fine
+cheeks, he did not even smile at her.</p>
+
+<p>But&mdash;was Ruth so bound? She still refused to admit even that she could
+fall in love. He knew that Ruth and he were not romantic characters,
+but every-day people with a tendency to quarrel and demand and be
+slack. He knew that even if the rose dream came true, there would be
+drab spots in it. And now that she was away, with Lenox and polo to
+absorb her, could the gauche, ignorant Carl Ericson, that he privately
+knew himself to be, retain her interest?</p>
+
+<p>Late in July he received an invitation to spend a week-end, Friday to
+Tuesday, with Ruth at the Patton Kerrs'.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[368]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXXIX</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>he brief trip to the Berkshires was longer than any he had taken
+these nine months. He looked forward animatedly to the journey,
+remembering details of travel&mdash;such trivial touches as the oval brass
+wash-bowls of a Pullman sleeper, and how, when the water is running
+out, the inside of the bowl is covered with a whitish film of water,
+which swiftly peels off. He recalled the cracked white paint of a
+steamer's ventilator; the abruptly stopping zhhhhh of a fog-horn; the
+vast smoky roof of a Philadelphia train-shed, clamorous with the
+train-bells of a strange town, giving a sense of mystery to the
+traveler stepping from the car for a moment to stretch his legs; an
+ugly junction station platform, with resin oozing from the heavy
+planks in the spring sun; the polished binnacle of the S.S. <i>Panama</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He expected keen joy in new fields and hills. Yet all the way north he
+was trying to hold the train back. In a few minutes, now, he would see
+Ruth. And at this hour he did not even know definitely that he liked
+her.</p>
+
+<p>He could not visualize her. He could see the sleeve of her blue
+corduroy jacket; her eyes he could not see. She was a stranger. Had he
+idealized her? He was apologetic for his unflattering doubt, but of
+what sort <i>was</i> she?</p>
+
+<p>The train was stopping at her station with rattling windows and a
+despairing grind of the wheels. Carl seized his overnight bag and
+suit-case with fictitious enthusiasm.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[369]</a></span> He was in a panic. Emerging
+from the safe, impersonal train upon the platform, he saw her.</p>
+
+<p>She was waving to him from a one-seated phaeton, come alone to meet
+him&mdash;and she was the adorable, the perfect comrade. He thought
+jubilantly as he strode along the platform: "She's wonderful. Love
+her? Should say I do!"</p>
+
+<p>While they drove under the elms, past white cottages and the village
+green, while they were talking so lightly and properly that none of
+the New England gossips could be wounded in the sense of propriety,
+Carl was learning her anew. She was an outdoor girl now, in
+low-collared blouse and white linen skirt. He rejoiced in her
+modulating laugh; the contrast of blue eyes and dark brows under her
+Panama hat; her full dark hair, with a lock sun-drenched; her bare
+throat, boyishly brown, femininely smooth; the sweet, clean,
+fine-textured girl flesh of the hollow of one shoulder faintly to be
+seen in the shadow of her broad, drooping collar; one hand, with a
+curious ring of rose quartz and steel points, excitedly pounding a
+tattoo of greeting with the whip-handle; her spirited irreverences
+regarding the people they passed; chatter which showed the world
+transformed as through ruby glass&mdash;a Ruth radiant, understanding, his
+comrade. She was all that he had believed during her absence and
+doubted while he was coming to her. But he had no time to repent of
+his doubt, now, so busily was he exulting to himself, slipping a hand
+under her arm: "Love her? I&mdash;should&mdash;say&mdash;I&mdash;do!"</p>
+
+<p>The carriage rolled out of town with the rhythmic creak of a country
+buggy, climbed a hill range by means of the black, oily state road,
+and turned upon a sandy side-road. A brook ran beside them. Sunny
+fields alternated with woods leaf-floored, quiet, holy&mdash;miraculous
+after the weary city. Below was a vista of downward-sloping fields,
+divided by creeper-covered stone walls; then a sun-meshed valley set
+with ponds like shining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[370]</a></span> glass dishes on a green table-cloth; beyond
+all, a long reach of hillsides covered with unbroken fleecy forest,
+like green down....</p>
+
+<p>"So much unspoiled country, and yet there's people herded in subways!"
+complained Carl.</p>
+
+<p>They drove along a level road, lined with wild raspberry-bushes and
+full of a thin jade light from the shading maples. They gossiped of
+the Patton Kerrs and the Berkshires; of the difference between the
+professional English week-ender and the American, who still has
+something of the na&iuml;ve provincial delight of "going visiting"; of New
+York and the Dunleavys. But their talk lulled to a nervous hush. It
+seemed to him that a great voice cried from the clouds: "It is beside
+<i>Ruth</i> that you are sitting; Ruth whose arm you feel!" In silence he
+caught her left hand.</p>
+
+<p>As he slowly drew back her hand and the reins with it, to stop the
+ambling horse, the two children stared straight at each other, hungry,
+tremulously afraid. Their kiss&mdash;not only their lips, but their spirits
+met without one reserve. A straining long kiss, as though they were
+forcing their lips into one body of living flame. A kiss in which his
+eyes were blind to the enchantment of the jade light about them, his
+ears deaf to brook and rustling forest. All his senses were
+concentrated on the close warmth of her misty lips, the curve of her
+young shoulder, her woman sweetness and longing. Then his senses
+forgot even her lips, and floated off into a blurred trance of
+bodiless happiness&mdash;the kiss of Nirvana. No foreign thought of trains
+or people or the future came now to drag him to earth. It was the most
+devoted, most sacred moment he had known.</p>
+
+<p>As he became again conscious of lips and cheek and brave shoulders and
+of her wide-spread fingers gripping his upper arm, she was slowly
+breaking the spell of the kiss. But again and again she kissed him,
+hastily, savage tokens of rejoicing possession.</p>
+
+<p>She cried: "I do know now! I do love you!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[371]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Blessed&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In silence they stared into the woods while her fingers smoothed his
+knuckles. Her eyes were faint with tears, in the magic jade light.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know a kiss could be like that," she marveled, presently. "I
+wouldn't have believed selfish Ruth could give all of herself."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! It was the whole universe."</p>
+
+<p>"Hawk dear, I wasn't experimenting, that time. I'm glad, glad! To know
+I can really love; not just curiosity!... I've wanted you so all day.
+I thought four o'clock wouldn't ever come&mdash;and oh, darling, my dear,
+dear Hawk, I didn't even know for sure I'd like you when you came!
+Sometimes I wanted terribly to have your silly, foolish, childish,
+pale hair on my breast&mdash;such hair! lady's hair!&mdash;but sometimes I
+didn't want to see you at all, and I was frightened at the thought of
+your coming, and I fussed around the house till Mrs. Pat laughed at me
+and accused me of being in love, and I denied it&mdash;and she was right!"</p>
+
+<p>"Blessed, I was scared to death, all the way up here. I didn't think
+you could be as wonderful as I knew you were! That sounds mixed
+but&mdash;&mdash; Oh, blessed, blessed, you really love me? You really love me?
+It's hard to believe I've actually heard you say it! And I love you so
+completely. Everything."</p>
+
+<p>"I love you!... That is such an adorable spot to kiss, just below your
+ear," she said. "Darling, keep me safe in the little house of arms,
+where there's only room for you and me&mdash;no room for offices or Aunt
+Emmas!... But not now. We must hurry on.... If a wagon had been coming
+along the road&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>As they entered the rhododendron-lined drive of the Patton Kerr place,
+Carl remembered a detail, not important, but usual. "Oh yes," he said,
+"I've forgotten to propose."</p>
+
+<p>"Need you? Proposals sound like contracts and all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[372]</a></span> those other dull
+forms; not like&mdash;that kiss.... See! There's Pat Kerr, Jr., waving to
+us. You can just make him out, there on the upper balcony. He is the
+darlingest child, with ash-blond hair cut Dutch style. I wonder if you
+didn't look like him when you were a boy, with your light hair?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a chance. I was a grubby kid. Made noises.... Gee! what a bully
+place. And the house!... Will you marry me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I will!... It <i>is</i> a dear place. Mrs. Pat is&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"When?"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;always fussing over it; she plants narcissuses and crocuses in
+the woods, so you find them growing wild."</p>
+
+<p>"I like those awnings. Against the white walls.... May I consider that
+we are engaged then, Miss Winslow&mdash;engaged for the next marriage?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, no, not engaged, dear. Don't you know it's one of my
+principles&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But look&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;&mdash;not to be engaged, Hawk? Everybody brings the cunnin' old jokes
+out of the moth-balls when you're engaged. I'll marry you, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Marry me next month&mdash;August?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nope."</p>
+
+<p>"September?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nope."</p>
+
+<p>"Please, Ruthie. Aw yes, September. Nice month, September is. Autumn.
+Harvest moon. And apples to swipe. Come on. September."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, perhaps September. We'll see. Oh, Hawk dear, can you conceive
+of us actually sitting here and solemnly discussing being <i>married</i>?
+Us, the babes in the wood? And I've only known you three days or so,
+seems to me.... Well, as I was saying, <i>perhaps</i> I'll marry you in
+September (um! frightens me to think of it; frightens me and awes me
+and amuses me to death, all at once). That is, I shall marry you
+unless you take to wearing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[373]</a></span> pearl-gray derbies or white evening ties
+with black edging, or kill Mason in a duel, or do something equally
+disgraceful. But engaged I will not be. And we'll put the money for a
+diamond ring into a big davenport.... Are we going to be dreadfully
+poor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not pawn-shop poor. I made VanZile boost my salary, last week,
+and with my Touricar stock I'm getting a little over four thousand
+dollars a year."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that lots or little?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it 'll give us a decent apartment and a nearly decent maid, I
+guess. And if the Touricar keeps going, we can beat it off for a year,
+wandering, after maybe three four years."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope so. Here we are! That's Mrs. Pat waiting for us."</p>
+
+<p>The Patton Kerr house, set near the top of the highest hill in that
+range of the Berkshires, stood out white against a slope of crisp
+green; an old manor house of long lines and solid beams, with striped
+awnings of red and white, and in front a brick terrace, with
+basket-chairs, a swinging couch, and a wicker tea-table already
+welcomingly spread with a service of Royal Doulton. From the terrace
+one saw miles of valley and hills, and villages strung on a rambling
+river. The valley was a golden bowl filled with the peace of
+afternoon; a world of sun and listening woods.</p>
+
+<p>On the terrace waited a woman of thirty-five, of clever face a bit
+worn at the edges, carefully coiffed hair, and careless white blouse
+with a tweed walking-skirt. She was gracefully holding out her hand,
+greeting Carl, "It's terribly good of you to come clear out into our
+wilderness." She was interrupted by the bouncing appearance of a
+stocky, handsome, red-faced, full-chinned, curly-black-haired man of
+forty, in riding-breeches and boots and a silk shirt; with him an
+excited small boy in rompers&mdash;Patton Kerr, Sr. and Jr.</p>
+
+<p>"Here you are!" Senior observantly remarked. "Glad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[374]</a></span> to see you,
+Ericson. You and Ruthie been a deuce of a time coming up from town.
+Holding hands along the road, eh? Lord! these aviators!"</p>
+
+<p>"Pat!"</p>
+
+<p>"Animal!"</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;&mdash;protested Mrs. Kerr and Ruth, simultaneously.</p>
+
+<p>"All right. I'll be good. Saw you fly at Nassau Boulevard, Ericson.
+Turned my horn loose and hooted till they thought I was a militant,
+like Ruthie here. Lord! what flying, what flying! I'd like to see you
+race Weymann and Vedrines.... Ruthie, will you show Mr. Ericson where
+his room is, or has poor old Pat got to go and drag a servant away
+from reading <i>Town Topics</i>, heh?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will, Pat," said Ruth.</p>
+
+<p>"I will, daddy," cried Pat, Jr.</p>
+
+<p>"No, my son, I guess maybe Ruthie had better do it. There's a certain
+look in her eyes&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Basilisk!"</p>
+
+<p>"Salamander!"</p>
+
+<p>Ruth and Carl passed through the wide colonial hall, with mahogany
+tables and portraits of the Kerrs and the sword of Colonel Patton. At
+the far end was an open door, and a glimpse of an old-fashioned garden
+radiant with hollyhocks and Canterbury bells. It was a world of utter
+content. As they climbed the curving stairs Ruth tucked her arm in
+his, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"Now do you see why I won't be engaged? Pat Kerr is the best chum in
+the world, yet he finds even a possible engagement wildly
+humorous&mdash;like mothers-in-law or poets or falling on your ear."</p>
+
+<p>"But gee! Ruth, you <i>are</i> going to marry me?"</p>
+
+<p>"You little child! My little boy Hawk! Of course I'm going to marry
+you. Do you think I would miss my chance of a cabin in the Rockies?...
+My famous Hawk what everybody cheered at Nassau Boulevard!" She opened
+the door of his room with a deferential, "Thy chamber, milord!... Come
+down quickly," she said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[375]</a></span> "We mustn't miss a moment of these days....
+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.</p>
+
+<p>After half home-comings and false home-comings the adventurer had
+really come home.</p>
+
+<p>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 spaces. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Saturday, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[376]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly would like a swim," he remarked. "Couldn't we bike down to
+Fisher's Pond, or maybe take the Ford?"</p>
+
+<p>"Let's. But there's no bath-house."</p>
+
+<p>"Put a bathing-suit under your dress. Sun 'll dry it in no time, after
+the swim."</p>
+
+<p>"As you command, my liege." And she ran in to change.</p>
+
+<p>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 shore. Cool, flashing, golden-sanded,
+the lake coaxed them out of their forest room.</p>
+
+<p>"A lot like the Minnesota lakes, only smaller," said Carl. "I'm going
+right in. About ready for a swim? Come on."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm af-fraid!" She suddenly plumped on the earth and hugged her
+skirts about her ankles.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, blessed, what you scared of? No sharks here, and no undertow.
+Nice white sand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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 cumbersome. So I put on a boy's
+bathing-suit under my dress&mdash;and&mdash;I'm terribly embarrassed."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[377]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why, blessed&mdash;&mdash;Well, I guess you'll have to decide." His voice was
+somewhat shaky. "Awful scared of Carl?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! I thought I wouldn't be, with you, but I'm self-conscious as can
+be."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, gee! I don't know. Of course&mdash;&mdash;Well, I'll jump in, and you can
+decide."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't look!"</p>
+
+<p>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
+sturdily 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.</p>
+
+<p>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-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[378]</a></span>colored pride an oriole went by. Fresh sky, sunfish like tropic
+shells 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[379]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XL" id="CHAPTER_XL"></a>CHAPTER XL</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_a.jpg" alt="A" width="44" height="50" /></div>
+<p>fter six festival months of married life&mdash;in April or May, 1914&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;but
+to be blandly willing to leave all theories of polygamy and polyandry,
+monogamy and varietism, to the clever Russian Jews.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>These things she delightfully had, in May, 1914.</p>
+
+<p>They were largely due to her own initiative. Carl's drifting theories
+of social structure concerned for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[380]</a></span> most part the wages of workmen
+and the ridiculousness of class 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&mdash;not to speak of a
+variety of taste as regards opening windows and sleeping diagonally
+across a bed&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 talcum 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&mdash;and truly
+spiritual&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was a room to live in and laugh in. The wood-work was
+white-enameled; the walls covered with gray Japanese paper. There were
+no porti&egrave;res between living-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[381]</a></span>room and dining-room and small hall, so
+that the three rooms, with their light-reflecting walls, gave an
+effect of spaciousness to rather a cramped and old-fashioned
+apartment. There were not many pictures and no bric-&agrave;-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&mdash;etchings and color prints, largely by
+unknown artists, like windows looking on delightful country. The
+chairs assembled 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 basement; 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
+assured 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[382]</a></span> by late-Victorian bric-&agrave;-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.</p>
+
+<p>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 muffin-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
+Maupassant translated by a worthy lady with a French lexicon. Instead,
+they bought what they wanted&mdash;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 Japanese gray, a simple room with that
+simplicity of hand-embroidery, real lace, and fine linen appreciated
+by exclamatory women friends.</p>
+
+<p>She taught Carl to say "dahg" instead of "dawg" for "dog"; "wawta"
+instead of "wotter" for "water." Whether she was more correct in her
+pronunciation 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-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[383]</a></span>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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? <i>My</i> country, <i>my</i> religion, <i>my</i> wife, <i>my</i> business&mdash;we think that
+whatever is ours is necessarily sacred, or, in other words, that we are
+gods&mdash;and then we call it faith and patriotism! The Hindu or the Christian
+is equally ready to prove to you&mdash;and mind you, he may be a wise old man
+with a beard&mdash;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-shell Baptist, why, good luck. If you don't think for yourself,
+then you're admitting that your theory of happiness is the old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[384]</a></span> dog asleep
+in the sun. And maybe he is happier than the student. But I think you like
+to experiment with life."</p>
+
+<p>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 God as
+to discuss sex, 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.</p>
+
+<p>The process gave her many anxious hours of alternating impatience with
+fixed religious dogmas, and loneliness for the comfortable refuge of a
+personal God, 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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
+assortment of personages and awkward rovers whom the ex-aviator knew. The
+Ericsons made an institution of "bruncheon"&mdash;breakfast-luncheon&mdash;at which
+coffee and eggs and deviled kidneys, a table of auction bridge and a
+davenport of talk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[385]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Carl and Ruth joined the Peace Waters Country Club, and in the spring
+of 1914 went there nearly every Saturday 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.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed content to stick to office, home, and tennis-court. It was
+Ruth who planned their week-end trips, proposed at 8 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span> Saturday,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+She may have had more curiosity than principle, but she did badger
+policemen pluckily. She was studying Italian, the Montessori method,
+cooking. She taught new dishes to her maid. She adopted a careless
+suggestion of Carl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[386]</a></span> and voluntarily increased the maid's salary,
+thereby shaking the rock-ribbed foundations of Upper West Side
+society.</p>
+
+<p>In nothing did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither
+"the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which
+recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends
+expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her
+honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly
+and tinily telling her difficulties with household work.</p>
+
+<p>When a purring, baby-talking acquaintance gurgled: "How did the Ruthie
+bride spend her morning? Did she cook some little dainty for her
+husband? Nothing bourgeois, I'm <i>sure</i>!" in reply Ruth pleasantly
+observed: "Not a chance. The Ruthie bride cussed out the janitor for
+not shooting up a dainty cabbage on the dumb-waiter, and then counted
+up her husband's cigarette coupons and skipped right down to the
+premium parlors with 'em and got him a pair of pale-blue Boston
+garters and a cunning granite-ware stew-pan, and then sponged lunch
+off Olive Dunleavy. But nothing bourgeois!"</p>
+
+<p>Such experiences, told to Carl, he found diverting. He seemed, in the
+spring of 1914, to want no others.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[387]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLI" id="CHAPTER_XLI"></a>CHAPTER XLI</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_t.jpg" alt="T" width="39" height="50" /></div>
+<p>he apparently satisfactory development of the Touricar in the late
+spring of 1914 was the result of an uneconomical expenditure of energy
+on the part of Carl. Personally he followed by letter the trail of
+every amateur aviator, every motoring big-game hunter. He never let up
+for an afternoon. VanZile had lost interest in the whole matter.
+Whenever Carl thought of how much the development of the Touricar
+business depended upon himself, he was uneasy about the future, and
+bent more closely over his desk. On his way home, swaying on a subway
+strap, his pleasant sensation of returning to Ruth was interrupted by
+worry in regard to things he might have done at the office. Nights he
+dreamed of lists of "prospects."</p>
+
+<p>Late in May he was disturbed for several days by headaches, lassitude,
+nausea. He lied to Ruth: "Guess I've eaten something at lunch that was
+a little off. You know what these restaurants are." He admitted,
+however, that he felt like a Symptom. He stuck to the office, though
+his chief emotion about life and business was that he wished to go off
+somewhere and lie down and die gently.</p>
+
+<p>Directly after a Sunday bruncheon, at which he was silent and looked
+washed out, he went to bed with typhoid fever.</p>
+
+<p>For six weeks he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the
+boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun.
+That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the
+specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the
+intensity of her care, even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[388]</a></span> to want credit for virtue, taking one
+splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed,
+she mourned and mourned for her lost boy, while she hid her fear and
+kept her blouses fresh and her hair well-coiffed, and mothered the
+stern man who lay so dreadfully still in the bed.... He was not shaved
+every day; he had a pale beard under his hollow cheeks.... Even when
+he was out of delirium, even when he was comparatively strong, he
+never said anything gaily foolish for the sake of being young and
+noisy with her.</p>
+
+<p>During convalescence Carl was so wearily gentle that she hoped the
+little boy she loved was coming back to dwell in him. But the Hawk's
+wings seemed broken. For the first time Carl was afraid of life. He
+sat and worried, going over the possibilities of the Touricar, and the
+positions he might get if the Touricar failed. He was willing to loaf
+by the window all day, his eyes on a narrow, blood-red stripe in the
+Navajo blanket on his knees, along which he incessantly ran a
+finger-nail, back and forth, back and forth, for whole quarter-hours,
+while she read aloud from Kipling and London and Conrad, hoping to
+rekindle the spirit of daring.</p>
+
+<p>One sweet drop was in their cup of iron. As woodland playmates they
+could never have known such intimacy as hovered about them when she
+rested her head lightly against his knees and they watched the Hudson,
+the storms and flurries of light on its waves, the windy clouds and
+the processional of barges, the beetle-like ferries and the great
+steamers for Albany. They talked in half sentences, understanding the
+rest: "Tough in winter&mdash;&mdash;" "Might be good trip&mdash;&mdash;" Carl's hand was
+always demanding her thick hair, but he stroked it gently. The coarse,
+wholesome vigor was drained from him; part even of his slang went with
+it; his "Gee!" was not explosive.</p>
+
+<p>He took to watching her like a solemn baby, when she moved about the
+room; thus she found the little boy Carl again; laughed full-throated
+and secretly cried over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[389]</a></span> him, as his sternness passed into a wistful
+obedience. He was not quite the same impudent boy whose naughtiness
+she had loved. But the good child who came in his place did trust her
+so, depend upon her so....</p>
+
+<p>When Carl was strong enough they went for three weeks to Point
+Pleasant, on the Jersey coast, where the pines and breakers from the
+open sea healed his weakness and his multitudinous worries. They even
+swam, once, and Carl played at learning two new dances, strangely
+called the "fox trot" and the "lu lu fado." Their hotel was a vast
+barn, all porches, white flannels, and handsome young Jews chattering
+tremendously with young Jewesses; but its ball-room floor was smooth,
+and Ruth had lacked music and excitement for so long that she danced
+every night, and conducted an amiable flirtation with a mysterious
+young man of Harvard accent, Jewish features, fine brown eyes, and
+tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses, while Carl looked on, a contented
+wall-flower.</p>
+
+<p>They came back to town with ocean breeze and pine scent in their
+throats and sea-sparkle in their eyes&mdash;and Carl promptly tied himself
+to the office desk as though sickness and recovery had never given him
+a vision of play.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth had not taken the Point Pleasant dances seriously, but as day on
+day she stifled in a half-darkened flat that summer, she sometimes
+sobbed at the thought of the moon-path on the sea, the reflection of
+lights on the ball-room floor, the wavelike swish of music-mad feet.</p>
+
+<p>The flat was hot, dead. The summer heat was unrelenting as bedclothes
+drawn over the head and lashed down. Flies in sneering circles mocked
+the listless hand she flipped at them. Too hot to wear many clothes,
+yet hating the disorder of a flimsy neglig&eacute;e, she panted by a window,
+while the venomous sun glared on tin roofs, and a few feet away
+snarled the ceaseless trrrrrr of a steam-riveter that was erecting new
+flats to shut off their view of the Hudson. In the lava-paved back
+yard was the insistent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[390]</a></span> filelike voice of the janitor's son, who kept
+piping: "Haaay, Bil-lay, hey; Billy's got a girl! Hey, Billy's got a
+girl! Haaay, Bil-lay!" She imagined herself going down and
+slaughtering him; vividly saw herself waiting for the elevator,
+venturing into the hot sepulcher of the back areaway, and there
+becoming too languid to complete the task of ridding the world of the
+dear child. She was horrified to discover what she had been imagining,
+and presently imagined it all over again.</p>
+
+<p>Two blocks across from her, seen through the rising walls of the new
+apartment-houses, were the drab windows of a group of run-down
+tenements, which broke the sleek respectability of the well-to-do
+quarter. In those windows Ruth observed foreign-looking, idle women,
+not very clean, who had nothing to do after they had completed half an
+hour of slovenly housework in the morning. They watched their
+neighbors breathlessly. They peered out with the petty virulent
+curiosity of the workless at whatever passed in the streets below
+them. Fifty times a day they could be seen to lean far out on their
+fire-escapes and follow with slowly craning necks and unblinking eyes
+the passing of something&mdash;ice-wagons, undertakers' wagons, ole-clo'
+men, Ruth surmised. The rest of the time, ragged-haired and greasy of
+wrapper, gum-chewing and yawning, they rested their unlovely stomachs
+on discolored sofa-cushions on the window-sills and waited for
+something to appear. Two blocks away they were&mdash;yet to Ruth they
+seemed to be in the room with her, claiming her as one of their
+sisterhood. For now she was a useless woman, as they were. She raged
+with the thought that she might grow to be like them in every
+respect&mdash;she, Ruth Winslow!... She wondered if any of them were
+Norwegians named Ericson.... With the fascination of dread she watched
+them as closely as they watched the world with the hypnotization of
+unspeakable hopelessness.... She had to find her work, something for
+which the world needed her, lest she be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[391]</a></span> left here, useless and
+unhappy in a flat. In her kitchen she was merely an intruder on the
+efficient maid, and there was no nursery.</p>
+
+<p>She sat apprehensively on the edge of a chair, hating the women at the
+windows, hating the dull, persistent flies, hating the wetness of her
+forehead and the dampness of her palm; repenting of her hate and
+hating again&mdash;and taking another cold bath to be fresh for the
+home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother and whom, of
+all the world, she did not hate.</p>
+
+<p>Even on the many cool days when the streets and the flat became
+tolerable and the vulture women of the tenements ceased to exist for
+her, Ruth was not much interested, whether she went out or some one
+came to see her. Every one she knew, except for the Dunleavys and a
+few others, was out of town, and she was tired of Olive Dunleavy's
+mirth and shallow gossip. After her days with Carl in the valley of
+the shadow, Olive was to her a stranger giggling about strange people.
+Phil was rather better. He occasionally came in for tea, poked about,
+stared at the color prints, and said cryptic things about feminism and
+playing squash.</p>
+
+<p>Her settlement-house classes were closed for the summer. She brooded
+over the settlement work and accused herself of caring less for people
+than for the sensation of being charitable. She wondered if she was a
+hypocrite.... Then she would take another cold bath to be fresh for
+the home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother, and
+toward whom, of all the world's energies, she knew that she was not
+hypocritical.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the story of Ruth Winslow, but of Carl Ericson. Yet Ruth's
+stifling days are a part of it, for her unhappiness meant as much to
+him as it did to her. In the swelter of his office, overlooking
+motor-hooting, gasoline-reeking Broadway, he was aware that Ruth was
+in the flat, buried alive. He made plans for her going away, but she
+refused to desert him. He tried to arrange for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[392]</a></span> week more of holiday
+for them both; he could not; he came to understand that he was now
+completely a prisoner of business.</p>
+
+<p>He was in a rut, both sides of which were hedged with "back work that
+had piled up on him." He had no desire, no ambition, no interest,
+except in Ruth and in making the Touricar pay.</p>
+
+<p>The Touricar Company had never paid expenses as yet. How much longer
+would old VanZile be satisfied with millions to come in the
+future&mdash;perhaps?</p>
+
+<p>Carl even took work home with him, though for Ruth's sake he wanted to
+go out and play. It really was for her sake; he himself liked to play,
+but the disease of perpetual overwork had hold of him. He was glad to
+have her desert him for an evening now and then and go out to the
+Peace Waters Country Club for a dance with Phil and Olive Dunleavy.
+She felt guilty when she came home and found him still making
+calculations. But she hummed waltzes while she put on a thin, blue
+silk dressing-gown and took down her hair.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>can't</i> stand this grubby, shut-in prison," she finally snapped at
+him, on an evening when he would not go to the first night of a
+roof-garden.</p>
+
+<p>He snarled back: "You don't have to! Why don't you go with your
+bloomin' Phil and Olive? Of course, I don't ever want to go myself!"</p>
+
+<p>"See here, my friend, you have been taking advantage for a long time
+now of the fact that you were ill. I'm not going to be your nurse
+indefinitely." She slammed her bedroom door.</p>
+
+<p>Later she came stalking out, very dignified, and left the flat. He
+pretended not to see her. But as soon as the elevator door had clanged
+and the rumbling old car had begun to carry her down, away from him,
+the flat was noisy with her absence. She came home eagerly sorry&mdash;to
+find an eagerly sorry Carl. Then, while they cried together, and he
+kissed her lips, they made a compact<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[393]</a></span> that no matter for what reason
+or through whose fault they might quarrel, they would always settle it
+before either went to bed.... But they were uncomfortably polite for
+two days, and obviously were so afraid that they might quarrel that
+they were both prepared to quarrel.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had been back at work for less than one month, but he hoped that
+the Touricar was giving enough promise now of positive success to
+permit him to play during the evening. He rented a VanZile car for
+part time; planned week-end trips; hoped they could spend&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Then the whole world exploded.</p>
+
+<p>Just at the time when the investigation of Twilight Sleep indicated
+that the world might become civilized, the Powers plunged into a war
+whose reason no man has yet discovered. Carl read the head-lines on
+the morning of August 5th, 1914, with a delusion of not reading
+"news," but history, with himself in the history book.</p>
+
+<p>Ten thousand books record the Great War, and how bitterly Europe
+realized it; this is to record that Carl, like most of America, did
+not comprehend it, even when recruits of the Kaiser marched down
+Broadway with German and American flags intertwined, even when his
+business was threatened. It was too big for his imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Every noon he bought half a dozen newspaper extras and hurried down to
+the bulletin-boards on the <i>Times</i> and <i>Herald</i> buildings. He
+pretended that he was a character in one of the fantastic novels about
+a world-war when he saw such items as "Russians invading Prussia,"
+"Japs will enter war," "Aeroplane and submarine attack English
+cruiser."</p>
+
+<p>"Rats!" he said, "I'm dreaming. There couldn't be a war like that.
+We're too civilized. I can prove the whole thing 's impossible."</p>
+
+<p>In the world-puzzle nothing confused Carl more than the question of
+socialism. He had known as a final fact that the alliance of French
+and German socialist workmen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[394]</a></span> made war between the two nations
+absolutely impossible&mdash;and his knowledge was proven ignorance, his
+faith folly. He tentatively bought a socialist magazine or two, to
+find some explanation, and found only greater confusion on the part of
+the scholars and leaders of the party. They, too, did not understand
+how it had all happened; they stood amid the ruins of international
+socialism, sorrowing. If their faith was darkened, how much more so
+was Carl's vague untutored optimism about world-brotherhood.</p>
+
+<p>He had two courses&mdash;to discard socialism as a failure, or to stand by
+it as a course of action which was logical but had not, as yet, been
+able to accomplish its end. He decided to stand by it; he could not
+see himself plunging into the unutterable pessimism of believing that
+all of mankind were such beast fools that, after this one great sin,
+they could not repent and turn from tribal murder. And what other
+remedy was there? If socialism had not prevented the war, neither had
+monarchy nor bureaucracy, bourgeois peace movements, nor the church.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>With a whole world at war, Carl thought chiefly of his own business.
+He was not abnormal. The press was filled with bewildered queries as
+to what would happen to America. For two weeks the automobile business
+seemed dead, save for a grim activity in war-trucks. VanZile called in
+Carl and shook his head over the future of the Touricar, now that all
+luxuries were threatened.</p>
+
+<p>But the Middle West promised a huge crop and prosperity. The East
+followed; then, slowly, the South, despite the closed outlet for its
+cotton crop. Within a few weeks all sorts of motor-cars were selling
+well, especially expensive cars. It was apparent that automobiles were
+no longer merely luxuries. There was even a promise of greater trade
+than ever, so rapidly were all the cars of the warring nations being
+destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>But, once VanZile had considered the possibility of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[395]</a></span> letting go his
+Touricar interest in order to be safe, he seemed always to be
+considering it. Carl read fate in VanZile's abstracted manner. And if
+VanZile withdrew, Carl's own stock would be worthless. But he stuck at
+his work, with something of a boy's frightened stubbornness and
+something of a man's quiet sternness. Fear was never far from him. In
+an aeroplane he had never been greatly frightened; he could himself,
+by his own efforts, fight the wind. But how could he steer a world-war
+or a world-industry?</p>
+
+<p>He tried to conceal his anxiety from Ruth, but she guessed it. She
+said, one evening: "Sometimes I think we two are unusual, because we
+really want to be free. And then a thing like this war comes and our
+bread and butter and little pink cakes are in danger, and I realize
+we're not free at all; that we're just like all the rest, prisoners,
+dependent on how much the job brings and how fast the subway runs. Oh,
+sweetheart, we mustn't forget to be just a bit mad, no matter how
+serious things become." Standing very close to him, she put her head
+on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure mustn't. Must stick by each other all the more when the world
+takes a run and jumps on us."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed we will!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Unsparingly the war's cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along
+the edge of a business precipice, looking down. He became so
+accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with
+the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called
+"courage," began to come to life again, laughing, "Let the darned old
+business bust, if she's going to."</p>
+
+<p>Only, it refused to bust.</p>
+
+<p>It kept on trembling, while Carl became nervous again, then gaily
+defiant, then nervous again, till the alternation of gloom and bravado
+disgusted him and made Ruth wonder whether he was an office-slave or a
+freebooter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[396]</a></span> As he happened to be both at the time, it was hard for
+him to be either convincingly. She accused him of vacillating; he
+retorted; the suspense kept them both raw....</p>
+
+<p>To add to their difficulties of adjustment to each other, and to the
+ego-mad world, Ruth's sense of established amenities was shocked by
+the reappearance of Carl's pioneering past as revealed in the lively
+but vulgar person of Martin Dockerill, Carl's former aviation
+mechanic.</p>
+
+<p>Martin Dockerill was lanky and awkward as ever, he still wrote
+post-cards to his aunt in Fall River, and admired burlesque-show
+choruses, but he no longer played the mouth-organ (publicly), for he
+had become so well-to-do as to be respectable. As foreign agent for
+the Des Moines Auto-Truck Company he had toured Europe, selling
+war-trucks, or lorries, as the English called them, first to the
+Balkan States, then to Italy, Russia, and Turkey. He was for a time
+detailed to the New York office.</p>
+
+<p>It did not occur either to him nor to Carl that he was not "welcome to
+drop in any time; often as possible," to slap Carl on the back, loudly
+recollect the time when he had got drunk and fought with a policeman
+in San Antonio, or to spend a whole evening belligerently discussing
+the idea of war or types of motor-trucks when Ruth wistfully wanted
+Carl to herself. Martin supposed, because she smiled, that she was as
+interested as Carl in his theories about aeroplane-scouting in war.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth knew that most of Carl's life had been devoted to things quite
+outside her own sphere of action, but she had known it without feeling
+it. His talk with Martin showed her how sufficient his life had been
+without her. She began to worry lest he go back to aviation.</p>
+
+<p>So began their serious quarrels; there were not many of them, and they
+were forgotten out of existence in a day or two; but there were at
+least three pitched battles during which both of them believed that
+"this ended everything."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[397]</a></span> They quarreled always about the one thing
+which had intimidated them before&mdash;the need of quarreling; though
+apropos of this every detail of life came up: Ruth's conformities; her
+fear that he would fly again; her fear that the wavering job was
+making him indecisive.</p>
+
+<p>And Martin Dockerill kept coming, as an excellent starting-point for
+dissension.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth did not dislike Martin's roughness, but when the ex-mechanic
+discovered that he was making more money than was Carl, and asked
+Carl, in her presence, if he'd like a loan, then she hated Martin, and
+would give no reason. She became unable to see him as anything but a
+boor, an upstart servant, whose friendship with Carl indicated that
+her husband, too, was an "outsider." Believing that she was superbly
+holding herself in, she asked Carl if there was not some way of
+tactfully suggesting to Martin that he come to the flat only once in
+two weeks, instead of two or three times a week. Carl was angry. She
+said furiously what she really thought, and retired to Aunt Emma's for
+the evening. When she returned she expected to find Carl as repentant
+as herself. Unfortunately that same Carl who had declared that it was
+pure egotism to regard one's own religion or country as necessarily
+sacred, regarded his own friends as sacred&mdash;a noble faith which is an
+important cause of political graft. He was ramping about the
+living-room, waiting for a fight&mdash;and he got it.</p>
+
+<p>Their moment of indiscretion. The inevitable time when, believing
+themselves fearlessly frank, they exaggerated every memory of an
+injury. Ruth pointed out that Carl had disliked Florence Crewden as
+much as she had disliked Martin. She renewed her accusation that he
+was vacillating; scoffed at Walter MacMonnies (whom she really liked),
+Gertie Cowles (whom she had never met), and even, hesitatingly, Carl's
+farmer relatives.</p>
+
+<p>And Carl was equally unpleasant. At her last thrust he called her a
+thin-blooded New-Yorker and slammed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[398]</a></span> his bedroom door. They had broken
+their pledge not to go to bed on a quarrel.</p>
+
+<p>He was gone before she came out to breakfast in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening they were perilously polite again. Martin Dockerill
+appeared and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind
+had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she
+could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks
+wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the
+British Aero Corps, to get life's supreme sensation&mdash;scouting ten
+thousand feet in air, while dozens of batteries fired at him; a
+nose-to-earth volplane. The thinking Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth
+knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer&mdash;and as one who was not
+merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured. And Martin
+Dockerill seemed so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might
+go.</p>
+
+<p>Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter-of-fact chatter about
+a kind of wandering which shut her out as completely as did the
+project of war. "I don't know," said he, "but what the biggest fun in
+chasing round the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where
+you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of
+greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a hand-out and sneak on a
+blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every
+brakie and constabule out after you. That's living!"</p>
+
+<p>When Martin was gone Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended
+to be absorbed in a magazine. He took from the mess of papers and
+letters that lived in his inside coat pocket a war-map he had clipped
+from a newspaper, and drew tactical lines on it. From his room he
+brought a small book he had bought that day. He studied it intently.
+Ruth managed to see that the title of the book was <i>Aeroplanes and
+Air-Scouting in the European Armies</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[399]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She sprang up, cried: "Hawk! Why are you reading that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't I read it?"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean to&mdash;&mdash; You&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, I don't suppose I'd have the nerve to go and enlist now.
+You've already pointed out to me that I've been getting cold feet."</p>
+
+<p>"But why do you shut me out? Why do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, good Lord! have we got to go all over that again? We've gone over
+it and over it and over it till I'm sick of telling you it isn't
+true."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm very sorry, Hawk. Thank you for making it clear to me that I'm a
+typical silly wife."</p>
+
+<p>"And thank you for showing me I'm a clumsy brute. You've done it quite
+often now. Of course it doesn't mean anything that I've given up
+aviation."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't be melodramatic. Or if you must be, don't fail to tell me
+that I've ruined your life."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. I won't say anything, then, Ruth."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't look at me like that, Hawk. So hard. Studying me.... Can't you
+understand&mdash;&mdash; Haven't you any perception? Can't you understand how
+hard it is for me to come to you like this, after last night, and
+try&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Very nice of you," he said, grimly.</p>
+
+<p>With one cry of "Oh!" she ran into her bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>He could hear her sobbing; he could feel her agony dragging him to
+her. But no woman's arms should drug his anger, this time, to let it
+ache again. For once he definitely did not want to go to her. So
+futile to make up and quarrel, make up and quarrel. He was impatient
+that her distant sobs expressed so clearly a wordless demand that he
+come to her and make peace. "Hell!" he crawked; jerked his top-coat
+from its nail, and left the flat&mdash;eleven o'clock of a chilly November
+evening.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[400]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLII" id="CHAPTER_XLII"></a>CHAPTER XLII</h2>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/image_d.jpg" alt="D" width="47" height="50" /></div>
+<p>izzy with all the problems of life, he did not notice where he went.
+He walked blocks; took a trolley-car; got off to buy a strong cigar;
+took the next trolley that came along; was carried across the
+Fifty-ninth Street bridge to Long Island. At the eighth or tenth stop
+he hurried out of the car just as it was starting again. He wondered
+why he had been such a fool as to leave it in a dark street of
+flat-faced wooden houses with dooryards of trampled earth and a
+general air of poverty, goats, and lunch-pails. He tramped on, a
+sullen and youthless man. Presently he was in shaggy, open country.</p>
+
+<p>He was frightened by his desertion of Ruth, but he did not want to go
+back, nor even telephone to her. He had to diagram where and what and
+why he was; determine what he was to do.</p>
+
+<p>He disregarded the war as a cause of trouble. Had there been no extra
+business-pressure caused by the war, there would have been some other
+focus for their misunderstandings. They would have quarreled over
+clothes and aviation, Aunt Emma and Martin Dockerill, poverty and
+dancing, quite the same.</p>
+
+<p>Walking steadily, with long periods when he did not think, but stared
+at the dusty stars or the shaky, ill-lighted old houses, he alined her
+every fault, unhappily rehearsed every quarrel in which she had been
+to blame, his lips moving as he emphasized the righteous retorts he
+was almost certain he had made. It was not hard to find faults in her.
+Any two people who have spent more than two days together already have
+the material for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[401]</a></span> life-long feud, in traits which at first were
+amusing or admirable. Ruth's pretty manners, of which Carl had been
+proud, he now cited as snobbish affectation. He did not spare his
+reverence, his passion, his fondness. He mutilated his soul like a
+hermit. He recalled her pleasure in giving him jolly surprises, in
+writing unexpected notes addressed to him at the office, as fussy
+discontent with a quiet, normal life; he regarded her excitement over
+dances as evidence that she was so dependent on country-club society
+that he would have to spend the rest of his life drudging for her.</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to flee. He saw the whole world as a conspiracy of secret,
+sinister powers that are concealed from the child, but to the man are
+gradually revealed by a pitiless and never-ending succession of
+misfortunes. He would never be foot-loose again. His land of heart's
+desire would be the office.</p>
+
+<p>But the ache of disappointment grew dull. He was stunned. He did not
+know what had happened; did not even know precisely how he came to be
+walking here. Now and then he remembered anew that he had sharply left
+Ruth&mdash;Ruth, his dear girl!&mdash;remembered that she was not at hand, ready
+to explain with love's lips the somber puzzles of life. He was
+frightened again, and beginning to be angry with himself for having
+been angry with Ruth.</p>
+
+<p>He had walked many miles. Brown fields came up at him through the
+paling darkness. A sign-board showed that he was a few miles from
+Mineola. Letting the coming dawn uplift him, he tramped into Mineola,
+with a half-plan of going on to the near-by Hempstead Plains Aviation
+Field, to see if there was any early-morning flying. It would be bully
+to see a machine again!</p>
+
+<p>At a lunch-wagon he ordered buckwheat-cakes and coffee. Sitting on a
+high stool before a seven-inch shelf attached to the wall, facing an
+array of salt-castors and catsup-bottles and one of those colored
+glass windows<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[402]</a></span> with a portrait of Washington which give to all
+lunch-wagons their air of sober refinement, Carl ate solemnly,
+meditatively.... It did not seem to him an ignoble setting for his
+grief; but he was depressed when he came out to a drab first light of
+day that made the street seem hopeless and unrested after the night.
+The shops were becoming visible, gray and chilly, like a just-awakened
+janitor in slippers, suspenders, and tousled hair. The pavement was
+wet. Carl crossed the street, stared at the fly-specked cover of a
+magazine six months old that lay in a shop window lighted by one
+incandescent. He gloomily planned to go back and have another cup of
+coffee on the shelf before Washington's glassy but benign face.</p>
+
+<p>But he looked down the street, and all the sky was becoming a delicate
+and luminous blue.</p>
+
+<p>He trotted off toward Hempstead Plains.</p>
+
+<p>The Aviation Field was almost abandoned. Most of the ambitious line of
+hangars were empty, now, with faded grass thick before the great doors
+that no one ever opened. A recent fire had destroyed a group of five
+hangars.</p>
+
+<p>He found one door open, and three sleepy youngsters in sweaters and
+khaki trousers bringing out a monoplane.</p>
+
+<p>Carl watched them start, bobbed his chin to the music of the motor,
+saw the machine canter down the field and ascend from dawn to the
+glory of day. The rising sun picked out the lines of the uninclosed
+framework and hovered on the silvery wing-surface. The machine circled
+the field at two hundred feet elevation, smoothly, peacefully. And
+peace beyond understanding came to Carl.</p>
+
+<p>He studied the flight. "Mm. Good and steady. Banks a little sharp, but
+very thorough. Firs' rate. I believe I could get more speed out of her
+if I were flying. Like to try."</p>
+
+<p>Wonderingly he realized that he did not want to fly;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[403]</a></span> that only his
+lips said, "Like to try." He was almost as much an outsider to
+aviation as though he had never flown. He discovered that he was
+telling Ruth this fact, in an imaginary conversation; was commenting
+for her on dawn-sky and the plains before him and his alienation from
+exploits in which she could not share.</p>
+
+<p>The monoplane landed with a clean volplane. The aviator and his
+mechanicians were wheeling it toward the hangar. They glanced at him
+uninterestedly. Carl understood that, to them, he was a Typical
+Bystander, here where he had once starred.</p>
+
+<p>The aviator stared again, let go the machine, walked over, exclaiming:
+"Say, aren't you Hawk Ericson? This is an honor. I heard you were
+somewhere in New York. Just missed you at the Aero Club one night.
+Wanted to ask you about the Bagby hydro. Won't you come in and have
+some coffee and sinkers with us? Proud to have you. My name 's Berry."</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks. Be glad to."</p>
+
+<p>While the youngsters were admiring him, hearing of the giants of
+earlier days, while they were drinking inspiration from this veteran
+of twenty-nine, they were in turn inspiring Carl by their faith in
+him. He had been humble. They made him trust himself, not
+egotistically, but with a feeling that he did matter, that it was
+worth while to be in tune with life.</p>
+
+<p>Yet all the while he knew that he wanted to be by himself, because he
+could thus be with the spirit of Ruth. And he knew, subconsciously,
+that he was going to hurry back to Mineola and telephone to her.</p>
+
+<p>As he dog-trotted down the road, he noted the old Dutch houses for
+her; picked out the spot where he had once had a canvas hangar, and
+fancied himself telling her of those days. He did not remember that at
+this hangar he had known Istra, Istra Nash, the artist, whose name he
+scarce recalled. Istra was an incident; Ruth was the meaning of his
+life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[404]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And the solution of his problem came, all at once, when suddenly it
+was given to him to understand what that problem was.</p>
+
+<p>Ruth and he had to be up and away, immediately; go any place, do
+anything, so long as they followed new trails, and followed them
+together. He knew positively, after his lonely night, that he could
+not be happy without her as comrade in the freedom he craved. And he
+also knew that they had not done the one thing for which their
+marriage existed. They were not just a man and a woman. They were a
+man and a woman who had promised to find new horizons for each other.</p>
+
+<p>However much he believed in the sanctity of love's children, Carl also
+believed that merely to be married and breed casual children and die
+is a sort of suspended energy which has no conceivable place in this
+over-complex and unwieldy world. He had no clear nor ringing message,
+but he did have, just then, an overpowering conviction that Ruth and
+he&mdash;not every one, but Ruth and he, at least&mdash;had a vocation in
+keeping clear of vocations, and that they must fulfil it.</p>
+
+<p>Over the telephone he said: "Ruth dear, I'll be right there. Walked
+all night. Got straightened out now. I'm out at Mineola. It's all
+right with me now, blessed. I want so frightfully much to make it all
+right with you. I'll be there in about an hour."</p>
+
+<p>She answered "Yes" so non-committally that he was smitten by the fact
+that he had yet to win forgiveness for his frenzy in leaving her; that
+he must break the shell of resentment which would incase her after a
+whole night's brooding between sullen walls.</p>
+
+<p>On the train, unconscious of its uproar, he was bespelled by his new
+love. During a few moments of their lives, ordinary real people,
+people real as a tooth-brush, do actually transcend the coarsely
+physical aspects of sex and feeding, and do approximate to the
+unwavering glow of romantic heroes. Carl was no more a romantic
+hero-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[405]</a></span>lover than, as a celebrated aviator, he had been a
+hero-adventurer. He was a human being. He was not even admirable,
+except as all people are admirable, from the ash-man to the king.
+There had been nothing exemplary in his struggle to find adjustment
+with his wife; he had been bad in his impatience just as he had been
+good in his boyish affection; in both he had been human. Even now,
+when without reserve he gave himself up to love, he was aware that he
+would ascend, not on godlike pinions, but by a jerky old
+apartment-house elevator, to make peace with a vexed girl who was also
+a human being, with a digestive system and prejudices. Yet with a joy
+that encompassed all the beauty of banners and saluting swords,
+romantic towers and a fugitive queen, a joy transcending trains and
+elevators and prejudices, Carl knew that human girl as the symbol of
+man's yearning for union with the divine; he desired happiness for her
+with a devotion great as the passion in Galahad's heart when all night
+he knelt before the high altar.</p>
+
+<p>He came slowly up to their apartment-house. If it were only possible
+for Ruth to trust him, now&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Mingled with his painfully clear remembrance of all the sweet things
+Ruth was and had done was a tragic astonishment that he&mdash;this same he
+who was all hers now&mdash;could possibly have turned impatiently from her
+sobs. Yet it would have been for good, if only she would trust him.</p>
+
+<p>Not till he left the elevator, on their floor, did he comprehend that
+Ruth might not be awaiting him; might have gone. He looked
+irresolutely at the grill of the elevator door, shut on the black
+shaft.</p>
+
+<p>"She was here when I telephoned&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He waited. Perhaps she would peep out to see if it was he who had come
+up in the elevator.</p>
+
+<p>She did not appear.</p>
+
+<p>He walked the endless distance of ten feet to their door, unlocked it,
+labored across the tiny hall into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[406]</a></span> living-room. She was there. She
+stood supporting herself by the back of the davenport, her eyes
+red-edged and doubtful, her face tightened, expressing enmity or dread
+or shy longing. He held out his hands, like a prisoner beseeching
+royal mercy. She in turn threw out her arms. He could not say one
+word. The clumsy signs called "words" could not tell his emotion. He
+ran to her, and she welcomed his arms. He held her, abandoned himself
+utterly to her kiss. His hard-driving mind relaxed; relaxed was her
+body in his arms. He knew, not merely with his mind, but with the
+vaster powers that drive mind and emotion and body, that Ruth, in her
+disheveled dressing-gown, was the glorious lover to whom he had been
+hastening this hour past. All the love which civilization had tried to
+turn into Normal Married Life had escaped Efficiency's pruning-hook,
+and had flowered.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right with me, now," she said; "so wonderfully all right."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to explain. Had to be by myself; find out. Must have seemed so
+unspeakably r&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't, don't explain! Our kiss explained."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>While they talked on the davenport together, reaching out again and
+again for the hands that now really were there, Ruth agreed with Carl
+that they must be up and away, not wait till it should be too late.
+She, too, saw how many lovers plan under the June honeymoon to sail
+away after a year or two and see the great world, and, when they
+wearily die, know that it will still be a year or two before they can
+flee to the halcyon isles.</p>
+
+<p>But she did insist that they plan practically; and it was she who
+wondered: "But what would happen if everybody went skipping off like
+us? Who'd bear the children and keep the fields plowed to feed the
+ones that ran away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Golly!" cried Carl, "wish that were the worst problem we had! Maybe a
+thousand years from now, when every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[407]</a></span> one is so artistic that they want
+to write books, it will be hard to get enough drudges. But now&mdash;&mdash;
+Look at any office, with the clerks toiling day after day, even the
+unmarried ones. Look at all the young fathers of families, giving up
+everything they want to do, to support children who'll do the same
+thing right over again with <i>their</i> children. Always handing on the
+torch of life, but never getting any light from it. People don't run
+away from slavery often enough. And so they don't ever get to do real
+work, either!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, sweetheart, what if we should have children some day? You
+know&mdash;&mdash; Of course, we haven't been ready for them yet, but some day
+they might come, anyhow, and how could we wander round&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, probably they will come some day, and then we'll take our dose of
+drudgery like the rest. There's nothing that our dear civilization
+punishes as it does begetting children. For poisoning food by
+adulterating it you may get fined fifty dollars, but if you have
+children they call it a miracle&mdash;as it is&mdash;and then they get busy and
+condemn you to a lifetime of being scared by the boss."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, darling, please don't blame it on me."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean to get so oratorical, blessed. But it does make me mad
+the way the state punishes one for being willing to work and have
+children. Perhaps if enough of us run away from nice normal grinding,
+we'll start people wondering just why they should go on toiling to
+produce a lot of booze and clothes and things that nobody needs."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, my Hawk.... Don't you think, though, that we might be bored
+in your Rocky Mountain cabin, if we were there for months and months?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I suppose so," Carl mused. "The rebellion against stuffy
+marriage has to be a whole lot wider than some little detail like
+changing from city to country. Probably for some people the happiest
+thing 'd be to live<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[408]</a></span> in a hobohemian flat and have parties, and for
+some to live in the suburbs and get the missus elected president of
+the Village Improvement Society. For us, I believe, it's change and
+<i>keep going</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I do think so. Hawk, my Hawk, I lay awake nearly all night last
+night, realizing that we <i>are</i> one, not because of a wedding ceremony,
+but because we can understand each other's make-b'lieves and
+seriousnesses. I knew that no matter what happened, we had to try
+again.... I saw last night, by myself, that it was not a question of
+finding out whose fault a quarrel was; that it wasn't anybody's
+'fault,' but just conditions.... And we'll change them.... We won't be
+afraid to be free."</p>
+
+<p>"We won't! Lord! life's wonderful!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! When I think of how sweet life can be&mdash;so wonderfully sweet&mdash;I
+know that all the prophets must love human beings, oh, so terribly, no
+matter how sad they are about the petty things that lives are wasted
+over.... But I'm not a prophet. I'm a girl that's awfully much in
+love, and, darling, I want you to hold me close."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Three months later, in February, 1915, Ruth and Carl sailed for Buenos
+Ayres, America's new export-market. Carl was the Argentine Republic
+manager for the VanZile Motor Corporation, possessed of an unimportant
+salary, a possibility of large commissions, and hopes like comets.
+Their happiness seemed a thing enchanted. They had not quarreled
+again.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The S.S. <i>Sangrael</i>, for Buenos Ayres and Rio, had sailed from snow
+into summer. Ruth and Carl watched isles of palms turn to fantasies
+carved of ebony, in the rose and garnet sunset waters, and the vast
+sky laugh out in stars. Carl was quoting Kipling:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[409]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the deuce knows what we may do&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We're down, hull down on the Old Trail&mdash;the trail that is always new."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Anyway," he commented, "deuce only knows what we'll do after
+Argentine, and I don't care. Do you?"</p>
+
+<p>Her clasping hand answered, as he went on:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, say, bles-sed! I forgot to look in the directory before we left
+New York to see if there wasn't a Society for the Spread of Madness
+among the Respectable. It might have sent us out as missionaries....
+There's a flying-fish; and to-morrow I won't have to watch clerks
+punch a time-clock; and you can hear a sailor shifting the
+ventilators; and there's a little star perched on the fore-mast;
+singing; but the big thing is that you're here beside me, and we're
+<i>going</i>. How bully it is to be living, if you don't have to give up
+living in order to make a living."</p>
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;' />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+</body>
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@@ -0,0 +1,14668 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trail of the Hawk, by Sinclair Lewis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Trail of the Hawk
+       A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
+
+Author: Sinclair Lewis
+
+Release Date: September 14, 2008 [EBook #26610]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, K Nordquist, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Transcriber's Note.
+
+       The Table of Contents is not part of the original book.
+
+       In page 212 there is an incomplete sentence "Poor Tad was". This
+       sentence is incomplete in this book as well as the many editions
+       verified.
+
+
+
+   [Illustration: [See page 290
+    THE COLD BREEZE ENLIVENED THEM, THE STERNNESS OF THE SWIFT, CRUEL
+    RIVER AND MILES OF BROWN SHORE MADE THEM GRAVELY HAPPY.]
+
+
+
+                             THE TRAIL OF
+
+                               THE HAWK
+
+
+                               A COMEDY
+
+                          OF THE SERIOUSNESS
+
+                               OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            SINCLAIR LEWIS
+
+                              AUTHOR OF
+
+                            OUR MR. WRENN
+
+
+
+
+                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+
+                         NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+                        THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK
+
+                Copyright, 1915, by Harper & Brothers
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                 PAGE
+
+Part I                   1
+
+CHAPTER I                3
+CHAPTER II              16
+CHAPTER III             26
+CHAPTER IV              35
+CHAPTER V               46
+CHAPTER VI              58
+CHAPTER VII             71
+CHAPTER VIII            78
+CHAPTER IX              86
+CHAPTER X              100
+CHAPTER XI             106
+CHAPTER XII            115
+
+Part II                125
+
+CHAPTER XIII           127
+CHAPTER XIV            135
+CHAPTER XV             146
+CHAPTER XVI            156
+CHAPTER XVII           162
+CHAPTER XVIII          167
+CHAPTER XIX            174
+CHAPTER XX             179
+CHAPTER XXI            187
+CHAPTER XXII           202
+CHAPTER XXIII          210
+
+Part III               223
+
+CHAPTER XXIV           225
+CHAPTER XXV            231
+CHAPTER XXVI           242
+CHAPTER XXVII          248
+CHAPTER XXVIII         261
+CHAPTER XXIX           270
+CHAPTER XXX            282
+CHAPTER XXXI           290
+CHAPTER XXXII          300
+CHAPTER XXXIII         310
+CHAPTER XXXIV          324
+CHAPTER XXXV           333
+CHAPTER XXXVI          342
+CHAPTER XXXVII         352
+CHAPTER XXXVIII        362
+CHAPTER XXXIX          368
+CHAPTER XL             379
+CHAPTER XLI            387
+CHAPTER XLII           400
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TO THE OPTIMISTIC REBELS THROUGH
+WHOSE TALK AT LUNCHEON THE AUTHOR
+WATCHES THE MANY-COLORED SPECTACLE
+OF LIFE--GEORGE SOULE, HARRISON
+SMITH, ALLAN UPDEGRAFF, F. K. NOYES,
+ALFRED HARCOURT, B. W. HUEBSCH.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Part I
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF YOUTH
+
+
+THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Carl Ericson was being naughty. Probably no boy in Joralemon was being
+naughtier that October Saturday afternoon. He had not half finished
+the wood-piling which was his punishment for having chased the family
+rooster thirteen times squawking around the chicken-yard, while
+playing soldiers with Bennie Rusk.
+
+He stood in the middle of the musty woodshed, pessimistically kicking
+at the scattered wood. His face was stern, as became a man of eight
+who was a soldier of fortune famed from the front gate to the
+chicken-yard. An unromantic film of dirt hid the fact that his
+Scandinavian cheeks were like cream-colored silk stained with
+rose-petals. A baby Norseman, with only an average boy's prettiness,
+yet with the whiteness and slenderness of a girl's little finger. A
+back-yard boy, in baggy jacket and pants, gingham blouse, and cap
+whose lining oozed back over his ash-blond hair, which was tangled now
+like trampled grass, with a tiny chip riding grotesquely on one flossy
+lock.
+
+The darkness of the shed displeased Carl. The whole basic conception
+of work bored him. The sticks of wood were personal enemies to which
+he gave insulting names. He had always admired the hard bark and
+metallic resonance of the ironwood, but he hated the poplar--"popple"
+it is called in Joralemon, Minnesota. Poplar becomes dry and dusty,
+and the bark turns to a monstrously mottled and evil greenish-white.
+Carl announced to one poplar stick, "I could lick you! I'm a gen'ral,
+I am." The stick made no reply whatever, and he contemptuously shied
+it out into the chickweed which matted the grubby back yard. This
+necessitated his sneaking out and capturing it by stalking it from the
+rear, lest it rouse the Popple Army.
+
+He loitered outside the shed, sniffing at the smoke from burning
+leaves--the scent of autumn and migration and wanderlust. He glanced
+down between houses to the reedy shore of Joralemon Lake. The surface
+of the water was smooth, and tinted like a bluebell, save for one
+patch in the current where wavelets leaped with October madness in
+sparkles of diamond fire. Across the lake, woods sprinkled with
+gold-dust and paprika broke the sweep of sparse yellow stubble, and a
+red barn was softly brilliant in the caressing sunlight and lively air
+of the Minnesota prairie. Over there was the field of valor, where
+grown-up men with shiny shotguns went hunting prairie-chickens; the
+Great World, leading clear to the Red River Valley and Canada.
+
+Three mallard-ducks, with necks far out and wings beating hurriedly,
+shot over Carl's head. From far off a gun-shot floated echoing through
+forest hollows; in the waiting stillness sounded a rooster's crow,
+distant, magical.
+
+"I want to go hunting!" mourned Carl, as he trailed back into the
+woodshed. It seemed darker than ever and smelled of moldy chips. He
+bounced like an enraged chipmunk. His phlegmatic china-blue eyes
+filmed with tears. "Won't pile no more wood!" he declared.
+
+Naughty he undoubtedly was. But since he knew that his father, Oscar
+Ericson, the carpenter, all knuckles and patched overalls and bad
+temper, would probably whip him for rebellion, he may have acquired
+merit. He did not even look toward the house to see whether his mother
+was watching him--his farm-bred, worried, kindly, small, flat-chested,
+pinch-nosed, bleached, twangy-voiced, plucky Norwegian mother. He
+marched to the workshop and brought a collection of miscellaneous
+nails and screws out to a bare patch of earth in front of the
+chicken-yard. They were the Nail People, the most reckless band of
+mercenaries the world has ever known, led by old General Door-Hinge,
+who was somewhat inclined to collapse in the middle, but possessed of
+the unusual virtue of eyes in both ends of him. He had explored the
+deepest canyons of the woodshed, and victoriously led his ten-penny
+warriors against the sumacs in the vacant lot beyond Irving Lamb's
+house.
+
+Carl marshaled the Nail People, sticking them upright in the ground.
+After reasoning sternly with an intruding sparrow, thus did the
+dauntless General Door-Hinge address them:
+
+"Men, there's a nawful big army against us, but le's die like men, my
+men. Forwards!"
+
+As the veteran finished, a devastating fire of stones enfiladed the
+company, and one by one they fell, save for the commander himself, who
+bowed his grizzled wrought-steel head and sobbed, "The brave boys done
+their duty."
+
+From across the lake rolled another gun-shot.
+
+Carl dug his grimy fingers into the earth. "Jiminy! I wisht I was out
+hunting. Why can't I never go? I guess I'll pile the wood, but I'm
+gonna go seek-my-fortune after that."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Since Carl Ericson (some day to be known as "Hawk" Ericson) was the
+divinely restless seeker of the romance that must--or we die!--lie
+beyond the hills, you first see him in action; find him in the year
+1893, aged eight, leading revolutions in the back yard. But equally,
+since this is a serious study of an average young American, there
+should be an indication of his soil-nourished ancestry.
+
+Carl was second-generation Norwegian; American-born, American in
+speech, American in appearance, save for his flaxen hair and
+china-blue eyes; and, thanks to the flag-decked public school,
+overwhelmingly American in tradition. When he was born the "typical
+Americans" of earlier stocks had moved to city palaces or were
+marooned on run-down farms. It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a
+Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was the "typical American" of his
+period. It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending
+the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the
+exuberant, October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to
+add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for
+beauty.
+
+They are the New Yankees, these Scandinavians of Wisconsin and
+Minnesota and the Dakotas, with a human breed that can grow, and a
+thousand miles to grow in. The foreign-born parents, when they first
+come to the Northern Middlewest, huddle in unpainted farm-houses with
+grassless dooryards and fly-zizzing kitchens and smelly dairies, set
+on treeless, shadeless, unsoftened leagues of prairie or bunched in
+new clearings ragged with small stumps. The first generation are alien
+and forlorn. The echoing fjords of Trondhjem and the moors of Finmark
+have clipped their imaginations, silenced their laughter, hidden with
+ice their real tenderness. In America they go sedulously to the bare
+Lutheran church and frequently drink ninety-per-cent. alcohol. They
+are also heroes, and have been the makers of a new land, from the days
+of Indian raids and ox-teams and hillside dug-outs to now, repeating
+in their patient hewing the history of the Western Reserve.... In one
+generation or even in one decade they emerge from the desolation of
+being foreigners. They, and the Germans, pay Yankee mortgages with
+blood and sweat. They swiftly master politics, voting for honesty
+rather than for hand-shakes; they make keen, scrupulously honest
+business deals; send their children to school; accumulate land--one
+section, two sections--or move to town to keep shop and ply skilled
+tools; become Methodists and Congregationalists; are neighborly with
+Yankee manufacturers and doctors and teachers; and in one generation,
+or less, are completely American.
+
+So was it with Carl Ericson. His carpenter father had come from
+Norway, by way of steerage and a farm in Wisconsin, changing his name
+from Ericsen. Ericson senior owned his cottage and, though he still
+said, "Aye ban going," he talked as naturally of his own American
+tariff and his own Norwegian-American Governor as though he had five
+generations of Connecticut or Virginia ancestry.
+
+Now, it was Carl's to go on, to seek the flowering.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unconscious that he was the heir-apparent of the age, but decidedly
+conscious that the woodshed was dark, Carl finished the pile.
+
+From the step of the woodshed he regarded the world with plaintive
+boredom.
+
+"Ir-r-r-r-rving!" he called.
+
+No answer from Irving, the next-door boy.
+
+The village was rustlingly quiet. Carl skipped slowly and unhappily to
+the group of box-elders beside the workshop and stuck his finger-nails
+into the cobwebby crevices of the black bark. He made overtures for
+company on any terms to a hop-robin, a woolly worm, and a large blue
+fly, but they all scorned his advances, and when he yelled an
+ingratiating invitation to a passing dog it seemed to swallow its tail
+and ears as it galloped off. No one else appeared.
+
+Before the kitchen window he quavered:
+
+"Ma-ma!"
+
+In the kitchen, the muffled pounding of a sad-iron upon the padded
+ironing-board.
+
+"Ma!"
+
+Mrs. Ericson's whitey-yellow hair, pale eyes, and small nervous
+features were shadowed behind the cotton fly-screen.
+
+"Vell?" she said.
+
+"I haven't got noth-ing to do-o."
+
+"Go pile the vood."
+
+"I piled piles of it."
+
+"Then you can go and play."
+
+"I _been_ playing."
+
+"Then play some more."
+
+"I ain't got nobody to play with."
+
+"Then find somebody. But don't you step vun step out of this yard."
+
+"I don't see _why_ I can't go outa the yard!"
+
+"Because I said so."
+
+Again the sound of the sad-iron.
+
+Carl invented a game in which he was to run in circles, but not step
+on the grass; he made the tenth inspection that day of the drying
+hazelnuts whose husks were turning to seal-brown on the woodshed roof;
+he hunted for a good new bottle to throw at Irving Lamb's barn; he
+mended his sling-shot; he perched on a sawbuck and watched the street.
+Nothing passed, nothing made an interesting rattling, except one
+democrat wagon.
+
+From over the water another gun-shot murmured of distant hazards.
+
+Carl jumped down from the sawbuck and marched deliberately out of the
+yard, along Oak Street toward The Hill, the smart section of
+Joralemon, where live in exclusive state five large houses that get
+painted nearly every year.
+
+"I'm gonna seek-my-fortune. I'm gonna find Bennie and go swimming," he
+vowed. Calmly as Napoleon defying his marshals, General Carl
+disregarded the sordid facts that it was too late in the year to go
+swimming, and that Benjamin Franklin Rusk couldn't swim, anyway. He
+clumped along, planting his feet with spats of dust, very dignified
+and melancholy but, like all small boys, occasionally going mad and
+running in chase of nothing at all till he found it.
+
+He stopped before the House with Mysterious Shutters.
+
+Carl had never made b'lieve fairies or princes; rather, he was in the
+secret world of boyhood a soldier, a trapper, or a swing-brakeman on
+the M. & D. R.R. But he was bespelled by the suggestion of grandeur in
+the iron fence and gracious trees and dark carriage-shed of the House
+with Shutters. It was a large, square, solid brick structure, set
+among oaks and sinister pines, once the home, or perhaps the mansion,
+of Banker Whiteley, but unoccupied for years. Leaves rotted before the
+deserted carriage-shed. The disregarded steps in front were seamed
+with shallow pools of water for days after a rain. The windows had
+always been darkened, but not by broad-slatted outside shutters,
+smeared with house-paint to which stuck tiny black hairs from the
+paint-brush, like the ordinary frame houses of Joralemon. Instead,
+these windows were masked with inside shutters haughtily varnished to
+a hard refined brown.
+
+To-day the windows were open, the shutters folded; furniture was being
+moved in; and just inside the iron gate a frilly little girl was
+playing with a whitewashed conch-shell.
+
+She must have been about ten at that time, since Carl was eight. She
+was a very dressy and complacent child, possessed not only of a clean
+white muslin with three rows of tucks, immaculate bronze boots, and a
+green tam-o'-shanter, but also of a large hair-ribbon, a ribbon sash,
+and a silver chain with a large, gold-washed, heart-shaped locket. She
+was softly plump, softly gentle of face, softly brown of hair, and
+softly pleasant of speech.
+
+"Hello!" said she.
+
+"H'lo!"
+
+"What's your name, little boy?"
+
+"Ain't a little boy. I'm Carl Ericson."
+
+"Oh, are you? I'm----"
+
+"I'm gonna have a shotgun when I'm fifteen." He shyly hurled a stone
+at a telegraph-pole to prove that he was not shy.
+
+"My name is Gertie Cowles. I came from Minneapolis. My mamma owns part
+of the Joralemon Flour Mill.... Are you a nice boy? We just moved here
+and I don't know anybody. Maybe my mamma will let me play with you if
+you are a nice boy."
+
+"I jus' soon come play with you. If you play soldiers.... My pa 's the
+smartest man in Joralemon. He builded Alex Johnson's house. He's got a
+ten-gauge gun."
+
+"Oh.... My mamma 's a widow."
+
+Carl hung by his arms from the gate-pickets while she breathed,
+"M-m-m-m-m-m-y!" in admiration at the feat.
+
+"That ain't nothing. I can hang by my knees on a trapeze.... What did
+you come from Minneapolis for?"
+
+"We're going to live here," she said.
+
+"Oh."
+
+"I went to the Chicago World's Fair with my mamma this summer."
+
+"Aw, you didn't!"
+
+"I did so. And I saw a teeny engine so small it was in a walnut-shell
+and you had to look at it through a magnifying-glass and it kept on
+running like anything."
+
+"Huh! that's nothing! Ben Rusk, he went to the World's Fair, too, and
+he saw a statchue that was bigger 'n our house and all pure gold. You
+didn't see that."
+
+"I did so! And we got cousins in Chicago and we stayed with them, and
+Cousin Edgar is a very _prominent_ doctor for eyenear and stummick."
+
+"Aw, Ben Rusk's pa is a doctor, too. And he's got a brother what's
+going to be a sturgeon."
+
+"I got a brother. He's a year older than me. His name is Ray....
+There's lots more people in Minneapolis than there is in Joralemon.
+There's a hundred thousand people in Minneapolis."
+
+"That ain't nothing. My pa was born in Christiania, in the Old
+Country, and they's a million million people there."
+
+"Oh, there is not!"
+
+"Honest there is."
+
+"Is there, honest?" Gertie was admiring now.
+
+He looked patronizingly at the red-plush furniture which was being
+splendidly carried into the great house from Jordan's dray--an old
+friend of Carl's, which had often carried him banging through town. He
+condescended:
+
+"Jiminy! You don't know Bennie Rusk nor nobody, do you! I'll bring him
+and we can play soldiers. And we can make tents out of carpets. Did
+you ever run through carpets on the line?"
+
+He pointed to the row of rugs and carpets airing beside the
+carriage-shed.
+
+"No. Is it fun?"
+
+"It's awful scary. But I ain't afraid."
+
+He dashed at the carpets and entered their long narrow tent. To tell
+the truth, when he stepped from the sunshine into the intense darkness
+he was slightly afraid. The Ericsons' one carpet made a short passage,
+but to pass on and on and on through this succession of heavy rug
+mats, where snakes and poisonous bugs might hide, and where the
+rough-threaded, gritty under-surface scratched his pushing hands, was
+fearsome. He emerged with a whoop and encouraged her to try the feat.
+She peeped inside the first carpet, but withdrew her head, giving
+homage:
+
+"Oh, it's so _dark_ in there where you went!"
+
+He promptly performed the feat again.
+
+As they wandered back to the gate to watch the furniture-man Gertie
+tried to regain the superiority due her years by remarking, of a large
+escritoire which was being juggled into the front door, "My papa
+bought that desk in Chicago----"
+
+Carl broke in, "I'll bring Bennie Rusk, and me and him 'll teach you
+to play soldiers."
+
+"My mamma don't think I ought to play games. I've got a lot of dolls,
+but I'm too old for dolls. I play Authors with mamma, sometimes. And
+dominoes. Authors is a very nice game."
+
+"But maybe your ma will let you play Indian squaw, and me and Bennie
+'ll tie you to a stake and scalp you. That won't be rough like
+soldiers. But I'm going to be a really-truly soldier. I'm going to be
+a norficer in the army."
+
+"I got a cousin that's an officer in the army," Gertie said grandly,
+bringing her yellow-ribboned braid round over her shoulder and gently
+brushing her lips with the end.
+
+"Cross-your-heart?"
+
+"Um-huh."
+
+"Cross-your-heart, hope-t'-die if you ain't?"
+
+"Honest he's an officer."
+
+"Jiminy crickets! Say, Gertie, could he make me a norficer? Let's go
+find him. Does he live near here?"
+
+"Oh my, no! He's 'way off in San Francisco."
+
+"Come on. Let's go there. You and me. Gee! I like you! You got a'
+awful pertty dress."
+
+"'Tain't polite to compliment me to my face. Mamma says----"
+
+"Come on! Let's go! We're going!"
+
+"Oh no. I'd like to," she faltered, "but my mamma wouldn't let me. She
+don't let me play around with boys, anyway. She's in the house now.
+And besides, it's 'way far off across the sea, to San Francisco; it's
+beyond the salt sea where the Mormons live, and they all got seven
+wives."
+
+"Beyond the sea like Christiania? Ah, 'tain't! It's in America,
+because Mr. Lamb went there last winter. 'Sides, even if it was across
+the sea, couldn't we go an' be stow'ways, like the Younger Brothers
+and all them? And Little Lord Fauntleroy. He went and was a lord, and
+he wasn't nothing but a' orphing. My ma read me about him, only she
+don't talk English very good, but we'll go stow'ways," he wound up,
+triumphantly.
+
+"Gerrrrrrtrrrrrude!" A high-pitched voice from the stoop.
+
+Gertie glowered at a tall, meager woman with a long green-and-white
+apron over a most respectable black alpaca gown. Her nose was large,
+her complexion dull, but she carried herself so commandingly as to be
+almost handsome and very formidable.
+
+"Oh, dear!" Gertie stamped her foot. "Now I got to go in. I never can
+have any fun. Good-by, Carl----"
+
+He urgently interrupted her tragic farewell. "Say! Gee whillikins! I
+know what we'll do. You sneak out the back door and I'll meet you, and
+we'll run away and go seek-our-fortunes and we'll find your
+cousin----"
+
+"Gerrrtrrrude!" from the stoop.
+
+"Yes, mamma, I'm just coming." To Carl: "'Sides, I'm older 'n you and
+I'm 'most grown-up, and I don't believe in Santy Claus, and onc't I
+taught the infant class at St. Chrysostom's Sunday-school when the
+teacher wasn't there; anyway, I and Miss Bessie did, and I asked them
+'most all the questions about the trumpets and pitchers. So I couldn't
+run away. I'm too old."
+
+"Gerrrtrrrude, come here this _instant_!"
+
+"Come on. I'll be waiting," Carl demanded.
+
+She was gone. She was being ushered into the House of Mysterious
+Shutters by Mrs. Cowles. Carl prowled down the street, a fine, new,
+long stick at his side, like a saber. He rounded the block, and waited
+back of the Cowles carriage-shed, doing sentry-go and planning the
+number of parrots and pieces of eight he would bring back from San
+Francisco. _Then_ his father and mother would be sorry they'd talked
+about him in their Norwegian!
+
+"Carl!" Gertie was running around the corner of the carriage-shed.
+"Oh, Carl, I had to come out and see you again, but I can't go
+seek-our-fortunes with you, 'cause they've got the piano moved in now
+and I got to practise, else I'll grow up just an ignorant common
+person, and, besides, there's going to be tea-biscuits and honey for
+supper. I saw the honey."
+
+He smartly swung his saber to his shoulder, ordering, "Come on!"
+
+Gertie edged forward, perplexedly sucking a finger-joint, and followed
+him along Lake Street toward open country. They took to the Minnesota
+& Dakota railroad track, a natural footpath in a land where the trains
+were few and not fast, as was the condition of the single-tracked M. &
+D. of 1893. In a worried manner Carl inquired whether San Francisco
+was northwest or southeast--the directions in which ran all
+self-respecting railroads. Gertie blandly declared that it lay to the
+northwest; and northwest they started--toward the swamps and the first
+forests of the Big Woods.
+
+He had wonderlands to show her along the track. To him every detail
+was of scientific importance. He knew intimately the topography of the
+fields beside the track; in which corner of Tubbs's pasture, between
+the track and the lake, the scraggly wild clover grew, and down what
+part of the gravel-bank it was most exciting to roll. As far along the
+track as the Arch, each railroad tie (or sleeper) had for him a
+personality: the fat, white tie, which oozed at the end into an
+awkward knob, he had always hated because it resembled a flattened
+grub; a new tamarack tie with a sliver of fresh bark still on it,
+recently put in by the section gang, was an entertaining stranger; and
+he particularly introduced Gertie to his favorite, a wine-colored tie
+which always smiled.
+
+Gertie, though _noblesse oblige_ compelled her to be gracious to the
+imprisoned ties writhing under the steel rails, did not really show
+much enthusiasm till he led her to the justly celebrated Arch. Even
+then she boasted of Minnehaha Falls and Fort Snelling and Lake
+Calhoun; but, upon his grieved solicitation, declared that, after all,
+the Twin Cities had nothing to compare with the Arch--a sandstone
+tunnel full twenty feet high, miraculously boring through the railroad
+embankment, and faced with great stones which you could descend by
+lowering yourself from stone to stone. Through the Arch ran the creek,
+with rare minnows in its pools, while important paths led from the
+creek to a wilderness of hazelnut-bushes. He taught her to tear the
+drying husks from the nuts and crack the nuts with stones. At his
+request Gertie produced two pins from unexpected parts of her small
+frilly dress. He found a piece of string, and they fished for perch in
+the creek. As they had no bait whatever, their success was not large.
+
+A flock of ducks flew low above them, seeking a pond for the night.
+
+"Jiminy!" Carl cried, "it's getting late. We got to hurry. It's awful
+far to San Francisco and--I don't know--gee! where'll we sleep
+to-night?"
+
+"We hadn't ought to go on, had we?"
+
+"Yes! Come on!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+From the creek they tramped nearly two miles, through the dark
+gravel-banks of the railroad cut, across the high trestle over
+Joralemon River where Gertie had to be coaxed from stringer to
+stringer. They stopped only when a gopher in a clearing demanded
+attention. Gertie finally forgot the superiority of age when she saw
+Carl whistle the quivering gopher-cry, while the gopher sat as though
+hypnotized on his pile of fresh black earth. Carl stalked him. As
+always happened, the gopher popped into his hole just before Carl
+reached him; but it certainly did seem that he had nearly been caught;
+and Gertie was jumping with excitement when Carl returned, strutting,
+cocking his saber-stick over his shoulder.
+
+Gertie was tired. She, the Minneapolis girl, had not been much awed by
+the railroad ties nor the Arch, but now she tramped proudly beside the
+man who could catch gophers, till Carl inquired:
+
+"Are you gettin' awful hungry? It's a'most supper-time."
+
+"Yes, I _am_ hungry," trustingly.
+
+"I'm going to go and swipe some 'taters. I guess maybe there's a
+farm-house over there. I see a chimbly beyond the slough. You stay
+here."
+
+"I dassn't stay alone. Oh, I better go home. I'm scared."
+
+"Come on. I won't let nothing hurt you."
+
+They circled a swamp surrounded by woods, Carl's left arm about her,
+his right clutching the saber. Though the sunset was magnificent and a
+gay company of blackbirds swayed on the reeds of the slough, dusk was
+sneaking out from the underbrush that blurred the forest floor, and
+Gertie caught the panic fear. She wished to go home at once. She saw
+darkness reaching for them. Her mother would unquestionably whip her
+for staying out so late. She discovered a mud-smear on the side of her
+skirt, and a shoe-button was gone. She was cold. Finally, if she
+missed supper at home she would get no tea-biscuits and honey.
+Gertie's polite little stomach knew its rights and insisted upon them.
+
+"I wish I hadn't come!" she lamented. "I wish I hadn't. Do you s'pose
+mamma will be dreadfully angry? Won't you 'splain to her? You will,
+won't you?"
+
+It was Carl's duty, as officer commanding, to watch the blackened
+stumps that sprang from the underbrush. And there was Something, 'way
+over in the woods, beyond the trees horribly gashed to whiteness by
+lightning. Perhaps the Something hadn't moved; perhaps it _was_ a
+stump----
+
+But he answered her loudly, so that lurking robbers might overhear: "I
+know a great big man over there, and he's a friend of mine; he's a
+brakie on the M. & D., and he lets me ride in the caboose any time I
+want to, and he's right behind us. (I was just making b'lieve, Gertie;
+I'll 'splain everything to your mother.) He's bigger 'n anybody!" More
+conversationally: "Aw, Jiminy! Gertie, don't cry! Please don't. I'll
+take care of you. And if you ain't going to have any supper we'll
+swipe some 'taters and roast 'em." He gulped. He hated to give up, to
+return to woodshed and chicken-yard, but he conceded: "I guess maybe
+we hadn't better go seek-our-fortunes no more to----"
+
+A long wail tore through the air. The children shrieked together and
+fled, stumbling in dry bog, weeping in terror. Carl's backbone was all
+one prickling bar of ice. But he waved his stick fiercely, and,
+because he had to care for her, was calm enough to realize that the
+wail must have been the cry of the bittern.
+
+"It wasn't nothing but a bird, Gertie; it can't hurt us. Heard 'em
+lots of times."
+
+Nevertheless, he was still trembling when they reached the edge of a
+farm-yard clearing beyond the swamp. It was gray-dark. They could see
+only the mass of a barn and a farmer's cabin, both new to Carl.
+Holding her hand, he whispered:
+
+"They must be some 'taters or 'beggies in the barn. I'll sneak in and
+see. You stand here by the corn-crib and work out some ears between
+the bars. See--like this."
+
+He left her. The sound of her frightened snivel aged him. He tiptoed
+to the barn door, eying a light in the farm-house. He reached far up
+to the latch of the broad door and pulled out the wooden pin. The
+latch slipped noisily from its staple. The door opened with a groaning
+creek and banged against the barn.
+
+Paralyzed, hearing all the silence of the wild clearing, he waited.
+There was a step in the house. The door opened. A huge farmer,
+tousle-haired, black-bearded, held up a lamp and peered out. It was
+the Black Dutchman.
+
+The Black Dutchman was a living legend. He often got drunk and rode
+past Carl's home at night, lashing his horses and cursing in German.
+He had once thrashed the school-teacher for whipping his son. He had
+no friends.
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear, I wisht I was home!" sobbed Carl; but he started to
+run to Gertie's protection.
+
+The Black Dutchman set down the lamp. "_Wer ist da?_ I see you!
+Damnation!" he roared, and lumbered out, seizing a pitchfork from the
+manure-pile.
+
+Carl galloped up to Gertie, panting, "He's after us!" and dragged her
+into the hazel-bushes beyond the corn-crib. As his country-bred feet
+found and followed a path toward deeper woods, he heard the Black
+Dutchman beating the bushes with his pitchfork, shouting:
+
+"Hiding! I know vere you are! _Hah!_"
+
+Carl jerked his companion forward till he lost the path. There was no
+light. They could only crawl on through the bushes, whose malicious
+fingers stung Gertie's face and plucked at her proud frills. He lifted
+her over fallen trees, freed her from branches, and all the time,
+between his own sobs, he encouraged her and tried to pretend that
+their incredible plight was not the end of the world, whimpering:
+
+"We're a'most on the road now, Gertie; honest we are. I can't hear him
+now. I ain't afraid of him--he wouldn't dast hurt us or my pa would
+fix him."
+
+"Oh! I hear him! He's coming! Oh, please save me, Carl!"
+
+"Gee! run fast!... Aw, I don't hear him. I ain't afraid of him!"
+
+They burst out on a grassy woodland road and lay down, panting. They
+could see a strip of stars overhead; and the world was dark, silent,
+in the inscrutable night of autumn. Carl said nothing. He tried to
+make out where they were--where this road would take them. It might
+run deeper into the woods, which he did not know as he did the Arch
+environs; and he had so twisted through the brush that he could not
+tell in what direction lay either the main wagon-road or the M. & D.
+track.
+
+He lifted her up, and they plodded hand in hand till she said:
+
+"I'm awful tired. It's awful cold. My feet hurt awfully. Carl dear,
+oh, pleassssse take me home now. I want my mamma. Maybe she won't whip
+me now. It's so dark and--ohhhhhh----" She muttered, incoherently:
+"There! By the road! He's waiting for us!" She sank down, her arm over
+her face, groaning, "Don't hurt me!"
+
+Carl straddled before her, on guard. There was a distorted mass
+crouched by the road just ahead. He tingled with the chill of fear,
+down through his thighs. He had lost his stick-saber, but he bent,
+felt for, and found another stick, and piped to the shadowy watcher:
+
+"I ain't af-f-fraid of you! You gwan away from here!"
+
+The watcher did not answer.
+
+"I know who you are!" Bellowing with fear, Carl ran forward, furiously
+waving his stick and clamoring: "You better not touch me!" The stick
+came down with a silly, flat clack upon the watcher--a roadside
+boulder. "It's just a rock, Gertie! Jiminy, I'm glad! It's just a
+rock!... Aw, I knew it was a rock all the time! Ben Rusk gets scared
+every time he sees a stump in the woods, and he always thinks it's a
+robber."
+
+Chattily, Carl went back, lifted her again, endured her kissing his
+cheek, and they started on.
+
+"I'm so cold," Gertie moaned from time to time, till he offered:
+
+"I'll try and build a fire. Maybe we better camp. I got a match what I
+swiped from the kitchen. Maybe I can make a fire, so we better camp."
+
+"I don't want to camp. I want to go home."
+
+"I don't know where we are, I told you."
+
+"Can you make a regular camp-fire? Like Indians?"
+
+"Um-huh."
+
+"Let's.... But I rather go home."
+
+"_You_ ain't scared now. _Are_ you, Gertie? Gee! you're a' awful brave
+girl!"
+
+"No, but I'm cold and I wisht we had some tea-biscuits----"
+
+Ever too complacent was Miss Gertrude Cowles, the Good Girl in
+whatever group she joined; but she seemed to trust in Carl's heroism,
+and as she murmured of a certain chilliness she seemed to take it for
+granted that he would immediately bring her some warmth. Carl had
+never heard of the romantic males who, in fiction, so frequently offer
+their coats to ladies fair but chill; yet he stripped off his jacket
+and wrapped it about her, while his gingham-clad shoulders twitched
+with cold.
+
+"I can hear a crick, 'way, 'way over there. Le's camp by it," he
+decided.
+
+They scrambled through the brush, Carl leading her and feeling the
+way. He found a patch of long grass beside the creek; with only his
+tremulous hands for eyes he gathered leaves, twigs, and dead branches,
+and piled them together in a pyramid, as he had been taught to do by
+the older woods-faring boys.
+
+It was still; no wind; but Carl, who had gobbled up every word he had
+heard about deer-hunting in the north woods, got a great deal of
+interesting fear out of dreading what might happen if his one match
+did not light. He made Gertie kneel beside him with the jacket
+outspread, and he hesitated several times before he scratched the
+match. It flared up; the leaves caught; the pile of twigs was
+instantly aflame.
+
+He wept, "Jiminy, if it hadn't lighted!..." By and by he announced,
+loudly, "I wasn't afraid," to convince himself, and sat up, throwing
+twigs on the fire grandly.
+
+Gertie, who didn't really appreciate heroism, sighed, "I'm hungry
+and----"
+
+"My second-grade teacher told us a story how they was a' arctic
+explorer and he was out in a blizzard----"
+
+"----and I wish we had some tea-biscuits," concluded Gertie,
+companionably but firmly.
+
+"I'll go pick some hazelnuts."
+
+He left her feeding the flame. As he crept away, the fire behind him,
+he was dreadfully frightened, now that he had no one to protect. A few
+yards from the fire he stopped in terror. He clutched a branch so
+tightly that it creased his palm. Two hundred yards away, across the
+creek, was the small square of a lighted window hovering detached in
+the darkness.
+
+For a panic-filled second Carl was sure that it must be the Black
+Dutchman's window. His tired child-mind whined. But there was no creek
+near the Black Dutchman's. Though he did not want to venture up to
+the unknown light, he growled, "I will if I want to!" and limped
+forward.
+
+He had to cross the creek, the strange creek whose stepping-stones he
+did not know. Shivering, hesitant, he stripped off his shoes and
+stockings and dabbled the edge of the water with reluctant toes, to
+see if it was cold. It was.
+
+"Dog-gone!" he swore, mightily. He plunged in, waded across.
+
+He found a rock and held it ready to throw at the dog that was certain
+to come snapping at him as he tiptoed through the clearing. His wet
+legs smarted with cold. The fact that he was trespassing made him feel
+more forlornly lost than ever. But he stumbled up to the one-room
+shack that was now shaping itself against the sky. It was a house
+that, he believed, he had never seen before. When he reached it he
+stood for fully a minute, afraid to move. But from across the creek
+whimpered Gertie's call:
+
+"Carl, oh, _Carl_, where are you?"
+
+He had to hurry. He crept along the side of the shack to the window.
+It was too high in the wall for him to peer through. He felt for
+something to stand upon, and found a short board, which he wedged
+against the side of the shack.
+
+He looked through the dusty window for a second. He sprang from the
+board.
+
+Alone in the shack was the one person about Joralemon more feared,
+more fabulous than the Black Dutchman--"Bone" Stillman, the man who
+didn't believe in God.
+
+Bone Stillman read Robert G. Ingersoll, and said what he thought.
+Otherwise he was not dangerous to the public peace; a lone old
+bachelor farmer. It was said that he had been a sailor or a policeman,
+a college professor or a priest, a forger or an embezzler. Nothing
+positive was known except that three years ago he had appeared and
+bought this farm. He was a grizzled man of fifty-five, with a long,
+tobacco-stained, gray mustache and an open-necked blue-flannel shirt.
+To Carl, beside the shack, Bone Stillman was all that was demoniac.
+
+Gertie was calling again. Carl climbed upon his board and resumed his
+inspection, seeking a course of action.
+
+The one-room shack was lined with tar-paper, on which were pinned
+lithographs of Robert G. Ingersoll, Karl Marx, and Napoleon. Under a
+gun-rack made of deer antlers was a cupboard half filled with dingy
+books, shotgun shells, and fishing tackle. Bone was reading by a pine
+table still littered with supper-dishes. Before him lay a clean-limbed
+English setter. The dog was asleep. In the shack was absolute
+stillness and loneliness intimidating.
+
+While Carl watched, Bone dropped his book and said, "Here, Bob, what
+d'you think of single-tax, heh?"
+
+Carl gazed apprehensively.... No one but Bone was in the shack.... It
+was said that the devil himself sometimes visited here.... On Carl was
+the chill of a nightmare.
+
+The dog raised his head, stirred, blinked, pounded his tail on the
+floor, and rose, a gentlemanly, affable chap, to lay his muzzle on
+Bone's knee while the solitary droned:
+
+"This fellow says in this book here that the city 's the natural place
+to live--aboriginal tribes prove man 's naturally gregarious. What
+d'you think about it, heh, Bob?... Bum country, this is. No thinking.
+What in the name of the seven saintly sisters did I ever want to be a
+farmer for, heh?
+
+"Let's skedaddle, Bob.
+
+"I ain't an atheist. I'm an agnostic.
+
+"Lonely, Bob? Go over and talk to his whiskers, Karl Marx. He's
+liberal. He don't care what you say. He---- Oh, shut up! You're damn
+poor company. Say something!"
+
+Carl, still motionless, was the more agonized because there was no
+sound from Gertie, not even a sobbing call. Anything might have
+happened to her. While he was coaxing himself to knock on the pane,
+Stillman puttered about the shack, petting the dog, filling his pipe.
+He passed out of Carl's range of vision toward the side of the room in
+which was the window.
+
+A huge hand jerked the window open and caught Carl by the hair. Two
+wild faces stared at each other, six inches apart.
+
+"I saw you. Came here to plague me!" roared Bone Stillman.
+
+"Oh, mister, oh please, mister, I wasn't. Me and Gertie is lost in the
+woods--we----Ouch! Oh, _please_ lemme go!"
+
+"Why, you're just a brat! Come here."
+
+The lean arm of Bone Stillman dragged Carl through the window by the
+slack of his gingham waist.
+
+"Lost, heh? Where's t'other one--Gertie, was it?"
+
+"She's over in the woods."
+
+"Poor little tyke! Wait 'll I light my lantern."
+
+The swinging lantern made friendly ever-changing circles of light, and
+Carl no longer feared the dangerous territory of the yard. Riding
+pick-a-back on Bone Stillman, he looked down contentedly on the dog's
+deferential tail beside them. They found Gertie asleep by the fire.
+She scarcely awoke as Stillman picked her up and carried her back to
+his shack. She nestled her downy hair beneath his chin and closed her
+eyes.
+
+Stillman said, cheerily, as he ushered them into his mansion: "I'll
+hitch up and take you back to town. You young tropical tramps! First
+you better have a bite to eat, though. What do kids eat, bub?"
+
+The dog was nuzzling Carl's hand, and Carl had almost forgotten his
+fear that the devil might appear. He was flatteringly friendly in his
+answer: "Porritch and meat and potatoes--only I don't like potatoes,
+and--_pie!_"
+
+"'Fraid I haven't any pie, but how'd some bacon and eggs go?" As he
+stoked up his cannon-ball stove and sliced the bacon, Stillman
+continued to the children, who were shyly perched on the buffalo-robe
+cover of his bed, "Were you scared in the woods?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Don't ever for----Da----Blast that egg! Don't forget this, son:
+nothing outside of you can ever hurt you. It can chew up your toes,
+but it can't reach you. Nobody but you can hurt you. Let me try to
+make that clear, old man, if I can....
+
+"There's your fodder. Draw up and set to. Pretty sleepy, are you? I'll
+tell you a story. J' like to hear about how Napoleon smashed the
+theory of divine rule, or about how me and Charlie Weems explored
+Tiburon? Well----"
+
+Though Carl afterward remembered not one word of what Bone Stillman
+said, it is possible that the outcast's treatment of him as a grown-up
+friend was one of the most powerful of the intangible influences which
+were to push him toward the great world outside of Joralemon. The
+school-bound child--taught by young ladies that the worst immorality
+was whispering in school; the chief virtue, a dull quietude--was here
+first given a reasonable basis for supposing that he was not always to
+be a back-yard boy.
+
+The man in the flannel shirt, who chewed tobacco, who wrenched
+infinitives apart and thrust profane words between, was for fifteen
+minutes Carl's Froebel and Montessori.
+
+Carl's recollection of listening to Bone blurs into one of being
+somewhere in the back of a wagon beside Gertie, wrapped in buffalo
+robes, and of being awakened by the stopping of the wagon when Bone
+called to a band of men with lanterns who were searching for the
+missing Gertie. Apparently the next second he was being lifted out
+before his home, and his aproned mother was kissing him and sobbing,
+"Oh, my boy!" He snuggled his head on her shoulder and said:
+
+"I'm cold. But I'm going to San Francisco."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Carl Ericson, grown to sixteen and long trousers, trimmed the
+arc-lights for the Joralemon Power and Lighting Company, after school;
+then at Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor he won two games of Kelly pool,
+smoked a cigarette of flake tobacco and wheat-straw paper, and
+"chipped in" five cents toward a can of beer.
+
+A slender Carl, hesitating in speech, but with plenty to say; rangy as
+a setter pup, silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an
+age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn
+and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black
+four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian
+of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who
+quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even
+Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin
+haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the
+high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked"
+in stores on Saturdays, or tended furnaces. Sometimes he donned the
+virile--and noisy--uniform of an electrician: army gauntlets, a coil
+of wire, pole-climbers strapped to his legs. Crunching his steel spurs
+into the crisp pine wood of the lighting-poles, he carelessly ascended
+to the place of humming wires and red cross-bars and green-glass
+insulators, while crowds of two and three small boys stared in awe
+from below. At such moments Carl did not envy the aristocratic leisure
+of his high-school classmate, Fatty Ben Rusk, who, as son of the
+leading doctor, did not work, but stayed home and read library books.
+
+Carl's own home was not adapted to the enchantments of a boy's
+reading. Perfectly comfortable it was, and clean with the hard
+cleanness that keeps oilcloth looking perpetually unused, but it was
+so airlessly respectable that it doubled Carl's natural restlessness.
+It had been old Oscar Ericson's labor of love, but the carpenter loved
+shininess more than space and leisure. His model for a house would
+have been a pine dry-goods box grained in imitation of oak. Oscar
+Ericson radiated intolerance and a belief in unimaginative, unresting
+labor. Every evening, collarless and carpet-slippered, ruffling his
+broom-colored hair or stroking his large, long chin, while his
+shirt-tab moved ceaselessly in time to his breathing, he read a
+Norwegian paper. Carl's mother darned woolen socks and thought about
+milk-pans and the neighbors and breakfast. The creak of rockers filled
+the unventilated, oilcloth-floored sitting-room. The sound was as
+unchanging as the sacred positions of the crayon enlargement of Mrs.
+Ericson's father, the green-glass top-hat for matches, or the violent
+ingrain rug with its dog's-head pattern.
+
+Carl's own room contained only plaster walls, a narrow wooden bed, a
+bureau, a kitchen chair. Fifteen minutes in this irreproachable home
+sent Carl off to Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor, which was not
+irreproachable.
+
+He rather disliked the bitterness of beer and the acrid specks of
+cigarette tobacco that stuck to his lips, but the "bunch at Eddie's"
+were among the few people in Joralemon who were conscious of life.
+Eddie's establishment was a long, white-plastered room with a
+pressed-steel ceiling and an unswept floor. On the walls were
+billiard-table-makers' calendars and a collection of cigarette-premium
+chromos portraying bathing girls. The girls were of lithographic
+complexions, almost too perfect of feature, and their lips were more
+than ruby. Carl admired them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A September afternoon. The sixteen-year-old Carl was tipped back in a
+chair at Eddie Klemm's, one foot on a rung, while he discussed village
+scandals and told outrageous stories with Eddie Klemm, a brisk
+money-maker and vulgarian aged twenty-three, who wore a "fancy vest"
+and celluloid buttons on his lapels. Ben Rusk hesitatingly poked his
+head through the door.
+
+Eddie Klemm called, with business-like cordiality: "H'lo, Fatty! Come
+in. How's your good health? Haven't reformed, have you? Going to join
+us rough-necks? Come on; I'll teach you to play pool. Won't cost you a
+cent."
+
+"No, I guess I hadn't better. I was just looking for Carl."
+
+"Well, well, Fatty, ain't we ree-fined! Why do we guess we hadn't to
+probably maybe oughtn't to had better?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Some day I'll learn, I guess," sighed Fatty Ben
+Rusk, who knew perfectly that with a doctor father, a religious
+mother, and an effeminate taste for reading he could never be a town
+sport.
+
+"Hey! watch out!" shrieked Eddie.
+
+"Wh-what's the matter?" gasped Fatty.
+
+"The floor 's falling on you!"
+
+"Th--th----Aw, say, you're kidding me," said Fatty, weakly, with a
+propitiating smile.
+
+"Don't worry, son; you're the third guy to-day that I've caught on
+that! Stick around, son, and sit in any time, and I'll learn you some
+pool. You got just the right build for a champ player. Have a
+cigarette?"
+
+The social amenities whereby Joralemon prepares her youth for the
+graces of life having been recognized, Fatty Rusk hitched a chair
+beside Carl, and muttered:
+
+"Say, Carl, here's what I wanted to tell you: I was just up to the
+Cowleses' to take back a French grammar I borrowed to look at----Maybe
+that ain't a hard-looking language! What d'you think? Mrs. Cowles told
+me Gertie is expected back to-morrow."
+
+"Gee whiz! I thought she was going to stay in New York for two years!
+And she's only been gone six months."
+
+"I guess Mrs. Cowles is kind of lonely without her," Ben mooned.
+
+"So now you'll be all nice and in love with Gertie again, heh? It
+certainly gets me why you want to fall in love, Fatty, when you could
+go hunting."
+
+"If you'd read about King Arthur and Galahad and all them instead of
+reading the _Scientific American_, and about these fool horseless
+carriages and stuff----There never will be any practical use for
+horseless carriages, anyway."
+
+"There will----" growled Carl.
+
+"My mother says she don't believe the Lord ever intended us to ride
+without horses, or what did He give us horses for? And the things
+always get stuck in the mud and you have to walk home--mother was
+reading that in a newspaper, just the other day."
+
+"Son, let me tell you, I'll own a horseless carriage some day, and I
+bet I go an average of twenty miles an hour with it, maybe forty."
+
+"Oh, rats! But I was saying, if you'd read some library books you'd
+know about love. Why, what 'd God put love in the world for----"
+
+"Say, will you quit explaining to me about what God did things for?"
+
+"Ouch! Quit! Awwww, quit, Carl.... Say, listen; here's what I wanted
+to tell you: How if you and me and Adelaide Benner and some of us went
+down to the depot to meet Gertie, to-morrow? She comes in on the
+twelve-forty-seven."
+
+"Well, all right. Say, Bennie, you don't want to be worried when I kid
+you about being in love with Gertie. I don't think I'll ever get
+married. But it's all right for you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Saturday morning was so cool, so radiant, that Carl awakened early to
+a conviction that, no matter how important meeting Gertie might be in
+the cosmic scheme, he was going hunting. He was down-stairs by five.
+He fried two eggs, called Dollar Ingersoll, his dog--son of Robert
+Ingersoll Stillman, gentleman dog--then, in canvas hunting-coat and
+slouch-hat, tramped out of town southward, where the woods ended in
+prairie. Gertie's arrival was forgotten.
+
+It was a gipsy day. The sun rolled splendidly through the dry air,
+over miles of wheat stubble, whose gray-yellow prickles were
+transmuted by distance into tawny velvet, seeming only the more
+spacious because of the straight, thin lines of barbed-wire fences
+lined with goldenrod, and solitary houses in willow groves. The dips
+and curves of the rolling plain drew him on; the distances satisfied
+his eyes. A pleasant hum of insects filled the land's wide serenity
+with hidden life.
+
+Carl left a trail of happy, monotonous whistling behind him all day,
+as his dog followed the winding trail of prairie-chickens, as a covey
+of chickens rose with booming wings and he swung his shotgun for a
+bead. He stopped by prairie-sloughs or bright-green bogs to watch for
+a duck. He hailed as equals the occasional groups of hunters in
+two-seated buggies, quartering the fields after circling dogs. He
+lunched contentedly on sandwiches of cold lamb, and lay with his arms
+under his head, gazing at a steeple fully ten miles away.
+
+By six of the afternoon he had seven prairie-chickens tucked inside
+the long pocket that lined the tail of his coat, and he headed for
+home, superior to miles, his quiet eyes missing none of the purple
+asters and goldenrod.
+
+As he began to think he felt a bit guilty. The flowers suggested
+Gertie. He gathered a large bunch, poking stalks of aster among the
+goldenrod, examining the result at arm's-length. Yet when he stopped
+at the Rusks' in town, to bid Bennie take the rustic bouquet to
+Gertie, he replied to reproaches:
+
+"What you making all the fuss about my not being there to meet her
+for? She got here all right, didn't she? What j' expect me to do? Kiss
+her? You ought to known it was too good a day for hunting to miss....
+How's Gert? Have a good time in New York?"
+
+Carl himself took the flowers to her, however, and was so shyly
+attentive to her account of New York that he scarcely stopped to speak
+to the Cowleses' "hired girl," who was his second cousin.... Mrs.
+Cowles overheard him shout, "Hello, Lena! How's it going?" to the
+hired girl with cousinly ease. Mrs. Cowles seemed chilly. Carl
+wondered why.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From month to month of his junior year in high school Carl grew more
+discontented. He let the lines of his Cicero fade into a gray blur
+that confounded Cicero's blatant virtue and Cataline's treachery,
+while he pictured himself tramping with snow-shoes and a mackinaw coat
+into the snowy solemnities of the northern Minnesota tamarack swamps.
+Much of his discontent was caused by his learned preceptors. The
+teachers for this year were almost perfectly calculated to make any
+lad of the slightest independence hate culture for the rest of his
+life. With the earnestness and industry usually ascribed to the devil,
+"Prof" Sybrant E. Larsen (B. A. Platonis), Miss McDonald, and Miss
+Muzzy kept up ninety-five per cent. discipline, and seven per cent.
+instruction in anything in the least worth while.
+
+Miss Muzzy was sarcastic, and proud of it. She was sarcastic to Carl
+when he gruffly asked why he couldn't study French instead of "all
+this Latin stuff." If there be any virtue in the study of Latin (and
+we have all forgotten all our Latin except the fact that "suburb"
+means "under the city"--_i. e._, a subway), Carl was blinded to it for
+ever. Miss Muzzy wore eye-glasses and had no bosom. Carl's father used
+to say approvingly, "Dat Miss Muzzy don't stand for no nonsense," and
+Mrs. Dr. Rusk often had her for dinner.... Miss McDonald, fat and
+slow-spoken and kind, prone to use the word "dearie," to read
+Longfellow, and to have buttons off her shirt-waists, used on Carl a
+feminine weapon more unfair than the robust sarcasm of Miss Muzzy. For
+after irritating a self-respecting boy into rudeness by pawing his
+soul with damp, puffy hands, she would weep. She was a kind, honest,
+and reverent bovine. Carl sat under her supervision in the junior
+room, with its hardwood and blackboards and plaster, high windows and
+portraits of Washington and a President who was either Madison or
+Monroe (no one ever remembered which). He hated the eternal school
+smell of drinking-water pails and chalk and slates and varnish; he
+loathed the blackboard erasers, white with crayon-dust; he found
+inspiration only in the laboratory where "Prof" Larsen mistaught
+physics and rebuked questions about the useless part of
+chemistry--that is, the part that wasn't in their text-books.
+
+As for literature, Ben Rusk persuaded him to try Captain Marryat and
+Conan Doyle. Carl met Sherlock Holmes in a paper-bound book, during a
+wait for flocks of mallards on the duck-pass, which was a little
+temple of silver birches bare with November. He crouched down in his
+canvas coat and rubber boots, gun across knees, and read for an hour
+without moving. As he tramped home, into a vast Minnesota sunset like
+a furnace of fantastic coals, past the garnet-tinged ice of lakes, he
+kept his gun cocked and under his elbow, ready for the royal robber
+who was dogging the personage of Baker Street.
+
+He hunted much; distinguished himself in geometry and chemistry;
+nearly flunked in Cicero and English; learned to play an
+extraordinarily steady game of bottle pool at Eddie Klemm's.
+
+And always Gertie Cowles, gently hesitant toward Ben Rusk's affection,
+kept asking Carl why he didn't come to see her oftener, and play
+tiddledywinks.
+
+On the Friday morning before Christmas vacation, Carl and Ben Rusk
+were cleaning up the chemical laboratory, its pine experiment-bench
+and iron sink and rough floor. Bennie worried a rag in the sink with
+the resigned manner of a man who, having sailed with purple banners
+the sunset sea of tragedy, goes bravely on with a life gray and weary.
+
+The town was excited. Gertie Cowles was giving a party, and she had
+withdrawn her invitation to Eddie Klemm. Gertie was staying away from
+high school, gracefully recovering from a cold. For two weeks the
+junior and senior classes had been furtively exhibiting her
+holly-decked cards of invitation. Eddie had been included, but after
+his quarrel with Howard Griffin, a Plato College freshman who was
+spending the vacation with Ray Cowles, it had been explained to Eddie
+that perhaps he would be more comfortable not to come to the party.
+
+Gertie's brother, Murray, or "Ray," was the town hero. He had
+captained the high-school football team. He was tall and very
+black-haired, and he "jollied" the girls. It was said that twenty
+girls in Joralemon and Wakamin, and a "grass widow" in St. Hilary,
+wrote to him. He was now a freshman in Plato College, Plato,
+Minnesota. He had brought home with him his classmate, Howard Griffin,
+whose people lived in South Dakota and were said to be wealthy.
+Griffin had been very haughty to Eddie Klemm, when introduced to that
+brisk young man at the billiard-parlor, and now, the town eagerly
+learned, Eddie had been rejected of society.
+
+In the laboratory Carl was growling: "Well, say, Fatty, if it was
+right for them to throw Eddie out, where do I come in? His dad 's a
+barber, and mine 's a carpenter, and that's just as bad. Or how about
+you? I was reading that docs used to be just barbers."
+
+"Aw, thunder!" said Ben Rusk, the doctor's scion, uncomfortably,
+"you're just arguing. I don't believe that about doctors being
+barbers. Don't it tell about doctors 'way back in the Bible? Why, of
+course! Luke was a physician! 'Sides, it ain't a question of Eddie's
+being a barber's son. I sh'd think you'd realize that Gertie isn't
+well. She wouldn't want to have to entertain both Eddie and Griffin,
+and Griffin 's her guest; and besides----"
+
+"You're getting all tangled up. If I was to let you go on you'd trip
+over a long word and bust your dome. Come on. We've done enough
+cleaning. Le's hike. Come on up to the house and help me on my bobs. I
+got a new scheme for pivoting the back sled.... You just wait till
+to-night. I'm going to tell Gertie and Mister Howard Griffin just what
+I think of them for being such two-bit snobs. And your future
+ma-in-law. Gee! I'm glad I don't have to be in love with anybody, and
+become a snob! Come on."
+
+Out of this wholesome, democratic, and stuffy village life Carl
+suddenly stepped into the great world. A motor-car, the first he had
+ever seen, was drawn up before the Hennepin House.
+
+He stopped. His china-blue eyes widened. His shoulders shot forward to
+a rigid stoop of astonishment. His mouth opened. He gasped as they ran
+to join the gathering crowd.
+
+"A horseless carriage! Do you get that? There's one _here_!" He
+touched the bonnet of the two-cylinder 1901 car, and worshiped. "Under
+there--the engine! And there's where you steer.... I _will_ own
+one!... Gee! you're right, Fatty; I believe I will go to college. And
+then I'll study mechanical engineering."
+
+"Thought you said you were going to try and go to Annapolis and be a
+sailor."
+
+"No. Rats! I'm going to own a horseless carriage, and I'm going to
+tour every state in the Union.... Think of seeing mountains! And the
+ocean! And going twenty miles an hour, like a train!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+While Carl prepared for Gertie Cowles's party by pressing his trousers
+with his mother's flat-iron, while he blacked his shoes and took his
+weekly sponge-bath, he was perturbed by partisanship with Eddie Klemm,
+and a longing for the world of motors, and some anxiety as to how he
+could dance at the party when he could not dance.
+
+He clumped up the new stone steps of the Cowles house carelessly, not
+unusually shy, ready to tell Gertie what he thought of her treatment
+of Eddie. Then the front door opened and an agonized Carl was
+smothered in politeness. His second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses' "hired
+girl," was opening the door, stiff and uncomfortable in a cap, a black
+dress, and a small frilly apron that dangled on her boniness like a
+lace kerchief pinned on a broom-handle. Murray Cowles rushed up. He
+was in evening clothes!
+
+Behind Murray, Mrs. Cowles greeted Carl with thawed majesty: "We are
+so glad to have you, Carl. Won't you take your things off in the room
+at the head of the stairs?"
+
+An affable introduction to Howard Griffin (also in evening clothes)
+was poured on Carl like soothing balm. Said Griffin: "Mighty glad to
+meet you, Ericson. Ray told me you'd make a ripping sprinter. The
+captain of the track team 'll be on the lookout for you when you get
+to Plato. Course you're going to go there. The U. of Minn. is too
+big.... You'll _do_ something for old Plato. Wish I could. But all I
+can do is warble like a darn' dicky-bird. Have a cigarette?... They're
+just starting to dance. Come on, old man. Come on, Ray."
+
+Carl was drawn down-stairs and instantly precipitated into a dance
+regarding which he was sure only that it was either a waltz, a
+two-step, or something else. It filled with glamour the Cowles
+library--the only parlor in Joralemon that was called a library, and
+the only one with a fireplace or a polished hardwood floor. Grandeur
+was in the red lambrequins over the doors and windows; the bead
+portiere; a hand-painted coal-scuttle; small, round paintings of
+flowers set in black velvet; an enormous black-walnut bookcase with
+fully a hundred volumes; and the two lamps of green-mottled shades and
+wrought-iron frames, set on pyrographed leather skins brought from New
+York by Gertie. The light was courtly on the polished floor. Adelaide
+Benner--a new Adelaide, in chiffon over yellow satin, and
+patent-leather slippers--grinned at him and ruthlessly towed him into
+the tide of dancers. In the spell of society no one seemed to remember
+Eddie Klemm. Adelaide did not mention the incident.
+
+Carl found himself bumping into others, continually apologizing to
+Adelaide and the rest--and not caring. For he saw a vision! Each time
+he turned toward the south end of the room he beheld Gertie Cowles
+glorified.
+
+She was out of ankle-length dresses! She looked her impressive
+eighteen, in a foaming long white mull that showed her soft throat. A
+red rose was in her brown hair. She reclined in a big chair of leather
+and oak and smiled her gentlest, especially when Carl bobbed his head
+to her.
+
+He had always taken her as a matter of course; she had no age, no sex,
+no wonder. That afternoon she had been a negligible bit of Joralemon,
+to be accused of snobbery toward Eddie Klemm, and always to be watched
+suspiciously lest she "spring some New York airs on us."... Gertie had
+craftily seemed unchanged after her New York enlightenment till
+now--here she was, suddenly grown-up and beautiful, haloed with a
+peculiar magic, which distinguished her from all the rest of the
+world.
+
+"She's the one that would ride in that horseless carriage when I got
+it!" Carl exulted. "That must be a train, that thing she's got on."
+
+After the dance he disposed of Adelaide Benner as though she were only
+a sister. He hung over the back of Gertie's chair and urged: "I was
+awful sorry to hear you were sick.... Say, you look wonderful,
+to-night."
+
+"I'm so glad you could come to my party. Oh, I must speak to you
+about----Do you suppose you would ever get very, very angry at poor
+me? Me so bad sometimes."
+
+He cut an awkward little caper to show his aplomb, and assured her, "I
+guess probably I'll kill you some time, all right."
+
+"No, listen, Carl; I'm dreadfully serious. I hope you didn't go and
+get dreadfully angry at me about Eddie Klemm. I know Eddie 's good
+friends with you. And I did want to have him come to my party. But you
+see it was this way: Mr. Griffin is our guest (he likes you a _lot_,
+Carl. Isn't he a dandy fellow? I guess Adelaide and Hazel 're just
+crazy about him. I think he's just as swell as the men in New York).
+Eddie and he didn't get along very well together. It isn't anybody's
+fault, I don't guess. I thought Eddie would be lots happier if he
+didn't come, don't you see?"
+
+"Oh no, of course; oh yes, I see. Sure. I can see how----Say, Gertie,
+I never did know you could look so grown-up. I suppose now you'll
+never play with me."
+
+"I want you to be a good friend of mine always. We always have been
+awfully good friends, haven't we?"
+
+"Yes. Do you remember how we ran away?"
+
+"And how the Black Dutchman chassssed us!" Her sweet and complacent
+voice was so cheerful that he lost his awe of her new magic and
+chortled:
+
+"And how we used to play pum-pum-pull-away."
+
+She delicately leaned her cheek on a finger-tip and sighed: "Yes, I
+wonder if we shall ever be so happy as when we were young.... I don't
+believe you care to play with me so much now."
+
+"Oh, gee! Gertie! Like to----!" The shyness was on him again. "Say,
+are you feeling better now? You're all over being sick?"
+
+"Almost, now. I'll be back in school right after vacation."
+
+"It's you that don't want to play, I guess.... I can't get over that
+long white dress. It makes you look so--oh, you know, so, uh----"
+
+"They're going to dance again. I wish I felt able to dance."
+
+"Let me sit and talk to you, Gertie, instead of dancing."
+
+"I suppose you're dreadfully bored, though, when you could be down at
+the billiard-parlor?"
+
+"Yes, I could! Not! Eddie Klemm and his fancy vest wouldn't have much
+chance, alongside of Griffin in his dress-suit! Course I don't want to
+knock Eddie. Him and me are pretty good side-kicks----"
+
+"Oh no; I understand. It's just that people have to go with their own
+class, don't you think?"
+
+"Oh Yes. Sure. I do think so, myself." Carl said it with a spurious
+society manner. In Gertie's aristocratic presence he desired to keep
+aloof from all vulgar persons.
+
+"Of course, I think we ought to make allowances for Eddie's father,
+Carl, but then----"
+
+She sighed with the responsibilities of _noblesse oblige_; and Carl
+gravely sighed with her.
+
+He brought a stool and sat at her feet. Immediately he was afraid that
+every one was watching him. Ray Cowles bawled to them, as he passed in
+the waltz, "Watch out for that Carl, Gert. He's a regular badix."
+
+Carl's scalp tickled, but he tried to be very offhand in remarking:
+"You must have gotten that dress in New York, didn't you? Why haven't
+you ever told me about New York? You've hardly told me anything at
+all."
+
+"Well, I like that! And you never been near me to give me a chance!"
+
+"I guess I was kind of scared you wouldn't care much for Joralemon,
+after New York."
+
+"Why, Carl, you mustn't say that to me!"
+
+"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Gertie, honestly I didn't. I was
+just joking. I didn't think you'd take me seriously."
+
+"As though I could forget my old friends, even in New York!"
+
+"I didn't think that. Straight. Please tell me about New York. That's
+the place, all right. Jiminy! wouldn't I like to go there!"
+
+"I wish you could have been there, Carl. We had such fun in my school.
+There weren't any boys in it, but we----"
+
+"No boys in it? Why, how's that?"
+
+"Why, it was just for girls."
+
+"I see," he said, fatuously, completely satisfied.
+
+"We did have the best times, Carl. I _must_ tell you about one awfully
+naughty thing Carrie--she was my chum in school--and I did. There was
+a stock company on Twenty-third Street, and we were all crazy about
+the actors, especially Clements Devereaux, and one afternoon Carrie
+told the principal she had a headache, and I asked if I could go home
+with her and read her the assignments for next day (they called the
+lessons 'assignments' there), and they thought I was such a meek
+little country mouse that I wouldn't ever fib, and so they let us go,
+and what do you think we did? She had tickets for 'The Two Orphans' at
+the stock company. (You've never seen 'The Two Orphans,' have you?
+It's perfectly splendid. I used to weep my eyes out over it.) And
+afterward we went and waited outside, right near the stage entrance,
+and what do you think? The leading man, Clements Devereaux, went
+right by us as near as I am to you. Oh, _Carl_, I wish you could have
+seen him! Maybe he wasn't the handsomest thing! He had the blackest,
+curliest hair, and he wore a thumb ring."
+
+"I don't think much of all these hamfatters," growled Carl. "Actors
+always go broke and have to walk back to Chicago. Don't you think it
+'d be better to be a civil engineer or something like that, instead of
+having to slick up your hair and carry a cane? They're just dudes."
+
+"Why! of course, Carl, you silly boy! You don't suppose I'd take
+Clements seriously, do you? You silly boy!"
+
+"I'm not a boy."
+
+"I don't mean it that way." She sat up, touched his shoulder, and sank
+back. He blushed with bliss, and the fear that some one had seen, as
+she continued: "I always think of you as just as old as I am. We
+always will be, won't we?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Now you must go and talk to Doris Carson. Poor thing, she always is a
+wall-flower."
+
+However much he thought of common things as he left her, beyond those
+common things was the miracle that Gertie had grown into the one
+perfect, divinely ordained woman, and that he would talk to her again.
+He danced the Virginia reel. Instead of clumping sulkily through the
+steps, as at other parties, he heeded Adelaide Benner's lessons, and
+watched Gertie in the hope that she would see how well he was dancing.
+He shouted a demand that they play "Skip to Maloo," and cried down the
+shy girls who giggled that they were too old for the childish
+party-game. He howled, without prejudice in favor of any particular
+key, the ancient words:
+
+    "Rats in the sugar-bowl, two by two,
+    Bats in the belfry, two by two,
+    Rats in the sugar-bowl, two by two,
+        Skip to Maloo, my darling."
+
+In the nonchalant company of the smarter young bachelors up-stairs he
+smoked a cigarette. But he sneaked away. He paused at the bend in the
+stairs. Below him was Gertie, silver-gowned, wonderful. He wanted to
+go down to her. He would have given up his chance for a motor-car to
+be able to swagger down like an Eddie Klemm. For the Carl Ericson who
+sailed his ice-boat over inch-thick ice was timid now. He poked into
+the library, and in a nausea of discomfort he conversed with Mrs.
+Cowles, Mrs. Cowles doing the conversing.
+
+"Are you going to be a Republican or a Democrat, Carl?" asked the
+forbidding lady.
+
+"Yessum," mumbled Carl, peering over at Gertie's throne, where Ben
+Rusk was being cultured.
+
+"I hope you are having a good time. We always wish our young friends
+to have an especially good time at Gertrude's parties," Mrs. Cowles
+sniffed, and bowed away.
+
+Carl sat beside Adelaide Benner in the decorous and giggling circle
+that ringed the room, waiting for the "refreshments." He was healthily
+interested in devouring maple ice-cream and chocolate layer-cake. But
+all the while he was spying on the group gathering about Gertie--Ben
+Rusk, Howard Griffin, and Joe Jordan. He took the most strategic
+precautions lest some one think that he wanted to look at Gertie; made
+such ponderous efforts to prove he was care-free that every one knew
+something was the matter.
+
+Ben Rusk was taking no part in the gaiety of Howard and Joe. The
+serious man of letters was not easily led into paths of frivolity.
+Carl swore to himself: "Ben 's the only guy I know that's got any
+delicate feelings. He appreciates how Gertie feels when she's sick,
+poor girl. He don't make a goat of himself, like Joe.... Or maybe he's
+got a stomach-ache."
+
+"Post-office!" cried Howard Griffin to the room at large. "Come on!
+We're all of us going to be kids again, and play post-office. Who's
+the first girl wants to be kissed?"
+
+"The idea!" giggled Adelaide Benner.
+
+"Me for Adelaide!" bawled Joe Jordan.
+
+"Oh, Jo-oe, bet I kiss Gertie!" from Irving Lamb.
+
+"The idea!"
+
+"Just as if we were children----"
+
+"He must think we're kids again----"
+
+"Shamey! Winnie wants to be kissed, and Carl won't----"
+
+"I don't, either, so there----"
+
+"I think it's awful."
+
+"Bet I kiss Gertie----"
+
+Carl was furious at all of them as they strained their shoulders
+forward from their chairs and laughed. He asked himself, "Haven't
+these galoots got any sense?"
+
+To speak so lightly of kissing Gertie! He stared at the smooth
+rounding of her left cheek below the cheek-bone till it took a
+separate identity, and its white softness filled the room.
+
+Ten minutes afterward, playing "post-office," he was facing Gertie in
+the semi-darkness of the sitting-room, authorized by the game to kiss
+her; shut in with his divinity.
+
+She took his hand. Her voice was crooning, "Are you going to kiss me
+terribly hard?"
+
+He tried to be gracefully mocking: "Oh yes! Sure! I'm going to eat you
+alive."
+
+She was waiting.
+
+He wished that she would not hold his hand. Within he groaned, "Gee
+whiz! I feel foolish!" He croaked: "Do you feel better, now? You'll
+catch more cold in here, won't you? There's kind of a draught. Lemme
+look at this window."
+
+Crossing to the obviously tight window, he ran his finger along the
+edge of the sash with infinite care. He trembled. In a second, _now_,
+he had to turn and make light of the lips which he would fain have
+approached with ceremony pompous and lingering.
+
+Gertie flopped into a chair, laughing: "I believe you're afraid to
+kiss me! 'Fraid cat! You'll never be a squire of dames, like those
+actors are! All right for you!"
+
+"I am not afraid!" he piped.... Even his prized semi-bass voice had
+deserted him.... He rushed to the back of her chair and leaned over,
+confused, determined. Hastily he kissed her. The kiss landed on the
+tip of her cold nose.
+
+And the whole party was tumbling in, crying:
+
+"Time 's up! You can't hug her all evening!"
+
+"Did you see? He kissed her on the nose!"
+
+"Did he? Ohhhhh!"
+
+"Time 's up. Can't try it again."
+
+Joe Jordan, in the van, was dancing fantastically, scraping his
+forefinger at Carl, in token of disgrace.
+
+The riotous crowd, Gertie and Carl among them, flooded out again. To
+show that he had not minded the incident of the misplaced kiss, Carl
+had to be very loud and merry in the library for a few minutes; but
+when the game of "post-office" was over and Mrs. Cowles asked Ray to
+turn down the lamp in the sitting-room, Carl insisted:
+
+"I'll do it, Mrs. Cowles; I'm nearer 'n Ray," and bolted.
+
+He knew that he was wicked in not staying in the library and
+continuing his duties to the party. He had to crowd into a minute all
+his agonizing and be back at once.
+
+It was beautiful in the stilly sitting-room, away from the noisy
+crowd, to hear love's heart beating. He darted to the chair where
+Gertie had sat and guiltily kissed its arm. He tiptoed to the table,
+blew out the lamp, remembered that he should only have turned down the
+wick, tried to raise the chimney, burnt his fingers, snatched his
+handkerchief, dropped it, groaned, picked up the handkerchief, raised
+the chimney, put it on the table, searched his pockets for a match,
+found it, dropped it, picked it up from the floor, dropped his knife
+from his pocket as he stooped, felt itchy about the scalp, picked up
+the knife, relighted the lamp, exquisitely adjusted the chimney--and
+again blew out the flame. And swore.
+
+As darkness whirled into the room again the vision of Gertie came
+nearer. Then he understood his illness, and gasped: "Great jumping
+Jupiter on a high mountain! I guess--I'm--in--love! _Me!_"
+
+The party was breaking up. Each boy, as he accompanied a girl from the
+yellow lamplight into the below-zero cold, shouted and scuffled the
+snow, to indicate that there was nothing serious in his attentions,
+and immediately tried to manoeuver his girl away from the others.
+Mrs. Cowles was standing in the hall--not hurrying the guests away,
+you understand, but perfectly resigned to accepting any
+farewells--when Gertie, moving gently among them with little sounds of
+pleasure, penned Carl in a corner and demanded:
+
+"Are you going to see some one home? I suppose you'll forget poor me
+completely, now!"
+
+"I will not!"
+
+"I wanted to tell you what Ray and Mr. Griffin said about Plato and
+about being lawyers. Isn't it nice you'll know them when you go to
+Plato?"
+
+"Yes, it 'll be great."
+
+"Mr. Griffin 's going to be a lawyer and maybe Ray will, too, and why don't
+you think about being one? You can get to be a judge and know all the best
+people. It would be lovely.... Refining influences--they--that's----"
+
+"I couldn't ever be a high-class lawyer like Griffin will," said Carl,
+his head on one side, much pleased.
+
+"You silly boy, of course you could. I think you've got just as much
+brains as he has, and Ray says they all look up to him even in Plato.
+And I don't see why Plato isn't just as good--of course it isn't as
+large, but it's so select and the faculty can give you so much more
+individual attention, and I don't see why it isn't every bit as good
+as Yale and Michigan and all those Eastern colleges.... Howard--Mr.
+Griffin--he says that he wouldn't ever have thought of being a lawyer
+only a girl was such a good influence with him, and if you get to be a
+famous man, too, maybe I'll have been just a teeny-weeny bit of an
+influence, too, won't I?"
+
+"Oh _yes_!"
+
+"I must get back now and say good-by to my guests. Good night, Carl."
+
+"I am going to study--you just watch me; and if I do get to go to
+Plato----Oh, gee! you always have been a good influence----" He
+noticed that Doris Carson was watching them. "Well, I gotta be going.
+I've had a peach of a time. Good night."
+
+Doris Carson was expectantly waiting for one of the boys to "see her
+home," but Carl guiltily stole up to Ben Rusk and commanded:
+
+"Le's hike, Fatty. Le's take a walk. Something big to tell you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Carl kicked up the snow in moon-shot veils. The lake boomed. For all
+their woolen mittens, ribbed red-cotton wristlets, and plush caps with
+ear-laps, the cold seared them. Carl encouraged Ben to discourse of
+Gertie and the delights of a long and hopeless love. He discovered
+that, actually, Ben had suddenly fallen in love with Adelaide Benner.
+"Gee!" he exulted. "Maybe that gives me a chance with Gertie, then.
+But I won't let her know Ben ain't in love with her any more. Jiminy!
+ain't it lucky Gertie liked me just when Ben fell in love with
+somebody else! Funny the way things go; and her never knowing about
+Ben." He laid down his cards. While they plowed through the hard
+snow-drifts, swinging their arms against their chests like milkmen, he
+blurted out all his secret: that Gertie was the "slickest girl in
+town"; that no one appreciated her.
+
+"Ho, ho!" jeered Ben.
+
+"I thought you were crazy about her, and then you start kidding about
+her! A swell bunch of chivalry you got, you and your Galahad! You----"
+
+"Don't you go jumping on Galahad, or I'll fight!"
+
+"He was all right, but you ain't," said Carl. "You hadn't ought to
+ever sneer at love."
+
+"Why, you said, just this afternoon----"
+
+"You poor yahoo, I was only teasing you. No; about Gertie. It's like
+this: she was telling me a lot about how Griffin 's going to be a
+lawyer, about how much they make in cities, and I've about decided
+I'll be a lawyer."
+
+"Thought you were going to be a mechanical engineer?"
+
+"Well, can't a fellow change his mind? When you're an engineer you're
+always running around the country, and you never get shaved or
+anything, and there ain't any refining influences----"
+
+The absorbing game of "what we're going to be" made them forget snow
+and cold-squeezed fingers. Ben, it was decided, was to own a newspaper
+and support C. Ericson, Attorney-at-Law, in his dramatic run for state
+senator.
+
+Carl did not mention Gertie again. But it all meant Gertie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carl made his round trimming the arc-lights next day, apparently a
+rudely healthy young person, but really a dreamer love-lorn and
+misunderstood. He had found a good excuse for calling on Gertie, at
+noon, and had been informed that Miss Gertrude was taking a nap. He
+determined to go up the lake for rabbits. He doubted if he would ever
+return, and wondered if he would be missed. Who would care if he froze
+to death? He wouldn't! (Though he did seem to be taking certain
+precautions, by donning a mackinaw coat, two pairs of trousers, two
+pairs of woolen socks, and shoe-packs.)
+
+He was graceful as an Indian when he swept, on skees he had made
+himself, across miles of snow covering the lake and dazzling in the
+diffused light of an even gray sky. The reeds by the marshy shore were
+frost-glittering and clattered faintly. Marshy islands were lost in
+snow. Hummocks and ice-jams and the weaving patterns of mink tracks
+were blended in one white immensity, on which Carl was like a fly on a
+plaster ceiling. The world was deserted. But Carl was not lonely. He
+forgot all about Gertie as he cached his skees by the shore and
+prowled through the woods, leaping on brush-piles and shooting quickly
+when a rabbit ran out.
+
+When he had bagged three rabbits he was besieged by the melancholy of
+loneliness, the perfection of the silver-gowned Gertie. He wanted to
+talk. He thought of Bone Stillman.
+
+It was very likely that Bone was, as usual in winter, up beyond Big
+Bend, fishing for pickerel with tip-ups. A never-stopping dot in the
+dusk, Carl headed for Big Bend, three miles away.
+
+The tip-up fisher watches a dozen tip-ups--short, automatic
+fishing-rods, with lines running through the ice, the pivoted arm
+signaling the presence of a fish at the bait. Sometimes, for warmth,
+he has a tiny shanty, perhaps five feet by six in ground area, heated
+by a powder-can stove. Bone Stillman often spent the night in his
+movable shanty on the lake, which added to his reputation as village
+eccentric. But he was more popular, now, with the local sporting
+gentlemen, who found that he played a divine game of poker.
+
+"Hello, son!" he greeted Carl. "Come in. Leave them long legs of yours
+up on shore if there ain't room."
+
+"Say, Bone, do you think a fellow ever ought to join a church?"
+
+"Depends. Why?"
+
+"Well, suppose he was going to be a lawyer and go in for politics?"
+
+"Look here. What 're you thinking of becoming a lawyer for?"
+
+"Didn't say I was."
+
+"Of course you're thinking of it. Look here. Don't you know you've got a
+chance of seeing the world? You're one of the lucky people that can have a
+touch of the wanderlust without being made useless by it--as I have. You
+may, you _may_ wander in thought as well as on freight-trains, and discover
+something for the world. Whereas a lawyer----They're priests. They decide
+what's holy and punish you if you don't guess right. They set up codes that
+it takes lawyers to interpret, and so they perpetuate themselves. I don't
+mean to say you're extraordinary in having a chance to wander. Don't get
+the big-head over it. You're a pretty average young American. There's
+plenty of the same kind. Only, mostly they get tied up to something before
+they see what a big world there is to hike in, and I want to keep you from
+that. I'm not roasting lawyers----Yes, I am, too. They live in calf-bound
+books. Son, son, for God's sake live in life."
+
+"Yes, but look here, Bone; I was just thinking about it, that's all.
+You're always drumming it into me about not taking anything for
+granted. Anyway, by the time I go to Plato I'll know----"
+
+"D'you mean to say you're going to that back-creek nunnery? That
+Blackhaw University? Are you going to play checkers all through life?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know, now, Bone. Plato ain't so bad. A fellow's got to go
+some place so he can mix with people that know what's the proper thing
+to do. Refining influences and like that."
+
+"Proper! _Refining!_ Son, son, are you going to get Joralemonized? If
+you want what the French folks call the grand manner, if you're going
+to be a tip-top, A Number 1, genuwine grand senyor, or however they
+pronounce it, why, all right, go to it; that's one way of playing a
+big game. But when it comes down to a short-bit, fresh-water
+sewing-circle like Plato College, where an imitation scholar teaches
+you imitation translations of useless classics, and amble-footed girls
+teach you imitation party manners that 'd make you just as plumb
+ridic'lous in a real _salon_ as they would in a lumber-camp,
+why----Oh, sa-a-a-y! I've got it. Girls, eh? What girl 've you been
+falling in love with to get this Plato idea from, eh?"
+
+"Aw, I ain't in love, Bone."
+
+"No, I don't opine you are. At your age you got about as much chance
+of being in love as you have of being a grandfather. But somehow I
+seem to have a little old suspicion that you _think_ you're in love.
+But it's none of my business, and I ain't going to ask questions
+about it." He patted Carl on the shoulder, moving his arm with
+difficulty in their small, dark space. "Son, I've learned this in my
+life--and I've done quite some hiking at that, even if I didn't have
+the book-l'arnin' and the git-up-and-git to make anything out of my
+experience. It's a thing I ain't big enough to follow up, but I know
+it's there. Life is just a little old checker game played by the
+alfalfa contingent at the country store unless you've got an ambition
+that's too big to ever quite lasso it. You want to know that there's
+something ahead that's bigger and more beautiful than anything you've
+ever seen, and never stop till--well, till you can't follow the road
+any more. And anything or anybody that doesn't pack any surprises--get
+that?--_surprises_ for you, is dead, and you want to slough it like a
+snake does its skin. You want to keep on remembering that Chicago's
+beyond Joralemon, and Paris beyond Chicago, and beyond Paris--well,
+maybe there's some big peak of the Himalayas."
+
+For hours they talked, Bone desperately striving to make his dreams
+articulate to Carl--and to himself. They ate fish fried on the
+powder-can stove, with half-warm coffee. They walked a few steps
+outside the shack in the ringing cold, to stretch stiff legs. Carl saw
+a world of unuttered freedom and beauty forthshadowed in Bone's cloudy
+speech. But he was melancholy. For he was going to give up his
+citizenship in wonderland for Gertie Cowles.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gertie continued to enjoy ill health for another week. Every evening
+Carl walked past her house, hoping that he might see her at a window,
+longing to dare to call. Each night he pictured rescuing her from
+things--rescuing her from fire, from drowning, from evil men. He felt
+himself the more bound to her by the social recognition of having his
+name in the _Joralemon Dynamite_, the following Thursday:
+
+     One of the pleasantest affairs of the holiday season among
+     the younger set was held last Friday evening, when Gertrude
+     Cowles entertained a number of her young friends at a party
+     at her mother's handsome residence on Maple Hill. Among
+     those present were Mesdames Benner and Rusk, who came in for
+     a brief time to assist in the jollities of the evening,
+     Misses Benner, Carson, Wesselius, Madlund, Ripka, Smith,
+     Lansing, and Brick; and Messrs. Ray Cowles, his classmate
+     Howard Griffin, who is spending his vacation here from Plato
+     College, Carl Ericson, Joseph Jordan, Irving Lamb, Benjamin
+     Rusk, Nels Thorsten, Peter Schoenhof, and William T. Upham.
+     After dancing and games, which were thoroughly enjoyed by
+     all present, and a social hour spent in discussing the
+     events of the season in J. H. S., a most delicious repast
+     was served and the party adjourned, one and all voting that
+     they had been royally entertained.
+
+The glory was the greater because at least seven names had been
+omitted from the list of guests. Such social recognition satisfied
+Carl--for half an hour. Possibly it nerved him finally to call on
+Gertie.
+
+Since for a week he had been dreading a chilly reception when he
+should call, he was immeasurably surprised when he did call and got
+what he expected. He had not expected the fates to be so treacherous
+as to treat him as he expected, after he had disarmed them by
+expecting it.
+
+When he rang the bell he was an immensely grown-up lawyer (though he
+couldn't get his worn, navy-blue tie to hang exactly right). He turned
+into a crestfallen youth as Mrs. Cowles opened the door and
+waited--waited!--for him to speak, after a crisp:
+
+"Well? What is it, Carl?"
+
+"Why, uh, I just thought I'd come and see how Gertie is."
+
+"Gertrude is much better, thank you. I presume she will return to
+school at the end of vacation."
+
+The hall behind Mrs. Cowles seemed very stately, very long.
+
+"I've heard a lot saying they hoped she was better."
+
+"You may tell them that she is better."
+
+Mrs. Cowles shivered. No one could possibly have looked more like a
+person closing a door without actually closing one. "Lena!" she
+shrieked, "close the kitchen door. There's a draught." She turned back
+to Carl.
+
+The shy lover vanished. An angry young man challenged, "If Gertie 's
+up I think I'll come in a few minutes and see her."
+
+"Why, uh----" hesitated Mrs. Cowles.
+
+He merely walked in past her. His anger kept its own council, for he
+could depend upon Gertie's warm greeting--lonely Gertie, he would
+bring her the cheer of the great open.
+
+The piano sounded in the library, and the voice of the one perfect
+girl mingled with a man's tenor in "Old Black Joe." Carl stalked into
+the library. Gertie was there, much corseted, well powdered, wearing a
+blue foulard frenziedly dotted with white, and being cultured in
+company with Dr. Doyle, the lively young dentist who had recently
+taken an office in the National Bank Block. He was a graduate of the
+University of Minnesota--dental department. He had oily black hair,
+and smiled with gold-filled teeth before one came to the real point of
+a joke. He sang in the Congregational church choir, and played tennis
+in a crimson-and-black blazer--the only one in Joralemon.
+
+To Carl Dr. Doyle was dismayingly mature and smart. He horribly feared
+him as a rival. For the second time that evening he did not balk fate
+by fearing it. The dentist was a rival. After fluttering about the
+mature charms of Miss Dietz, the school drawing-teacher, and taking a
+tentative buggy-ride or two with the miller's daughter, Dr. Doyle was
+bringing all the charm of his professional position and professional
+teeth and patent-leather shoes to bear upon Gertie.
+
+And Gertie was interested. Obviously. She was all of eighteen
+to-night. She frowned slightly as she turned on the piano-stool at
+Carl's entrance, and mechanically: "This is a pleasant surprise."
+Then, enthusiastically: "Isn't it too bad that Dr. Doyle was out of
+town, or I would have invited him to my party, and he would have given
+us some of his lovely songs.... Do try the second verse, doctor. The
+harmony is so lovely."
+
+Carl sat at the other end of the library from Gertie and the piano,
+while Mrs. Cowles entertained him. He obediently said "Yessum" and
+"No, 'm" to the observations which she offered from the fullness of
+her lack of experience of life. He sat straight and still. Behind his
+fixed smile he was simultaneously longing to break into the musical
+fiesta, and envying the dentist's ability to get married without
+having to wait to grow up, and trying to follow what Mrs. Cowles was
+saying.
+
+She droned, while crocheting with high-minded industry a useless
+piano-scarf, "Do you still go hunting, Carl?"
+
+"Yessum. Quite a little rabbit-hunting. Oh, not very much."
+
+(At the distant piano, across the shining acres of floor, the mystical
+woman and a dentist had ceased singing, and were examining a fresh
+sheet of music. The dentist coyly poked his finger at her coiffure,
+and she slapped the finger, gurgling.)
+
+"I hope you don't neglect your school work, though, Carl." Mrs. Cowles
+held the scarf nearer the lamp and squinted at it, deliberately and
+solemnly, through the eye-glasses that lorded it atop her severe nose.
+A headachy scent of moth-balls was in the dull air. She forbiddingly
+moved the shade of the lamp about a tenth of an inch. She removed some
+non-existent dust from the wrought-iron standard. Her gestures said
+that the lamp was decidedly more chic than the pink-shaded hanging
+lamps, raised and lowered on squeaking chains, which characterized
+most Joralemon living-rooms. She glanced at the red lambrequin over
+the nearest window. The moth-ball smell grew more stupifying.
+
+Carl felt stuffy in the top of his nose as he mumbled, "Oh, I work
+pretty hard at chemistry, but, gee! I can't see much to all this
+Latin."
+
+"When you're a little _older_, Carl, you'll _learn_ that the things
+you like now aren't necessarily the things that are _good_ for you. I
+used to say to Gertrude--of course she is older than you, but she
+hasn't been a young lady for so very long, even yet--and I used to say
+to her, 'Gertrude, you will do exactly what I _tell_ you to, and not
+what you _want_ to do, and we shall make--no--more--words--_about_
+it!' And I think she _sees_ now that her mother was right about some
+things! Dr. Doyle said to me, and of course you know, Carl, that he's
+a very fine scholar--our pastor told me that the doctor reads French
+better than _he_ does, and the doctor's told me some things about
+modern French authors that I didn't know, and I used to read French
+almost as well as English, when I was a girl, my teachers all told
+me--and he says that he thinks that Gertrude has a very fine mind, and
+he was _so_ glad that she hasn't been taken in by all this wicked,
+hysterical way girls have to-day of thinking they know more than their
+mothers."
+
+"Yes, she is--Gertie is----I think she's got a very fine mind," Carl
+commented.
+
+(From the other end of the room Gertie could be overheard confiding to
+the dentist in tones of hushed and delicious adult scandal, "They say
+that when she was in St. Paul she----")
+
+"So," Mrs. Cowles serenely sniffed on, while the bridge of Carl's nose
+felt broader and broader, stretching wider and wider, as that stuffy
+feeling increased and the intensive heat stung his eyelids, "you see
+you mustn't think because you'd rather play around with the boys than
+study Latin, Carl, that it's the fault of your Latin-teacher." She
+nodded at him with a condescending smile that was infinitely
+insulting.
+
+He knew it and resented it, but he did not resent it actively, for he
+was busy marveling, "How the dickens is it I never heard Doc Doyle was
+stuck on Gertie? Everybody thought he was going with Bertha. Dang him,
+anyway! The way he snickers, you'd think she was his best girl."
+
+Mrs. Cowles was loftily pursuing her pillared way: "Latin was _known_
+to be the best study for developing the mind a long, long time----"
+And her clicking crochet-needles impishly echoed, "A long, _long_
+time," and the odor of moth-balls got down into Carl's throat, while
+in the golden Olympian atmosphere at the other end of the room Gertie
+coyly pretended to slap the dentist's hand with a series of tittering
+taps. "A long, _long_ time before either you or I were born, Carl, and
+we can't very well set ourselves up to be wiser than the wisest men
+that ever lived, now _can_ we?" Again the patronizing smile. "That
+would scarcely----"
+
+Carl resolved: "This 's got to stop. I got to do something." He felt
+her monologue as a blank steel wall which he could not pierce. Aloud:
+"Yes, that's so, I guess. Say, that's a fine dress Gertie 's got on
+to-night, ain't it.... Say, I been learning to play crokinole at Ben
+Rusk's. You got a board, haven't you? Would you like to play? Does the
+doctor play?"
+
+"Indeed, I haven't the slightest idea, but I have very little doubt
+that he does--he plays tennis so beautifully. He is going to teach
+Gertrude, in the spring." She stopped, and again held the scarf up to
+the light. "I am so glad that my girly, that was so naughty once and
+ran away with you--I don't think I shall _ever_ get over the awful
+fright I had that night!--I am so glad that, now she is growing up,
+clever people like Dr. Doyle appreciate her so much, so very much."
+
+She dropped her crochet to her lap and stared squarely at Carl. Her
+warning that he would do exceedingly well to go home was more than
+plain. He stared back, agitated but not surrendering. Deliberately,
+almost suavely, with ten years of experience added to the sixteen
+years that he had brought into the room, he said:
+
+"I'll see if they'd like to play." He sauntered to the other end of
+the room, abashed before the mystic woman, and ventured: "I saw Ray,
+to-day.... I got to be going, pretty quick, but I was wondering if you
+two felt like playing some crokinole?"
+
+Gertie said, slowly: "I'd like to, Carl, but----Unless you'd like to
+play, doctor?"
+
+"Why of course it's _comme il faut_ to play, Miss Cowles, but I was
+just hoping to have the pleasure of hearing you make some more of your
+delectable music," bowed the dentist, and Gertie bowed back; and their
+smiles joined in a glittery bridge of social aplomb.
+
+"Oh yes," from Carl, "that--yes, do----But you hadn't ought to play
+too much if you haven't been well."
+
+"Oh, Carl!" shrieked Gertie. "'Ought not to,' not 'hadn't ought to'!"
+
+"'Ought not to,'" repeated Mrs. Cowles, icily, while the dentist waved
+his hand in an amused manner and contributed:
+
+"Ought not to say 'hadn't ought to,' as my preceptor used to tell
+me.... I'd like to hear you sing Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life,' Miss
+Cowles."
+
+"Don't you think Longfellow's a bum poet?" growled Carl. "Bone
+Stillman says Longfellow's the grind-organ of poetry. Like this: 'Life
+is re-al, life is ear-nest, tum te diddle dydle dum!'"
+
+"Carl," ordered Mrs. Cowles, "you will please to never mention that
+Stillman person in my house!"
+
+"Oh, Carl!" rebuked Gertie. She rose from the piano-stool. Her essence
+of virginal femininity, its pure and cloistered and white-camisoled
+odor, bespelled Carl to fainting timidity. And while he was thus
+defenseless the dentist thrust:
+
+"Why, they tell me Stillman doesn't even believe the Bible!"
+
+Carl was not to retrieve his credit with Gertie, but he couldn't
+betray Bone Stillman. Hastily: "Yes, maybe, that way----Oh, say,
+doctor, Pete Jordan was telling me" (liar!) "that you were one of the
+best tennis-players at the U."
+
+Gertie sat down again.
+
+The dentist coyly fluffed his hair and deprecated, "Oh no, I wouldn't
+say that!"
+
+Carl had won. Instantly they three became a country club of urban
+aristocrats, who laughed at the poor rustics of Joralemon for knowing
+nothing of golf and polo. Carl was winning their tolerance--though not
+their close attention--by relating certain interesting facts from the
+inside pages of the local paper as to how far the tennis-rackets sold
+in one year would extend, if laid end to end, when he saw Gertie and
+her mother glance at the hall. Gertie giggled. Mrs. Cowles frowned. He
+followed their glance.
+
+Clumping through the hall was his second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses'
+"hired girl." Lena nodded and said, "Hallo, Carl!"
+
+Gertie and the dentist raised their eyebrows at each other.
+
+Carl talked for two minutes about something, he did not know what, and
+took his leave. In the intensity of his effort to be resentfully
+dignified he stumbled over the hall hat-rack. He heard Gertie yelp
+with laughter.
+
+"I _got_ to go to college--be worthy of her!" he groaned, all the way
+home. "And I can't afford to go to the U. of M. I'd like to be free,
+like Bone says, but I've got to go to Plato."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Plato College, Minnesota, is as earnest and undistinguished, as
+provincially dull and pathetically human, as a spinster missionary.
+Its two hundred or two hundred and fifty students come from the
+furrows, asking for spiritual bread, and are given a Greek root.
+Red-brick buildings, designed by the architect of county jails, are
+grouped about that high, bare, cupola-crowned gray-stone barracks, the
+Academic Building, like red and faded blossoms about a tombstone. In
+the air is the scent of crab-apples and meadowy prairies, for a time,
+but soon settles down a winter bitter as the learning of the Rev. S.
+Alcott Wood, D.D., the president. The town and college of Plato
+disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks.
+In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees
+shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on
+a frozen bed-sheet--no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no
+windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time
+individuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the
+prairie itself--far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops
+in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch
+with the fields. From droning class-rooms the victims of education see
+the rippling wheat in summer; and in winter the impenetrable wall of
+sky. Footsteps and quick laughter of men and girls, furtively flirting
+along the brick walls under the beautiful maples, do make Plato dear
+to remember. They do not make it brilliant. They do not explain the
+advantages of leaving the farm for another farm.
+
+To the freshman, Carl Ericson, descending from the dusty smoking-car
+of the M. & D., in company with tumultuous youths in pin-head caps and
+enormous sweaters, the town of Plato was metropolitan. As he walked
+humbly up Main Street and beheld two four-story buildings and a marble
+bank and an interurban trolley-car, he had, at last, an idea of what
+Minneapolis and Chicago must be. Two men in sweaters adorned with a
+large "P," athletes, generals, heroes, walked the streets in the
+flesh, and he saw--it really was there, for him!--the "College Book
+Store," whose windows were filled with leather-backed treatises on
+Greek, logic, and trigonometry; and, finally, he was gaping through a
+sandstone gateway at four buildings, each of them nearly as big as the
+Joralemon High School, surrounding a vast stone castle.
+
+He entered the campus. He passed an old man with white side-whiskers
+and a cord on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses; an aged old man who might
+easily be a professor. A blithe student with "Y. M. C. A. Receptn.
+Com." large on his hat-band, rushed up to Carl, shook his hand busily,
+and inquired:
+
+"Freshman, old man? Got your room yet? There's a list of
+rooming-houses over at the Y. M. Come on, I'll show you the way."
+
+He was received in Academe, in Arcadia, in Elysium; in fact, in Plato
+College.
+
+He was directed to a large but decomposing house conducted by the
+widow of a college janitor, and advised to take a room at $1.75 a week
+for his share of the rent. That implied taking with the room a large,
+solemn room-mate, fresh from teaching country school, a heavy,
+slow-spoken, serious man of thirty-one, named Albert Smith, registered
+as A. Smith, and usually known as "Plain Smith." Plain Smith sat
+studying in his cotton socks, and never emptied the wash-basin. He
+remarked, during the first hour of their discourse in the groves of
+Academe: "I hope you ain't going to bother me by singing and
+skylarking around. I'm here to work, bub." Smith then returned to the
+large books which he was diligently scanning that he might find
+wisdom, while Carl sniffed at the brown-blotched wall-paper, the faded
+grass matting, the shallow, standing wardrobe.... He liked the house,
+however. It had a real bath-room! He could, for the first time in his
+life, splash in a tub. Perhaps it would not be regarded as modern
+to-day; perhaps effete souls would disdain its honest tin tub, smeared
+with a paint that peeled instantly; but it was elegance and the
+Hesperides compared with the sponge and two lard-pails of hot water
+from the Ericson kitchen reservoir, which had for years been his
+conception of luxurious means of bathing.
+
+Also, there were choicer spirits in the house. One man, who pressed
+clothes for a living and carried a large line of cigarettes in his
+room, was second vice-president of the sophomore class. As smoking was
+dourly forbidden to all Platonians, the sophomore's room was a refuge.
+The sophomore encouraged Carl in his natural talent for cheerful
+noises, while Plain Smith objected even to singing while one dressed.
+
+Like four of his classmates, Carl became a waiter at Mrs. Henkel's
+student boarding-house, for his board and two dollars a week. The two
+dollars constituted his pin-money--a really considerable sum for
+Plato, where the young men were pure and smoked not, neither did they
+drink; where evening clothes were snobbish and sweaters thought rather
+well of; where the only theatrical attractions were week-stand
+melodramas playing such attractions as "Poor but True," or the Rev.
+Sam J. Pitkins's celebrated lecture on "The Father of Lies," annually
+delivered at the I.O.O.F. Hall.
+
+Carl's father assured him in every letter that he was extravagant. He
+ran through the two dollars in practically no time at all. He was a
+member in good and regular standing of the informal club that hung
+about the Corner Drug Store, to drink coffee soda and discuss
+athletics and stare at the passing girls. He loved to set off his
+clear skin and shining pale hair with linen collars, though soft
+roll-collar shirts were in vogue. And he was ready for any wild
+expedition, though it should cost fifty or sixty cents. With the
+sophomore second vice-president and John Terry of the freshman class
+(usually known as "the Turk") he often tramped to the large
+neighboring town of Jamaica Mills to play pool, smoke Turkish
+cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused Plato songs, in
+long-drawn close harmony. Once they had imported English ale, out of
+bottles, and carried the bottles back to decorate and distinguish
+their rooms.
+
+Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl
+students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little
+college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it
+never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of
+the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters
+as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she
+did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then
+before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen
+washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they
+discussed the value of the "classical course" _versus_ the "scientific
+course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and
+arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's
+dining-room--a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a
+gilded rope portiere, a comfortable rocker with a Plato cushion, a
+Garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-framed
+photograph of the champion Plato football team of 1899.
+
+Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the
+piano in the evening. His graceful-seeming body, his puppyish
+awkwardness, his quietly belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of
+new things, won him respect; though he was too boyish to rouse
+admiration, except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful,
+fuzzy-haired, candy-eating Mae Thurston. Mae so influenced Carl that
+he learned to jest casually; and he practised a new dance, called the
+"Boston," which Mae had brought from Minneapolis, though as a rival to
+the waltz and two-step the new dance was ridiculed by every one. He
+mastered all the _savoir faire_ of the boarding-house. But he was
+always hurrying away from it to practise football, to prowl about the
+Plato power-house, to skim through magazines in the Y. M. C. A.
+reading-room, even to study.
+
+Beyond the dish-washing and furnace-tending set he had no probable
+social future, though everybody knew everybody at Plato. Those
+immaculate upper-classmen, Murray Cowles and Howard Griffin, never
+invited him to their room (in a house on Elm Street with a screened
+porch and piano sounds). He missed Ben Rusk, who had gone to Oberlin
+College, and Joe Jordan, who had gone to work for the Joralemon
+Specialty Manufacturing Company.
+
+Life at Plato was suspicious, prejudiced, provincial, as it affected
+the ambitious students; and for the weaker brethren it was
+philandering and vague. The class work was largely pure rot--arbitrary
+mathematics, antiquated botany, hesitating German, and a veritable
+military drill in the conjunction of Greek verbs conducted by a man
+with a non-com. soul, a pompous, sandy-whiskered manikin with cold
+eyes and a perpetual cold in the nose, who had inflicted upon a
+patient world the four-millionth commentary on Xenophon. Few of the
+students realized the futility of it all; certainly not Carl, who
+slept well and believed in football.
+
+The life habit justifies itself. One comes to take anything as a
+matter of course; to take one's neighbors seriously, whether one lives
+in Plato or Persia, in Mrs. Henkel's kitchen or a fo'c's'le. The
+Platonians raced toward their various goals of high-school teaching,
+or law, or marriage, or permanently escaping their parents; they made
+love, and were lazy, and ate, and swore off bad habits, and had
+religious emotions, all quite naturally; they were not much bored,
+rarely exhilarated, always ready to gossip about their acquaintances;
+precisely like a duke or a delicatessen-keeper. They played out their
+game. But it was so tiny a game, so played to the exclusion of all
+other games, that it tended to dwarf its victims--and the restless
+children, such as Carl, instinctively resent this dwarfing. They seek
+to associate themselves with other rebels. Carl's unconscious rebel
+band was the group of rowdyish freshmen who called themselves "the
+Gang," and loafed about the room of their unofficial captain, John
+Terry, nicknamed "the Turk," a swarthy, large-featured youth with a
+loud laugh, a habit of slapping people upon the shoulder, an ingenious
+mind for deviltry, and considerable promise as a football end.
+
+Most small local colleges, and many good ones, have their "gangs" of
+boys, who presumably become honorable men and fathers, yet who in
+college days regard it as heroic to sneak out and break things, and as
+humorous to lead countryside girls astray in sordid amours. The more
+cloistered the seat of learning, the more vicious are the active boys,
+to keep up with the swiftness of life forces. The Turk's gang painted
+the statues of the Memorial Arch; they stole signs; they were the
+creators of noises unexpected and intolerable, during small, quiet
+hours of moonlight.
+
+As the silkworm draws its exquisite stuff from dowdy leaves, so youth
+finds beauty and mystery in stupid days. Carl went out unreservedly to
+practise with the football squad; he had a joy of martyrdom in
+tackling the dummy and peeling his nose on the frozen ground. He knew
+a sacred aspiration when Mr. Bjorken, the coach, a former University
+of Minnesota star, told him that he might actually "make" the team in
+a year or two; that he had twice as much chance as Ray Cowles,
+who--while Carl was thinking only of helping the scrub team to
+win--was too engrossed in his own dignity as a high-school notable to
+get into the scrimmage.
+
+At the games, among the Gang on the bleachers, Carl went mad with
+fervor. He kept shooting to his feet, and believed that he was saving
+his country every time he yelled in obedience to the St. Vitus
+gestures of the cheer-leader, or sang "On the Goal-line of Plato" to
+the tune of "On the Sidewalks of New York." Tears of a real patriotism
+came when, at the critical moment of a losing game against the
+Minnesota Military Institute, with sunset forlorn behind bare trees,
+the veteran cheer-leader flung the hoarse Plato rooters into another
+defiant yell. It was the never-say-die of men who rose, with clenched
+hands and arms outstretched, to the despairing need of their college,
+and then--Lord! They hurled up to their feet in frenzy as Pete Madlund
+got away with the ball for a long run and victory.... The next week,
+when the University of Keokuk whipped them, 40 to 10, Carl stood
+weeping and cheering the defeated Plato team till his throat burned.
+
+He loved the laughter of the Turk, Mae Thurston's welcome, experiments
+in the physics laboratory. And he was sure that he was progressing
+toward the state of grace in which he might aspire to marry Gertie
+Cowles.
+
+He did not think of her every day, but she was always somewhere in his
+thoughts, and the heroines of magazine stories recalled some of her
+virtues to his mind, invariably. The dentist who had loved her had
+moved away. She was bored. She occasionally wrote to Carl. But she was
+still superior--tried to "influence him for good" and advised him to
+"cultivate nice people."
+
+He was convinced that he was going to become a lawyer, for her sake,
+but he knew that some day he would be tempted by the desire to become
+a civil or a mechanical engineer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A January thaw. Carl was tramping miles out into the hilly country
+north of Plato. He hadn't been able to persuade any of the Gang to
+leave their smoky loafing-place in the Turk's room, but his own lungs
+demanded the open. With his heavy boots swashing through icy pools,
+calling to an imaginary dog and victoriously running Olympic races
+before millions of spectators, he defied the chill of the day and
+reached Hiawatha Mound, a hill eight miles north of Plato.
+
+Toward the top a man was to be seen crouched in a pebbly, sunny
+arroyo, peering across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending,
+Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That
+amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that
+"Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the
+head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek
+books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of
+merit in the three manly arts--athletics, flirting, and breaking rules
+by smoking. Genie was small, anemic, and too well dressed. He
+stuttered slightly and was always peering doubtfully at you with large
+and childish eyes that were made more eerie by his pale, bulbous
+forehead and the penthouse of tangled mouse-brown hair over it.... The
+Gang often stopped him on the campus to ask mock-polite questions
+about his ambition, which was to be a teacher of English at Harvard or
+Yale. Not very consistently, but without ever wearying of the jest,
+they shadowed him to find out if he did not write poetry; and while no
+one had actually caught him, he was still suspect.
+
+Genie said nothing when Carl called, "H'lo, son!" and sat on a
+neighboring rock.
+
+"What's trouble, Genie? You look worried."
+
+"Why don't any of you fellows like me?"
+
+Carl felt like a bug inspected by a German professor. "W-why, how
+d'you mean, Genie?"
+
+"None of you take me seriously. You simply let me hang around. And you
+think I'm a grind. I'm not. I like to read, that's all. Perhaps you
+think I shouldn't like to go out for athletics if I could! I wish I
+could run the way you can, Ericson. Darn it! I was happy out here by
+myself on the Mound, where every prospect pleases, and--'n' now here I
+am again, envying you."
+
+"Why, son, I--I guess--I guess we admire you a whole lot more than we
+let on to. Cheer up, old man! When you're valedictorian and on the
+debating team and wallop Hamlin you'll laugh at the Gang, and we'll be
+proud to write home we know you." Carl was hating himself for ever
+having teased Genie Linderbeck. "You've helped me a thundering lot
+whenever I've asked you about that blame Greek syntax. I guess we're
+jealous of you. You--uh--you don't want to _let_ 'em kid you----"
+
+Carl was embarrassed before Genie's steady, youthful, trusting gaze.
+He stooped for a handful of pebbles, with which he pelted the
+landscape, maundering, "Say, why don't you come around to the Turk's
+room and get better acquainted with the Gang?"
+
+"When shall I come?"
+
+"When? Oh, why, thunder!--you know, Genie--just drop in any time."
+
+"I'll be glad to."
+
+Carl was perspiring at the thought of what the Gang would do to him
+when they discovered that he had invited Genie. But he was game. "Come
+up to my room whenever you can, and help me with my boning," he added.
+"You mustn't ever get the idea that we're conferring any blooming
+favor by having you around. It's you that help us. Our necks are
+pretty well sandpapered, I'm afraid.... Come up to my room any
+time.... I'll have to be hiking on if I'm going to get much of a walk.
+Come over and see me to-night."
+
+"I wish you'd come up to Mr. Frazer's with me some Sunday afternoon
+for tea, Ericson."
+
+Henry Frazer, M.A. (Yale), associate professor of English literature,
+was a college mystery. He was a thin-haired young man, with a
+consuming love of his work, which was the saving of souls by teaching
+Lycidas and Comus. This was his first year out of graduate school, his
+first year at Plato--and possibly his last. It was whispered about
+that he believed in socialism, and the president, the Rev. Dr. S.
+Alcott Wood, had no patience with such silly fads.
+
+Carl marveled, "Do you go to Frazer's?"
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+"Thought everybody was down on him. They say he's an anarchist, and I
+know he gives fierce assignments in English lit.; that's what all the
+fellows in his classes say."
+
+"All the fools are down on him. That's why I go to his house."
+
+"Don't the fellows--uh--kind of----"
+
+"Yes," piped Genie in his most childish tone of anger, his tendency to
+stammer betraying him, "they k-kid me for liking Frazer. He's--he's
+the only t-teacher here that isn't p-p-p----"
+
+"Spit!"
+
+"----provincial!"
+
+"What d'you mean by 'provincial'?"
+
+"Narrow. Villagey. Do you know what Bernard Shaw says----?"
+
+"Never read a word of him, my son. And let me tell you that my idea of
+no kind of conversation is to have a guy spring 'Have you read?' on me
+every few seconds, and me coming back with: 'No, I haven't. Ain't it
+interesting!' If that's the brand of converse at Prof Frazer's you can
+count me out."
+
+Genie laughed. "Think how much more novelty you get out of roasting me
+like that than telling Terry he's got 'bats in his belfry' ten or
+twelve times a day."
+
+"All right, my son; you win. Maybe I'll go to Frazer's with you.
+Sometime."
+
+The Sunday following Carl went to tea at Professor Henry Frazer's.
+
+The house was Platonian without, plain and dumpy, with gingerbread
+Gothic on the porch, blistered paint, and the general lines of a
+prairie barn, but the living-room was more nearly beautiful than any
+room Carl had seen. In accordance with the ideal of that era it had
+Mission furniture with large leather cushions, brown wood-work, and
+tan oatmeal paper scattered with German color prints, instead of the
+patent rockers and carbon prints of Roman monuments which adorned the
+houses of the other professors. While waiting with Genie Linderbeck
+for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table
+such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound
+in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs,
+heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic
+legends and Provencal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters
+of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books
+and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his
+experiences of literature that he suddenly believed in culture.
+
+Professor Frazer appeared, walking into the room _after_ his fragile
+wife and gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon
+instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few
+stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an
+Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor
+Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in
+brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars,
+and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" seniors,
+listened with nodding interest while Carl bashfully analyzed each of
+the nine cars owned in Plato and Jamaica Mills. At dusk the Diana in
+brown played MacDowell, and the light of the silken-shaded lamp was
+on a print of a fairy Swiss village.
+
+That evening Carl wrestled with the Turk for one hour,
+catch-as-catch-can, on the Turk's bed and under it and nearly out of
+the window, to prove the value of Professor Frazer and culture. Next
+morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in
+modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt
+Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt
+Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling
+from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of
+emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes,
+rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair of
+scissors on his knee, and persisted in his violent pursuit of the
+beautiful. Meanwhile his room-mate, Plain Smith, flapped the pages of
+a Latin lexicon or took a little recreation by reading the Rev. Mr.
+Todd's _Students' Manual_, that gem of the alarm-clock and
+water-bucket epoch in American colleges.
+
+Carl never understood Genie Linderbeck's conviction that words are
+living things that dream and sing and battle. But he did learn that
+there was speech transcending the barking of the Gang.
+
+In the spring of his freshman year Carl gave up waiting on table and
+drove a motor-car for a town banker. He learned every screw and spring
+in the car. He also made Genie go out with him for track athletics.
+Carl won his place on the college team as a half-miler, and viciously
+assaulted two freshmen and a junior for laughing at Genie's legs,
+which stuck out of his large running-pants like straws out of a
+lemonade-glass.
+
+In the great meet with Hamlin University, though Plato lost most of
+the events, Carl won the half-mile race. He was elected to the
+exclusive fraternity of Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, Omega Chi
+Delta, just before Commencement. That excited him less than the fact
+that the Turk and he were to spend the summer up north, in the
+hard-wheat country, stringing wire for the telephone company with a
+gang of Minneapolis wiremen.
+
+Oh yes. And he would see Gertie in Joralemon.... She had written to
+him with so much enthusiasm when he had won the half-mile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+He saw Gertie two hours after he had reached Joralemon for a week's
+stay before going north. They sat in rockers on the grass beside her
+stoop. They were embarrassed, and rocked profusely and chattily. Mrs.
+Cowles was surprised and not much pleased to find him, but Gertie
+murmured that she had been lonely, and Carl felt that he must be nobly
+patient under Mrs. Cowles's slight. He got so far as to sigh, "O
+Gertie!" but grew frightened, as though he were binding himself for
+life. He wished that Gertie were not wearing so many combs stuck all
+over her pompadoured hair. He noted that his rocker creaked at the
+joints, and thought out a method of strengthening it by braces. She
+bubbled that he was going to be the Big Man in his class. He said,
+"Aw, rats!" and felt that his collar was too tight.... He went home.
+His father remarked that Carl was late for supper, that he had been
+extravagant in Plato, and that he was unlikely to make money out of
+"all this runnin' races." But his mother stroked his hair and called
+him her big boy.... He tramped out to Bone Stillman's shack, impatient
+for the hand-clasp of the pioneer, and grew eloquent, for the first
+time since his home-coming, as he described Professor Frazer and the
+delights of poesy. A busy week Carl had in Joralemon. Adelaide Benner
+gave a porch-supper for him. They sat under the trees, laughing, while
+in the dimly lighted street bicycles whirred, and box-elders he had
+always known whispered that this guest of honor was Carl Ericson, come
+home a hero.
+
+The cycling craze still existed in Joralemon. Carl rented a wheel for
+a week from the Blue Front Hardware Store. Once he rode with a party
+of boys and girls to Tamarack Lake. Once he rode to Wakamin with Ben
+Rusk, home from Oberlin College. The ride was not entirely enjoyable,
+because Oberlin had nearly two thousand students and Ben was amusedly
+superior about Plato. They did, however, enjoy the stylishness of
+buying bottles of strawberry pop at Wakamin.
+
+Twice Carl rode to Tamarack Lake with Gertie. They sat on the shore,
+and while he shied flat skipping-stones across the water and flapped
+his old cap at the hovering horse-flies he babbled of the Turk's
+"stunts," and the banker's car, and the misty hinterlands of Professor
+Frazer's lectures. Gertie appeared interested, and smiled at regular
+intervals, but so soon as Carl fumbled at one of Frazer's abstract
+theories she interrupted him with highly concrete Joralemon gossip....
+He suspected that she had not kept up with the times. True, she
+referred to New York, but as the reference was one she had been using
+these two years he still identified her with Joralemon.... He did not
+even hold her hand, though he wondered if it might not be possible;
+her hand lay so listlessly by her skirt, on the sand.... They rode
+back in twilight of early June. Carl was cheerful as their wheels
+crunched the dirt roads in a long, crisp hum. The stilly rhythm of
+frogs drowned the clank of their pedals, and the sky was vast and pale
+and wistful.
+
+Gertie, however, seemed less cheerful.
+
+On the last evening of his stay in Joralemon Gertie gave him a
+hay-ride party. They sang "Seeing Nelly Home," and "Merrily We Roll
+Along," and "Suwanee River," and "My Old Kentucky Home," and "My
+Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and "In the Good Old Summertime," under a
+delicate new moon in a sky of apple-green. Carl pressed Gertie's hand;
+she returned the pressure so quickly that he was embarrassed. He
+withdrew his hand as quickly as possible, ostensibly to help in the
+unpacking of the basket of ginger-ale and chicken sandwiches and three
+cakes (white-frosted, chocolate layer, and banana cake).
+
+The same group said good-by to Carl at the M. & D. station. As the
+train started, Carl saw Gertie turn away disconsolately, her shoulders
+so drooping that her blouse was baggy in the back. He mourned that he
+had not been more tender with her that week. He pictured himself
+kissing Gertie on the shore of Tamarack Lake, enfolded by afternoon
+and the mystery of sex and a protecting reverence for Gertie's
+loneliness. He wanted to go back--back for one more day, one more ride
+with Gertie. But he picked up a mechanics magazine, glanced at an
+article on gliders, read in the first paragraph a prophecy about
+aviation, slid down in his seat with his head bent over the
+magazine--and the idyl of Gertie and afternoon was gone.
+
+He was reading the article on gliders in June, 1905, so early in the
+history of air conquest that its suggestions were miraculous to him;
+for it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world
+by his flights at Le Mans; four years before Bleriot was to cross the
+Channel--though, indeed, it was a year and a half after the Wrights'
+first secret ascent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kittyhawk, and
+fourteen years after Lilienthal had begun that epochal series of
+glider-flights which was followed by the experiments of Pilcher and
+Chanute, Langley and Montgomery.
+
+The article declared that if gasoline or alcohol engines could be made
+light enough we should all be aviating to the office in ten years;
+that now was the time for youngsters to practise gliding, as pioneers
+of the new age. Carl "guessed" that flying would be even better than
+automobiling. He made designs for three revolutionary new aeroplanes,
+drawing on the margins of the magazine with a tooth-mark-pitted pencil
+stub.
+
+Gertie was miles back, concealed behind piles of triplanes and
+helicopters and following-surface monoplanes which the wizard
+inventor, C. Ericson, was creating and ruthlessly destroying.... A
+small boy was squalling in the seat opposite, and Carl took him from
+his tired mother and lured him into a game of tit-tat-toe.
+
+He joined the Turk and the wire-stringers at a prairie
+hamlet--straggly rows of unpainted frame shanties, the stores with
+tin-corniced false fronts that pretended to be two stories high. There
+were pig-pens in the dooryards, and the single church had a square,
+low, white steeple like the paper cap which Labor wears in the
+posters. Farm-wagons were hitched before a gloomy saloon. Carl was
+exceeding glum. But the Turk introduced him to a University of
+Minnesota Pharmacy School student who was with the crew during
+vacation, and the three went tramping across breezy, flowered
+prairies. So began for Carl a galloping summer.
+
+The crew strung telephone wire from pole to pole all day, playing the
+jokes of hardy men, and on Sunday loafed in haystacks, recalling
+experiences from Winnipeg to El Paso. Carl resolved to come back to
+this life of the open, with Gertie, after graduation. He would buy a
+ranch "on time." Or the Turk and Carl would go exploring in Alaska or
+the Orient. "Law?" he would ask himself in monologues, "law? Me in a
+stuffy office? Not a chance!"
+
+The crew stayed for four weeks in a boom town of nine thousand,
+installing a complete telephone system. South-east of the town lay
+rolling hills. As Carl talked with the Turk and the Pharmacy School
+man on a hilltop, the first evening of their arrival, he told them the
+scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these
+hills were of the sort Lilienthal would probably have chosen for his
+glider-flights.
+
+"Say! by the great Jim Hill, let's make us a glider!" he exulted,
+sitting up, his eyelids flipping rapidly.
+
+"Sure!" said the Pharmacy man. "How would you make one?"
+
+"Why--uh--I guess you could make a frame out of willow--have to; the
+willows along the creeks are the only kind of trees near here. You'd
+cover it with varnished cotton--that's what Lilienthal did, anyway.
+But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved--cambered--like
+he did. You got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays.
+Like a quarter barrel-hoop.... I guess it would be better to try to
+make a Chanute glider--just a plain pair of sup'rimposed planes,
+instead of one all combobulated like a bat's wings, like Lilienthal's
+glider was.... Or we could try some experiments with paper
+models----Oh no! Thunder! Let's make a glider."
+
+They did.
+
+They studied with aching heads the dry-looking tables of lift and
+resistance for which Carl telegraphed to Chicago. Stripped to their
+undershirts, they worked all through the hot prairie evenings in the
+oil-smelling, greasy engine-room of the local power-house, in front of
+the dynamos, which kept evilly throwing out green sparks and rumbling
+the mystic syllable "Om-m-m-m," to greet their modern magic.
+
+They hunted for three-quarter-inch willow rods, but discarded them for
+seasoned ash from the lumber-yard. They coated cotton with thin
+varnish. They stopped to dispute furiously over angles of incidence,
+bellowing, "Well, look here then, you mutton-head; I'll draw it for
+you."
+
+On their last Sunday in the town they assembled the glider,
+single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span, with a
+tail, and with a double bar beneath the plane, by which the pilot was
+to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the
+plane, balancing the glider by movements of his body.
+
+At dawn on Monday they loaded the glider upon a wagon and galloped
+with it out to a forty-foot hill. They stared down the easy slope,
+which grew in steepness and length every second, and thought about
+Lilienthal's death.
+
+"W-w-well," shivered the Turk, "who tries it first?"
+
+All three pretended to be adjusting the lashings, waiting for one
+another, till Carl snarled, "Oh, all _right_! I'll do it if I got to."
+
+"Course it breaks my heart to see you swipe the honor," the Turk said,
+"but I'm unselfish. I'll let you do it. Brrrr! It's as bad as the
+first jump into the swimming-hole in spring."
+
+Carl was smiling at the comparison as they lifted the glider, with him
+holding the bars beneath. The plane was instantly buoyed up like a
+cork on water as the fifteen-mile head-wind poured under it. He
+stopped smiling. This was a dangerous living thing he was going to
+guide. It jerked at him as he slipped his arms over the suspended
+bars. He wanted to stop and think this all over. "Get it done!" he
+snapped at himself, and began to run down-hill, against the wind.
+
+The wind lifted the plane again. With a shock Carl knew that his feet
+had left the ground. He was actually flying! He kicked wildly in air.
+All his body strained to get balance in the air, to control itself, to
+keep from falling, of which he now felt the world-old instinctive
+horror.
+
+The plane began to tip to one side, apparently irresistibly, like a
+sheet of paper turning over in the wind. Carl was sick with fear for a
+tenth of a second. Every cell in his body shrank before coming
+disaster. He flung his legs in the direction opposite to the tipping
+of the plane. With this counter-balancing weight, the glider righted.
+It was running on an even keel, twenty-five feet above the sloping
+ground, while Carl hung easily by the double bar beneath, like a
+circus performer with a trapeze under each arm. He ventured to glance
+down. The turf was flowing beneath him, a green and sunny blur. He
+exulted. Flying!
+
+The glider dipped forward. Carl leaned back, his arms wide-spread. A
+gust struck the plane, head on. Overloaded at the back, it tilted
+back, then soared up to thirty-five or forty feet. Slow-seeming,
+inevitable, the whole structure turned vertically upward.
+
+Carl dangled there against a flimsy sheet of wood and cotton, which
+for part of a second stuck straight up against the wind, like a paper
+on a screen-door.
+
+The plane turned turtle, slithered sidewise through the air, and
+dropped, horizontal now, but upside down, Carl on top.
+
+Thirty-five, forty feet down.
+
+"I'm up against it," was his only thought while he was falling.
+
+The left tip of the plane smashed against the ground, crashing,
+horribly jarring. But it broke the fall. Carl shot forward and landed
+on his shoulder.
+
+He got up, rubbing his shoulder, wondering at the suspended life in
+the faces of the other two as they ran down-hill toward him.
+
+"Jiminy," he said. "Glad the glider broke the fall. Wish we had time
+to make a new glider, with wing-warp. Say, we'll be late on the job.
+Better beat it P. D. Q."
+
+The others stood gaping.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+A pile of shoes and nose-guards and bicycle-pumps and broken
+hockey-sticks; a wall covered with such stolen signs as "East College
+Avenue," and "Pants Presser Ladys Garments Carefully Done," and "Dr.
+Sloats Liniment for Young and Old"; a broken-backed couch with a
+red-and-green afghan of mangy tassels; an ink-spattered wooden table,
+burnt in small black spots along the edges; a plaster bust of Martha
+Washington with a mustache added in ink; a few books; an inundation of
+sweaters and old hats; and a large, expensive mouth-organ--such were a
+few of the interesting characteristics of the room which Carl and the
+Turk were occupying as room-mates for sophomore year at Plato.
+
+Most objectionable sounds came from the room constantly: the Gang's
+songs, suggestive laughter, imitations of cats and fowls and
+fog-horns. These noises were less ingenious, however, than the devices
+of the Gang for getting rid of tobacco-smoke, such as blowing the
+smoke up the stove.
+
+Carl was happy. In this room he encouraged stammering Genie Linderbeck
+to become adaptable. Here he scribbled to Gertie and Ben Rusk little
+notes decorated with badly drawn caricatures of himself loafing. Here,
+with the Turk, he talked out half the night, planning future glory in
+engineering. Carl adored the Turk for his frankness, his lively
+speech, his interest in mechanics--and in Carl.
+
+Carl was still out for football, but he was rather light for a team
+largely composed of one-hundred-and-eighty-pound Norwegians. He had a
+chance, however. He drove the banker's car two or three evenings a
+week and cared for the banker's lawn and furnace and cow. He still
+boarded at Mrs. Henkel's, as did jolly Mae Thurston, whom he took for
+surreptitious rides in the banker's car, after which he wrote
+extra-long and pleasant letters to Gertie. It was becoming harder and
+harder to write to Gertie, because he had, in freshman year, exhausted
+all the things one can say about the weather without being profane.
+When, in October, a new bank clerk stormed, meteor-like, the Joralemon
+social horizon, and became devoted to Gertie, as faithfully reported
+in letters from Joe Jordan, Carl was melancholy over the loss of a
+comrade. But he strictly confined his mourning to leisure hours--and
+with books, football, and chores for the banker, he was a busy young
+man.... After about ten days it was a relief not to have to plan
+letters to Gertie. The emotions that should have gone to her Carl
+devoted to Professor Frazer's new course in modern drama.
+
+This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw,
+Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck,
+D'Annunzio, and Rostand; but unofficially announced by Professor
+Frazer as an attempt to follow the spirit of to-day wherever it should
+be found in contemporary literature. Carl and the Turk were bewildered
+but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course. They made every
+member of the Gang enroll in it, and discouraged inattention in the
+lecture-room by dexterous side-kicks.
+
+Even to his ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, the grim and slovenly
+school-teacher who had called him "bub" and discouraged his
+confidences, Carl presented the attractions of Professor Frazer's
+lectures when he met him on the campus. Smith looked quizzical and
+"guessed" that plays and play-actin' were useless, if not actually
+immoral.
+
+"Yes, but this isn't just plays, my young friend," said Carl, with a
+hauteur new but not exceedingly impressive to Plain Smith. "He takes
+up all these new stunts, all this new philosophy and stuff they have
+in London and Paris. There's something besides Shakespeare and the
+Bible!" he added, intending to be spiteful. It may be stated that he
+did not like Plain Smith.
+
+"What new philosophy?"
+
+"The spirit of brotherhood. I suppose you're too orthodox for that!"
+
+"Oh no, sonny, not for that, not for that. And it ain't so _very_ new.
+That's what Christ taught! No, sonny, I ain't so orthodox but what I'm
+willing to have 'em show me anything that tries to advance
+brotherhood. Not that I think it's very likely to be found in a lot of
+Noo York plays. But I'll look in at one lesson, anyway," and Plain
+Smith clumped away, humming "Greenland's Icy Mountains."
+
+Professor Frazer's modern drama course began with Ibsen. The first
+five lectures were almost conventional; they were an attempt to place
+contemporary dramatists, with reflections on the box-office
+standpoint. But his sixth lecture began rather unusually.
+
+There was an audience of sixty-four in Lecture-room A--earnest girl
+students bringing out note-books and spectacle-cases, frivolous girls
+feeling their back hair, and the men settling down with a "Come, let's
+get it over!" air, or glowing up worshipingly, like Eugene Field
+Linderbeck, or determined not to miss anything, like Carl--the
+captious college audience, credulous as to statements of fact and
+heavily unresponsive to the spirit. Professor Frazer, younger than
+half a dozen of the plow-trained undergraduates, thin of hair and
+sensitive of face, sitting before them, with one hand in his pocket
+and the other nervously tapping the small reading-table, spoke
+quietly:
+
+"I'm not going to be a lecturer to-day. I'm not going to analyze the
+plays of Shaw which I assigned to you. You're supposed to have read
+them yourselves. I am going to imagine that I am at tea in New Haven,
+or down in New York, at dinner in the basement of the old Brevoort,
+talking with a bunch of men who are trying to find out where the world
+is going, and why and when and how, and asking who are the prophets
+who are going to show it the way. We'd be getting excited over Shaw
+and Wells. There's something really worth getting excited over.
+
+"These men have perceived that this world is not a crazy-quilt of
+unrelated races, but a collection of human beings completely related,
+with all our interests--food and ambitions and the desire to
+play--absolutely in common; so that if we would take thought all
+together, and work together, as a football team does, we would start
+making a perfect world.
+
+"That's what socialism--of which you're beginning to hear so much, and
+of which you're going to hear so much more--means. If you feel
+genuinely impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my
+affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist party of this country
+constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do
+demand of you that you try to think for yourselves, if you are going
+to have the nerve to vote at all--think of it--to vote how this whole
+nation is to be conducted! Doesn't that tremendous responsibility
+demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting?
+that you really think, think hard, why you vote as you do?... Pardon
+me for getting away from the subject proper--yet am I, actually? For
+just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells.
+
+"The great vision of the glory that shall be, not in one sudden
+millennium, but slowly advancing toward joys of life which we can no
+more prevision than the aboriginal medicine-man could imagine the
+X-ray! I wish that this were the time and the place to rhapsodize
+about that vision, as William Morris has done, in _News from Nowhere_.
+You tell me that the various brands of socialists differ so much in
+their beliefs about this future that the bewildered layman can make
+nothing at all of their theories. Very well. They differ so much
+because there are so many different things we _can_ do with this human
+race.... The defeat of death; the life period advancing to ten-score
+years all crowded with happy activity. The solution of labor's
+problem; increasing safety and decreasing hours of toil, and a way out
+for the unhappy consumer who is ground between labor and capital. A
+real democracy and the love of work that shall come when work is not
+relegated to wage-slaves, but joyously shared in a community inclusive
+of the living beings of all nations. France and Germany uniting
+precisely as Saxony and Prussia and Bavaria have united. And, most of
+all, a general realization that the fact that we cannot accomplish all
+these things at once does not indicate that they are hopeless; an
+understanding that one of the wonders of the future is the fact that
+we shall _always_, in all ages, have improvements to look forward to.
+
+"Fellow-students, object as strongly as you wish to the petty
+narrowness and vituperation of certain street-corner ranters, but do
+not be petty and narrow and vituperative in doing it!
+
+"Now, to relate all this to the plays of Bernard Shaw. When he
+says----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Professor Frazer's utterances seem tamely conservative nowadays; but
+this was in 1905, in a small, intensely religious college among the
+furrows. Imagine a devout pastor when his son kicks the family Bible
+and you have the mental state of half the students of Plato upon
+hearing a defense of socialism. Carl, catching echoes of his own talks
+with Bone Stillman in the lecture, exultantly glanced about, and found
+the class staring at one another with frightened anxiety. He saw the
+grim Plain Smith, not so much angry as ill. He saw two class clowns
+snickering at the ecstasy in the eyes of Genie Linderbeck.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the corner drug-store, popularly known as "The Club," where all
+the college bloods gather to drink lemon phosphate, an excited old
+man, whose tieless collar was almost concealed by his tobacco-stained
+beard, pushed back his black slouch-hat with the G. A. R. cord, and
+banged his fist on the prescription-counter, shouting, half at the
+clerk and half at the students matching pennies on the soda-counter,
+"I've lived in Plato, man and boy, for forty-seven years--ever since
+it wa'n't nothing but a frontier trading-post. I packed logs on my
+back and I tramped fifty-three miles to get me a yoke of oxen. I
+remember when the Indians went raiding during the war and the cavalry
+rode here from St. Paul. And this town has always stood for decency
+and law and order. But when things come to such a pass that this
+fellow Frazer or any of the rest of these infidels from one of these
+here Eastern colleges is allowed to stand up on his hind legs in a
+college building and bray about anarchism and tell us to trample on
+the old flag that we fought for, and none of these professors that
+call themselves 'reverends' step in and stop him, then let me tell you
+I'm about ready to pull up stakes and go out West, where there's
+patriotism and decency still, and where they'd hang one of these
+foreign anarchists to the nearest lamp-post, yes, sir, and this fellow
+Frazer, too, if he encouraged them in their crank notions. Got no
+right in the country, anyway. Better deport 'em if they ain't
+satisfied with the way we run things. I won't stand for preaching
+anarchism, and never knew any decent place that would, never since I
+was a baby in Canada. Yes, sir, I mean it; I'm an old man, but I'd
+pull up stakes and go plugging down the Santa Fe trail first, and I
+mean it."
+
+"Here's your Bog Bitters, Mr. Goff," said the clerk, hastily, as a
+passer-by was drawn into the store by the old man's tirade.
+
+Mr. Goff stalked out, muttering, and the college sports at the
+soda-counter grinned at one another. But Gus Osberg, of the junior
+class, remarked to Carl Ericson: "At that, though, there's a good
+deal to what old Goff says. Bet a hat Prexy won't stand for Prof
+Frazer's talking anarchy. Fellow in the class told me it was fierce
+stuff he was talking. Reg'lar anarchy."
+
+"Rats! It wasn't anything of the kind," protested Carl. "I was there
+and I heard the whole thing. He just explained what this Bernard Shaw
+that writes plays meant by socialism."
+
+"Well, even so, don't you think it's kind of unnecessary to talk
+publicly, right out in a college lecture-room, about socialism?"
+inquired a senior who was high up in the debating society.
+
+"Well, thunder----!" was all Carl said, as the whole group stared at
+him. He felt ridiculous; he was afraid of seeming to be a "crank." He
+escaped from the drug-store.
+
+When he arrived at Mrs. Henkel's boarding-house for supper the next
+evening he found the students passing from hand to hand a copy of the
+town paper, the _Plato Weekly Times_, which bore on the front page
+what the town regarded as a red-hot news story:
+
+PLATO PROFESSOR
+
+TALKS SEDITIOUSLY
+
+     As we go to press we learn that rumors are flying about the
+     campus that the "powers that be" are highly incensed by the
+     remarks of a well-known member of the local faculty praising
+     Socialism and other form of anarchy. It is said that one of
+     the older members of the faculty will demand from the erring
+     teacher an explanation of his remarks which are alleged to
+     have taken the form of a defense of the English anarchist
+     Bernhard Shaw. Those on the que vive are expecting
+     sensational developments and campus talk is so extensively
+     occupied with discussions of the affair that the important
+     coming game with St. John's college is almost forgotten.
+
+     While the TIMES has always supported Plato College as one of
+     the chief glories in the proud crown of Minnesota learning,
+     we can but illy stomach such news. It goes without saying
+     that we cannot too strongly disapprove express our
+     disapproval of such incendiary utterances and we shall
+     fearlessly report the whole of this fair let the chips fall
+     where they may.
+
+"There, Mr. Ericson," said Mrs. Henkel, a plump, decent, disapproving
+person, who had known too many generations of great Platonians to be
+impressed by anything, "you see what the public thinks of your
+Professor Frazer. I told you people wouldn't stomach such news, and I
+wouldn't wonder if they strongly disapproved."
+
+"This ain't anything but gossip," said Carl, feebly; but as he read
+the account in the _Weekly Times_ he was sick and frightened, such was
+his youthful awe of print. He wanted to beat the mossy-whiskered
+editor of the _Times_, who always had white food-stains on his lapels.
+When he raised his eyes the coquette Mae Thurston tried to cheer him:
+"It 'll all come out in the wash, Eric; don't worry. These editors
+have to have something to write about or they couldn't fill up the
+paper."
+
+He pressed her foot under the table. He was chatty, and helped to keep
+the general conversation away from the Frazer affair; but he was
+growing more and more angry, with a desire for effective action which
+expressed itself within him only by, "I'll show 'em! Makes me so
+_sore_!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everywhere they discussed and rediscussed Professor Frazer: in the
+dressing-room of the gymnasium, where the football squad dressed in
+the sweat-reeking air and shouted at one another, balancing each on
+one leg before small lockers, and rubbing themselves with brown,
+unclean Turkish towels; in the neat rooms of girl co-eds with their
+banners and cushions and pink comforters and chafing-dishes of nut
+fudge and photographic postal-cards showing the folks at home; in the
+close, horse-smelling, lap-robe and whip scattered office of the town
+livery-stable, where Mr. Goff droned with the editor of the _Times_.
+
+Everywhere Carl heard the echoes, and resolved, "I've got to _do_
+something!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The day of Professor Frazer's next lecture, a rain-sodden day at the
+end of October, with the stubble-fields bleakly shelterless beyond the
+campus. The rain splashed up from pools on the worn brick walks and
+dripped from trees and whipped about buildings, soaking the legs and
+leaving them itchingly wet and the feet sloshily uncomfortable. Carl
+returned to his room at one; talked to the Turk, his feet thrust
+against the side of their rusty stove. He wanted to keep three
+o'clock, the hour of Frazer's lecture, from coming. "I feel as if I
+was in for a fight and scared to death about it. Listen to that rain
+outside. Gee! but the old dame keeps these windows dirty. I hope
+Frazer will give it to them good and hard. I wish we could applaud
+him. I do feel funny, like something tragic was going to happen."
+
+"Oh, tie that dog outside," yawned the Turk, stanch adherent of Carl,
+and therefore of Professor Frazer, but not imaginative. "Come on,
+young Kerl; I'll play you a slick little piece on the mouth-organ.
+Heh?"
+
+"Oh, thunder! I'm too restless to listen to anything except a cannon."
+Carl stumped to the window and pondered on the pool of water flooding
+the graying grass stems in the shabby yard.
+
+When it was time to start for Professor Frazer's lecture the Turk
+blurted: "Why don't we stay away and forget about it? Get her off your
+nerves. Let's go down to the bowling-alley and work up a sweat."
+
+"Not a chance, Turk. He'll want all the supporters he's got. And you'd
+hate to stay away as much as I would. I feel cheered up now; all
+ready for the scrap. Yip! Come on!"
+
+"All right, governor. I like the scrap, all right, but I don't want to
+see you get all worked up."
+
+Through the rain, across the campus, an unusual number of students in
+shining, cheap, black raincoats were hastening to the three o'clock
+classes, clattering up the stone steps of the Academic Building,
+talking excitedly, glancing up at the arched door as though they
+expected to see something startling. Dozens stared at Carl. He felt
+rather important. It was plain that he was known as a belligerent, a
+supporter of Professor Frazer. As he came to the door of Lecture-room
+A he found that many of the crowd were deserting their proper classes
+to attend the Frazer event. He bumped down into his own seat, gazing
+back superciliously at the outsiders who were edging into unclaimed
+seats at the back of the room or standing about the door--students
+from other classes, town girls, the young instructor in French,
+German, and music; a couple of town club-women in glasses and galoshes
+and woolen stockings bunchy at the ankles. Every one was rapidly
+whispering, watching every one else, peeping often at the platform and
+the small door beside it through which Professor Frazer would enter.
+Carl had a smile ready for him. But there was no chance that the smile
+would be seen. There must have been a hundred and fifty in the room,
+seated and standing, though there were but seventy in the course, and
+but two hundred and fifty-six students in the whole college that year.
+
+Carl looked back. He clenched his fist and pounded the soft side of it
+on his thigh, drawing in his breath, puffing it out with a long
+exasperated "Hellll!" For the Greek professor, the comma-sized,
+sandy-whiskered martinet, to whom nothing that was new was moral and
+nothing that was old was to be questioned by any undergraduate,
+stalked into the room like indignant Napoleon posing before two guards
+and a penguin at St. Helena. A student in the back row thriftily gave
+the Greek god his seat. The god sat down, with a precise nod.
+Instantly a straggly man with a celluloid collar left the group by the
+door, whisked over to the Greek professor, and fawned upon him. It was
+the fearless editor and owner (also part-time type-setter) of the
+_Plato Weekly Times_, who dated back to the days of Washington
+flat-bed hand-presses and pure Jeffersonian politics, and feared
+neither man nor devil, though he was uneasy in the presence of his
+landlady. He ostentatiously flapped a wad of copy-paper in his left
+hand, and shook a spatter of ink-drops from a fountain-pen as he
+interviewed the Greek professor, who could be seen answering
+pompously. Carl was hating them both, fearing the Greek as a faculty
+spy on Frazer, picturing himself kicking the editor, when he was aware
+of a rustling all over the room, of a general turning of heads toward
+the platform.
+
+He turned. He was smiling like a shy child in his hero-worship.
+Professor Frazer was inconspicuously walking through the low door
+beside the platform. Frazer's lips were together. He was obviously
+self-conscious. His motions were jerky. He elaborately did not look at
+the audience. He nearly stumbled on the steps up to the platform. His
+hand shook as he drew papers from a leather portfolio and arranged
+them on the small reading-table. One of the papers escaped and sailed
+off the platform, nearly to the front row. Nearly every one in the
+room snickered. Frazer flushed. A girl student in the front row
+nervously bounded out of her seat, picked up the paper, and handed it
+up to Frazer. They both fumbled it, and their heads nearly touched.
+Most of the crowd laughed audibly.
+
+Professor Frazer sat down in his low chair, took out his watch with a
+twitching hand, and compared his time with the clock at the back of
+the room--and so closely were the amateur executioners observing their
+victim that every eye went back to the clock as well. Even Carl was
+guilty of that imitation. Consequently he saw the editor, standing at
+the back, make notes on his copy-paper and smirk like an ill-bred
+hound stealing a bone. And the Greek professor stared at Frazer's
+gauche movements with a grim smugness that indicated, "Quite the sort
+of thing I expected." The Greek's elbows were on the arm of the seat,
+and he held up before his breast a small red-leather-covered note-book
+which he superciliously tapped with a thin pencil. He was waiting.
+Like a judge of the Inquisition....
+
+"Old Greek 's going to take notes and make a report to the faculty
+about what Frazer says," reflected Carl. "If I could only get hold of
+his notes and destroy them!"
+
+Carl turned again. It was just three. Professor Frazer had risen.
+Usually he sat while lecturing. Fifty whispers commented on that fact;
+fifty regular members of the course became self-important through
+knowing it. Frazer was leaning slightly against the table. It moved an
+inch or two with his weight, but by this time every one was too
+high-strung to laugh. He was pale. He re-arranged his papers. He had
+to clear his throat twice before he could speak, in the now silent,
+vulturishly attentive room, smelling of wet second-rate clothes.
+
+The gusty rain could be heard. They all hitched in their seats.
+
+"Oh, Frazer _can't_ be going to retract," groaned Carl; "but he's
+scared."
+
+Carl suddenly wished himself away from all this useless conflict; out
+tramping the wet roads with the Turk, or slashing through the puddles
+at thirty-five miles an hour in the banker's car. He noted stupidly
+that Genie Linderbeck's hair was scarcely combed. He found he was
+saying, "Frazer 'll flunk, flunk, flunk; he's going to flunk, flunk,
+flunk."
+
+Then Frazer spoke. His voice sounded harsh and un-rhythmical, but soon
+swung into the natural periods of a public speaker as he got into his
+lecture:
+
+"My friends," said he, "a part of you have come here legitimately, to hear
+a lecture; a part to satisfy the curiosity aroused by rumors to the effect
+that I am likely to make indecorous and indecent remarks, which your
+decorum and decency make you wish to hear, and of which you will carry away
+evil and twisted reports, to gain the reputation of being fearless
+defenders of the truth. It is a temptation to gratify your desire and shock
+you--a far greater temptation than to be repentant and reactionary. Only,
+it occurs to me that this place and time are supposed to be devoted to a
+lecture by Henry Frazer on his opinions about contemporary drama. It is in
+no sense to be given to the puling defense of a martyr, nor to the
+sensational self-advertisement of either myself or any of you. I have no
+intention of devoting any part of my lecture, aside from these introductory
+adumbrations, to the astonishing number of new friends whose bright and
+morning faces I see before me. I shall neither be so insincerely tactful as
+to welcome you, nor so frightened as to ignore you. Nor shall I invite you
+to come to me with any complaints you have about me. I am far too busy with
+my real work!
+
+"I am not speaking patiently. I am not patient with you! I am not
+speaking politely. Truly, I do not think that I shall much longer be
+polite!
+
+"Wait. That sounds now in my ears as rhetorical! Forgive me, and
+translate my indiscretions into more colloquial language.
+
+"Though from rumors I have overheard, I fancy some of you will do
+that, anyway.... And now, I think, you see where I stand.
+
+"Now then. For such of you as have a genuine interest in the brilliant
+work of Bernard Shaw I shall first continue the animadversions on the
+importance of his social thought, endeavor to link it with the great
+and growing vision of H. G. Wells (novelist and not dramatist though
+he is, because of the significance of his new books, _Kips_ and
+_Mankind in the Making_), and point out the serious purpose that seems
+to me to underlie Shaw's sarcastic pictures of life's shams.
+
+"In my last lecture I endeavored to present the destructive side of
+present social theories as little as possible; to dwell more on the
+keen desire of the modern thinkers for constructive imagination. But I
+judge that I was regarded as too destructive, which amuses me, and to
+which I shall apply the antidote of showing how destructive modern
+thought is and must be--whether running with sootily smoking torch of
+individuality in Bakunin, or hissing in Nietzsche, or laughing at
+Olympus in Bernard Shaw. My 'radicalism' has been spoken of. Radical!
+Do you realize that I am not suggesting that there might possibly some
+day be a revolution in America, but rather that now I am stating that
+there is, this minute, and for some years has been, an actual state of
+warfare between capital and labor? Do you know that daily more people
+are saying openly and violently that we starve our poor, we stuff our
+own children with useless bookishness, and work the children of others
+in mills and let them sell papers on the streets in red-light
+districts at night, and thereby prove our state nothing short of
+insane? If you tell me that there is no revolution because there are
+no barricades, I point to actual battles at Homestead, Pullman, and
+the rest. If you say that there has been no declaration of war, open
+war, I shall read you editorials from _The Appeal to Reason_.
+
+"Mind you, I shall not say whether I am enlisted for or against the
+revolutionary army. But I demand that you look about you and
+understand the significance of the industrial disturbances and
+religious unrest of the time. Never till then will you understand
+anything--certainly not that Shaw is something more than an _enfant
+terrible_; Ibsen something more than an ill-natured old man with
+dyspepsia and a silly lack of interest in skating. Then you will
+realize that in the most extravagant utterances of a red-shirted
+strike-leader there may be more fervent faith and honor, oftentimes,
+than in the virgin prayers of a girl who devoutly attends Christian
+Endeavor, but presumes to call Emma Goldman 'that dreadful woman.'
+Follow the labor-leader. Or fight him, good and hard. But do not
+overlook him.
+
+"But I must be more systematic. When John Tanner's independent
+chauffeur, of whom you have--I hope you have--read in _Man and
+Superman_----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carl looked about. Many were frowning; a few leaning sidewise to
+whisper to neighbors, with a perplexed head-shake that plainly meant,
+"I don't quite get that." Wet feet were shifted carefully; breaths
+caught quickly; hands nervously played with lower lips. The Greek
+professor was writing something. Carl's ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, was
+rigid, staring unyieldingly at the platform. Carl hated Smith's
+sinister stillness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Professor Frazer was finishing his lecture:
+
+"If it please you, flunk this course, don't read a single play I
+assign to you, be disrespectful, disbelieve all my contentions. And I
+shall still be content. But do not, as you are living souls, blind
+yourself to the fact that there is a world-wide movement to build a
+wider new world--and that the world needs it--and that in Jamaica
+Mills, on land owned by a director of Plato College, there are two
+particularly vile saloons which you must wipe out before you disprove
+me!" Silence for ten seconds. Then, "That is all."
+
+The crowd began to move hesitatingly, while Professor Frazer hastily
+picked up his papers and raincoat and hurried out through the door
+beside the platform. Voices immediately rose in a web of talk,
+many-colored, hot-colored.
+
+Carl babbled to the man next him, "He sure is broad. He doesn't care
+whether they're conservative or not. And some sensation at the end!"
+
+"Heh? What? Him?" The sophomore was staring.
+
+"Yes. Why, sure! Whadya mean?" demanded Carl.
+
+"Well, and wha' do _you_ mean by 'broad'? Sure! He's broad just like a
+razor edge."
+
+"Heh?" echoed the next man down the row, a Y. M. C. A. senior. "Do you
+mean to say you liked it?"
+
+"Why, sure! Why not? Didn't you?"
+
+"Oh yes. Yes indeed! All he said was that scarlet women like Emma
+Goldman were better than a C. E. girl, and that he hoped his students
+would bluff the course and flunk it, and that we could find booze at
+Jamaica Mills, and a few little things like that. That's all. Sure!
+That's the sort of thing we came here to study." The senior was
+buttoning his raincoat with angry fingers. "That's----Why, the man was
+insane! And the way he denounced decency and----Oh, I can't talk about
+it!"
+
+"W-w-w-well by gosh, of all the--the----" spluttered Carl. "You and
+your Y. M. C. A.--calling yourself religious, and misrepresenting like
+that--you and your----Why, you ain't worth arguing with. I don't
+believe you 'came to study' anything. You know it all already."
+Passionate but bewildered, trying not to injure the cause of Frazer by
+being nasty, he begged: "Straight, didn't you like his spiel? Didn't
+it give you some new ideas?"
+
+The senior vouchsafed: "No, 'me and my Y. M.' didn't like it. Now
+don't let me keep you, Ericson. I suppose you'll be wanting to join
+dear Mr. Frazer in a highball; you're such a pet of his. Did he teach
+you to booze? I understand you're good at it."
+
+"You apologize or I'll punch your face off," said Carl. "I don't
+understand Professor Frazer's principles like I ought to. I'm not
+fighting for them. Prob'ly would if I knew enough. But I don't like
+your face. It's too long. It's like a horse's face. It's an insult to
+Frazer to have a horse-faced guy listen to him. You apologize for
+having a horse face, see?"
+
+"You're bluffing. You wouldn't start anything here, anyway."
+
+"Apologize!" Carl's fist was clenched. People were staring.
+
+"Cut it out, will you! I didn't mean anything."
+
+"You wouldn't," snapped Carl, and rammed his way out, making wistful
+boyish plans to go to Frazer with devotion and offers of service in a
+fight whose causes grew more confused to him every moment. Beside him,
+as he hurried off to football practice, strode a big lineman of the
+junior class, cajoling:
+
+"Calm down, son. You can't lick the whole college."
+
+"But it makes me so sore----"
+
+"Oh, I know, but it strikes me that no matter how much you like
+Frazer, he was going pretty far when he said that anarchists had more
+sense than decent folks."
+
+"He didn't! You didn't get him. He meant----O Lord, what's the use!"
+
+He did not say another word as they hastened to the gymnasium for
+indoor practice.
+
+He was sure that they who knew of his partisanship would try to make
+him lose his temper. "Dear Lord, please just let me take out just one
+bonehead and beat him to a pulp, and then I'll be good and not open my
+head again," was his perfectly reverent prayer as he stripped before
+his locker.
+
+Carl and most of the other substitutes had to wait, and most of them
+gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazer's charge
+that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots, and tried to
+decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazer credit. Twenty
+times Carl wanted to deny; twenty times speech rose in him so hotly
+that he drew a breath and opened his mouth; but each time he muttered
+to himself: "Oh, shut up! You'll only make 'em worse." Students who
+had attended the lecture declared that Professor Frazer had advocated
+bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believed, marveling,
+"Well, well, well, well!" with unctuous appreciation of the scandal.
+
+Still Carl sat aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs
+with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him--slim,
+wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin
+glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight football jersey; a
+clean-carved boy.
+
+The rubber band of his nose-guard snapped harshly as he plucked at it,
+playing a song of hatred on that hard little harp.
+
+An insignificant thing made him burst out. Tommy La Croix, the French
+Canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken, tobacco-chewing, rather
+likeable young thug, stared directly at Carl and said, loudly:
+"'Nother thing I noticed was that Frazer didn't have his pants
+pressed. Funny, ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to
+be cranks they're short on baths and tailors?"
+
+Carl slid from the parallel bars. He walked up to the line of
+substitutes, glanced sneeringly along them, dramatized himself as a
+fighting rebel, remarked, "Half of you are too dumm to get Frazer, and
+the other half are old-woman gossips and ought to be drinking tea,"
+and gloomed away to the dressing-room, while behind him the
+substitutes laughed, and some one called: "Sorry you don't like us,
+but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericson?"
+
+His ears burned, in the dressing-room. He did not feel that they had
+been much impressed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To tell the next day or two in detail would be to make many books
+about the mixed childishness and heroic fineness of Carl's
+partisanship; to repeat a thousand rumors running about the campus to
+the effect that the faculty would demand Frazer's resignation; to
+explain the reason why Frazer's charge that a Plato director owned
+land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then
+quite forgotten, while Frazer's reputation as a "crank" was never
+forgotten, so much does muck resent the muck-raker; to describe Carl's
+brief call on Frazer and his confusing discovery that he had nothing
+to say; to repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazer
+affair, Turk's great oath to support Frazer "through hell and high
+water," Turk's repeated defiance: "Well, by golly! we'll show the
+mutts, but I wish we could _do_ something"; to chronicle dreary
+classes whose dullness was evident to Carl, now, after his interest in
+Frazer's lectures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Returning from Genie Linderbeck's room, Carl found a letter from
+Gertie Cowles on the black-walnut hat-rack. Without reading it, but
+successfully befooling himself into the belief that he was glad to
+have it, he went whistling up to his room.
+
+Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, those great seniors, sat tilted back in
+wooden chairs, and between them was the lord of the world, Mr.
+Bjorken, the football coach, a large, amiable, rather religious young
+man, who believed in football, foreign missions, and the Democratic
+party.
+
+"Hello! Waiting for me or the Turk?" faltered Carl, gravely shaking
+hands all round.
+
+"Just dropped up to see you for a second," said Mr. Bjorken.
+
+"Sorry the Turk wasn't here." Carl had an ill-defined feeling that he
+wanted to keep them from becoming serious as long as he could.
+
+Ray Cowles cleared his throat. Never again would the black-haired
+Adonis, blossom of the flower of Joralemon, be so old and sadly sage
+as then. "We want to talk to you seriously about something--for your
+own sake. You know I've always been interested in you, and Howard, and
+course we're interested in you as frat brothers, too. For old
+Joralemon and Plato, eh? Mr. Bjorken believes--might as well tell him
+now, don't you think, Mr. Bjorken?"
+
+The coach gave a regally gracious nod. Hitching about on the wood-box,
+Carl felt the bottom drop out of his anxious stomach.
+
+"Well, Mr. Bjorken thinks you're practically certain to make the team
+next year, and maybe you may even get put in the Hamlin game for a few
+minutes this year, and get your P."
+
+"Honest?"
+
+"Yes, if you do something for old Plato, same 's you expect her to do
+something for you." Ray was quite sincere. "But not if you put the
+team discipline on the bum and disgrace Omega Chi. Of course I can't
+speak as an actual member of the team, but still, as a senior, I hear
+things----"
+
+"How d'you mean 'disgrace'?"
+
+"Don't you know that because you've been getting so savage about
+Frazer the whole team 's getting mad?" said the coach. "Cowles and
+Griffin and I have been talking over the whole proposition. Your
+boosting Frazer----"
+
+"Look here," from Carl, "I won't crawl down on my opinion about
+Frazer. Folks haven't understood him."
+
+"Lord love you, son," soothed Howard Griffin, "we aren't trying to
+change your opinion of Frazer. We're, your friends, you know. We're
+proud of you for standing up for him. Only thing is, now that he's
+practically fired, just tell me how it's going to help him or you or
+anybody else, now, to make everybody sore by roasting them because
+they can't agree with you. Boost; don't knock! Don't make everybody
+think you're a crank."
+
+"To be frank," added Mr. Bjorken, "you're just as likely to hurt
+Frazer as to help him by stirring up all this bad blood. Look here. I
+suppose that if the faculty had already fired Frazer you'd still go
+ahead trying to buck them."
+
+"Hadn't thought about it, but suppose I would."
+
+"Afraid it might be that way. But haven't you seen by this time about
+how much good it does for one lone sophomore to try and run the
+faculty?" It was the coach talking again, but the gravely nodding
+mandarin-like heads of Howard and Ray accompanied him. "Mind you, I
+don't mean to disparage you personally, but you must admit that you
+can't hardly expect to boss everything. Just what good 'll it do to go
+on shouting for Frazer? Quite aside from the question of whether he is
+likely to get fired or not."
+
+"Well," grunted Carl, nervously massaging his chin, "I don't know as
+it will do any direct good--except maybe waking this darn conservative
+college up a little; but it does make me so dog-gone sore----"
+
+"Yes, yes, we understand, old man," the coach said, "but on the other
+hand here's the direct good of sitting tight and playing the game.
+I've heard you speak about Kipling. Well, you're like a young
+officer--a subaltern they call it, don't they?--in a Kipling story, a
+fellow that's under orders, and it's part of his game to play hard and
+keep his mouth shut and to not criticize his superior officers, ain't
+it?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose so, but----"
+
+"Well, it's just the same with you. Can't you see that? Think it over.
+What would you think of a lieutenant that tried to boss all the
+generals? Just same thing.... Besides, if you sit tight, you can make
+the team this year, I can practically promise you that. Do understand
+this now; it isn't a bribe; we want you to be able to play and _do_
+something for old Plato in a _real_ way--in athletics. But you most
+certainly can't make the team if you're going to be a disorganizer."
+
+"All we want you to do," put in Ray Cowles, "is not to make a public
+spectacle of yourself--as I'm afraid you've been doing. Admire Frazer
+all you want to, and talk about him to your own bunch, and don't back
+down on your own opinions, only don't think you've got to go round
+yelling about him. People get a false idea of you. I hate to have to
+tell you this, but several of the fellows, even in Omega Chi, have
+spoken about you, and wondered if you really were a regular crank. 'Of
+course he isn't, you poor cheese,' I tell 'em, but I can't be around
+to answer every one all the time, and you can't lick the whole
+college; that ain't the way the world does things. You don't know what
+a bad impression you make when you're too brash. See how I mean?"
+
+As the council of seers rose, Carl timidly said to Ray, "Straight,
+now, have quite a lot of the fellows been saying I was a goat?"
+
+"Good many, I'm afraid. All talking about you.... It's up to you. All
+you got to do is not think you know it all, and keep still. Keep still
+till you understand the faculty's difficulties just a little better.
+Savvy? Don't that sound fairly reasonable?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+They were gone. Carl was full of the nauseating shame which a
+matter-of-fact man, who supposes that he is never pilloried, knows
+when a conscientious friend informs him that he has been observed,
+criticized; that his enthusiasms have been regarded as eccentricities;
+his affectionate approaches toward friendship as impertinence.
+
+There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room, nudging one
+another, waiting agape for him to do something idiotic; a
+well-advertised fool on parade. He stalked about, now shamefaced, now
+bursting out with a belligerent, "Aw, rats! I'll show 'em!" now
+plaintively beseeching, "I don't suppose I am helping Frazer, but it
+makes me so darn sore when nobody stands up for him--and he teaches
+stuff they need so much here. Gee! I'm coming to think this is a
+pretty rough-neck college. He's the first teacher I ever got anything
+out of--and----Oh, hang it! what 'd I have to get mixed up in all this
+for, when I was getting along so good? And if it isn't going to help
+him----"
+
+His right hand became conscious of Gertie's letter crumpled in his
+pocket. As turning the letter over and over gave him surprisingly
+small knowledge of its contents, he opened it:
+
+     DEAR CARL,--You are just _silly_ to tease me about any bank
+     clerk. I don't like him any more at all and he can go with
+     Linda all he likes, much I care!
+
+     We are enjoying good health, though it is getting quite cold
+     now and we have the furnace running now and it feels pretty
+     good to have it. We had _such_ a good time at Adelaide's
+     party she wore such a pretty dress. She flirted terribly
+     with Joe Jordan though of course you'll call me a cat for
+     telling you because you like her so much better than me &
+     all.
+
+     Oh I haven't told you the news yet Joe has accepted a
+     position at St. Hilary in the mill there.
+
+     I have some pretty new things for my room, a beautiful
+     hand-painted picture. Before Joe goes there is going to be a
+     party for him at Semina's. I wish you could come I suppose
+     you have learned to dance well, of course you go to lots of
+     parties at Plato with all the pretty girls & forget all
+     about _me_.
+
+     I wish I was in Minneapolis it is pretty dull here, & such
+     good talks you and me had _didn't_ we!
+
+     Oh Carl dear Ray writes us you are sticking up for that
+     crazy Professor Frazer. I know it must take lots of courage
+     & I admire you _lots_ for it even if Ray doesn't but oh Carl
+     dear if you can't do any _good_ by it I hope you won't get
+     everybody talking about you without its doing any good, will
+     you, Carl?
+
+     I do so expect you to succeed wonderfully & I hope you won't
+     blast your career even to stand up for folks when it's too
+     late & won't do any good.
+
+     We all expect so much of you--we are waiting! You are our
+     knight & you aren't going to forget to keep your armor
+     bright, nor forget,
+
+Yours as ever,
+
+GERTIE.
+
+"Mmm!" remarked Carl. "Dun'no' about this knight-and-armor business.
+I'd look swell, I would, with a wash-boiler and a few more tons of
+junk on. Mmm! 'Expect you to succeed wonderfully----' Oh, I don't
+suppose I had ought to disappoint 'em. Don't see where I can help
+Frazer, anyway. Not a bit."
+
+The Frazer affair seemed very far from him; very hysterical.
+
+Two of the Gang ambled in with noisy proposals in regard to a game of
+poker, penny ante, but the thought of cards bored him. Leaving them in
+possession, one of them smoking the Turk's best pipe, which the Turk
+had been so careless as to leave in sight, he strolled out on the
+street and over to the campus.
+
+There was a light in the faculty-room in the Academic Building, yet it
+was not a "first and third Thursday," dates on which the faculty
+regularly met. Therefore, it was a special meeting; therefore----
+
+Promptly, without making any plans, Carl ran to the back of the
+building, shinned up a water-spout (humming "Just Before the Battle,
+Mother"), pried open a class-room window with his large jack-knife, of
+the variety technically known as a "toad-stabber" (changing his tune
+to "Onward, Christian Soldiers"), climbed in, tiptoed through the
+room, stopping often to listen, felt along the plaster walls to find
+the door, eased the door open, calmly sat down in the corridor, pulled
+off his shoes, said, "Ouch, it's cold on the feets!" slipped into
+another class-room in the front of the building, put on his shoes,
+crawled out of the window, walked along a limestone ledge one foot
+wide to a window of the faculty-room, and peeped in.
+
+All of the eleven assistant professors and full professors, except
+Frazer, were assembled, with President S. Alcott Wood in the chair,
+and the Greek professor addressing them, referring often to a
+red-leather-covered note-book.
+
+"Um! Making a report on Frazer's lecture," said Carl, clinging
+precariously to the rough faces of the stones. A gust swooped around
+the corner of the building. He swayed, gripped the stones more
+tightly, and looked down. He could not see the ground. It was
+thirty-five or forty feet down. "Almost fell," he observed. "Gosh! my
+hands are chilly!" As he peered in the window again he saw the Greek
+professor point directly at the window, while the whole gathering
+startled, turned, stared. A young assistant professor ran toward the
+door of the room.
+
+"Going to cut me off. Dog-gone it," said Carl. "They'll wait for me at
+the math.-room window. Hooray! I've started something."
+
+He carefully moved along the ledge to a point half-way between windows
+and waited, flat against the wall.
+
+Again he glanced down from the high, windy, narrow ledge. "It 'd be a
+long drop.... My hands are cold.... I could slip. Funny, I ain't
+really much scared, though.... Say! Where'd I do just this before? Oh
+yes!" He saw himself as little Carl, lost with Gertie in the woods,
+caught by Bone Stillman at the window. He laughed out as he compared
+the bristly virile face of Bone with the pasty face of the young
+professor. "Seems almost as though I was back there doing the same
+thing right over. Funny. But I'm not quite as scared as I was then.
+Guess I'm growing up. Hel-lo! here's our cunning Spanish Inquisition
+rubbering out of the next window."
+
+The window of the mathematics class-room, next to the faculty-room,
+had opened. The young professor who was pursuing Carl peppered the
+night with violent words delivered in a rather pedagogic voice. "Well,
+sir! We have you! You might as well come and give yourself up."
+
+Carl was silent.
+
+The voice said, conversationally: "He's staying out there. I'll see
+who it is." Carl half made out a head thrusting itself from the
+window, then heard, in _sotto voce_, "I can't see him." Loudly again,
+the pursuing professor yapped: "Ah, I see you. You're merely wasting
+time, sir. You might just as well come here now. I shall let you stay
+there till you do." Softly: "Hurry back into the faculty-room and see
+if you can get him from that side. Bet it's one of the sneaking Frazer
+faction."
+
+Carl said nothing; did not budge. He peeped at the ledge above him. It
+was too far for him to reach it. He tried to discern the mass of the
+ground in the confusing darkness below. It seemed miles down. He did
+not know what to do. He was lone as a mateless hawk, there on the
+ledge, against the wall whose stones were pinchingly cold to the small
+of his back and his spread-eagled arms. He swayed slightly; realized
+with trembling nausea what would happen if he swayed too much.... He
+remembered that there was pavement below him. But he did not think
+about giving himself up.
+
+From the mathematics-room window came: "Watch him. I'm going out after
+him."
+
+The young professor's shoulders slid out of the window. Carl carefully
+turned his head and found that now a form was leaning from the
+faculty-room window as well.
+
+"Got me on both sides. Darn it! Well, when they haul me up on the
+carpet I'll have the pleasure of telling them what I think of them."
+
+The young professor had started to edge along the ledge. He was coming
+very slowly. He stopped and complained to some one back in the
+mathematics-room, "This beastly ledge is icy, I'm afraid."
+
+Carl piped: "Look out! Y're slipping!"
+
+In a panic the professor slid back into the window. As his heels
+disappeared through it, Carl dashed by the window, running sidewise
+along the ledge. While the professor was cautiously risking his head
+in the night air outside the window again, gazing to the left, where,
+he had reason to suppose, Carl would have the decency to remain, Carl
+was rapidly worming to the right. He reached the corner of the
+building, felt for the tin water-pipe, and slid down it, with his
+coat-tail protecting his hands. Half-way down, the cloth slipped and
+his hand was burnt against the corrugated tin. "Consid'able slide," he
+murmured as he struck the ground and blew softly on his raw palm.
+
+He walked away--not at all like a melodramatic hero of a
+slide-by-night, but like a matter-of-fact young man going to see some
+one about business of no great importance. He abstractedly brushed his
+left sleeve or his waistcoat, now and then, as though he wanted to
+appear neat.
+
+He tramped into the telephone-booth of the corner drug-store, called
+up Professor Frazer:
+
+"Hello? Professor Frazer?... This is one of your students in modern
+drama. I've just learned--I happened to be up in the Academic Building
+and I happened to find out that Professor Drood is making a report to
+the faculty--special meeting!--about your last lecture. I've got a
+hunch he's going to slam you. I don't want to butt in, but I'm awfully
+worried; I thought perhaps you ought to know.... Who? Oh, I'm just one
+of your students.... You're welcome. Oh, say, Professor, g-good luck.
+G'-by."
+
+Immediately, without even the excuse that some evil mind in the Gang
+had suggested it, he prowled out to the Greek professor's house and
+tied both the front and back gates. Now the fence of that yard was
+high and strong and provided with sharp pickets; and the professor was
+short and dignified. Carl regretted that he could not wait for the
+pleasure of seeing the professor fumble with the knots and climb the
+fence. But he had another errand.
+
+He walked to the house of Professor Frazer. He stood on the walk
+before it. His shoulders straightened, his heels snapped together, and
+he raised his arm in a formal salute.
+
+He had saluted the gentleness of Henry Frazer. He had saluted his own
+soul. He cried: "I will stick by him, as long as the Turk or any of
+'em. I won't let Omega Chi and the coach scare me--not the whole
+caboodle of them. I----Oh, I don't _think_ they can scare me...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+The students of Plato were required to attend chapel every morning.
+President S. Alcott Wood earnestly gave out two hymns, and between
+them informed the Almighty of the more important news events of the
+past twenty-four hours, with a worried advisory manner which indicated
+that he felt something should be done about them at once.
+
+President Wood was an honest, anxious body, something like a small,
+learned, Scotch linen-draper. He was given to being worried and
+advisory and to sitting up till midnight in his unventilated library,
+grinding at the task of putting new wrong meanings into perfectly
+obvious statements in the Bible. He was a series of circles--round
+head with smooth gray hair that hung in a bang over his round
+forehead; round face with round red cheeks; absurdly heavy gray
+mustache that almost made a circle about his puerile mouth; round
+button of a nose; round heavy shoulders; round little stomach in a
+gray sack-suit; round dumplings of feet in congress shoes that were
+never quite fresh-blacked or quite dusty. A harassed, honorable,
+studious, ignorant, humorless, joke-popping, genuinely conscientious
+thumb of a man. His prayers were long and intimate.
+
+After the second hymn he would announce the coming social
+events--class prayer-meetings and lantern-slide lectures by
+missionaries. During the prayer and hymns most of the students hastily
+prepared for first-hour classes, with lists of dates inside their
+hymn-books; or they read tight-folded copies of the Minneapolis
+_Journal_ or _Tribune_. But when the announcements began all Plato
+College sat up to attention, for Prexy Wood was very likely to comment
+with pedantic sarcasm on student peccadillos, on cards and V-neck
+gowns and the unforgivable crime of smoking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As he crawled to the bare, unsympathetic chapel, the morning after
+spying on the faculty-room, Carl looked restlessly to the open fields,
+sniffed at the scent of burning leaves, watched a thin stream of
+blackbirds in the windy sky. He sat on the edge of a pew, nervously
+jiggling his crossed legs.
+
+During the prayer and hymns a spontaneously born rumor that there
+would be something sensational in President Wood's announcements went
+through the student body. The president, as he gave out the hymns, did
+not look at the students, but sadly smoothed the neat green cloth on
+the reading-stand. His prayer, timid, sincere, was for guidance to
+comprehend the will of the Lord.
+
+Carl felt sorry for him. "Poor man 's fussed. Ought to be! I'd be,
+too, if I tried to stop a ten-inch gun like Frazer.... He's singing
+hard.... Announcements, now.... What's he waiting for? Jiminy! I wish
+he'd spring it and get it over.... Suppose he said something about
+last night--me----"
+
+President Wood stood silent. His glance drifted from row to row of
+students. They moved uneasily. Then his dry, precise voice declaimed:
+
+"My friends, I have an unpleasant duty to perform this morning, but I
+have sought guidance in prayer, and I hope----"
+
+Carl was agonizing: "He does know it's me! He'll ball me out and fire
+me publicly!... Sit tight, Ericson; hold y' nerve; think of good old
+Turk." Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the
+eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He hated this
+place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In
+the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazer sat
+(infrequently). He could fancy Frazer there, pale and stern. "I'm glad
+I spied on 'em. Might have been able to put Frazer wise to something
+definite if I could just have overheard 'em."
+
+President Wood was mincing on:
+
+"----and so, my friends, I hope that in devotion to the ideals of the
+Baptist Church we shall strive ever onward and upward in even our
+smallest daily concerns, _per aspera ad astra_, not in a spirit of
+materialism and modern unrest, but in a spirit of duty.
+
+"I need not tell you that there has been a great deal of rumor about
+the so-called 'faculty dissensions.' But let me earnestly beseech you
+to give me your closest attention when I assure you that there have
+been _no_ faculty dissensions. It is true that we have found certain
+teachings rather out of harmony with the ideals of Plato College. The
+Word of God in the Bible was good enough for our fathers who fought to
+defend this great land, and the Bible is still good enough for us, I
+guess--and I cannot find anything in the Bible about such doctrines as
+socialism and anarchism and evolution. Probably most of you have been
+fortunate enough to not have wasted any time on this theory called
+'evolution.' If you don't know anything about it you have not lost
+anything. Absurd as it may seem, evolution says that we are all
+descended from monkeys! In spite of the fact that the Bible teaches us
+that we are the children of God. If you prefer to be the children of
+monkeys rather than of God, well, all I can say is, I don't!
+[Laughter.]
+
+"But the old fellow Satan is always busy going to and fro even in
+colleges, and in the unrestrained, overgrown, secularized colleges of
+the East they have actually been teaching this doctrine openly for
+many years. Indeed, I am told that right at the University of Chicago,
+though it is a Baptist institution, they teach this same silly
+twaddle of evolution, and I cannot advise any of you to go there for
+graduate work. But these scientific fellows that are too wise for the
+Bible fall into the pits they themselves have digged, sooner or later,
+and they have been so smart in discovering new things about evolution
+that they have contradicted almost everything that Darwin, who was the
+high priest of this abominable cult, first taught, and they have
+turned the whole theory into a hodge-podge of contradictions from
+which even they themselves are now turning in disgust. Indeed, I am
+told that Darwin's own son has come out and admitted that there is
+nothing to this evolution. Well, we could have told him that all
+along, and told his father, and saved all their time, for now they are
+all coming right back to the Bible. We could have told them in the
+first place that the Word of God definitely explains the origin of
+man, and that anybody who tried to find out whether we were descended
+from monkeys was just about as wise as the man who tried to make a
+silk purse out of a sow's ear."
+
+Carl was settled down in his pew, safe.
+
+President Wood was in his stride. "All this evolutionary fad becomes
+ridiculous, of course, when a mind that is properly trained in clear
+thinking by the diligent perusal of the classics strips it of its
+pseudo-scientific rags and shows it straight out from the shoulder, in
+the fire of common sense and sound religion. And here is the point of
+my disquisition:
+
+"On this selfsame evolution, this bombast of the self-pushing
+scientists, are founded _all_ such un-Christian and un-American
+doctrines as socialism and anarchism and the lusts of feminism, with
+all their followers, such as Shaw and the fellow who tried to shoot
+Mr. Frick, and all the other atheists of the stripe that think so well
+of themselves that they are quite willing to overthrow the grand old
+institutions that our forefathers founded on the Constitution; and
+they want to set up instead--oh, they're quite willing to tell us how
+to run the government! They want to set up a state in which all of us
+who are honest enough to do a day's work shall support the lazy
+rascals who aren't. Yet they are very clever men. They can pull the
+wool over your eyes and persuade you--if you let them--that a
+universal willingness to let the other fellow do the work while you
+paint pictures of flowers and write novels about the abominations of
+Babylon is going to evolute a superior race! Well, when you think they
+are clever, this Shaw and this fellow Wells and all of them that copy
+Robert G. Ingersoll, just remember that the cleverest fellow of them
+all is the old Satan, and that he's been advocating just such lazy
+doctrines ever since he stirred up rebellion and discontent in the
+Garden of Eden!
+
+"If these things are so, then the teachings of Professor Henry Frazer,
+however sincere he is, are not in accordance with the stand which we
+have taken here at Plato. My friends, I want you all to understand me.
+Certain young students of Plato appear to have felt that the faculty
+have not appreciated Professor Frazer. One of these students, I
+presume it was one of them, went so far as to attempt to spy on
+faculty meeting last night. Who that man is I have means of finding
+out at any time. But I do not wish to. For I cannot believe that he
+realized how dishonest was such sneaking.
+
+"I wish to assure the malcontents that I yield to no one in my
+admiration of Professor Frazer's eloquence and learning in certain
+subjects. Only, we have not found his doctrines quite consistent with
+what we are trying to do. They may be a lot more smart and new-fangled
+than what we have out here in Minnesota, and we may be a lot of old
+fogies, but we are not narrow, and we wish to give him just as much
+right of free speech--we wish--there is--uh--no slightest--uh--desire,
+in fact, to impose any authority on any one. But against any
+perversive doctrine we must in all honesty take a firm stand.
+
+"We carefully explained this to Professor Frazer, and permit me to
+inform those young men who have taken it upon themselves to be his
+champions, that they would do well to follow his example! For he quite
+agrees with us as to the need of keeping the Plato College doctrine
+consistent. In fact, he offered his resignation, which we reluctantly
+accepted, very, very reluctantly. It will take effect the first of the
+month, and, owing to illness in his family, he will not be giving any
+lectures before then. Students in his classes, by the way, are
+requested to report to the dean for other assignments.... And so you
+see how little there is to the cowardly rumors about 'faculty
+dissensions'!"
+
+"Liar, liar! Dear God, they've smothered that kind, straight Frazer,"
+Carl was groaning.
+
+"Now, my friends, I trust you understand our position, and--uh----"
+
+President Wood drew a breath, slapped the reading-stand, and piped,
+angrily:
+
+"We have every desire to permit complete freedom of thought and speech
+among the students of Plato, but on my _word_, when it comes to a pass
+where a few students can cause this whole great institution to forget
+its real tasks and devote all its time to quarreling about a fad like
+socialism, then it's time to call a halt!
+
+"If there are any students here who, now that I have explained that
+Professor Frazer leaves us of his own free will, still persist in
+their stubborn desire to create trouble, and still feel that the
+faculty have not treated Professor Frazer properly, or that we have
+endeavored to coerce him, then let them stand up, right here and now,
+in chapel. I mean it! Let them stop this cowardly running to and fro
+and secret gossip. Let them stand right up before us, in token of
+protest, here--and--now! or otherwise hold their peace!"
+
+So well trained to the authority of schoolmasters were the students of
+Plato, including Carl Ericson, that they sat as uncomfortable as
+though they were individually accused by the plump pedant who was
+weakly glaring at them, his round, childish hand clutching the sloping
+edge of the oak reading-stand, his sack-coat wrinkled at the shoulders
+and sagging back from his low linen collar. Carl sighted back at
+Frazer's pew, hoping that he would miraculously be there to confront
+the dictator. The pew was empty as before. There was no one to protest
+against the ousting of Frazer for saying what he believed true.
+
+Then Carl was agitated to find that Carl Ericson, a back-yard boy, was
+going to rise and disturb all these learned people. He was frightened
+again. But he stood up, faced the president, affectedly folded his
+arms, hastily unfolded them and put his hands in his pockets, one foot
+before the other, one shoulder humped a little higher than the other.
+
+The whole audience was staring at him. He did not dare peep at them,
+but he could hear their murmur of amazement. Now that he was up he
+rather enjoyed defying them.
+
+"Well, young man, so you are going to let us know how to run Plato,"
+teetered the president. "I'm sure everybody will feel much obliged to
+you."
+
+Carl did not move. He was aware of Genie Linderbeck rising, to his
+left. No one else was up, but, with Genie's frail adherence, Carl
+suddenly desired to rouse every one to stand for Frazer and freedom.
+He glanced over at the one man whom he could always trust to follow
+him--the Turk. A tiny movement of Carl's lips, a covert up-toss of his
+head, warned the Turk to rise now.
+
+The Turk moved, started to rise, slowly, as though under force. He
+looked rather shamefaced. He uncrossed his legs and put his hands on
+the pew, on either side of his legs.
+
+"Shame!" trembled a girl's voice in the junior section.
+
+"Sit down!" two or three voices of men softly snarled, with a rustle
+of mob-muttering.
+
+The Turk hastily crossed his legs and slumped down in his seat. Carl
+frowned at him imploringly, then angrily. He felt spiritually naked to
+ask support so publicly, but he _had_ to get the Turk up. The Turk
+shook his head beseechingly. Carl could fancy him grunting, "Aw,
+thunder! I'd like to stand up, but I don't want to be a goat."
+
+Another man rose. "I'll be darned!" thought Carl. It was the one man
+who would be expected not to support the heretic Frazer--it was Carl's
+rustic ex-room-mate, Plain Smith. Genie was leaning against the pew in
+front of him, but Plain Smith bulked more immovable than Carl.
+
+No one joined the three. All through the chapel was an undertone of
+amazed comment and a constant low hissing of, "Sssssit down!"
+
+The president, facing them, looked strained. It occurred to Carl that
+S. Alcott Wood had his side of the question. He argued about the
+matter, feeling detached from his stolidly defiant body. Then he
+cursed the president for keeping them there. He wanted to sit down. He
+wanted to cry out....
+
+President Wood was speaking. "Is there any one else? Stand up, if
+there is. No one else? Very well, young men, I trust that you are now
+satisfied with your heroism, which we have all greatly appreciated, I
+am sure. [Laughter.] Chapel dismissed."
+
+Instantly a swirl of men surrounded Carl, questioning: "What j' do it
+for? Why didn't you keep still?"
+
+He pushed out through them. He sat blind through the first-hour quiz
+in physics, with the whole class watching him. The thought of the
+Turk's failure to rise kept unhappy vigil in his mind. The same
+sequence of reflections ran around like midnight mice in the wall:
+
+"Just when I needed him.... After all his talk.... And us so chummy,
+sitting up all hours last night. And then the Turk throws me down....
+When he'd said so many times he just wanted the chance to show how
+strong he was for Frazer.... Damn coward! I'll go room with Genie. By
+gosh----Oh, I got to be fair to the Turk. I don't suppose he could
+have done much real good standing up. Course it does make you feel
+kind of a poor nut, doing it. Genie looked----Yes, by the Jim Hill!
+there you are. Poor little scrawny Genie--oh yes, sure, it was up to
+_him_ to stand up. He wasn't afraid. And the Turk, the big stiff, he
+was afraid to.... Just when I needed him. After all our talk about
+Frazer, sitting up all hours----"
+
+Through the black whirlpool in his head pierced an irritated, "Mr.
+Ericson, I said! Have you gone to sleep? I understood you were
+excellent at standing up! What is your explanation of the phenomenon?"
+The professor of physics and mathematics--the same who had pursued
+Carl on the ledge--was speaking to him.
+
+Carl mumbled, sullenly, "Not prepared." The class sniggered. He
+devoted a moment to hating them, as pariahs hate, then through his
+mind went whirling again, "Just wait till I see the Turk!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+A notice from the president's office, commanding Carl's instant
+presence, was in his post-office box. He slouched into the
+waiting-room of the offices of the president and dean. He was an
+incarnate desire to say exactly what he thought to the round, woolly
+President Wood.
+
+Plain Albert Smith was leaving the waiting-room. He seized Carl's hand
+with his plowman's paw, and, "Good-by, boy," he growled. There was
+nothing gallant about his appearance--his blue-flannel shirt dusty
+with white fuzz, his wrinkled brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at
+which he kept fumbling with a seamy finger-nail of his left hand. But
+Carl's salute was a salute to the new king.
+
+"How d'you mean 'good-by,' Al?"
+
+"I've just resigned from Plato, Carl."
+
+"How'd you happen to do that? Did they summon you here?"
+
+"No. Just resigned," said Plain Smith. "One time when I was
+school-teaching I had a set-to with a school committee of farmers
+about teaching the kids a little botany. They said the three R's were
+enough. I won out, but I swore I'd stand up for any teacher that tried
+to be honest the way he seen it. I don't agree with Frazer about these
+socialists and all--fellow that's worked at the plow like I have knows
+a man wants to get ahead for his woman and himself, first of all, and
+let the walking-delegates go to work, too. But I think he's honest,
+all right, and, well, I stood up, and that means losing my
+scholarship. They won't try to fire me. Guess I'll mosey on to the U.
+of M. Can't probably live there as cheap as here, but a cousin of mine
+owns a big shoe-store and maybe I can get a job with him.... Boy, you
+were plucky to get up.... Glad we've got each other, finally. I feel
+as though you'd freed me from something. God bless you."
+
+To the dean's assistant, in the waiting-room, Carl grandly stated:
+"Ericson, 1908. I'm to see the president."
+
+"It's been arranged you're to see the dean instead. Sit down. Dean's
+engaged just now."
+
+Carl was kept waiting for a half-hour. He did not like the
+transference to the dean, who was no anxious old lamb like S. Alcott
+Wood, but a young collegiate climber, with a clipped mustache, a gold
+eye-glass chain over one ear, a curt voice, many facts, a spurious
+appreciation of music, and no mellowness. He was a graduate of the
+University of Chicago, and aggressively proud of it. He had "earned
+his way through college," which all tradition and all fiction
+pronounce the perfect manner of acquiring a noble independence and
+financial ability. Indeed, the blessing of early poverty is in general
+praised as the perfect training for acquiring enough wealth to save
+one's own children from the curse of early poverty. It would be safer
+to malign George Washington and the Boy Scouts, professional baseball
+and the Y. M. C. A., than to suggest that working one's way through
+college is not necessarily manlier than playing and dreaming and
+reading one's way through.
+
+Diffidently, without generalizing, the historian reports this fact
+about the dean; he had lost the graciousness of his rustic clergyman
+father and developed an itchingly bustling manner, a tremendous
+readiness for taking charge of everything in sight, by acquiring
+during his undergraduate days a mastery of all the petty ways of
+earning money, such as charging meek and stupid wealthy students too
+much for private tutoring, and bullying his classmates into
+patronizing the laundry whose agent he was.... The dean stuck his
+little finger far out into the air when drinking from a cup, and liked
+to be taken for a well-dressed man of the world.
+
+The half-hour of waiting gave Carl a feeling of the power of the
+authorities. And he kept seeing Plain Smith in his cousin's
+shoe-store, trying to "fit" women's shoes with his large red hands.
+When he was ordered to "step into the dean's office, now," he stumbled
+in, pulling at his soft felt hat.
+
+With his back to Carl, the dean was writing at a roll-top desk. The
+burnished top of his narrow, slightly bald head seemed efficient and
+formidable. Not glancing up, the dean snapped, "Sit down, young man."
+
+Carl sat down. He crumpled his hat again. He stared at a framed
+photograph, and moved his feet about, trying to keep them quiet.
+
+More waiting.
+
+The dean inspected Carl, over his shoulder. He still held his pen. The
+fingers of his left hand tapped his desk-tablet. He turned in his
+swivel-chair deliberately, as though he was now ready to settle
+everything permanently.
+
+"Well, young man, are you prepared to apologize to the president and
+faculty?"
+
+"Apologize? What for? The president said those that wanted to
+protest----"
+
+"Now we won't have any blustering, if you please, Ericson. I haven't
+the slightest doubt that you are prepared to give an exhibition of
+martyrdom. That is why I asked the privilege of taking care of you,
+instead of permitting you to distress President Wood any further. We
+will drop all this posing, if you don't mind. I assure you that it
+doesn't make----"
+
+"I----"
+
+"----the slightest impression on me, Ericson. Let's get right down to
+business. You know perfectly well that you have stirred up all the
+trouble you----"
+
+"I----"
+
+"----could in regard to Mr. Frazer. And I think, I really think, that
+we shall either have to have your written apology and your promise to
+think a little more before you talk, hereafter, or else we shall have
+to request your resignation from college. I am sorry that we
+apparently can't run this college to suit you, Ericson, but as we
+can't, why, I'm afraid we shall have to ask you not to increase our
+inefficiency by making all the trouble you can. Wait now; let's not
+have any melodrama! You may as well pick up that hat again. It doesn't
+seem to impress me much when you throw it down, though doubtless it
+was ver-ee dramatically done, oh yes, indeed, ver-ee dramatic. See
+here. I know you, and I know your type, my young friend, and I
+haven't----"
+
+"Look here. Why do I get picked out as the goat, the one to apologize?
+Because I stood up first? When Prexy said to?"
+
+"Oh, not at all. Say it's because you quite shamelessly made motions
+at others while you stood there, and did your best to disaffect men
+who hadn't the least desire to join in your trouble-making.... Now I'm
+very busy, young man, and I think this is all the time I shall waste
+on you. I shall expect to find your written----"
+
+"Say, honest, dean," Carl suddenly laughed, "may I say just one thing
+before I get thrown out?"
+
+"Certainly. We have every desire to deal justly with you, and to
+always give--always to give you every opportunity----"
+
+"Well, I just wanted to say, in case I resign and don't see you again,
+that I admire you for your nerve. I wish I could get over feeling like
+a sophomore talking to a dean, and then I could tell you I hadn't
+supposed there was anybody could talk to me the way you have and get
+away with it. I'd always thought I'd punch their head off, and here
+you've had me completely buffaloed. It's wonderful! Honestly, it never
+struck me till just this second that there isn't any law that compels
+me to sit here and take all this. You had me completely hypnotized."
+
+"You know I might retort truthfully and say I am not accustomed to
+have students address me in quite this manner. I'm glad, however, to
+find that you are sensible enough not to make an amusing show of
+yourself by imagining that you are making a noble fight for freedom.
+By decision of the president and myself I am compelled to give you
+this one chance only. Unless I find your apology in my letter-box here
+by five this evening I shall have to suspend you or bring you up
+before the faculty for dismissal. But, my boy, I feel that perhaps,
+for all your mistaken notions, you do have a certain amount of
+courage, and I want to say a word----"
+
+The dean did say a word; in fact he said a large number of admirable
+words, regarding the effect of Carl's possible dismissal on his
+friends, his family, and, with an almost tearful climax, on his
+mother.
+
+"Now go and think it over; pray over it, unselfishly, my boy, and let
+me hear from you before five."
+
+Only----
+
+The reason why Carl _did_ visualize his mother, the reason why the
+Ericson kitchen became so clear to him that he saw his tired-faced
+mother reaching up to wind the alarm-clock that stood beside the ball
+of odd string on the shelf above the water-pail, the reason why he
+felt caved-in at the stomach, was that he knew he was going to leave
+Plato, and did not know where in the world he was going.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A time of quick action; of bursting the bonds even of friendship. He
+walked quietly into Genie Linderbeck's neat room, with its rose-hued
+comforter on a narrow brass bed, passe-partouted Copley prints, and a
+small oak table with immaculate green desk-blotter, and said
+good-by.... His hidden apprehension, the cold, empty feeling of his
+stomach, the nervous intensity of his motions, told him that he was
+already on the long trail that leads to fortune and Bowery
+lodging-houses and death and happiness. Even while he was warning
+himself that he must not go, that he owed it to his "folks" to
+apologize and stay, he was stumbling into the bank and drawing out his
+ninety-two dollars. It seemed a great sum. While waiting for it he did
+sums on the back of a deposit-slip:
+
+                  92.00 out of bank
+                   2.27 in pocket
+            about   .10 at room
+             -----------------------
+            tot.  94.37
+
+        Owe Tailor      1.45
+         "  Turk         .25
+        To  Mpls.       3.05
+To Chi. probably 15 to 18.00
+        To N. Y. 20 to 30.00
+To Europe (steerage)   40.00
+----------------------------
+        Total (about)  92.75----would take me to Europe!
+
+"Golly! I could go to Europe, to Europe! now, if I wanted to, and have
+maybe two plunks over, for grub on the railroad. But I'd have to allow
+something for tips, I guess. Maybe it wouldn't be as much as forty
+dollars for steerage. Ought to allow----Oh, thunder! I've got enough
+to make a mighty good start seeing the world, anyway."
+
+On the street a boy was selling extras of the _Plato Weekly Times_,
+with the heading:
+
+PRESIDENT CRUSHES STUDENT
+REBELLION
+
+Plato Demonstration for Anarchist Handled
+Without Gloves
+
+Carl read that he and two other students, "who are alleged to have
+been concerned in several student pranks," had attempted to break up a
+chapel meeting, but had been put to shame by the famous administrator,
+S. Alcott Wood. He had never seen his name in the press, except some
+three times in the local items of the _Joralemon Dynamite_. It looked
+so intimidatingly public that he tried to forget it was there. He
+chuckled when he thought of Plain Smith and Genie Linderbeck as
+"concerned in student pranks." But he was growing angry. He considered
+staying and fighting his opponents to the end. Then he told himself
+that he must leave Plato, after having announced to Genie that he was
+going.... He had made all of his decision except the actual deciding.
+
+He omitted his noonday dinner and tramped into the country, trying to
+plan how and where he would go. As evening came, cloudy and chill in a
+low wooded tract miles north of Plato, with dead boughs keening and
+the uneasy air threatening a rain that never quite came, the
+loneliness of the land seemed to befog all the possibilities of the
+future.... He wanted the lamp-lit security of his room, with the Turk
+and the Gang in red sweaters, singing ragtime; with the Frazer affair
+a bad dream that was forgotten. The world outside Plato would all be
+like these lowering woods and dreary swamps.
+
+He turned. He could find solace only in making his mind a blank.
+Sullen, dull, he watched the sunset, watched the bellying cumulus
+clouds mimic the Grand Canyon. He had to see the Grand Canyon! He
+would!... He had turned the corner. His clammy heart was warming. He
+was slowly coming to understand that he was actually free to take
+youth's freedom.
+
+He saw the vision of the America through which he might follow the
+trail like the pioneers whose spiritual descendant he was. How noble
+was the panorama that thrilled this one-generation American can be
+understood only by those who have smelled our brown soil; not by the
+condescending gods from abroad who come hither to gather money by
+lecturing on our evil habit of money-gathering, and return to Europe
+to report that America is a land of Irish politicians, Jewish
+theatrical managers, and mining millionaires who invariably say, "I
+swan to calculate"; all of them huddled in unfriendly hotels or in
+hovels set on hopeless prairie. Not such the America that lifted
+Carl's chin in wonder----
+
+Cities of tall towers; tawny deserts of the Southwest and the flawless
+sky of cornflower blue over sage-brush and painted butte; silent
+forests of the Northwest; golden China dragons of San Francisco; old
+orchards of New England; the oily Gulf of Mexico where tramp steamers
+puff down to Rio; a snow-piled cabin among somber pines of northern
+mountains. Elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere, beyond the sky-line, under
+larger stars, where men ride jesting and women smile. Names alluring
+to the American he repeated--Shenandoah, Santa Ynez, the Little Big
+Horn, Baton Rouge, the Great Smokies, Rappahannock, Arizona, Cheyenne,
+Monongahela, Androscoggin; canyon and bayou; sycamore and mesquite;
+Broadway and El Camino Real....
+
+He hurled along into Plato. He went to Mrs. Henkel's for supper. He
+smiled at the questions dumped upon him, and evaded answering. He took
+Mae Thurston aside and told her that he was leaving Plato. He wanted
+to call on Professor Frazer. He did not dare. From a pleasant
+gentleman drinking tea Frazer had changed to a prophet whom he
+revered.
+
+Carl darted into his room. The Turk was waiting for him. Carl cut
+short the Turk's apologies for not having supported Frazer, with the
+dreadful curt pleasantness of an alienated friend, and, as he began
+packing his clothes in two old suit-cases, insisted, "It's all
+right--was your biz whether you stood up in chapel or not." He hunted
+diligently through the back of the closet for a non-existent shoe, in
+order to get away from the shamefaced melancholy which covered the
+Turk when Carl presented him with all his books, his skees, and his
+pet hockey-stick. He prolonged the search because it had occurred to
+him that, as it was now eleven o'clock, and the train north left at
+midnight, the Minneapolis train at 2 A.M., it might be well to decide
+where he was going when he went away. Well, Minneapolis and Chicago.
+Beyond that--he'd wait and see. Anywhere--he could go anywhere in all
+the world, now....
+
+He popped out of the closet cheerfully.
+
+While the Turk mooned, Carl wrote short honest notes to Gertie, to his
+banker employer, to Bennie Rusk, whom he addressed as "Friend Ben." He
+found himself writing a long and spirited letter to Bone Stillman, who
+came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared.
+Frankly he wrote to his mother--his mammy he wistfully called her. To
+his father he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he
+stamped the letters, then glanced at the Turk. He was gay, mature,
+business-like, ready for anything. "I'll pull out in half an hour
+now," he chuckled.
+
+"Gosh!" sighed the Turk. "I feel as if I was responsible for
+everything. Oh, say, here's a letter I forgot to give you. Came this
+afternoon."
+
+The letter was from Gertie.
+
+     DEAR CARL,--I hear that you _are_ standing for that Frazer
+     just as much as ever and really Carl I think you might
+     consider other people's feelings a little and not be so  selfish----
+
+Without finishing it, Carl tore up the letter in a fury. Then, "Poor
+kid; guess she means well," he thought, and made an imaginary bow to
+her in farewell.
+
+There was a certain amount of the milk of human-kindness in the frozen
+husk he had for a time become. But he must be blamed for icily
+rejecting the Turk's blundering attempts to make peace. He
+courteously--courtesy, between these two!--declined the Turk's offer
+to help him carry his suit-cases to the station. That was like a slap.
+
+"Good-by. Hang on tight," he said, as he stooped to the heavy
+suit-cases and marched out of the door without looking back.
+
+By some providence he was saved from the crime of chilly
+self-righteousness. On the darkness of the stairs he felt all at once
+how responsive a chum the Turk had been. He dropped the suit-cases,
+not caring how they fell, rushed back into the room, and found the
+Turk still staring at the door. He cried:
+
+"Old man, I was----Say, you yahoo, are you going to make me carry both
+my valises to the depot?"
+
+They rushed off together, laughing, promising to write to each other.
+
+The Minneapolis train pulled out, with Carl trying to appear
+commonplace. None of the sleepy passengers saw that the Golden Fleece
+was draped about him or that under his arm he bore the harp of
+Ulysses. He was merely a young man taking a train at a way-station.
+
+
+
+
+Part II
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF ADVENTURING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+There are to-day in the mind of Carl Ericson many confused
+recollections of the purposeless wanderings which followed his leaving
+Plato College. For more than a year he went down, down in the social
+scale, down to dirt and poverty and association with the utterly tough
+and reckless. But day by day his young joy of wandering matured into
+an ease in dealing with whatever man or situation he might meet. He
+had missed the opportunity of becoming a respectable citizen which
+Plato offered. Now he did all the grubby things which Plato obviated
+that her sons might rise to a place in society, to eighteen hundred
+dollars a year and the possession of evening clothes and a knowledge
+of Greek. But the light danced more perversely in his eyes every day
+of his roving.
+
+The following are the several jobs for which Carl first applied in
+Chicago, all the while frightened by the roar and creeping shadows of
+the city:
+
+Tutoring the children of a millionaire brewer; keeping time on the
+Italian and Polack washers of a window-cleaning company; reporting on
+an Evanston newspaper; driving a taxicab, a motor-truck; keeping books
+for a suburban real-estate firm. He had it ground into him, as grit is
+ground into your face when you fall from a bicycle, that every one in
+a city of millions is too busy to talk to a stranger unless he sees a
+sound reason for talking. He changed the _Joralemon Dynamite's_
+phrase, "accept a position" to "get a job"--and he got a job, as
+packer in a department store big as the whole of Joralemon. Since the
+street throngs had already come to seem no more personal and
+separable than the bricks in the buildings, he was not so much
+impressed by the crowds in the store as by the number of things for
+women to hang upon themselves. He would ramble in at lunch-time to
+stare at them and marvel, "You can't beat it!"
+
+From eight till twelve-thirty and from one till six or seven, during
+nearly two months, Carl stood in a long, brick-walled, stuffy room,
+inundated by floods of things to pack, wondering why he had ever left
+Plato to become the slave of a Swede foreman. The Great World, as he
+saw it through a tiny hole in one of the opaque wire-glass windows,
+consisted of three bars of a rusty fire-escape-landing against a
+yellow brick wall, with a smudge of black on the wall below the
+landing.
+
+Within two days he was calling the packing-room a prison. The
+ceaseless rattle of speckled gray wrapping-paper, the stamp of feet on
+the gray cement floor, the greasy gray hair of the packer next to him,
+the yellow-stained, cracked, gray wash-bowl that served for thirty
+men, such was his food for dreams.
+
+Because his muscles were made of country earth and air he distanced
+the packers from the slums, however. He became incredibly swift at
+nailing boxes and crates and smashing the heavy wrapping-paper into
+shape about odd bundles. The foreman promised to make Carl his
+assistant. But on the cold December Saturday when his elevation was
+due he glanced out of a window, and farewell all ambition as a packer.
+
+The window belonged to the Florida Bakery and Lunch Room, where Carl
+was chastely lunching. There was dirty sawdust on the floor, six pine
+tables painted red and adorned with catsup-bottles whose mouths were
+clotted with dried catsup, and a long counter scattered with bread and
+white cakes and petrified rolls. Behind the counter a snuffling,
+ill-natured fat woman in slippers handed bags of crullers to
+shrill-voiced children who came in with pennies. The tables were
+packed with over-worked and underpaid men, to whom lunch was merely a
+means of keeping themselves from feeling inconveniently empty--a state
+to which the leadlike viands of the Florida Lunch Room were a certain
+prevention.
+
+Carl was gulping down salty beef stew and bitter coffee served in
+handleless cups half an inch thick. Beside him, elbow jogging elbow,
+was a surly-faced man in overalls. The old German waiters shuffled
+about and bawled, "_Zwei_ bif stew, _ein_ cheese-cake." Dishes
+clattered incessantly. The sicky-sweet scent of old pastry, of
+coffee-rings with stony raisins and buns smeared with dried cocoanut
+fibers, seemed to permeate even the bitter coffee.
+
+Carl got down most of his beef stew, attacked and gave up a chunk of
+hard boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced
+out of the dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big,
+leisurely policeman, was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty,
+rosy-cheeked, smart of hat, impeccable of gloves, with fluffy white
+furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of a
+life bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman,
+she shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of winter, and
+skipped away.
+
+"Bet she'd be a peach to know.... Fat chance I'd have to meet her,
+wrapping up baby-carriages for the North Shore commuters all day! All
+day!... Well, guess I'm going to honorably discharge myself!"
+
+He left the job that afternoon.
+
+His satiny Norse cheeks shone as he raced home through a rising
+blizzard, after dinner at the Florida Lunch Room, where he had allowed
+himself a ten-cent dessert for celebration.
+
+But when he lolled in his hall bedroom, with his eyes attracted, as
+usual, to the three cracks in the blue-painted ceiling which made a
+rough map of Africa, when he visioned lands where there were lions and
+desert instead of department-store packages, his happiness wilted in
+face of the fact that he had only $10.42, with $8.00 due him from the
+store the following Tuesday. Several times he subtracted the $3.00 he
+owed the landlady from $18.42, but the result persisted in being only
+$15.42. He could not make $15.42 appear a reasonable sum with which to
+start life anew.
+
+He had to search for a new job that evening. Only--he was so tired; it
+was so pleasant to lie there with his sore feet cooling against the
+wall, picturing a hunt in Africa, with native servants bringing him
+things to eat: juicy steaks and French-fried potatoes and gallons of
+ale (a repast which he may have been ignorant in assigning to the
+African jungles, but which seemed peculiarly well chosen, after a
+lunch-room dinner of watery corned-beef hash, burnt German-fried
+potatoes, and indigestible hot mince-pie). His thoughts drifted off to
+Plato. But Carl had a certain resoluteness even in these loose days.
+He considered the manoeuvers for a new job. He desired one which
+would permit him to go to theaters with the girl in white furs whom he
+had seen that noon--the unknown fairy of his discontent.
+
+It may be noted that he took this life quite seriously. Though he did
+not suppose that he was going to continue dwelling in a hall bedroom,
+yet never did he regard himself as a collegian Haroun-al-Raschid on an
+amusing masquerade, pretending to be no better than the men with whom
+he worked. Carl was no romantic hero incog. He was a workman, and he
+knew it. Was not his father a carpenter? his father's best friend a
+tailor? Had he not been a waiter at Plato?
+
+But not always a workman. Carl had no conception of world-wide
+class-consciousness; he had no pride in being a proletarian. Though
+from Bone's musings and Frazer's lectures he had drawn a vague
+optimism about a world-syndicate of nations, he took it for granted
+that he was going to be rich as soon as he could.
+
+Job. He had to have a job. He got stiffly up from the iron bed,
+painfully drew on his shoes, after inspecting the hole in the sole of
+the left shoe and the ripped seam at the back of the right. He pulled
+tight the paper-thin overcoat which he had bought at a second-hand
+dealer's shop, and dared a Chicago blizzard, with needles of snow
+thundering by on a sixty-mile gale. Through a street of unutterably
+drab stores and saloons he plowed to the Unallied Taxicab Company's
+garage. He felt lonely, cold, but he observed with ceaseless interest
+the new people, different people, who sloped by him in the dun web of
+the blizzard. The American marveled at a recently immigrated Slav's
+astrachan cap.
+
+He had hung about the Unallied garage on evenings when he was too poor
+to go to vaudeville. He had become decidedly friendly with the night
+washer, a youngster from Minneapolis. Trotting up to the washer, who
+was digging caked snow from the shoes of a car, he blurted:
+
+"Say, Coogan, I've beat my job at ----'s. How's chances for getting a
+taxi to drive? You know I know the game."
+
+"You? Driving a taxi?" stammered the washer. "Why, say, there was a
+guy that was a road-tester for the Blix Company and he's got a cousin
+that knows Bathhouse John, and that guy with all his pull has been
+trying to get on drivin' here for the last six months and ain't landed
+it, so you see about how much chance you got!"
+
+"Gosh! it don't look much like I had much chance, for a fact."
+
+"Tell you what I'll do, though. Why don't you get on at some
+automobile factory, and then you could ring in as a chauffeur, soon 's
+you got some recommends you could take to the Y. M. C. A. employment
+bureau." The washer gouged at a clot of ice with his heel, swore
+profusely, and went on: "Here. You go over to the Lodestar Motor
+Company's office, over on La Salle, Monday, and ask for Bill Coogan,
+on the sales end. He's me cousin, and you tell him to give you a card
+to the foreman out at the works, and I guess maybe you'll get a job,
+all right."
+
+Tuesday morning, after a severe questioning by the foreman, Carl was
+given a week's try-out without pay at the Lodestar factory. He proved
+to be one of those much-sought freaks in the world of mechanics, a
+natural filer. The uninspired filer, unaware of the niceties of the
+art, saws up and down, whereas the instinctive filer, like Carl, draws
+his file evenly across the metal, and the result fits its socket
+truly. So he was given welcome, paid twenty-five cents an hour, and
+made full member of exactly such a gang as he had known at Plato,
+after he had laughed away the straw boss who tried to make him go ask
+for a left-handed monkey-wrench. He roomed at a machinists'
+boarding-house, and enjoyed the furious discussions over religion and
+the question of air _versus_ water cooling far more than he had ever
+enjoyed the polite jesting at Mrs. Henkel's.
+
+He became friendly with the foreman of the repair-shop, and was
+promised a "chance." While the driver who made the road-tests of the
+cars was ill Carl was called on as a substitute. The older workmen
+warned him that no one could begin road-testing so early and hold the
+job. But Carl happened to drive the vice-president of the firm. He
+discussed bass-fishing in Minnesota with the vice-president, and he
+was retained as road-tester, getting his chauffeur's license. Two
+months later, when he was helping in the overhauling of a car in the
+repair-shop, he heard a full-bodied man with a smart English overcoat
+and a supercilious red face ask curtly of the shop foreman where he
+could get a "crack shuffer, right away, one that can give the traffic
+cops something to do for their money."
+
+The foreman always stopped to scratch his chin when he had to think.
+This process gave Carl time to look up from his repairs and blandly
+remark: "That's me. Want to try me?"
+
+Half an hour later Carl was engaged at twenty-five dollars a week as
+the Ruddy One's driver. Before Monday noon he had convinced the Ruddy
+One that he was no servant, but a mechanical expert. He drove the
+Ruddy One to his Investments and Securities office in the morning, and
+back at five; to restaurants in the evening. Not infrequently, with
+the wind whooping about corners, he slept peacefully in the car till
+two in the morning, outside a cafe. And he was perfectly happy. He was
+at last seeing the Great World. As he manoeuvered along State Street
+he rejoiced in the complications of the traffic and tooted his horn
+unnecessarily. As he waited before tall buildings, at noon, he gazed
+up at them with a superior air of boredom--because he was so boyishly
+proud of being a part of all this titanic life that he was afraid he
+might show it. He gloried in every new road, in driving along the Lake
+Shore, where the horizon was bounded not by unimaginative land, but by
+restless water.
+
+Then the Ruddy One's favorite roads began to be familiar to Carl, too
+familiar, and he so hated his sot of an employer that he caught
+himself muttering, while driving, "Thank the Lord I sit in front and
+don't have to see that chunk of raw beefsteak he calls a neck."
+
+While he waited for the fifth time before a certain expensive but not
+exclusive roadhouse, with the bouncing giggles of girls inside
+spoiling the spring night, he studied the background as once he had
+studied his father's woodshed. He was not, unfortunately, shocked by
+wine and women. But he was bored by box-trees. There was a smugly
+clipped box-tree on either side of the carriage entrance, the leaves
+like cheap green lacquer in the glare of the arc-light, which brought
+out all the artificiality of the gray-and-black cinder drive. He felt
+that five pilgrimages to even the best of box-trees were enough. It
+would be perfectly unreasonable for a free man to come here to stare
+at box-trees a sixth time. "All right," he growled. "I guess
+my-wandering-boy-to-night is going to beat it again."
+
+While he drove to the garage he pondered: "Is it worth twenty-five
+plunks to me to be able to beat it to-night instead of waiting four
+days till pay-day? Nope. I'm a poor man."
+
+But at 5 A.M. he was hanging about the railroad-yards at Hammond,
+recalling the lessons of youth in "flipping trains"; and at seven he
+was standing on the bumpers between two freight-cars, clinging to the
+brake-rod, looking out to the open meadows of Indiana, laughing to see
+farm-houses ringed with apple-blossoms and sweet with April morning.
+The cinders stormed by him. As he swung with the cars, on curves, he
+saw the treacherous wheels grinding beneath him. But to the
+chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck of the trucks he hummed,
+"Never turn back, never tur' back, never tur' back."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+A young hobo named Carl Ericson crawled from the rods of an N. & W.
+freight-car at Roanoke, Virginia, on a May day, with spring at full
+tide and the Judas-trees a singing pink on the slopes of the Blue
+Ridge.
+
+"Hm!" grunted the young hobo. "I like these mountains. Guess I'll stay
+here awhile.... Virginia! Plantations and Civil War history and
+Richmond and everything, and me here!"
+
+A frowzy old hobo poked a somnolent head up from a pile of lumber near
+the tracks and yawned welcome to the recruit. "Hello, Slim. How's
+tricks?"
+
+"Pretty good. What's the best section to batter for a poke-out,
+Billy?"
+
+"To the right, over that way, and straight out."
+
+"Much 'bliged," said Slim--erstwhile Ericson. "Say, j' know of any
+jobs in this----"
+
+"Any _whats_?"
+
+"Jobs."
+
+"Jobs? You looking for----Say, you beat it. Gwan. Chase yourself. Gwan
+now; don't stand there. You ain't no decent 'bo. You're another of
+those Unfortunate Workmen that's spoiling the profesh." The veteran
+stared at Carl reprovingly, yet with a little sadness, too, at the
+thought of how bitterly he had been deceived in this young comrade,
+and his uncombed head slowly vanished amid the lumber.
+
+Carl grinned and started up-town. He walked into four restaurants. At
+noon, in white jacket, he was bustling about as waiter in the
+dining-room of the Waskahominie Hotel, which had "white service" as a
+feature.
+
+Within two days he was boon companion of a guest of the
+Waskahominie--Parker Heye, an actor famous from Cape Charles to
+Shockeysville, now playing heavies at Roanoke in the Great Riley Tent
+Show, Presenting a Popular Repertoire of Famous Melodramas under
+Canvas, Rain or Shine, Admittance Twenty-five Cents, Section Reserved
+for Colored People, the Best Show under Canvas, This Week Only.
+
+When Parker Heye returned from the theater Carl sat with him in a room
+which had calico-like wall-paper, a sunken bed with a comforter out of
+which oozed a bit of its soiled cotton entrails, a cracked
+water-pitcher on a staggering wash-stand, and a beautiful new cuspidor
+of white china hand-painted with pink moss-roses tied with narrow blue
+ribbon.
+
+Carl listened credulously to Heye's confidences as to how jealous was
+Riley, the actor-manager, of Heye's art, how Heye had "knocked them
+all down" in a stock company at Newport News, and what E. H. Sothern
+had said to him when they met in Richmond as guests of the Seven Pines
+Club.
+
+"Say," rasped Heye, "you're a smart young fellow, good-looking,
+ejucated. Why don't you try to get an engagement? I'll knock you down
+to Riley. The second juvenile 's going to leave on Saturday, and there
+ain't hardly time to get anybody from Norfolk."
+
+"Golly! that 'd be great!" cried Carl, who, like every human being
+since Eden, with the possible exceptions of Calvin and Richard
+Mansfield, had a secret belief that he could be a powerful actor.
+
+"Well, I'll see what I can do for you," said Heye, at parting,
+alternately snapping his suspenders and scratching his head. Though he
+was in his stocking-feet and coat-less, though the back of his neck
+was a scraggle of hair, Parker Heye was preferable to the three Swiss
+waiters snoring in the hot room under the eaves, with its door half
+open, opposite the half-open door of the room where negro chambermaids
+tumbled and snorted in uncouth slumber. Carl's nose wrinkled with
+bitter fastidiousness as he pulled off his clothes, sticky with heat,
+and glared at the swathed forms of the waiters. He was the aristocrat
+among proletarians, going back to His Own People--of the Great Riley
+Tent Show.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As second juvenile of the Tent Show, Carl received only twelve dollars
+a week, but Mr. Riley made him promises rich as the Orient beryl, and
+permitted him to follow the example of two of the bandsmen and pitch a
+cot on the trampled hay flooring of the dressing-room tent, behind the
+stage. There also Carl prepared breakfast on an alcohol-stove. The
+canvas creaked all night; negroes and small boys stuck inquisitive
+heads under the edge of the canvas. But it was worth it--to travel on
+again; to have his mornings free except for an hour's rehearsal; to
+climb to upland meadows of Virginia and Kentucky, among the pines and
+laurel and rhododendron; tramping up past the log cabins plastered
+with mud, where pickaninnies stared shyly, past glens shining with
+dogwood, and friendly streams. Once he sat for an hour on Easter Knob,
+gazing through a distant pass whose misty blue he pretended was the
+ocean. Once he heard there were moonshiners back in the hills. He
+talked to bearded Dunkards and their sunbonneted wives; and when he
+found a Confederate veteran he listened to the tale of the defense of
+Richmond, delighted to find that the Boys in Gray were not merely
+names in the history-books.
+
+Of all these discoveries he wrote to his mother, wishing that her
+weary snow-bleached life might know the Southern sun. And the first
+five dollars he saved he sent to her.
+
+But as soon as Carl became an actor Parker Heye grew jealous of him,
+and was gratingly contemptuous when he showed him how to make up,
+among the cheap actors jammed in the men's dressing-room, before a
+pine board set on two saw-horses, under the light of a flaring
+kerosene-torch. Carl came to hate Heye and his splotched face, his
+pale, large eyes and yellow teeth and the bang on his forehead, his
+black string tie that was invariably askew, his slovenly blue suit,
+his foppishly shaped tan button shoes with "bulldog" toes. Heye
+invariably jeered: "Don't make up so heavy.... Well, put a _little_
+rouge on your lips. What d'you think you are? A blooming red-lipped
+Venus?... Try to learn to walk across the stage as if you had _one_
+leg that wasn't wood, anyway.... It's customary to go to sleep when
+you're playing a listening role, but don't snore!... Oh, you're a
+swell actor! Think of me swallering your story about having been t'
+college!... Don't make up your eyebrows so heavy, you fool.... Why you
+ever wanted to be an actor----!"
+
+The Great Riley agreed with all that Heye said, and marveled with Heye
+that he had ever tried an amateur. Carl found the dressing-room a
+hay-dusty hell. But he enjoyed acting in "The Widow's Penny," "Alabama
+Nell," "The Moonshiner's Daughter," and "The Crook's Revenge" far more
+than he had enjoyed picking phrases out of Shakespeare at a vaguely
+remembered Plato. Since, in Joralemon and Plato, he had been brought
+up on melodrama, he believed as much as did the audience in the plays.
+It was a real mountain cabin from which he fired wonderfully loud guns
+in "The Moonshiner's Daughter"; and when the old mountaineer cried,
+"They ain't going to steal mah gal!" Carl was damp at the eyes, and
+swore with real fervor the oath to protect the girl, sure that in the
+ravine behind the back-drop his bearded foe-men were lurking.
+
+"The Crook's Revenge" was his favorite, for he was cast as a young
+millionaire and wore evening clothes (second-hand). He held off a mob
+of shrieking gangsters, crouched behind an overturned table in a
+gambling-den. He coolly stroked the lovely hair of the ingenue, Miss
+Evelyn L'Ewysse, with one hand, leveled a revolver with the other, and
+made fearless jests the while, to the infinite excitement of the
+audience, especially of the hyah-hyah-hyahing negroes, whose faces,
+under the flicker of lowered calcium-carbide lights, made a segregated
+strip of yellow-black polka-dotted with white eye-balls.
+
+When the people were before him, respectful to art under canvas, Carl
+could love them; but even the tiniest ragged-breeched darky was bold
+in his curiosity about the strolling players when they appeared
+outside, and Carl was self-conscious about the giggles and stares that
+surrounded him when he stopped on the street or went into a drug-store
+for the comfortable solace of a banana split. He was in a rage
+whenever a well-dressed girl peeped at him amusedly from a one-lunged
+runabout. The staring so flustered him that even the pride of coming
+from Chicago and knowing about motors did not prevent his feeling
+feeble at the knees as he tried to stalk by the grinning motored
+aristocracy. He would return to the show-tent, to hate the few tawdry
+drops and flats--the patch of green spattered with dirty white which
+variously simulated a daisy-field, a mountainside, and that part of
+Central Park directly opposite the Fifth Avenue residence of the
+millionaire counterfeiter, who, you remember, always comes out into
+the street to plot with his confederates. Carl hated with peculiar
+heartiness the anemic, palely varnished, folding garden bench, which
+figured now as a seat in the moonshiner's den, and now, with a cotton
+leopard-skin draped over it, as a fauteuil in the luxurious
+drawing-room of Mrs. Van Antwerp. The garden bench was, however,
+associated with his learning to make stage love to Miss Evelyn
+L'Ewysse.
+
+It was difficult to appear unconscious of fifty small boys all
+smacking their lips in unison, while he kissed the air one centimeter
+in front of Miss L'Ewysse's lips. But he learned the art. Indeed, he
+began to lessen that centimeter of safety.
+
+Miss Evelyn L'Ewysse (christened Lena Ludwig, and heir presumptive to
+one of the best delicatessens in Newport News) reveled in love-making
+on and off. Carl was attracted by her constantly, uncomfortably. She
+smiled at him in the wings, smoothed her fluffy blond hair at him, and
+told him in confidence that she was a high-school graduate, that she
+was used to much, oh, _much_ better companies, and was playing under
+canvas for a lark. She bubbled: "_Ach_, Louie, say, ain't it hot!
+Honest, Mr. Ericson, I don't see how you stand it like you do.... Say,
+honest, that was swell business you pulled in the third act last
+night.... Say, I know what let's do--let's get up a swell act and get
+on the Peanut Circuit. We'd hit Broadway with a noise like seventeen
+marine bands.... Say, honest, Mr. Ericson, you do awful well for----I
+bet you ain't no amachoor. I bet you been on before."
+
+He devoured it.
+
+One night, finding that Miss Evelyn made no comment on his holding her
+hand, he lured her out of the tent during a long wait, trembled, and
+kissed her. Her fingers gripped his shoulders agitatedly, plucked at
+his sleeve as she kissed him back. She murmured, "Oh, you hadn't ought
+to do that." But afterward she would kiss him every time they were
+alone, and she told him with confidential giggles of Parker Heye's
+awkward attempts to win her. Heye's most secret notes she read, till
+Carl seriously informed her that she was violating a trust. Miss
+Evelyn immediately saw the light and promised she would "never, never,
+never do anythin' like that again, and, honest, she hadn't realized
+she was doing anythin' dishon'able, but Heye is such an old pest";
+which was an excuse for her weeping on his shoulder and his kissing
+the tears away.
+
+All day he looked forward to their meetings. Yet constantly the law of
+the adventurer, which means the instinct of practical decency, warned
+him that this was no amour for him; that he must not make love where
+he did not love; that this good-hearted vulgarian was too kindly to
+tamper with and too absurd to love. Only----And again his breath would
+draw in with swift exultation as he recalled how elastic were her
+shoulders to stroke.
+
+It was summer now, and they were back in Virginia, touring the Eastern
+Shore. Carl, the prairie-born, had been within five miles of the open
+Atlantic, though he had not seen it. Along the endless flat
+potato-fields, broken by pine-groves under whose sultry shadow negro
+cabins sweltered, the heat clung persistently. The show-tent was
+always filled with a stale scent of people.
+
+At the town of Nankiwoc the hotel was not all it might have been.
+Evelyn L'Ewysse announced that she was "good and sick of eating a
+vaudeville dinner with the grub acts stuck around your plate in a lot
+of birds' bath-tubs--little mess of turnips and a dab of spinach and a
+fried cockroach. And when it comes to sleeping another night on a bed
+like a gridiron, no--thank--_you_! And believe me, if I see that old
+rube hotel-keeper comb his whiskers at the hall hat-rack again--he
+keeps a baby comb in his vest pocket with a lead-pencil and a cigar
+some drummer gave him--if I have to watch him comb that alfalfa again
+I'll bite his ears off and get pinched by the S. P. C. A.!"
+
+With Mrs. Lubley, the old lady and complacent unofficial chaperon of
+the show, Eve was going to imitate Carl and the two bandsmen, and
+sleep in the dressing-room tent, over half of which was devoted to the
+women of the company.
+
+Every day Carl warned himself that he must go no farther, but every
+night as Eve and he parted, to sleep with only a canvas partition
+between them, he cursed the presence of the show chaperon, and of the
+two bandsmen, always distressingly awake and talking till after
+midnight.
+
+A hot June night. The whole company had been invited to a dance at the
+U. C. V. Hall; the two bandsmen were going; the chaperon--lively old
+lady with experience on the burlesque circuit--was gaily going. Carl
+and Eve were not. It had taken but one glance between them to decide
+that.
+
+They sat outside the silent tent, on a wardrobe trunk. What manner of
+night it was, whether starlit or sullen, Carl did not know; he was
+aware only that it was oppressive, and that Eve was in his arms in the
+darkness. He kissed her moist, hot neck. He babbled incoherently of
+the show people, but every word he said meant that he was palpitating
+because her soft body was against his. He knew--and he was sure that
+she knew--that when they discussed Heye's string tie and pretended to
+laugh, they were agitatedly voicing their intoxication.
+
+His voice unsteady, Carl said: "Jiminy! it's so hot, Eve! I'm going to
+take off this darn shirt and collar and put on a soft shirt. S-say,
+w-why don't you put on a kimono or something? Be so much cooler."
+
+"Oh, I don't know as I ought to----" She was frightened, awed at
+Bacchic madness. "D-do you think it would be all right?"
+
+"Why not? Guess anybody's got a right to get cool--night like this.
+Besides, they won't be back till 4 P.M. And you got to get cool. Come
+on."
+
+And he knew--and he was sure that she knew--that all he said was
+pretense. But she rose and said, nebulously, as she stood before him,
+ruffling his hair: "Well, I would like to get cool. If you think it's
+all right----I'll put on something cooler, anyway."
+
+She went. Carl could hear a rustling in the women's end of the
+dressing-room tent. Fevered, he listened to it. Fevered, he changed to
+an outing-shirt, open at the throat. He ran out, not to miss a moment
+with her.... She had not yet come. He was too overwrought to heed a
+small voice in him, a voice born of snow-fields colored with sunset
+and trained in the quietudes of Henry Frazer's house, which insisted:
+"Go slow! Stop!" A louder voice throbbed like the pulsing of the
+artery in his neck, "She's coming!"
+
+Through the darkness her light garment swished against the long grass.
+He sprang up. Then he was holding her, bending her head back. He
+exulted to find that his gripping hand was barred from the smoothness
+of her side only by thin silk that glided and warmed under his
+fingers. She sat on his knees and snuggled her loosened hair
+tinglingly against his bare chest. He felt that she was waiting for
+him to go on.
+
+Suddenly he could not, would not, go on.
+
+"Dearest, we mustn't!" he mourned.
+
+"O Carl!" she sobbed, and stopped his words with clinging lips.
+
+He found himself waiting till she should finish the kiss that he might
+put an end to this.
+
+Perhaps he was checked by provincial prejudices about chivalry. But
+perhaps he had learned a little self-control. In any case, he had
+stopped for a second to think, and the wine of love was gone flat. He
+wished she would release him. Also, her hair was tickling his ear. He
+waited, patiently, till she should finish the kiss.
+
+Her lips drew violently from his, and she accused, "You don't want to
+kiss me!"
+
+"Look here; I want to kiss you, all right--Lord----" For a second his
+arms tightened; then he went on, cold: "But we'll both be good and
+sorry if we go too far. It isn't just a cowardly caution. It's----Oh,
+you know."
+
+"Oh yes, yes, yes, we mustn't go too far, Carl. But can't we just sit
+like this? O sweetheart, I am so tired! I want somebody to care for me
+a little. That isn't wicked, is it? I want you to take me in your arms
+and hold me close, close, and comfort me. I want so much to be
+comforted. We needn't go any further, need we?"
+
+"Oh now, good Lord! Eve, look here: don't you know we can't go on and
+not go farther? I'm having a hard enough time----" He sprang up,
+shakily lighting a cigarette. He stroked her hair and begged: "Please
+go, Eve. I guess I haven't got very good control over myself. Please.
+You make me----"
+
+"Oh yes, yes, sure! Blame it on me! Sure! I made you let me put on a
+kimono! I'm leading your pure white shriveled peanut of a soul into
+temptation!... Don't you ever dare speak to me again! Oh,
+you--you----"
+
+She flounced away.
+
+Carl caught her, in two steps. "See here, child," he said, gravely,
+"if you go off like this we'll both be miserable.... You remember how
+happy we were driving out to the old plantation at Powhasset?"
+
+"O Gawd! won't you men never say anything original? Remember it? Of
+course I remember it! What do you suppose I wore that little branch of
+laurel you picked for me, wore it here, here, at my breast, and I
+thought you'd _care_ if I hid it here where there wasn't any grease
+paint, and you don't--you don't care--and we picnicked, and I sang all
+the time I put up those sandwiches and hid the grape-fruit in the
+basket to surprise you----"
+
+"O darling Eve, I don't know how to say how sorry I am, so terribly
+sorry I've started things going! It is my fault. But can't you see
+I've got to stop it before it's too late, just for that reason? Let's
+be chums again."
+
+She shook her head. Her hand crept to his, slid over it, drew it up to
+her breast. She was swaying nearer to him. He pulled his hand free and
+fled to his tent.
+
+Perhaps his fiercest gibe at himself was that he had had to play the
+role of virgin Galahad rejecting love, which is praised in books and
+ridiculed in clubs. He mocked at his sincere desire to be fair to Eve.
+And between mockeries he strained to hear her moving beyond the
+canvas partition. He was glad when the bandsmen came larruping home
+from the dance.
+
+Next day she went out of her way to be chilly to him. He did not woo
+her friendship. He had resigned from the Great Riley Show, and he was
+going--going anywhere, so long as he kept going.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+He had been a jolly mechanic again, in denim overalls and jumper and a
+defiant black skull-cap with long, shiny vizor; the tender of the
+motor-boat fleet at an Ontario summer hotel. One day he had looked up,
+sweating and greasy, to see Howard Griffin, of Plato, parading past in
+white flannels. He had muttered: "I don't want Them to know I've just
+been bumming around. I'll go some place else. And I'll do something
+worth while." Now he was on the train for New York, meditating
+impersonally on his uselessness, considering how free of moss his
+rolling had kept him. He could think of no particularly masterful plan
+for accumulating moss. If he had not bought a ticket through to New
+York he would have turned back, to seek a position in one of the great
+automobile factories that now, this early autumn of 1906, were
+beginning to distinguish Detroit. Well, he had enough money to last
+for one week in New York. He would work in an automobile agency there;
+later he would go to Detroit, and within a few years be president of a
+motor company, rich enough to experiment with motor-boats and to laugh
+at Howard Griffin or any other Platonian.
+
+So he sketched his conquering entrance into New York. Unfortunately it
+was in the evening, and, having fallen asleep at Poughkeepsie, he did
+not awake till a brakeman shook his shoulder at the Grand Central
+Station. He had heard of the old Grand Union Hotel, and drowsily, with
+the stuffy nose and sandy eyes and unclean feeling about the teeth
+that overpower one who sleeps in a smoking-car, he staggered across
+to the hotel and spent his first conquering night in filling a dollar
+room with vulgar sounds of over-weary slumber.
+
+But in the morning, when he stared along Forty-second Street; when he
+breakfasted at a Childs' restaurant, like a gigantic tiled bath-room,
+and realized that the buckwheat cakes were New York buckwheats; when
+he sighted the noble _Times_ Building and struck out for Broadway (the
+magic name that promised marble palaces, even if it provided two-story
+shacks); when he bustled into a carburetor agency and demanded a
+job--then he found the gateway of wonder.
+
+But he did not find a job.
+
+Eight nights after his arrival he quietly paid his bill at the hotel;
+tipped a curly-headed bell-boy; checked his baggage, which consisted
+of a shirt, a razor, and an illustrated catalogue of automobile
+accessories; put his tooth-brush in his pocket; bought an evening
+paper in order to feel luxurious; and walked down to the Charity
+Organization Society, with ten cents in his pocket.
+
+In the Joint Application Bureau, filled with desks and
+filing-cabinets, where poor men cease to be men and become Cases, Carl
+waited on a long bench till it was his turn to tell his troubles to a
+keen, kindly, gray-bearded man behind a roll-top desk. He asked for
+work. Work was, it seemed, the one thing the society could not give.
+He received a ticket to the Municipal Lodging House.
+
+This was not the hygienic hostelry of to-day, but a barracks on First
+Avenue. Carl had a chunk of bread with too much soda in it, and coffee
+with too little coffee in it, from a contemptuous personage in a white
+jacket, who, though his cuffs were grimy, showed plainly that he was
+too good to wait on bums. Carl leaned his elbows on the long scrubbed
+table and chewed the bread of charity sullenly, resolving to catch a
+freight next day and get out of town.
+
+He slept in a narrow bunk near a man with consumption. The room reeked
+of disinfectants and charity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The East Side of New York. A whirlwind of noise and smell and hovering
+shadows. The jargon of Jewish matrons in brown shawls and orthodox
+wigs, chaffering for cabbages and black cotton stockings and gray
+woolen undershirts with excitable push-cart proprietors who had beards
+so prophetic that it was startling to see a frivolous cigarette amid
+the reverend mane. The scent of fried fish and decaying bits of kosher
+meat, and hallways as damnably rotten of floor as they were profitable
+to New York's nicest circles. The tall gloom of six-story tenements
+that made a prison wall of dulled yellow, bristling with bedding-piled
+fire-escapes and the curious heads of frowzy women. A potpourri of
+Russian signs, Yiddish newspapers, synagogues with six-pointed gilt
+stars, bakeries with piles of rye bread crawling with caraway-seeds,
+shops for renting wedding finery that looked as if it could never fit
+any one, second-hand furniture-shops with folding iron beds, a filthy
+baby holding a baby slightly younger and filthier, mangy cats slinking
+from pile to pile of rubbish, and a withered geranium in a tin can
+whose label was hanging loose and showed rust-stains amid the dry
+paste on its back. Everywhere crowds of voluble Jews in dark clothes,
+and noisily playing children that catapulted into your legs. The
+lunger-blocks in which we train the victims of Russian tyranny to
+appreciate our freedom. A whirlwind of alien ugliness and foul smells
+and incessant roar and the deathless ambition of young Jews to know
+Ibsen and syndicalism. It swamped the courage of hungry Carl as he
+roamed through Rivington Street and Essex and Hester, vainly seeking
+jobs from shopkeepers too poor to be able to bathe.
+
+He felt that he, not these matter-of-fact crowds, was alien. He was
+hungry and tired. There was nothing heroic to do--just go hungry.
+There was no place where he could sit down. The benches of the tiny
+hard-trodden parks were full.... If he could sit down, if he could
+rest one little hour, he would be able to go and find freight-yards,
+where there would be the clean clang of bells and rattle of trucks
+instead of gabbled Yiddish. Then he would ride out into the country,
+away from the brooding shadows of this town, where there were no
+separable faces, but only a fog of ceaselessly moving crowds....
+
+Late that night he stood aimlessly talking to a hobo on a dirty corner
+of the Bowery, where the early September rain drizzled through the
+gaunt structure of the Elevated. He did not feel the hunger so much
+now, but he was meekly glad to learn from his new friend, the hobo,
+that in one more hour he could get food in the bread-line. He felt
+very boyish, and would have confided the fact that he was starving to
+any woman, to any one but this transcontinental hobo, the tramp royal,
+trained to scorn hunger. Because he was one of them he watched
+incuriously the procession of vagrants, in coats whose collars were
+turned up and fastened with safety-pins against the rain. The vagrants
+shuffled rapidly by, their shoulders hunched, their hands always in
+their trousers pockets, their shoe-heels always ground down and muddy.
+
+And incuriously he watched a saloon-keeper, whose face was plastered
+over with a huge mustache, come out and hang a sign, "Porter wanted in
+A.M.," on the saloon door.
+
+As he slouched away to join the bread-line, a black deuce in the
+world's discard, Carl was wondering how he could get that imperial
+appointment as porter in a Bowery saloon. He almost forgot it while
+waiting in the bread-line, so occupied was he in hating two collegians
+who watched the line with that open curiosity which nice, clean,
+respectable young men suppose the poor never notice. He restrained his
+desire to go over and quote Greek at them, because they were ignorant
+and not to blame for being sure that they were of clay superior to
+any one in a bread-line. And partly because he had forgotten his
+Greek.
+
+He came back to the Bowery briskly, alone, with the manhood of a loaf
+of bread in him. He was going to get that job as porter. He planned
+his campaign as a politician plans to become a statesman. He slipped
+the sign, "Porter wanted in A.M.," from its nail and hid it beneath
+his coat. He tramped the block all night and, as suspicious characters
+always do to avoid seeming suspicious, he begged a match from a
+policeman who was keeping an eye on him. The policeman chatted with
+him about baseball and advised him to keep away from liquor and
+missions.
+
+At 5 A.M. Carl was standing at the saloon door. When the bartender
+opened it Carl bounced in, slightly dizzy, conscious of the slime of
+mud on his fraying trouser-ends.
+
+The saloon had an air of cheap crime and a floor covered with clotted
+sawdust. The bar was a slab of dark-brown wood, so worn that
+semicircles of slivers were showing. The nasty gutter was still filled
+with cigar-ends and puddles of beer and bits of free-lunch cheese.
+
+"I want that job as porter," said Carl.
+
+"Oh, you do, do you? Well, you wait and see who else comes to get it."
+
+"Nobody else is going to come."
+
+"How do you know they ain't?"
+
+Carl drew the sign from beneath his coat and carefully laid it on the
+bar. "That's why."
+
+"Well, you got nerve. You got the nerve of a Republican on Fourteenth
+Street, like the fellow says. You must want it. Well, all right, I
+guess you can have it if the boss don't kick."
+
+Carl was accepted by the "boss," who gave him a quarter and told him
+to go out and get a "regular feed." He hummed over breakfast. He had
+been accepted again by all men when he had been accepted by the
+proprietor of a Bowery saloon. He was going to hold this job, no
+matter what happened. The rolling stone was going to gather moss.
+
+For three months Carl took seriously the dirtiest things in the world.
+He worked sixteen hours a day for eight dollars a week, cleaning
+cuspidors, scrubbing the floor, scattering clean sawdust, cutting the
+more rotten portions off the free-lunch meat. As he slopped about with
+half-frozen, brittle rags, hoboes pushed him aside and spat on the
+floor he had just cleaned.
+
+Of his eight dollars a week he saved four. He rented an airshaft
+bedroom in the flat of a Jewish sweatshop worker for one dollar and
+seventy-five cents a week. It was occupied daytimes by a cook in an
+all-night restaurant, who had taken a bath in 1900 when at Coney
+Island on an excursion of the Pip O'Gilligan Association. The room was
+unheated, and every night during January Carl debated whether to go to
+bed with his shoes on or off.
+
+The sub-landlord's daughter was a dwarfish, blotched-faced, passionate
+child of fifteen, with moist eyes and very low-cut waists of coarse
+voile (which she pronounced "voyle"). She would stop Carl in the dark
+"railroad" hallway and, chewing gum rapidly, chatter about the
+aisleman at Wanamacy's, and what a swell time there would be at the
+coming ball of the Thomas J. Monahan Literary and Social Club, tickets
+twenty-five cents for lady and gent, including hat-check. She let Carl
+know that she considered him close-fisted for never taking her to the
+movies on Sunday afternoons, but he patted her head and talked to her
+like a big brother and kept himself from noticing that she had
+clinging hands and would be rather pretty, and he bought her a
+wholesome woman's magazine to read--not an entirely complete solution
+to the problem of what to do with the girl whom organized society is
+too busy to nourish, but the best he could contrive just then.
+
+Sundays, when he was free for part of the day, he took his book of
+recipes for mixed drinks to the reading-room of the Tompkins Square
+library and gravely studied them, for he was going to be a bartender.
+
+Every night when he staggered from the comparatively clean air of the
+street into the fetid chill of his room he asked himself why he--son
+of Northern tamaracks and quiet books--went on with this horrible
+imitation of living; and each time answered himself that, whether
+there was any real reason or not, he was going to make good on one job
+at least, and that the one he held. And admonished himself that he was
+very well paid for a saloon porter.
+
+If Carl had never stood in the bread-line, if he had never been
+compelled to clean a saloon gutter artistically, in order to keep from
+standing in that bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the
+commonplaceness for which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry
+Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know
+how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did
+not at the time feel that he was debased. He lived twenty-four hours a
+day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by
+the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to
+learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself was so
+much less desirable than driving a car or wandering through the
+moonlight with Eve L'Ewysse in days wonderful and lost that, to endure
+it, to conquer it, he had to develop a control over temper and speech
+and body which was to stay with him in windy mornings of daring.
+
+Within three months Carl had become assistant bar-keeper, and now he
+could save eight dollars a week. He bought a couple of motor magazines
+and went to one vaudeville show and kept his sub-landlord's daughter
+from running off with a cadet, wondering how soon she would do it in
+any case, and receiving a depressing insight into the efficiency of
+society for keeping in the mire most of the people born there.
+
+Three months later, at the end of winter, he was ready to start for
+Panama.
+
+He was going to Panama because he had read in a Sunday newspaper of
+the Canal's marvels of engineering and jungle.
+
+He had avoided making friends. There was no one to give him farewell
+when he emerged from the muck. But he had one task to perform--to
+settle with the Saloon Snob.
+
+Petey McGuff was the name of this creature. He was an oldish and
+wicked man, born on the Bowery. He had been a heavy-weight
+prize-fighter in the days of John L. Sullivan; then he had met John,
+and been, ever since, an honest crook who made an excellent living by
+conducting a boxing-school in which the real work was done by
+assistants. He resembled a hound with a neat black bow tie, and he
+drooled tobacco-juice down his big, raw-looking, moist, bristly,
+too-masculine chin. Every evening from eleven to midnight Petey McGuff
+sat at the round table in the mildewed corner at the end of the bar,
+drinking old-fashioned whisky cocktails made with Bourbon, playing
+Canfield, staring at the nude models pasted on the milky surface of an
+old mirror, and teasing Carl.
+
+"Here, boy, come 'ere an' wipe off de whisky you spilled.... Come on,
+you tissy-cat. Get on de job.... You look like Sunday-school Harry.
+Mamma's little rosy-cheeked boy.... Some day I'm going to bust your
+beezer. Gawd! it makes me sick to sit here and look at dose
+goily-goily cheeks.... Come 'ere, Lizzie, an' wipe dis table again. On
+de jump, daughter."
+
+Carl held himself in. Hundreds of times he snarled to himself: "I
+_won't_ hit him! I will make good on _this_ job, anyway." He created a
+grin which he could affix easily.
+
+Now he was leaving. He had proven that he could hold a job; had
+answered the unspoken criticisms from Plato, from Chicago garages,
+from the Great Riley Show. For the first time since he had deserted
+college he had been able to write to his father, to answer the grim
+carpenter's unspoken criticisms of the son who had given up his chance
+for an "education." And proudly he had sent to his father a little
+check. He had a beautiful new fifteen-dollar suit of blue serge at
+home. In his pocket was his ticket--steerage by the P. R. R. line to
+Colon--and he would be off for bluewater next noon. His feet danced
+behind the bar as he filled schooners of beer and scraped off their
+foam with a celluloid ruler. He saw himself in Panama, with a clean
+man's job, talking to cosmopolitan engineers against a background of
+green-and-scarlet jungle. And, oh yes, he was going to beat Petey
+McGuff that evening, and get back much of the belligerent self-respect
+which he had been drawing off into schooners with the beer.
+
+Old Petey rolled in at two minutes past eleven, warmed his hands at
+the gas-stove, poked disapprovingly at the pretzels on the free-lunch
+counter, and bawled at Carl: "Hey, keep away from dat cash-register!
+Wipe dem goilish tears away, will yuh, Agnes, and bring us a little
+health-destroyer and a couple matches."
+
+Carl brought a whisky cocktail.
+
+"Where's de matches, you tissy-cat?"
+
+Carl wiped his hands on his apron and beamed: "Well, so the old soak
+is getting too fat and lazy to reach over on the bar and get his own!
+You'll last quick now!"
+
+"Aw, is dat so!... For de love of Mike, d'yuh mean to tell me Lizzie
+is talking back? Whadda yuh know about dat! Whadda yuh know about dat!
+You'll get sick on us here, foist t'ing we know. Where was yuh
+hoited?"
+
+Petey McGuff's smile was absolutely friendly. It made Carl hesitate,
+but it had become one of the principles of cosmic ethics that he had
+to thump Petey, and he growled: "I'll give you all the talking back
+you want, you big stiff. I'm getting through to-night. I'm going to
+Panama."
+
+"No, straight, is dat straight?"
+
+"That's what I said."
+
+"Well, dat's fine, boy. I been watching yuh, and I sees y' wasn't cut
+out to be no saloon porter. I made a little bet with meself you was
+ejucated. Why, y'r cuffs ain't even doity--not very doity. Course you
+kinda need a shave, but dem little blond hairs don't show much. I seen
+you was a gentleman, even if de bums didn't. You're too good t' be a
+rum-peddler. Glad y're going, boy, mighty glad. Sit down. Tell us
+about it. We'll miss yuh here. I was just saying th' other night to
+Mike here dere ain't one feller in a hundred could 'a' stood de
+kiddin' from an old he-one like me and kep' his mout' shut and grinned
+and said nawthin' to nobody. Dat's w'at wins fights. But, say, boy,
+I'll miss yuh, I sure will. I get to be kind of lonely as de boys drop
+off--like boozers always does. Oh, hell, I won't spill me troubles
+like an old tissy-cat.... So you're going to Panama? I want yuh to sit
+down and tell me about it. Whachu taking, boy?"
+
+"Just a cigar.... I'll miss you, too, Petey. Tell you what I'll do.
+I'll send you some post-cards from Panama."
+
+Next noon as the S.S. _Panama_ pulled out of her ice-lined dock Carl
+saw an old man shivering on the wharf and frantically waving
+good-by--Petey McGuff.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+The S.S. _Panama_ had passed Watling's Island and steamed into
+story-land. On the white-scrubbed deck aft of the wheel-house Carl sat
+with his friends of the steerage--sturdy men all, used to open places;
+old Ed, the rock-driller, long, Irish, huge-handed, irate, kindly;
+Harry, the young mechanic from Cleveland. Ed and an oiler were
+furiously debating about the food aboard:
+
+"Aw, it's rotten, all of it."
+
+"Look here, Ed, how about the chicken they give the steerage on
+Sunday?"
+
+"Chicken? I didn't see no chicken. I see some sea-gull, though. No
+wonder they ain't no more sea-gulls following us. They shot 'em and
+cooked 'em on us."
+
+"Say," mused Harry, "makes me think of when I was ship-building in
+Philly--no, it was when I was broke in K. C.--and a guy----"
+
+Carl smiled in content, exulting in the talk of the men of the road,
+exulting in his new blue serge suit, his new silver-gray tie with no
+smell of the saloon about it, finger-nails that were growing pink
+again--and the sunset that made glorious his petty prides. A vast
+plane of unrippling plum-colored sea was set with mirror-like pools
+where floated tree-branches so suffused with light that the glad heart
+blessed them. His first flying-fish leaped silvery from silver sea,
+and Carl cried, almost aloud, "This is what I've been wanting all my
+life!"
+
+Aloud, to Harry: "Say, what's it like in Kansas? I'm going down
+through there some day." He spoke harshly. But the real Carl was
+robed in light and the murmurous wake of evening, with the tropics
+down the sky-line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lying in his hot steerage bunk, stripped to his under-shirt, Carl
+peered through the "state-room" window to the swishing night sea,
+conscious of the rolling of the boat, of the engines shaking her, of
+bolts studding the white iron wall, of life-preservers over his head,
+of stokers singing in the gangway as they dumped the clinkers
+overboard. The _Panama_ was pounding on, on, on, and he rejoiced,
+"This is just what I've wanted, always."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They are creeping in toward the wharf at Colon. He is seeing Panama!
+First a point of palms, then the hospital, the red roofs of the I. C.
+C. quarters at Cristobal, and negroes on the sun-blistered wharf.
+
+At last he is free to go ashore in wonderland--a medley of Colon and
+Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like
+monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen
+in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads
+and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in
+lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of
+their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with
+silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched
+pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island
+pineapples. Carl gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French
+peasant laborers and indignant Irish foremen and German
+concessionaries with dueling scars and high collars. Gold Spanish
+signs and Spiggoty money and hotels with American cuspidors and
+job-hunters; tin roofs and arcades; shops open to the street in front,
+but mysterious within, giving glimpses of the canny Chinese
+proprietors smoking tiny pipes. Trains from towns along the Canal, and
+sometimes the black funeral-car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery.
+Gambling-houses where it is considered humorous to play "Where Is My
+Wandering Boy To-night?" on the phonograph while wandering boys sit at
+poker; and less cleanly places, named after the various states. Negro
+wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddled tunes older than voodoo;
+Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green bananas; memories
+of the Spanish Main and Morgan's raid, of pieces of eight and
+cutlasses ho! Capes of cocoanut palms running into a welter of surf;
+huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases land-crabs scuttle
+with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist, still air, and
+suggests the corpses of disappeared men found half devoured.
+
+Then, for contrast, the transplanted North, with its seriousness about
+the Service; the American avenues and cool breezes of Cristobal, where
+fat, bald chiefs of the I. C. C. drive pompously with political guests
+who, in 1907, are still incredulous about the success of the military
+socialism of the Canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston,
+seated in Grand Rapids golden-oak rockers on the screened porches of
+bungalows, talk of hats, and children, and mail-orders, and cards, and
+The Colonel, and malarial fever, and Chautauqua, and the Culebra
+slide.
+
+Colon! A kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white,
+warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high
+endeavor of the Canal and whispers from the unknown Bush; drenched
+with sudden rain like escaping steam, or languid under the desert
+glare of the sky, where hangs a gyre of buzzards whose slow circles
+are stiller than death and calmer than wisdom.
+
+"Lord!" sighs Carl Ericson from Joralemon, "this is what I've wanted
+ever since I was a kid."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Pedro Miguel, which the Canal employees always called "Peter
+McGill," he found work, first as an unofficial time-keeper; presently,
+after examinations, as a stationery engineer on the roll of the I. C.
+C. Within a month he showed no signs of his Bowery experiences beyond
+a shallow hollow in his smooth cheeks. He lived in quarters like a
+college dormitory, communistic and jolly, littered with shoes and
+cube-cut tobacco and college banners; clean youngsters dropping in for
+an easy chat--and behind it all, the mystery of the Bush. His
+room-mate, a conductor on the P. R. R., was a globe-trotter, and
+through him Carl met the Adventurers, whom he had been questing ever
+since he had run away from Oscar Ericson's woodshed. There was a young
+engineer from Boston Tech., who swore every morning at 7.07 (when it
+rained boiling water as enthusiastically as though it had never done
+such a thing before) that he was going to Chihuahua, mining. There was
+Cock-eye Corbett, an ex-sailor, who was immoral and a Lancashireman,
+and knew more about blackbirding and copra and Kanakas, and the
+rum-holes from Nagasaki to Mombasa, than it is healthy for a civil
+servant to know.
+
+Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers,
+who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St.
+John's College, China, and a sub-contractor for railroad construction
+in Montana, and who was now a minor clerk in the cool, lofty offices
+of the Materials and Supplies Department, came over from Colon,
+relaxed in a tilted-back chair, and fingered the Masonic charm on his
+horsehair watch-guard, while he talked with the P. R. R. conductor and
+the others about ruby-hunting and the Relief of Peking, and Where is
+Hector Macdonald? and Is John Orth dead? and Shall we try to climb
+Chimborazo? and Creussot guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal
+lore. These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside
+information. The others drawled about various strange things which
+make a man discontented and bring him no good.
+
+Carl was full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery
+and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an
+authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in
+_Aeronautics_ at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this
+time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown
+even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful
+machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a
+motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim
+had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines;
+lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his
+dirigible, and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous
+aeroplane; and in May, 1907, a sculptor named Delagrange flew over six
+hundred feet in France. Various crank inventors were "solving the
+problem of flight" every day. Man was fluttering on the edge of his
+earthy nest, ready to plunge into the air. Carl was able to make
+technical-sounding predictions which caught the imaginations of the
+restless children.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The adventurers kept moving. The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he
+was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed in
+Tahiti, whence he sent Carl one post-card, worded, "What price T. T.?"
+The engineer from Boston Tech. kept his oath about mining in
+Chihuahua. He got the appointment as assistant superintendent of the
+Tres Reyes mine--and he took Carl with him.
+
+Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and
+hill. He found rare days, purposeless and wonderful as the voyages of
+ancient Norse Ericsens; days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly
+balancing a .32-20 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack; the joy of
+repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons
+with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at
+night under an exhilarating splendor of stars. It never seemed to him
+that the machinery desecrated the mountains' stern grandeur.
+
+Stolen hours he gave to the building of box-kites with cambered
+wings, after rapturously learning, in the autumn of 1908, that in
+August a lanky American mechanic named Wilbur Wright had startled the
+world by flying an aeroplane many miles publicly in France; that
+before this, on July 4, 1908, another Yankee mechanic, Glenn Curtiss,
+had covered nearly a mile, for the _Scientific American_ trophy, after
+a series of trials made in company with Alexander Graham Bell, J. A.
+D. McCurdy, "Casey" Baldwin, and Augustus Post.
+
+He might have gone on until death, dealing with excitable greasers and
+hysterical machinery, but for the coming of a new mine superintendent--one
+of those Englishmen, stolid, red-mustached, pipe-smoking, eye-brow-lifting,
+who at first seem beefily dull, but prove to have known every one from
+George Moore to Marconi. He inspected Carl hundreds of times, then told him
+that the period had come when he ought to attack a city, conquer it, build
+up a reputation cumulatively; that he needed a contrast to Platonians and
+Bowery bums and tropical tramps, and even to his beloved engineers.
+
+"You can do everything but order a _petit diner a deux_, but you must
+learn to do that, too. Go make ten thousand pounds and study Pall Mall
+and the boulevards, and then come back to us in Mexico. I'll be sorry
+to have you go--with your damned old silky hair like a woman's and
+your wink when Guittrez comes up here to threaten us--but don't let
+the hinterland enslave you too early."
+
+A month later, in January, 1909, aged twenty-three and a half, Carl
+was steaming out of El Paso for California, with one thousand dollars
+in savings, a beautiful new Stetson hat, and an ambition to build up a
+motor business in San Francisco. As the desert sky swam with orange
+light and a white-browed woman in the seat behind him hummed Musetta's
+song from "La Boheme" he was homesick for the outlanders, whom he was
+deserting that he might stick for twenty years in one street and grub
+out a hundred thousand dollars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+On a grassy side-street of Oakland, California, was "Jones & Ericson's
+Garage: Gasoline and Repairs: Motor Cycles and Bicycles for Rent:
+Oakland Agents for Bristow Magnetos."
+
+It was perhaps the cleverest garage in Oakland and Berkeley for the
+quick repairing of motor-cycles; and newly wed owners of family
+runabouts swore that Carl Ericson could make a carburetor out of a
+tomato-can, and even be agreeable when called on for repairs at 2 A.M.
+He had doubled old Jones's business during the nine months--February
+to November, 1909--that they had been associated.
+
+Carl believed that he thought of nothing but work and the restaurants
+and theaters of civilization. No more rolling for him until he had
+gathered moss! He played that he was a confirmed business man. The
+game had hypnotized him for nearly a year. He whistled as he cleaned
+plugs, and glanced out at the eucalyptus-trees and the sunny road,
+without wanting to run away. But just to-day, just this glorious
+rain-cleansed November day, with high blue skies and sunlight on the
+feathery pepper-trees, he was going to sneak away from work and have a
+celebration all by himself.
+
+He was going down to San Mateo to see his first flying-machine!
+
+November, 1909. Bleriot had crossed the English Channel; McCurdy had,
+in March, 1909, calmly pegged off sixteen miles in the "Silver Dart"
+biplane; Paulhan had gone eighty-one miles, and had risen to the
+incredible height of five hundred feet, to be overshadowed by Orville
+Wright's sixteen hundred feet; Glenn Curtiss had won the Gordon
+Bennett cup at Rheims.
+
+California was promising to be in the van of aviation. She was
+remembering that her own Montgomery had been one of the pioneers. Los
+Angeles was planning a giant meet for January. A dozen cow-pasture
+aviators were taking credulous young reporters aside and confiding
+that next day, or next week, or at latest next month, they would
+startle the world by ascending in machines "on entirely new and
+revolutionary principles, on which they had been working for ten
+years." Sometimes it was for eight years they had been working. But
+always they remarked that "the model from which the machine will be
+built has flown perfectly in the presence of some of the most
+prominent men in the locality." These machines had a great deal to do
+with the mysterious qualities of gyroscopes and helicopters.
+
+Now, Dr. Josiah Bagby, the San Francisco physician and
+oil-burning-marine-engine magnate, had really brought three genuine
+Bleriot monoplanes from France, with Carmeau, graduate of the Bleriot
+school and licensed French aviator, for working pilot; and was
+experimenting with them at San Mateo, near San Francisco, where the
+grandsons of the Forty-niners play polo. It had been rumored that he
+would open a school for pilots and build Bleriot-type monoplanes for
+the American market.
+
+Carl had lain awake for an hour the night before, picturing the wonder
+of flight that he hoped to see. He rose early, put on his politest
+garments, and informed grumpy old Jones that he was off for a
+frolic--he wasn't sure, he said, whether he would get drunk or get
+married. He crossed the bay, glad of the sea-gulls, the glory of Mt.
+Tamalpais, and San Francisco's hill behind fairy hill. He consumed a
+Pacific sundae, with a feeling of holiday, and hummed "Mandalay." On
+the trolley to San Mateo he read over and over the newspaper accounts
+of Bagby's monoplanes.
+
+Walking through San Mateo, Carl swung his cocky green hat and scanned
+the sky for aircraft. He saw none. But as he tramped out on the
+flying-field he began to run at the sight of two wide, cambered wings,
+rounded at the ends like the end of one's thumb, attached to a fragile
+long body of open framework. Men were gathered about it. A man with a
+short, crisp beard and a tight woolen toboggan-cap was seated in the
+body, the wings stretching on either side of him. He scratched his
+beard and gesticulated. A mechanic revolved the propeller, and the
+unmuffled motor burst out with a trrrrrrrr whose music rocked Carl's
+heart. Black smoke hurled back along the machine. The draught tore at
+the hair of two men crouched on the ground holding the tail. They let
+go. The monoplane ran forward along the ground, and suddenly was off
+it, a foot up, ten feet up--really flying. Carl could see the aviator
+calmly staring ahead, working his arms, as the machine turned and
+slipped away over distant trees.
+
+His first impression of an aeroplane in the air had nothing to do with
+birds or dragon-flies or the miracle of it, because he was completely
+absorbed in an impression of Carl Ericson, which he expressed after
+this wise:
+
+"I--am--going--to--be--an--aviator!"
+
+And later, "Yes, _that's_ what I've always wanted."
+
+He joined the group in front of the hangar-tent. Workmen were
+hammering on wooden sheds back of it. He recognized the owner, Dr.
+Bagby, from his pictures: a lean man of sixty with a sallow
+complexion, a gray mustache like a rat-tail, a broad, black
+countrified slouch-hat on the back of his head, a gray sack-suit which
+would have been respectable but unfashionable at any period
+whatsoever. He looked like a country lawyer who had served two terms
+in the state legislature. His shoes were black, but not blackened, and
+had no toe-caps--the comfortable shoes of an oldish man. He was
+tapping his teeth with a thin corded forefinger and remarking in a
+monotonous voice to a Mexican youth plump and polite and well dressed,
+"Wel-l-l-l, Tony, I guess those plugs were better; I guess those plugs
+were better. Heh?" Bagby turned to the others, marveled at them as if
+trying to remember who they were, and said, slowly, "I guess those
+plugs were all right. Heh?"
+
+The monoplane was returning, for a time apparently not moving, like a
+black mark painted on the great blue sky; then soaring overhead, the
+sharply cut outlines clear as a pen-and-ink drawing; then landing,
+bouncing on the slightly uneven ground.
+
+As the French aviator climbed out, Dr. Bagby's sad face brightened and
+he suggested: "Those plugs went better, Munseer. Heh? I've been
+thinking. Maybe you been giving her too rich a mixture."
+
+While they were wiping the Gnome engine Carl shyly approached Dr.
+Bagby. He felt frightfully an outsider; wondered if he could ever be
+intimate with the magician as was the plump Mexican youth they called
+"Tony." He said "Uh" once or twice, and blurted, "I want to be an
+aviator."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Dr. Bagby, gently, glancing away from Carl to the machine.
+He went over, twanged a supporting-wire, and seemed to remember that some
+one had spoken to him. He returned to the fevered Carl, walking sidewise,
+staring all the while at the resting monoplane, so efficient, yet so quiet
+now and slender and feminine. "Yes, yes. So you'd like to be an aviator. So
+you'd like--like----(Hey, boy, don't touch that!)----to be an aviator. Yes,
+yes. They all would, m' boy. They all would. Well, maybe you can be, some
+day. Maybe you can be.... Some day."
+
+"I mean now. Right away. Heard you were going t' start a school. Want
+to join."
+
+"Hm, hm," sighed Dr. Bagby, tapping his teeth, jingling his heavy
+gold watch-chain, brushing a trail of cigar-ashes from a lapel, then
+staring abstractedly at Carl, who was turning his hat swiftly round
+and round, so flushed of cheek, so excited of eye, that he seemed
+twenty instead of twenty-four. "Yes, yes, so you'd like to join. Tst.
+But that would cost you five hundred dollars, you know."
+
+"Right!"
+
+"Well, you go talk to Munseer about it; Munseer Carmeau. He is a very
+good aviator. He is a licensed aviator. He knows Henry Farman. He
+studied under Bleriot. He is the boss here. I'm just the poor old
+fellow that stands around. Sometimes Munseer takes me up for a little
+ride in our machine; sometimes he takes me up; but he is the boss. He
+is the boss, my friend; you'll have to see him." And Dr. Bagby walked
+away, apparently much discouraged about life.
+
+Carl was not discouraged about life. He swore that now he would be an
+aviator even if he had to go to Dayton or Hammondsport or France.
+
+He returned to Oakland. He sold his share in the garage for $1,150.
+
+Before the end of January he was enrolled as a student in the Bagby
+School of Aviation and Monoplane Building.
+
+On an impulse he wrote of his wondrous happiness to Gertie Cowles, but
+he tore up the letter. Then proudly he wrote to his father that the
+lost boy had found himself. For the first time in all his desultory
+writing of home-letters he did not feel impelled to defend himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Crude were the surroundings where Carmeau turned out some of the best
+monoplane pilots America will ever see. There were two rude shed-hangars in
+which they kept the three imported Bleriots--a single-seat racer of the
+latest type, a Bleriot XII. passenger-carrying machine with the seat under
+the plane, and "P'tite Marie," the school machine, which they usually kept
+throttled down to four hundred or five hundred, but in which Carmeau made
+such spirited flights as the one Carl had first witnessed. Back of the
+hangars was the workshop, which had little architecture, but much
+machinery. Here the pupils were building two Bleriot-type machines, and
+trying to build an eight-cylinder V motor. All these things had Bagby given
+for the good of the game, expecting no profit in return. He was one of the
+real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy
+of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings
+and become superman.
+
+His generosity did not extend to living-quarters. Most of the students
+lived at the hangars and dined on Hamburg sandwiches, fried eggs, and
+Mexican _enchiladas_, served at a lunch-wagon anchored near the field.
+That lunch-wagon was their club. Here, squatted on high stools,
+treating one another to ginger-ale, they argued over torque and angles
+of incidence and monoplanes _vs._ biplanes. Except for two unpopular
+aristocrats who found boarding-houses in San Mateo, they slept in the
+hangars, in their overalls, sprawled on mattresses covered with
+horse-blankets. It was bed at eight-thirty. At four or five Carmeau
+would crawl out, scratch his beard, start a motor, and set every
+neighborhood dog howling. The students would gloomily clump over to
+the lunch-wagon for a ham-and-egg breakfast. The first flights began
+at dawn, if the day was clear. At eight, when the wind was coming up,
+they would be heard in the workshop, adjusting and readjusting,
+machining down bearings, testing wing strength, humming and laughing
+and busy; a life of gasoline and hammers and straining attempts to get
+balance exactly right; a happy life of good fellows and the
+achievements of machinery and preparation for daring the upper air; a
+life of very ordinary mechanics and of sheer romance!
+
+It is a grievous heresy that aviation is most romantic when the
+aviator is portrayed as a young god of noble rank and a collar high
+and spotless, carelessly driving a transatlantic machine of perfect
+efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man,
+the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically
+real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his
+infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ingenue,
+should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar
+miles in the air and fulfil the dream of all the creeping ages.
+
+In English and American fiction there are now nearly as many
+aeroplanes as rapiers or roses. The fictional aviators are society
+amateurs, wearers of evening clothes, frequenters of The Club,
+journalists and civil engineers and lordlings and international agents
+and gentlemen detectives, who drawl, "Oh yes, I fly a bit--new
+sensation, y' know--tired of polo"; and immediately thereafter use the
+aeroplane to raid arsenals, rescue a maiden from robbers or a large
+ruby from its lawful but heathenish possessors, or prevent a Zeppelin
+from raiding the coast. But they never by any chance fly these
+machines before gum-chewing thousands for hire. In England they
+absolutely must motor from The Club to the flying-field in a "powerful
+Rolls-Royce car." The British aviators of fiction are usually from
+Oxford and Eton. They are splendidly languid and modest and smartly
+dressed in society, but when they condescend to an adventure or to a
+coincidence, they are very devils, six feet of steel and sinew, boys
+of the bulldog breed with a strong trace of humming-bird. Like their
+English kindred, the Americans take up aviation only for gentlemanly
+sport. And they do go about rescuing things. Nothing is safe from
+their rescuing. But they do not have Rolls-Royce cars.
+
+Carl and his class at Bagby's were not of this gilded race. Carl's
+flying was as sordidly real as laying brick for a one-story laundry in
+a mill-town. Therefore, being real, it was romantic and miraculous.
+
+Among Carl's class was Hank Odell, the senior student, tall, thin,
+hopelessly plain of face; a drawling, rough-haired, eagle-nosed
+Yankee, who grinned shyly and whose Adam's apple worked slowly up and
+down when you spoke to him; an unimaginative lover of dogs and
+machinery; the descendant of Lexington and Gettysburg and a flinty
+Vermont farm; an ex-fireman, ex-sergeant of the army, and ex-teamster.
+He always wore a khaki shirt--the wrinkles of which caught the grease
+in black lines, like veins--with black trousers, blunt-toed shoes, and
+a pipe, the most important part of his costume.
+
+There was the round, anxious, polite Mexican, Tony Beanno, called
+"Tony Bean"--wealthy, simple, fond of the violin and of fast motoring.
+There was the "school grouch," surly Jack Ryan, the chunky
+ex-chauffeur. There were seven nondescripts--a clever Jew from
+Seattle, two college youngsters, an apricot-rancher's son, a circus
+acrobat who wanted a new line of tricks, a dull ensign detailed by the
+navy, and an earnest student of aerodynamics, aged forty, who had
+written marvelously dull books on air-currents and had shrinkingly
+made himself a fair balloon pilot. The navy ensign and the student
+were the snobs who lived away from the hangars, in boarding-houses.
+
+There was Lieutenant Forrest Haviland, detailed by the army--Haviland
+the perfect gentle knight, the well-beloved, the nearest approach to
+the gracious fiction aviator of them all, yet never drawling in
+affected modesty, never afraid of grease; smiling and industrious and
+reticent; smooth of hair and cameo of face; wearing khaki
+riding-breeches and tan puttees instead of overalls; always a
+gentleman, even when he tried to appear a workman. He pretended to be
+enthusiastic about the lunch-wagon, and never referred to his three
+generations of army officers. But most of the others were shy of him,
+and Jack Ryan, the "school grouch," was always trying to get him into
+a fight.
+
+Finally, there was Carl Ericson, who slowly emerged as star of them
+all. He knew less of aerodynamics than the timid specialist, less of
+practical mechanics than Hank Odell; but he loved the fun of daring
+more. He was less ferocious in competition than was Jack Ryan, but he
+wasted less of his nerve. He was less agile than the circus acrobat,
+but knew more of motors. He was less compactly easy than Lieutenant
+Haviland, but he took better to overalls and sleeping in hangars and
+mucking in grease--he whistled ragtime while Forrest Haviland hummed
+MacDowell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carl's earliest flights were in the school machine, "P'tite Marie,"
+behind Carmeau, the instructor. Reporters were always about, talking
+of "impressions," and Carl felt that he ought to note his impressions
+on his first ascent, but all that he actually did notice was that it
+was hard to tell at what instant they left the ground; that when they
+were up, the wind threatened to crush his ribs and burst his nostrils;
+that there must be something perilously wrong, because the machine
+climbed so swiftly; and, when they were down, that it had been worth
+waiting a whole lifetime for the flight.
+
+For days he merely flew with the instructor, till he was himself
+managing the controls. At last, his first flight by himself.
+
+He had been ordered to try a flight three times about the aerodrome at
+a height of sixty feet, and to land carefully, without pancaking--"and
+be sure, Monsieur, be veree sure you do not cut off too high from the
+ground," said Carmeau.
+
+It was a day when five reporters had gathered, and Carl felt very much
+in the limelight, waiting in the nacelle of the machine for the time
+to start. The propeller was revolved, Carl drew a long breath and
+stuck up his hand--and the engine stopped. He was relieved. It had
+seemed a terrific responsibility to go up alone. He wouldn't, now, not
+for a minute or two. He knew that he had been afraid. The engine was
+turned over once more--and once more stopped. Carl raged, and never
+again, in all his flying, did real fear return to him. "What the deuce
+is the matter?" he snarled. Again the propeller was revolved, and this
+time the engine hummed sweet. The monoplane ran along the ground, its
+tail lifting in the blast, till the whole machine seemed delicately
+poised on its tiptoes. He was off the ground, his rage leaving him as
+his fear had left him.
+
+He exulted at the swiftness with which a distant group of trees shot
+at him, under him. He turned, and the machine mounted a little on the
+turn, which was against the rules. But he brought her to even keel so
+easily that he felt all the mastery of the man who has finally learned
+to be natural on a bicycle. He tilted up the elevator slightly and
+shot across a series of fields, climbing. It was perfectly easy. He
+would go up--up. It was all automatic now--cloche toward him for
+climbing; away from him for descent; toward the wing that tipped up,
+in order to bring it down to level. The machine obeyed perfectly. And
+the foot-bar, for steering to right and left, responded to such light
+motions of his foot. He grinned exultantly. He wanted to shout.
+
+He glanced at the barometer and discovered that he was up to two
+hundred feet. Why not go on?
+
+He sailed out across San Mateo, and the sense of people below, running
+and waving their hands, increased his exultation. He curved about at
+the end, somewhat afraid of his ability to turn, but having all the
+air there was to make the turn in, and headed back toward the
+aerodrome. Already he had flown five miles.
+
+Half a mile from the aerodrome he realized that his motor was
+slackening, missing fire; that he did not know what was the matter;
+that his knowledge had left him stranded there, two hundred feet above
+ground; that he had to come down at once, with no chance to choose a
+landing-place and no experience in gliding. The motor stopped
+altogether.
+
+The ground was coming up at him too quickly.
+
+He tilted the elevator, and rose. But, as he was volplaning, this cut
+down the speed, and from a height of ten feet above a field the
+machine dropped to the ground with a flat plop. Something gave
+way--but Carl sat safe, with the machine canted to one side.
+
+He climbed out, cold about the spine, and discovered that he had
+broken one wheel of the landing-chassis.
+
+All the crowd from the flying-field were running toward him, yelling.
+He grinned at the foolish sight they made with their legs and arms
+strewn about in the air as they galloped over the rough ground.
+Lieutenant Haviland came up, panting: "All right, o' man? Good!" He
+seized Carl's hand and wrung it. Carl knew that he had a new friend.
+
+Three reporters poured questions on him. How far had he flown? Was
+this really his first ascent by himself? What were his sensations? How
+had his motor stopped? Was it true he was a mining engineer, a wealthy
+motorist?
+
+Hank Odell, the shy, eagle-nosed Yankee, running up as jerkily as a
+cow in a plowed field, silently patted Carl on the shoulder and began
+to examine the fractured landing-wheel. At last the instructor, M.
+Carmeau.
+
+Carl had awaited M. Carmeau's praise as the crown of his long flight.
+But Carmeau pulled his beard, opened his mouth once or twice, then
+shrieked: "What the davil you t'ink you are? A millionaire that we
+build machines for you to smash them? I tole you to fly t'ree time
+around--you fly to Algiers an' back--you t'ink you are another Farman
+brother--you are a damn fool! Suppose your motor he stop while you fly
+over San Mateo? Where you land? In a well? In a chimney? _Hein?_ You
+know naut'ing yet. Next time you do what I tal' you. _Zut!_ That was a
+flight, a flight, you make a flight, that was fine, fine, you make the
+heart to swell. But nex' time you break the chassis and keel yourself,
+_nom d'un tonnerre_, I scol' you!"
+
+Carl was humble. But the _Courier_ reporter spread upon the front page
+the story of "Marvelous first flight by Bagby student," and predicted
+that a new Curtiss was coming out of California. Under a half-tone ran
+the caption, "Ericson, the New Hawk of the Birdmen."
+
+The camp promptly nicknamed him "Hawk." They used it for plaguing him
+at first, but it survived as an expression of fondness--Hawk Ericson,
+the cheeriest man in the school, and the coolest flier.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Not all their days were spent in work. There were mornings when the
+wind would not permit an ascent and when there was nothing to do in
+the workshop. They sat about the lunch-wagon wrangling endlessly, or,
+like Carl and Forrest Haviland, wandered through fields which were all
+one flame with poppies.
+
+Lieutenant Haviland had given up trying to feel comfortable with the
+naval ensign student, who was one of the solemn worthies who clear
+their throats before speaking, and then speak in measured terms of
+brands of cigars and weather. Gradually, working side by side with
+Carl, Haviland seemed to find him a friend in whom to confide. Once or
+twice they went by trolley to San Francisco, to explore Chinatown or
+drop in on soldier friends of Haviland at the Presidio.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the porch of a studio on Telegraph Hill, in San Francisco, they
+were looking down on the islands of the bay, waiting for the return of
+an artist whom Haviland knew. Inarticulate dreamers both, they
+expressed in monosyllables the glory of bluewater before them, the
+tradition of R. L. S. and Frank Norris, the future of aviation. They
+gave up the attempt to explain the magic of San Francisco--that
+city-personality which transcends the opal hills and rare amber
+sunlight, festivals, and the transplanted Italian hill-town of
+Telegraph Hill, liners sailing out for Japan, and memories of the
+Forty-niners. It was too subtle a spirit, too much of it lay in human
+life with the passion of the Riviera linked to the strength of the
+North, for them to be able to comprehend its spell.... But regarding
+their own ambitions to do, they became eloquent.
+
+"I say," hesitated Haviland, "why is it I can't get in with most of
+the fellows at the camp the way you can? I've always been chummy
+enough with the fellows at the Point and at posts."
+
+"Because you've been brought up to be afraid to be anything but a
+gentleman."
+
+"Oh, I don't think it's that. I can get fond as the deuce of some of
+the commonest common soldiers--and, Lord! some of them come from the
+Bowery and all sorts of impossible places."
+
+"Yes, but you always think of them as 'common.' They don't think of
+each other that way. Suppose I'd worked----Well, just suppose I'd been
+a Bowery bartender. Could you be loafing around here with me? Could
+you go off on a bat with Jack Ryan?"
+
+"Well, maybe not. Maybe working with Jack Ryan is a good thing for me.
+I'm getting now so I can almost stand his stories! I envy you,
+knocking around with all sorts of people. Oh, I _wish_ I could call
+Ryan 'Jack' and feel easy about it. I can't. Perhaps I've got a little
+of the subaltern snob some place in me."
+
+"You? You're a prince."
+
+"If you've elevated me to a princedom, the least I can do is to invite
+you down home for a week-end--down to the San Spirito Presidio. My
+father's commandant there."
+
+"Oh, I'd like to, but----I haven't got a dress-suit."
+
+"Buy one."
+
+"Yes, I could do that, but----Oh, rats! Forrest, I've been knocking
+around so long I feel shy about my table manners and everything. I'd
+probably eat pie with my fingers."
+
+"You make me so darn tired, Hawk. You talk about my having to learn to
+chum with people in overalls. You've got to learn not to let people in
+evening clothes put anything over on you. That's your difficulty from
+having lived in the back-country these last two or three years. You
+have an instinct for manners. But I did notice that as soon as you
+found out I was in the army you spent half the time disliking me as a
+militarist, and the other half expecting me to be haughty--Lord knows
+what over. It took you two weeks to think of me as Forrest Haviland.
+I'm ashamed of you! If you're a socialist you ought to think that
+anything you like belongs to you."
+
+"That's a new kind of socialism."
+
+"So much the better. Me and Karl Marx, the economic inventors.... But
+I was saying: if you act as though things belong to you people will
+apologize to you for having borrowed them from you. And you've _got_
+to do that, Hawk. You're going to be one of the best-known fliers in
+the country, and you'll have to meet all sorts of big guns--generals
+and Senators and female climbers that work the peace societies for
+social position, and so on, and you've got to know how to meet
+them.... Anyway, I want you to come to San Spirito."
+
+To San Spirito they went. During the three days preceding, Carl was
+agonized at the thought of having to be polite in the presence of
+ladies. No matter how brusquely he told himself, "I'm as good as
+anybody," he was uneasy about forks and slang and finger-nails, and
+looked forward to the ordeal with as much pleasure as a man about to
+be hanged, hanged in a good cause, but thoroughly.
+
+Yet when Colonel Haviland met them at San Spirito station, and Carl
+heard the kindly salutation of the gracious, fat, old Indian-fighter,
+he knew that he had at last come home to his own people--an impression
+that was the stronger because the house of Oscar Ericson had been so
+much house and so little home. The colonel was a widower, and for his
+only son he showed a proud affection which included Carl. The three of
+them sat in state, after dinner, on the porch of Quarters No. 1,
+smoking cigars and looking down to a spur of the Santa Lucia
+Mountains, where it plunged into the foam of the Pacific. They talked
+of aviation and eugenics and the Benet-Mercier gun, of the post
+doctor's sister who had come from the East on a visit, and of a
+riding-test, but their hearts spoke of affection.... Usually it is a
+man and a woman that make home; but three men, a stranger one of them,
+talking of motors on a porch in the enveloping dusk, made for one
+another a home to remember always.
+
+They stayed over Monday night, for a hop, and Carl found that the
+officers and their wives were as approachable as Hank Odell. They did
+not seem to be waiting for young Ericson to make social errors. When
+he confessed that he had forgotten what little dancing he knew, the
+sister of the post doctor took him in hand, retaught him the waltz,
+and asked with patent admiration: "How does it feel to fly? Don't you
+get frightened? I'm terribly in awe of you and Mr. Haviland. I know I
+should be frightened to death, because it always makes me dizzy just
+to look down from a high building."
+
+Carl slipped away, to be happy by himself, and hid in the shadow of
+palms on the porch, lapped in the flutter of pepper-trees. The
+orchestra began a waltz that set his heart singing. He heard a girl
+cry: "Oh, goody! the 'Blue Danube'! We must go in and dance that."
+
+"The Blue Danube." The name brought back the novels of General Charles
+King, as he had read them in high-school days; flashed the picture of
+a lonely post, yellow-lighted, like a topaz on the night-swathed
+desert; a rude ball-room, a young officer dancing to the "Blue
+Danube's" intoxication; a hot-riding, dusty courier, hurling in with
+news of an Apache outbreak; a few minutes later a troop of cavalry
+slanting out through the gate on horseback, with a farewell burning
+the young officer's lips.... He was in just such an army story, now!
+
+The scent of royal climbing-roses enveloped Carl as that picture
+changed into others. San Spirito Presidio became a vast military
+encampment over which Hawk Ericson was flying.... From his monoplane
+he saw a fairy town, with red roofs rising to a tower of fantastic
+turrets. (That was doubtless the memory of a magazine-cover painted by
+Maxfield Parrish.)... He was wandering through a poppy-field with a
+girl dusky of eyes, soft black of hair, ready for any jaunt....
+Pictures bright and various as tropic shells, born of music and peace
+and his affection for the Havilands; pictures which promised him the
+world. For the first time Hawk Ericson realized that he might be a
+Personage instead of a back-yard boy.... The girl with twilight eyes
+was smiling.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Bagby camp broke up on the first of May, with all of them, except
+one of the nondescript collegians and the air-current student, more or
+less trained aviators. Carl was going out to tour small cities, for
+the George Flying Corporation. Lieutenant Haviland was detailed to the
+army flying-camp.
+
+Parting with Haviland and kindly Hank Odell, with Carmeau and
+anxiously polite Tony Bean, was as wistful as the last night of senior
+year. Till the old moon rose, sad behind tulip-trees, they sat on
+packing-boxes by the larger hangar, singing in close harmony "Sweet
+Adeline," "Teasing," "I've Been Working on the Railroad."... "Hay-ride
+classics, with barber-shop chords," the songs are called, but tears
+were in Carl's eyes as the minors sobbed from the group of comrades
+who made fun of one another and were prosaic and pounded their heels
+on the packing-boxes--and knew that they were parting to face death.
+Carl felt Forrest Haviland's hand on one shoulder, then an awkward pat
+from tough Jack Ryan's paw, as Tony Bean's violin turned the plaintive
+half-light into music, and broke its heart in the "Moonlight Sonata."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+"Yuh, piston-ring burnt off and put the exhaust-valve on the blink.
+That means one cylinder out of business," growled Hawk Ericson. "I
+could fly, maybe, but I don't like to risk it in this wind. It was bad
+enough this morning when I tried it."
+
+"Oh, this hick town 's going to be the death of us, all right--and
+Riverport to-morrow, with a contract nice as pie, if we can only get
+there," groaned his manager, Dick George, a fat man with much muscle
+and more diamonds. "Listen to that crowd. Yelling for blood. Sounds
+like a bunch of lumber-jacks with the circus slow in starting."
+
+The head-line feature of the Onamwaska County spring fair was "Hawk
+Ericson, showing the most marvelous aerial feats of the ages with the
+scientific marvels of aviation, in his famous French Bleriot
+flying-machine, the first flying-machine ever seen in this state, no
+balloon or fake, come to Onamwaska by the St. L. & N." The spring fair
+was usually a small gathering of farmers to witness races and new
+agricultural implements, but this time every road for thirty-five
+miles was dust-fogged with buggies and democrat wagons and small
+motor-cars. Ten thousand people were packed about the race-track.
+
+It was Carl's third aviation event. A neat, though not imposing
+figure, in a snug blue flannel suit, with his cap turned round on his
+head, he went to the flap of the rickety tent which served as his
+hangar. A fierce cry of "Fly! Fly! Why don't he fly?" was coming from
+the long black lines edging the track, and from the mound of people on
+the small grand stand; the pink blur of their faces turned toward
+him--him, Carl Ericson; all of them demanding _him_! The five meek
+police of Onamwaska were trotting back and forth, keeping them behind
+the barriers. Carl was apprehensive lest this ten-thousandfold demand
+drag him out, make him fly, despite a wind that was blowing the flags
+out straight, and whisking up the litter of newspapers and
+cracker-jack boxes and pink programs. While he stared out, an official
+crossing the track fairly leaned up against the wind, which seized his
+hat and sailed it to the end of the track.
+
+"Some wind!" Carl grunted, stolidly, and went to the back of the
+silent tent, to reread the local papers' accounts of his arrival at
+Onamwaska. It was a picturesque narrative of the cheering mob
+following him down the street ("Gee! that was _me_ they followed!"),
+crowding into the office of the Astor House and making him autograph
+hundreds of cards; of girls throwing roses ("Humph! geraniums is more
+like it!") from the windows.
+
+"A young man," wrote an enthusiastic female reporter, "handsome as a
+Greek god, but honestly I believe he is still in his twenties; and he
+is as slim and straight as a soldier, flaxen-haired and
+rosy-cheeked--the birdman, the god of the air."
+
+"Handsome as a Greek----" Carl commented. "I look like a Minnesota
+Norwegian, and that ain't so bad, but handsome----Urrrrrg!... Sure
+they love me, all right. Hear 'em yell. Oh, they love me like a dog
+does a bone.... Saint Jemima! talk about football rooting.... Come on,
+Greek god, buck up."
+
+He glanced wearily about the tent, its flooring of long, dry grass
+stained with ugly dark-blue lubricating-oil, under the tan light
+coming through the canvas. His manager was sitting on a suit-case,
+pretending to read a newspaper, but pinching his lower lip and
+consulting his watch, jogging his foot ceaselessly. Their temporary
+mechanic, who had given up trying to repair the lame valve, squatted
+with bent head, biting his lip, harkening to the blood-hungry mob.
+Carl's own nerves grew tauter and tauter as he saw the manager's
+restless foot and the mechanic's tension. He strolled to the
+monoplane, his back to the tent-opening.
+
+He started as the manager exclaimed: "Here they come! After us!"
+
+Outside the tent a sound of running.
+
+The secretary of the fair, a German hardware-dealer with an
+automobile-cap like a yachting-cap, panted in, gasping: "Come quick!
+They won't wait any longer! I been trying to calm 'em down, but they
+say you got to fly. They're breaking over the barriers into the track.
+The p'lice can't keep 'em back."
+
+Behind the secretary came the chairman of the entertainment committee,
+a popular dairyman, who was pale as he demanded: "You got to play
+ball, Mr. Ericson. I won't guarantee what 'll happen if you don't play
+ball, Mr. Ericson. You got to make him fly, Mr. George. The crowd 's
+breaking----"
+
+Behind him charged a black press of people. They packed before the
+tent, trying to peer in through the half-closed tent-opening, like a
+crowd about a house where a policeman is making an arrest. Furiously:
+
+"Where's the coward? Fake! Bring 'im out! Why don't he fly? He's a
+fake! His flying-machine's never been off the ground! He's a
+four-flusher! Run 'im out of town! Fake! Fake! Fake!"
+
+The secretary and chairman stuck out deprecatory heads and coaxed the
+mob. Carl's manager was an old circus-man. He had removed his collar,
+tie, and flashy diamond pin, and was diligently wrapping the thong of
+a black-jack about his wrist. Their mechanic was crawling under the
+side of the tent. Carl caught him by the seat of his overalls and
+jerked him back.
+
+As Carl turned to face the tent door again the manager ranged up
+beside him, trying to conceal the black-jack in his hand, and casually
+murmuring, "Scared, Hawk?"
+
+"Nope. Too mad to be scared."
+
+The tent-flap was pulled back. Tossing hands came through. The
+secretary and chairman were brushed aside. The mob-leader, a
+red-faced, loud-voiced town sport, very drunk, shouted, "Come out and
+fly or we'll tar and feather you!"
+
+"Yuh, come on, you fake, you four-flusher!" echoed the voices.
+
+The secretary and chairman were edging back into the tent, beside
+Carl's cowering mechanic.
+
+Something broke in Carl's hold on himself. With his arm drawn back,
+his fist aimed at the point of the mob-leader's jaw, he snarled: "You
+can't make me fly. You stick that ugly mug of yours any farther in and
+I'll bust it. I'll fly when the wind goes down----You would, would
+you?"
+
+As the mob-leader started to advance, Carl jabbed at him. It was not a
+very good jab. But the leader stopped. The manager, black-jack in
+hand, caught Carl's arm, and ordered: "Don't start anything! They can
+lick us. Just look ready. Don't say anything. We'll hold 'em till the
+cops come. But nix on the punch."
+
+"Right, Cap'n," said Carl.
+
+It was a strain to stand motionless, facing the crowd, not answering
+their taunts, but he held himself in, and in two minutes the yell
+came: "Cheese it! The cops!" The mob unwillingly swayed back as
+Onamwaska's heroic little band of five policemen wriggled through it,
+requesting their neighbors to desist.... They entered the tent and,
+after accepting cigars from Carl's manager, coldly told him that Carl
+was a fake, and lucky to escape; that Carl would better "jump right
+out and fly if he knew what was good for him." Also, they nearly
+arrested the manager for possessing a black-jack, and warned him that
+he'd better not assault any of the peaceable citizens of beautiful
+Onamwaska....
+
+When they had coaxed the mob behind the barriers, by announcing that
+Ericson would now go up, Carl swore: "I won't move! They can't make
+me!"
+
+The secretary of the fair, who had regained most of his courage, spoke
+up, pertly, "Then you better return the five hundred advance, pretty
+quick sudden, or I'll get an attachment on your fake flying-machine!"
+
+"You go----Nix, nix, Hawk, don't hit him; he ain't worth it. You go to
+hell, brother," said the manager, mechanically. But he took Carl
+aside, and groaned: "Gosh! we got to do something! It's worth two
+thousand dollars to us, you know. Besides, we haven't got enough cash
+in our jeans to get out of town, and we'll miss the big Riverport
+purse.... Still, suit yourself, old man. Maybe I can get some money by
+wiring to Chicago."
+
+"Oh, let's get it over!" Carl sighed. "I'd love to disappoint
+Onamwaska. We'll make fifteen thousand dollars this month and next,
+anyway, and we can afford to spit 'em in the eye. But I don't want to
+leave you in a hole.... Here you, mechanic, open up that tent-flap.
+All the way across.... No, not like _that_, you boob!... So.... Come
+on, now, help me push out the machine. Here you, Mr. Secretary, hustle
+me a couple of men to hold her tail."
+
+The crowd rose, the fickle crowd, scenting the promised blood, and
+applauded as the monoplane was wheeled upon the track and turned to
+face the wind. The mechanic and two assistants had to hold it as a
+dust-filled gust caught it beneath the wings. As Carl climbed into the
+seat and the mechanic went forward to start the engine, another squall
+hit the machine and she almost turned over sidewise.
+
+As the machine righted, the manager ran up and begged: "You never in
+the world can make it in this wind, Hawk. Better not try it. I'll wire
+for some money to get out of town with, and Onamwaska can go soak its
+head."
+
+"Nope. I'm gettin' sore now, Dick.... Hey you, mechanic: hurt that
+wing when she tipped?... All right. Start her. Quick. While it's
+calm."
+
+The engine whirred. The assistants let go the tail. The machine
+labored forward, but once it left the ground it shot up quickly. The
+head-wind came in a terrific gust. The machine hung poised in air for
+a moment, driven back by the gale nearly as fast as it was urged
+forward by its frantically revolving propeller.
+
+Carl was as yet too doubtful of his skill to try to climb above the
+worst of the wind. If he could only keep a level course----
+
+He fought his way up one side of the race-track. He crouched in his
+seat, meeting the sandy blast with bent head. The parted lips which
+permitted him to catch his breath were stubborn and hard about his
+teeth. His hands played swiftly, incessantly, over the control as he
+brought her back to even keel. He warped the wings so quickly that he
+balanced like an acrobat sitting rockingly on a tight-wire. He was too
+busy to be afraid or to remember that there was a throng of people
+below him. But he was conscious that the grand stand, at the side of
+the track, half-way down, was creeping toward him.
+
+More every instant did he hate the clamor of the gale and the stream
+of minute drops of oil, blown back from the engine, that spattered his
+face. His ears strained for misfire of the engine, if it stopped he
+would be hurled to earth. And one cylinder was not working. He forgot
+that; kept the cloche moving; fought the wind with his will as with
+his body.
+
+Now, he was aware of the grand stand below him. Now, of the people at
+the end of the track. He flew beyond the track, and turned. The whole
+force of the gale was thrown behind him, and he shot back along the
+other side of the race-track at eighty or ninety miles an hour.
+Instantly he was at the end; then a quarter of a mile beyond the
+track, over plowed fields, where upward currents of warm air
+increased the pitching of the machine as he struggled to turn her
+again and face the wind.
+
+The following breeze was suddenly retarded and he dropped forty feet,
+tail down.
+
+He was only forty feet from the ground, falling straight, when he got
+back to even keel and shot ahead. How safe the nest of the nacelle
+where he sat seemed then! Almost gaily he swung her in a great
+wavering circle--and the wind was again in his face, hating him,
+pounding him, trying to get under the wings and turn the machine
+turtle.
+
+Twice more he worked his way about the track. The conscience of the
+beginner made him perform a diffident Dutch roll before the grand
+stand, but he was growling, "And that's all they're going to get.
+See?"
+
+As he soared to earth he looked at the crowd for the first time. His
+vision was so blurred with oil and wind-soreness that he saw the
+people only as a mass and he fancied that the stretch of slouch-hats
+and derbies was a field of mushrooms swaying and tilted back. He was
+curiously unconscious of the presence of women; he felt all the
+spectators as men who had bawled for his death and whom he wanted to
+hammer as he had hammered the wind.
+
+He was almost down. He cut off his motor, glided horizontally three
+feet above the ground, and landed, while the cheers cloaked even the
+honking of the parked automobiles.
+
+Carl's manager, fatly galloping up, shrilled, "How was it, old man?"
+
+"Oh, it was pretty windy," said Carl, crawling down and rubbing the
+kinks out of his arms. "But I think the wind 's going down. Tell the
+announcer to tell our dear neighbors that I'll fly again at five."
+
+"But weren't you scared when she dropped? You went down so far that
+the fence plumb hid you. Couldn't see you at all. Ugh! Sure thought
+the wind had you. Weren't you scared then? You don't look it."
+
+"Then? Oh! Then. Oh yes, sure, I guess I was scared, all right!...
+Say, we got that seat padded so she's darn comfortable now."
+
+The crowd was collecting. Carl's manager chuckled to the president of
+the fair association, "Well, that was some flight, eh?"
+
+"Oh, he went down the opposite side of the track pretty fast, but why
+the dickens was he so slow going up my side? My eyes ain't so good now
+that it does me any good if a fellow speeds up when he's a thousand
+miles away. And where's all these tricks in the air----"
+
+"That," murmured Carl to his manager, "is the i-den-ti-cal man that
+stole the blind cripple's crutch to make himself a toothpick."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+The great Belmont Park Aero Meet, which woke New York to aviation, in
+October, 1910, was coming to an end. That clever new American flier,
+Hawk Ericson, had won only sixth place in speed, but he had won first
+prize in duration, by a flight of nearly six hours, driving round and
+round and round the pylons, hour on hour, safe and steady as a train,
+never taking the risk of sensational banking, nor spiraling like
+Johnstone, but amusing himself and breaking the tedium by keeping an
+eye out on each circuit for a fat woman in a bright lavender top-coat,
+who stood out in the dark line of people that flowed beneath. When he
+had descended--acclaimed the winner--thousands of heads turned his way
+as though on one lever; the pink faces flashing in such October
+sunshine as had filled the back yard of Oscar Ericson, in Joralemon,
+when a lonely Carl had performed duration feats for a sparrow. That
+same shy Carl wanted to escape from the newspaper-men who came running
+toward him. He hated their incessant questions--always the same: "Were
+you cold? Could you have stayed up longer?"
+
+Yet he had seen all New York go mad over aviation--rather, over news
+about aviation. The newspapers had spread over front pages his name
+and the names of the other fliers. Carl chuckled to himself, with
+bashful awe, "Gee! can you beat it?--that's _me_!" when he beheld
+himself referred to in editorial and interview and picture-caption as
+a superman, a god. He heard crowds rustle, "Look, there's Hawk
+Ericson!" as he walked along the barriers. He heard cautious
+predictions from fellow-fliers, and loud declarations from outsiders,
+that he was the coming cross-country champion. He was introduced to
+the mayor of New York, two Cabinet members, an assortment of Senators,
+authors, bank presidents, generals, and society rail-birds. He
+regularly escaped from them--and their questions--to help the
+brick-necked Hank Odell, from the Bagby School, who had entered for
+the meet, but smashed up on the first day, and ever since had been
+whistling and working over his machine and encouraging Carl, "Good
+work, bud; you've got 'em all going."
+
+With vast secrecy and a perception that this was twice as stirring as
+steadily buzzing about in his Bleriot, he went down to the Bowery and,
+in front of the saloon where he had worked as a porter four years
+before, he bought a copy of the _Evening World_ because he knew that
+on the third page of it was a large picture of him and a signed
+interview by a special-writer. He peered into the saloon windows to
+see if Petey McGuff was there, but did not find him. He went to the
+street on which he had boarded in the hope that he might do something
+for the girl who had been going wrong. The tenement had been torn
+down, with blocks of others, to make way for a bridge-terminal, and he
+saw the vision of the city's pitiless progress. This quest of old
+acquaintances made him think of Joralemon. He informed Gertie Cowles
+that he was now "in the aviation game, and everything is going very
+well." He sent his mother a check for five hundred dollars, with
+awkward words of affection.
+
+A greater spiritual adventure was talking for hours, over a small
+table in the basement of the Brevoort, to Lieutenant Forrest Haviland,
+who was attending the Belmont Park Meet as spectator. Theirs was the
+talk of tried friends; droning on for a time in amused comment, rising
+to sudden table-pounding enthusiasms over aviators or explorers, with
+exclamations of, "Is that the way it struck you, too? I'm awfully glad
+to hear you say that, because that's just the way I felt about it."
+They leaned back in their chairs and played with spoons and
+reflectively broke up matches and volubly sketched plans of controls,
+drawing on the table-cloth.
+
+Carl took the sophisticated atmosphere of the Brevoort quite for
+granted. Why _shouldn't_ he be there! And after the interest in him at
+the meet it did not hugely abash him to hear a group at a table behind
+him ejaculate: "I think that's Hawk Ericson, the aviator! Yes, sir,
+that's--who--it--is!"
+
+Finally the gods gave to Carl a new mechanic, a prince of mechanics,
+Martin Dockerill. Martin was a tall, thin, hatchet-faced,
+tousle-headed, slow-spoken, irreverent Irish-Yankee from Fall River;
+the perfect type of American aviators; for while England sends out its
+stately soldiers of the air, and France its short, excitable geniuses,
+practically all American aviators and aviation mechanics are either
+long-faced and lanky, like Martin Dockerill and Hank Odell, or slim,
+good-looking youngsters of the college track-team type, like Carl and
+Forrest Haviland.
+
+Martin Dockerill ate pun'kin pie with his fingers, played "Marching
+through Georgia" on the mouth-organ, admired burlesque-show women in
+sausage-shaped pink tights, and wore balbriggan socks that always
+reposed in wrinkles over the tops of his black shoes with frayed
+laces. But he probably could build a very decent motor in the dark,
+out of four tin cans and a crowbar. In A.D. 1910 he still believed in
+hell and plush albums. But he dreamed of wireless power-transmission.
+He was a Free and Independent American Citizen who called the Count de
+Lesseps, "Hey, Lessup." But he would have gone with Carl aeroplaning
+to the South Pole upon five minutes' notice--four minutes to devote to
+the motor, and one minute to write, with purple indelible pencil, a
+post-card to his aunt in Fall River. He was precise about only two
+things--motor-timing and calling himself a "mechanician," not a
+"mechanic." He became very friendly with Hank Odell; helped him
+repair his broken machine, went with him to vaudeville, or stood with
+him before the hangar, watching the automobile parties of pretty girls
+with lordly chaperons that came to call on Grahame-White and Drexel.
+"Some heart-winners, them guys, but I back my boss against them and
+ev'body else, Hank," Martin would say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The meet was over; the aviators were leaving. Carl had said farewell
+to his new and well-loved friends, the pioneers of aviation--Latham,
+Moisant, Leblanc, McCurdy, Ely, de Lesseps, Mars, Willard, Drexel,
+Grahame-White, Hoxsey, and the rest. He was in the afterglow of the
+meet, for with Titherington, the Englishman, and Tad Warren, the
+Wright flier, he was going to race from Belmont Park to New Haven for
+a ten-thousand-dollar prize jointly offered by a New Haven millionaire
+and a New York newspaper. At New Haven the three competitors were to
+join with Tony Bean (of the Bagby School) and Walter MacMonnies
+(flying a Curtiss) in an exhibition meet.
+
+Enveloped in baggy overalls over the blue flannel suit which he still
+wore when flying, Carl was directing Martin Dockerill in changing his
+spark-plugs, which were fouled. About him, the aviators were having
+their machines packed, laughing, playing tricks on one another--boys
+who were virile men; mechanics in denim who stammered to the
+reporters, "Oh, well, I don't know----" yet who were for the time more
+celebrated than Roosevelt or Harry Thaw or Bernard Shaw or Champion
+Jack Johnson.
+
+Before 9.45 A.M., when the race to New Haven was scheduled to start,
+the newspaper-men gathered; but there were not many outsiders. Carl
+felt the lack of the stimulus of thronging devotees. He worked
+silently and sullenly. It was "the morning after." He missed Forrest
+Haviland.
+
+He began to be anxious. Could he get off on time?
+
+Exactly at 9.45 Titherington made a magnificent start in his Henry
+Farman biplane. Carl stared till the machine was a dot in the clouds,
+then worked feverishly. Tad Warren, the second contestant, was testing
+out his motor, ready to go. At that moment Martin Dockerill suggested
+that the carburetor was dirty.
+
+"I'll fly with her the way she is," Carl snapped, shivering with the
+race-fever.
+
+A cub reporter from the City News Association piped, like a
+fox-terrier, "What time 'll you get off, Hawk?"
+
+"Ten sharp."
+
+"No, I mean what time will you really get off!"
+
+Carl did not answer. He understood that the reporters were doubtful
+about him, the youngster from the West who had been flying for only
+six months. At last came the inevitable pest, the familiarly
+suggestive outsider. A well-dressed, well-meaning old bore he was; a
+complete stranger. He put his podgy hand on Carl's arm and puffed:
+"Well, Hawk, my boy, give us a good flight to-day; not but what you're
+going to have trouble. There's something I want to suggest to you. If
+you'd use a gyroscope----"
+
+"Oh, beat it!" snarled Carl. He was ashamed of himself--but more angry
+than ashamed. He demanded of Martin, aside: "All right, heh? Can I fly
+with the carburetor as she is? Heh?"
+
+"All right, boss. Calm down, boss, calm down."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Look here, Hawk, I don't want to butt in. You can have old Martin for
+a chopping-block any time you want to cut wood. But if you don't calm
+down you'll get so screwed up mit nerves that you won't have any
+control. Aw, come on, boss, speak pretty! Just keep your shirt on and
+I'll hustle like a steam-engine."
+
+"Well, maybe you're right. But these assistant aviators in the crowd
+get me wild.... All right? Hoorray. Here goes.... Say, don't stop for
+anything after I get off. Leave the boys to pack up, and you hustle
+over to Sea Cliff for the speed-boat. You ought to be in New Haven
+almost as soon as I am."
+
+Calmer now, he peeled off his overalls, drew a wool-lined leather
+jacket over his coat, climbed into the cockpit, and inspected the
+indicators. As he was testing the spark Tad Warren got away.
+
+Third and last was Carl. The race-fever shook him.
+
+He would try to save time. Like the others, he had planned to fly from
+Belmont Park across Long Island to Great Neck, and cross Long Island
+Sound where it was very narrow. He studied his map. By flying across
+to the vicinity of Hempstead Harbor and making a long diagonal flight
+over water, straight over to Stamford, he would increase the factor of
+danger, but save many miles; and the specifications of the race
+permitted him to choose any course to New Haven. Thinking only of the
+new route, taking time only to nod good-by to Martin Dockerill and
+Hank Odell, he was off, into the air.
+
+As the ground dropped beneath him and the green clean spaces and
+innumerous towns of Long Island spread themselves out he listened to
+the motor. Its music was clear and strong. Here, at least, the wind
+was light.
+
+He would risk the long over-water flight--very long they thought it in
+1910.
+
+In a few minutes he sighted the hills about Roslyn and began to climb,
+up to three thousand feet. It was very cold. His hands were almost
+numb on the control. He descended to a thousand feet, but the machine
+jerked like a canoe shooting rapids, in the gust that swept up from
+among the hills. The landscape rose swiftly at him over the ends of
+the wings, now on one side, now on the other, as the machine rolled.
+
+His arms were tired with the quick, incessant wing-warping. He rose
+again. Then he looked at the Sound, and came down to three hundred
+feet, lest he lose his way. For the Sound was white with fog.... No
+wind out there!... Water and cloud blurred together, and the sky-line
+was lost in a mass of somber mist, which ranged from filmy white to
+the cold dead gray of old cigar-ashes. He wanted to hold back, not
+dash out into that danger-filled twilight. But already he was roaring
+over gray-green marshes, then was above fishing-boats that were slowly
+rocking in water dully opaque as a dim old mirror. He noted two men on
+a sloop, staring up at him with foolish, gaping, mist-wet faces.
+Instantly they were left behind him. He rose, to get above the fog.
+Even the milky, sulky water was lost to sight.
+
+He was horribly lonely, abominably lonely.
+
+At five hundred feet altitude he was not yet entirely above the fog.
+Land was blotted out. Above him, gray sky and thin writhing filaments
+of vapor. Beneath him, only the fog-bank, erupting here and there like
+the unfolding of great white flowers as warm currents of air burst up
+through the mist-blanket.
+
+Completely solitary. All his friends were somewhere far distant, in a
+place of solid earth and sun-warmed hangars. The whole knowable earth
+had ceased to exist. There was only slatey void, through which he was
+going on for ever. Or perhaps he was not moving. Always the same coil
+of mist about him. He was horribly lonely.
+
+He feared that the fog was growing thicker. He studied his compass
+with straining eyes. He was startled by a gull's plunging up through
+the mist ahead of him, and disappearing. He was the more lonely when
+it was gone. His eyebrows and cheeks were wet with the steam. Drops of
+moisture shone desolately on the planes. It was an unhealthy shine. He
+was horribly lonely.
+
+He pictured what would happen if the motor should stop and he should
+plunge down through that flimsy vapor. His pontoonless frail monoplane
+would sink almost at once.... It would be cold, swimming. How long
+could he keep up? What chance of being found? He didn't want to fall.
+The cockpit seemed so safe, with its familiar watch and map-stand and
+supporting-wires. It was home. The wings stretching out on either side
+of him seemed comfortingly solid, adequate to hold him up. But the
+body of the machine behind him was only a framework, not even
+inclosed. And cut in the bottom of the cockpit was a small hole for
+observing the earth. He could see fog through it, in unpleasant
+contrast to the dull yellow of the cloth sides and bottom. Not before
+had it daunted him to look down through that hole. Now, however, he
+kept his eyes away from it, and, while he watched the compass and
+oil-gauge, and kept a straight course, he was thinking of how nasty it
+would be to drop, drop down _there_, and have to swim. It would be
+horribly lonely, swimming about a wrecked monoplane, hearing steamers'
+fog-horns, hopeless and afar.
+
+As he thought that, he actually did hear a steamer hoarsely whistling,
+and swept above it, irresistibly. He started; his shoulders drooped.
+
+More than once he wished that he could have seen Forrest Haviland
+again before he started. He wished with all the poignancy of man's
+affection for a real man that he had told Forrest, when they were
+dining at the Brevoort, how happy he was to be with him. He was
+horribly lonely.
+
+He cursed himself for letting his thoughts become thin and damp as the
+vapor about him. He shrugged his shoulders. He listened thankfully to
+the steady purr of the engine and the whir of the propeller. He
+_would_ get across! He ascended, hoping for a glimpse of the shore.
+The fog-smothered horizon stretched farther and farther away. He was
+unspeakably lonely.
+
+Through a tear in the mist he saw sunshine reflected from houses on a
+hill, directly before him, perhaps one mile distant. He shouted. He
+was nearly across. Safe. And the sun was coming out.
+
+Two minutes later he was turning north, between the water and a town
+which his map indicated as Stamford. The houses beneath him seemed
+companionable; friendly were the hand-waving crowds, and
+factory-whistles gave him raucous greeting.
+
+Instantly, now that he knew where he was, the race-fever caught him
+again. Despite the strain of crossing the Sound, he would not for
+anything have come down to rest. He began to wonder how afar ahead of
+him were Titherington and Tad Warren.
+
+He spied a train running north out of Stamford, swung over above it,
+and raced with it. The passengers leaned out of the windows, trainmen
+hung perilously from the opened doors of vestibuled platforms, the
+engineer tooted his frantic greetings to a fellow-mechanic who, above
+him in the glorious bird, sent telepathic greetings which the engineer
+probably never got. The engineer speeded up; the engine puffed out
+vast feathery plumes of dull black smoke. But he drew away from the
+train as he neared South Norwalk.
+
+He was ascending again when he noted something that seemed to be a
+biplane standing in a field a mile away. He came down and circled the
+field. It was Titherington's Farman biplane. He hoped that the kindly
+Englishman had not been injured. He made out Titherington, talking to
+a group about the machine. Relieved, he rose again, amused by the
+ant-hill appearance as hundreds of people, like black bugs, ran toward
+the stalled biplane, from neighboring farms and from a trolley-car
+standing in the road.
+
+He should not have been amused just then. He was too low. Directly
+before him was a hillside crowned with trees. He shot above the trees,
+cold in the stomach, muttering, "Gee! that was careless!"
+
+He sped forward. The race-fever again. Could he pass Tad Warren as he
+had passed Titherington? He whirled over the towns, shivering but
+happy in the mellow, cool October air, far enough from the water to be
+out of what fog the brightening sun had left. The fields rolled
+beneath him, so far down that they were turned into continuous and
+wonderful masses of brown and gold. He sang to himself. He liked
+Titherington; he was glad that the Englishman had not been injured;
+but it was good to be second in the race; to have a chance to win a
+contest which the whole country was watching; to be dashing into a
+rosy dawn of fame. But while he sang he was keeping a tense lookout
+for Tad Warren. He had to pass him!
+
+With the caution of the Scotchlike Norwegian, he had the cloche
+constantly on the jiggle, with ceaseless adjustments to the wind,
+which varied constantly as he passed over different sorts of terrain.
+Once the breeze dropped him sidewise. He shot down to gain momentum,
+brought her to even keel, and, as he set her nose up again, laughed
+boisterously.
+
+Never again would he be so splendidly young, never again so splendidly
+sure of himself and of his medium of expression. He was to gain
+wisdom, but never to have more joy of the race.
+
+He was sure now that he was destined to pass Tad Warren.
+
+The sun was ever brighter; the horizon ever wider, rimming the
+saucer-shaped earth. When he flew near the Sound he saw that the fog
+had almost passed. The water was gentle and colored like pearl,
+lapping the sands, smoking toward the radiant sky. He passed over
+summer cottages, vacant and asleep, with fantastic holiday roofs of
+red and green. Gulls soared like flying sickles of silver over the
+opal sea. Even for the racer there was peace.
+
+He made out a mass of rock covered with autumn-hued trees to the left,
+then a like rock to the right. "West and East Rock--New Haven!" he
+cried.
+
+The city mapped itself before him like square building-blocks on a
+dark carpet, with railroad and trolley tracks like flashing
+spider-webs under the October noon.
+
+So he had arrived, then--and he had not caught Tad Warren. He was
+furious.
+
+He circled the city, looking for the Green, where (in this day before
+the Aero Club of America battled against over-city flying) he was to
+land. He saw the Yale campus, lazy beneath its elms, its towers and
+turrets dreaming of Oxford. His anger left him.
+
+He plunged down toward the Green--and his heart nearly stopped. The
+spectators were scattered everywhere. How could he land without
+crushing some one? With trees to each side and a church in front, he
+was too far down to rise again. His back pressed against the back of
+the little seat, and seemed automatically to be trying to restrain him
+from this tragic landing.
+
+The people were fleeing. In front there was a tiny space. But there
+was no room to sail horizontally and come down lightly. He shut off
+his motor and turned the monoplane's nose directly at the earth. She
+struck hard, bounced a second. Her tail rose, and she started, with
+dreadful deliberateness, to turn turtle. With a vault Carl was out of
+the cockpit and clear of the machine as she turned over.
+
+Oblivious of the clamorous crowd which was pressing in about him,
+cutting off the light, replacing the clean smell of gasoline and the
+upper air by the hot odor of many bodies, he examined the monoplane
+and found that she had merely fractured the propeller and smashed the
+rudder.
+
+Some one was fighting through the crowd to his side--Tony Bean--Tony
+the round, polite Mexican from the Bagby School. He was crying:
+"_Hombre_, what a landing! You have saved lives.... Get out of the
+way, all you people!"
+
+Carl grinned and said: "Good to see you, Tony. What time did Tad
+Warren get here? Where's----"
+
+"He ees not here yet."
+
+"What? Huh? How's that? Do I win? That----Say, gosh! I hope he hasn't
+been hurt."
+
+"Yes, you win."
+
+A newspaper-man standing beside Tony said: "Warren had to come down at
+Great Neck. He sprained his shoulder, but that's all."
+
+"That's good."
+
+"But you," insisted Tony, "aren't you badly jarred, Hawk?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+The gaping crowd, hanging its large collective ear toward the two
+aviators, was shouting: "Hoorray! He's all right!"--As their voices
+rose Carl became aware that all over the city hundreds of
+factory-whistles and bells were howling their welcome to him--the
+victor.
+
+The police were clearing a way for him. As a police captain touched a
+gold-flashing cap to him, Carl remembered how afraid of the police
+that hobo Slim Ericson had been.
+
+Tony and he completed examination of the machine, with Tony's
+mechanician, and sent it off to a shop, to await Martin Dockerill's
+arrival by speed-boat and racing-automobile. Carl went to receive
+congratulations--and a check--from the prize-giver, and a reception by
+Yale officials on the campus. Before him, along his lane of passage,
+was a kaleidoscope of hands sticking out from the wall of
+people--hands that reached out and shook his own till they were sore,
+hands that held out pencil and paper to beg for an autograph, hands of
+girls with golden flowers of autumn, hands of dirty, eager, small
+boys--weaving, interminable hands. Dizzy with a world peopled only by
+writhing hands, yet moved by their greeting, he made his way across
+the Green, through Phelps Gateway, and upon the campus. Twisting his
+cap and wishing that he had taken off his leather flying-coat, he
+stood upon a platform and heard officials congratulating him.
+
+The reception was over. But the people did not move. And he was very
+tired. He whispered to a professor: "Is that a dormitory, there
+behind us? Can I get into it and get away?"
+
+The professor beckoned to one of the collegians, and replied, "I
+think, Mr. Ericson, if you will step down they will pass you into
+Vanderbilt Courtyard--by the gate back of us--and you will be able to
+escape."
+
+Carl trusted himself to the bunch of boys forming behind him, and
+found himself rushed into the comparative quiet of a Tudor courtyard.
+A charming youngster, hatless and sleek of hair, cried, "Right this
+way, Mr. Ericson--up this staircase in the tower--and we'll give 'em
+the slip."
+
+From the roar of voices to the dusky quietude of the hallway was a
+joyous escape. Suddenly Carl was a youngster, permitted to see Yale, a
+university so great that, from Plato College, it had seemed an
+imperial myth. He stared at the list of room-occupants framed and hung
+on the first floor. He peeped reverently through an open door at a
+suite of rooms.
+
+He was taken to a room with a large collection of pillows, fire-irons,
+Morris chairs, sets of books in crushed levant, tobacco-jars and
+pipes--a restless and boyish room, but a real haven. He stared out
+upon the campus, and saw the crowd stolidly waiting for him. He
+glanced round at his host and waved his hand deprecatingly, then tried
+to seem really grown up, really like the famous Hawk Ericson. But he
+wished that Forrest Haviland were there so that he might marvel: "Look
+at 'em, will you! Waiting for _me!_ Can you beat it? Some start for my
+Yale course!"
+
+In a big chair, with a pipe supplied by the youngster, he shyly tried
+to talk to a senior in the great world of Yale (he himself had not
+been able to climb to seniorhood even in Plato), while the awed
+youngster shyly tried to talk to the great aviator.
+
+He had picked up a Yale catalogue and he vaguely ruffled its pages,
+thinking of the difference between its range of courses and the petty
+inflexible curriculum of Plato. Out of the pages leaped the name
+"Frazer." He hastily turned back. There it was: "Henry Frazer, A.M.,
+Ph.D., Assistant Professor in English Literature."
+
+Carl rejoiced boyishly that, after his defeat at Plato, Professor
+Frazer had won to victory. He forgot his own triumph. For a second he
+longed to call on Frazer and pay his respects. "No," he growled to
+himself, "I've been so busy hiking that I've forgotten what little
+book-learnin' I ever had. I'd like to see him, but----By gum! I'm
+going to begin studying again."
+
+Hidden away in the youngster's bedroom for a nap, he dreamed
+uncomfortably of Frazer and books. That did not keep him from making a
+good altitude flight at the New Haven Meet that afternoon, with his
+hastily repaired machine and a new propeller. But he thought of new
+roads for wandering in the land of books, as he sat, tired and sleepy,
+but trying to appear bright and appreciative, at the big dinner in his
+honor--the first sacrificial banquet to which he had been
+subjected--with earnest gentlemen in evening clothes, glad for an
+excuse to drink just a little too much champagne; with mayors and
+councilmen and bankers; with the inevitable stories about the man who
+was accused of stealing umbrellas and about the two skunks on a fence
+enviously watching a motor-car.
+
+Equally inevitable were the speeches praising Carl's flight as a
+"remarkable achievement, destined to live forever in the annals of
+sport and heroism, and to bring one more glory to the name of our fair
+city."
+
+Carl tried to appear honored, but he was thinking: "Rats! I'll live in
+the annals of nothin'! Curtiss and Brookins and Hoxsey have all made
+longer flights than mine, in this country alone, and they're aviators
+I'm not worthy to fill the gas-tanks of.... Gee! I'm sleepy! Got to
+look polite, but I wish I could beat it.... Let's see. Now look here,
+young Carl; starting in to-morrow, you begin to read oodles of books.
+Let's see. I'll start out with Forrest's favorites. There's _David
+Copperfield_, and that book by Wells, _Tono-Bungay_, that's got aerial
+experiments in it, and _Jude the Ob--, Obscure_, I guess it is, and
+_The Damnation of Theron Ware_ (wonder what he damned), and
+_McTeague_, and _Walden_, and _War and Peace_, and _Madame Bovary_,
+and some Turgenev and some Balzac. And something more serious. Guess
+I'll try William James's book on psychology."
+
+He bought them all next morning. His other belongings had been suited
+to rapid transportation, and Martin Dockerill grumbled, "That's a
+swell line of baggage, all right--one tooth-brush, a change of socks,
+and ninety-seven thousand books."
+
+Two nights later, in a hotel at Portland, Maine, Carl was plowing
+through the Psychology. He hated study. He flipped the pages angrily,
+and ran his fingers through his corn-colored hair. But he sped on,
+concentrated, stopping only to picture a day when the people who
+honored him publicly would also know him in private. Somewhere among
+them, he believed, was the girl with whom he could play. He would meet
+her at some aero race, and she would welcome him as eagerly as he
+welcomed her.... Had he, perhaps, already met her? He walked over to
+the writing-table and scrawled a note to Gertie Cowles--regarding the
+beauty of the Yale campus.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+(_Editor's Note_: The following pages are extracts from a diary kept
+by Mr. C. O. Ericson in a desultory fashion from January, 1911, to the
+end of April, 1912. They are reprinted quite literally. Apparently Mr.
+Ericson had no very precise purpose in keeping his journal. At times
+it seems intended as _materia_ for future literary use; at others, as
+comments for his own future amusement; at still others, as a sort of
+long letter to be later sent to his friend, Lieut. Forrest Haviland,
+U.S.A. I have already referred to them in my _Psycho-Analysis of the
+Subconscious with Reference to Active Temperaments_, but here reprint
+them less for their appeal to us as a scientific study of reactions
+than as possessing, doubtless, for those interested in pure narrative,
+a certain curt expression of somewhat unusual exploits, however
+inferior is their style to a more critical thesis on the adventurous.)
+
+
+_May 9_, (_1911_). Arrived at Mineola flying field, N. Y. to try out
+new Bagby monoplane I have bought. Not much accomodation here yet.
+Many of us housed in tents. Not enough hangars. We sit around and tell
+lies in the long grass at night, like a bunch of kids out camping.
+Went over and had a beer at Peter McLoughlin's today, that's where
+Glenn Curtiss started out from to make his first flight for Sci. Amer.
+cup.
+
+Like my new Bagby machine better than Bleriot in many respects, has
+non-lifting tail, as should all modern machines. Rudder and elevator a
+good deal like the Nieuport. One passenger. Roomy cockpit and enclosed
+fuselage. Bleriot control. Nearer streamline than any American plane
+yet. Span, 33.6 ft., length 24, chord of wing at fuselage 6' 5''.
+Chauviere propeller, 6' 6'', pitch 4' 5''. Dandy new Gnome engine, 70
+h.p., should develop 60 to 80 m.p.h.
+
+Martin Dockerill my mechanician is pretty cute. He said to me to-day
+when we were getting work-bench up, "I bet a hat the spectators all
+flock here, now. Not that you're any better flier than some of the
+other boys, but you got the newest plane for them to write their names
+on."
+
+Certainly a scad of people butting in. Come in autos and motor cycles
+and on foot, and stand around watching everything you do till you want
+to fire a monkey wrench at them.
+
+Hank Odell has joined the Associated Order of the Pyramid and just now
+he is sitting out in front of his tent talking to some of the Grand
+Worthy High Mighties of it I guess--fat old boy with a yachting cap
+and a big brass watch chain and an Order of Pyramid charm big as your
+thumb, and a tough young fellow with a black sateen shirt and his hat
+on sideways with a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth.
+
+Since I wrote the above a party of sports, the women in fade-away
+gowns made to show their streamline forms came butting in, poking
+their fingers at everything, while the slob that owned their car
+explained everything wrong. "This is a biplane," he says, "you can see
+there's a plane sticking out on each side of the place where the
+aviator sits, it's a new areoplane (that's the way he pronounced it),
+and that dingus in front is a whirling motor." I was sitting here at
+the work-bench, writing, hot as hell and sweaty and in khaki pants and
+soft shirt and black sneakers, and the Big Boss comes over to me and
+says, "Where is Hawk Ericson, my man." "How do I know," I says. "When
+will he be back," says he, as though he was thinking of getting me
+fired p. d. q. for being fresh. "Next week. He ain't come yet."
+
+He gets sore and says, "See here, my man, I read in the papers to-day
+that he has just joined the flying colony. Permit me to inform you
+that he is a very good friend of mine. If you will ask him, I am quite
+sure that he will remember Mr. Porter Carruthers, who was introduced
+to him at the Belmont Park Meet. Now if you will be so good as to show
+the ladies and myself about----" Well, I asked Hawk, and Hawk seemed
+to be unable to remember his friend Mr. Carruthers, who was one of the
+thousand or so people recently introduced to him, but he told me to
+show them about, which I did, and told them the Gnome was built radial
+to save room, and the wires overhead were a frame for a little roof
+for bad weather, and they gasped and nodded to every fool thing I
+said, swallowed it hook line and sinker till one of the females showed
+her interest by saying "How fascinating, let's go over to the Garden
+City Hotel, Porter, I'm dying for a drink." I hope she died for it.
+
+_May 10_: Up at three, trying out machine. Smashed landing chassis in
+coming down, shook me up a little. Interesting how when I rose it was
+dark on the ground but once up was a little red in the east like smoke
+from a regular fairy city.
+
+Another author out to-day bothering me for what he called "copy."
+
+Must say I've met some darn decent people in this game though. To-day
+there was a girl came out with Billy Morrison of the N. Y. Courier,
+she is an artist but crazy about outdoor life, etc. Named Istra Nash,
+a red haired girl, slim as a match but the strangest face, pale but it
+lights up when she's talking to you. Took her up and she was not
+scared, most are.
+
+_May 11_: Miss Istra Nash came out by herself. She's thinking quite
+seriously about learning to fly. She sat around and watched me work,
+and when nobody was looking smoked a cigarette. Has recently been in
+Europe, Paris, London, etc.
+
+Somehow when I'm talking to a woman like her I realize how little I
+see of women with whom I can be really chummy, tho I meet so many
+people at receptions etc. sometimes just after I have been flying
+before thousands of people I beat it to my hotel and would be glad for
+a good chat with the night clerk, of course I can bank on Martin
+Dockerill to the limit but when I talk to a person like Miss Nash I
+realize I need some one who knows good art from bad. Though Miss Nash
+doesn't insist on talking like a high-brow, indeed is picking up
+aviation technologies very quickly. She talks German like a native.
+
+Think Miss Nash is perhaps older than I am, perhaps couple of years,
+but doesn't make any difference.
+
+Reading a little German to-night, almost forgot what I learned of it
+in Plato.
+
+_May 14, Sunday_: Went into town this afternoon and went with Istra to
+dinner at the Lafayette. She told me all about her experiences in
+Paris and studying art. She is quite discontented here in N. Y. I
+don't blame her much, it must have been bully over in Paree. We sat
+talking till ten. Like to see Vedrines fly, and the Louvre and the gay
+grisettes too by heck! Istra ought not to drink so many cordials, nix
+on the booze you learn when you try to keep in shape for flying,
+though Tad Warren doesn't seem to learn it. After ten we went to
+studio where Istra is staying on Washington Sq. several of her friends
+there and usual excitement and fool questions about being an aviator,
+it always makes me feel like a boob. But they saw Istra and I wanted
+to be alone and they beat it.
+
+This is really dawn but I'll date it May 14, which is yesterday. No
+sleep for me to-night, I'm afraid. Going to fly around NY in aerial
+derby this afternoon. Must get plenty sleep now.
+
+_May 15_: Won derby, not much of an event though. Struck rotten
+currents over Harlem River, machine rolled like a whale-back.
+
+Istra out here to-morrow. Glad. But after last night afraid I'll get
+so I depend on her, and the aviator that keeps his nerve has to be
+sort of a friendless cuss some ways.
+
+_May 16_: Istra came out here. Seems very discontented. I'm afraid
+she's the kind to want novelty and attention incessantly, she seems to
+forget that I'm pretty busy.
+
+_May 17_: Saw Istra in town, she forgot all her discontent and her
+everlasting dignity and danced for me then came over and kissed me,
+she is truly a wonder, can hum a French song so you think you're among
+the peasants, but she expects absolute devotion and constant amusing
+and I must stick to my last if a mechanic like me is to amount to
+anything.
+
+_May 18_: Istra out here, she sat around and looked bored, wanted to
+make me sore, I think. When I told her I had to leave to-morrow
+morning for Rochester and couldn't come to town for dinner etc. she
+flounced home. I'm sorry, I'm mighty sorry; poor kid she's always
+going to be discontented wherever she is, and always getting some one
+and herself all wrought up. She always wants new sensations yet
+doesn't want to work, and the combination isn't very good. It'd be
+great if she really worked at her painting, but she usually stops her
+art just this side of the handle of a paint-brush.
+
+Curious thing is that when she'd gone and I sat thinking about her I
+didn't miss her so much as Gertie Cowles. I hope I see Gertie again
+some day, she is a good pal.
+
+Istra wanted me to name my new monoplane Babette, because she says it
+looks "cunning" which the Lord knows it don't, it may look efficient
+but not cunning. But I don't think I'll name it anything, tho she says
+that shows lack of imagination.
+
+People especially reporters are always asking me this question, do
+aviators have imagination? I'm not sure I know what imagination is.
+It's like this stuff about "sense of humor." Both phrases are pretty
+bankrupt now. A few years ago when I was running a car I would make
+believe I was different people, like a king driving through his
+kingdom, but when I'm warping and banking I don't have time to think
+about making believe. Of course I do notice sunsets and so on a good
+deal but that is not imagination. And I do like to go different
+places; possibly I take the imagination out that way--I guess
+imagination is partly wanting to be places where you aren't--well, I
+go when I want to, and I like that better.
+
+Anyway darned if I'll give my monoplane a name. Tad Warren has been
+married to a musical comedy soubrette with ringlets of red-brown hair
+(Istra's hair is quite bright red, but this woman has dark red hair,
+like the color of California redwood chips, no maybe darker) and she
+wears a slimpsy bright blue dress with the waist-line nearly down to
+her knees, and skirt pretty short, showing a lot of ankle, and a kind
+of hat I never noticed before, must be getting stylish now I guess,
+flops down so it almost hides her face like a basket. She's a typical
+wife for a 10 h.p. aviator with exhibition fever. She and Tad go joy
+riding almost every night with a bunch of gasoline and alcohol sports
+and all have about five cocktails and dance a new Calif. dance called
+the Turkey Trot. This bunch have named Tad's new Wright "Sammy," and
+they think it's quite funny to yell "Hello Sammy, how are you, come
+have a drink."
+
+I guess I'll call mine a monoplane and let it go at that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_July 14_: Quebec. Lost race Toronto to Quebec. Had fair chance to win
+but motor kept misfiring, couldn't seem to get plugs that would work,
+and smashed hell out of elevator coming down on tail when landing
+here. Glad Hank Odell won, since I lost. Hank has designed new
+rocker-arm for Severn motor valves. All of us invited to usual big
+dinner, never did see so many uniforms, also members of Canadian
+parliament. I don't like to lose a race, but thunder it doesn't bother
+me long. Good filet of sole at dinner. Sat near a young lieutenant,
+leftenant I suppose it is, who made me think of Forrest Haviland. I
+miss Forrest a lot. He's doing some good flying for the army, flying
+Curtiss hydro now, and trying out muffler for military scouting. What
+I like as much as anything about him is his ease, I hope I'm learning
+a little of it anyway. This stuff is all confused but must hustle off
+to reception at summer school of Royal College for Females. Must send
+all this to old Forrest to read some day--if you ever see this,
+Forrest, hello, dear old man, I thought about you when I flew over
+military post.
+
+_Later_: Big reception, felt like an awful nut, so shy I didn't hardly
+dare look up off the ground. After the formal reception I was taken
+around the campus by the Lady President, nice old lady with white hair
+and diamond combs in it. What seemed more than a million pretty girls
+kept dodging out of doorways and making snapshots of me. Good thing
+I've been reading quite a little lately, as the Lady Principal (that
+was it, not Lady President) talked very high brow. She asked me what I
+thought of this "terrible lower class unrest." Told her I was a
+socialist and she never batted an eye--of course an aviator is
+permitted to be a nut. Wonder if I am a good socialist as a matter of
+fact, I do know that most governments, maybe all, permit most children
+to never have a chance, start them out by choking them with dirt and
+T.B. germs, but how can we make international solidarity seem
+practical to the dub average voters, _how_!
+
+Letter from Gertie to-night, forwarded here. She seems sort of bored
+in Joralemon, but is working hard with Village Improvement Committee
+of woman's club for rest room for farmers' wives, also getting up P.E.
+Sunday school picnic. Be good for Istra if she did common nice things
+like that, since she won't really get busy with her painting, but how
+she'd hate me for suggesting that she be what she calls "burjoice."
+Guess Gertie is finding herself. Hope yours truly but sleepy is
+finding himself too. How I love my little bed!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+(THE DIARY OF MR. ERICSON, CONTINUED.--EDITOR)
+
+
+_AUGUST 20_, (_1911, as before_): Big Chicago meet over. They sure did
+show us a good time. Never saw better meet. Won finals in duration
+to-day. Also am second in altitude, but nix on the altitude again, I'm
+pretty poor at it. I'm no Lincoln Beachey! Don't see how he breathes.
+His 11,578 ft. was _some_ climb.
+
+Tomorrow starts my biggest attempt, by far; biggest distance flight
+ever tried in America, and rather niftier than even the European
+Circuit and British Circuit that Beaumont has won.
+
+To fly as follows: Chicago to St. Louis to Indianapolis to Columbus to
+Washington to Baltimore to Philadelphia to Atlantic City to New York.
+The New York Chronicle in company with papers along line gives prize
+of $40,000. Ought to help bank account if win, in spite of big
+expenses to undergo. Now have $30,000 stowed away, and have sent
+mother $3,000.
+
+To fly against my good old teacher M. Carmeau, and Tony Bean, Walter
+MacMonnies, M. Beaufort the Frenchman, Tad Warren, Billy Witzer, Chick
+Bannard, Aaron Solomons and other good men. Special NY Chronicle
+reporter, fellow named Forbes, assigned to me, and he hangs around all
+the time, sort of embarrassing (hurray, spelled it right, I guess) but
+I'm getting used to the reporters.
+
+Martin Dockerill has an ambition! He said to me to-day, "Say, Hawk, if
+you win the big race you got to give me five plunks for my share and
+then by gum I'm going to buy two razor-strops." "What for?" I said.
+"Oh I bet there ain't anybody else in the world that owns _two_
+razor-strops!"
+
+Not much to say about banquet, lots of speeches, good grub.
+
+What tickles me more than anything is my new flying garments--not
+clothes but _garments_, by heck! I'm going to be a regular little old
+aviator in a melodrama. I've been wearing plain suits and a cap, same
+good old cap, always squeegee on my head. But for the big race I've
+got riding breeches and puttees and a silk shirt and a tweed Norfolk
+jacket and new leather coat and French helmet with both felt and
+springs inside the leather--this last really valuable. The real stage
+aviator, that's me. Watch the photographers fall for it. I bet Tad
+Warren's Norfolk jacket is worth $10,000 a year to him!
+
+I pretended to Martin that I was quite serious about the clothes, the
+garments I mean. I dolled myself all up last night and went swelling
+into my hangar and anxiously asked Martin if he didn't like the
+get-up, and he nearly threw a fit. "Good Lord," he groans, "you look
+like an aviator on a Ladies Home Journal cover, guaranteed not to
+curse, swear or chaw tobacco. What's become of that girl you was
+kissing, last time I seen you on the cover?"
+
+_August 25_: Not much time to write diary on race like this, it's just
+saw wood all the time or lose.
+
+Bad wind to-day. Sometimes the wind don't bother me when I am flying,
+and sometimes, like to-day, it seems as though the one thing in the
+whole confounded world is the confounded wind that roars in your ears
+and makes your eyes water and sneaks down your collar to chill your
+spine and goes scooting up your sleeves, unless you have gauntlets,
+and makes your ears sting. Roar, roar, roar, the wind's worse than the
+noisiest old cast-iron tin-can Vrenskoy motor. You want to duck your
+head and get down out of it, and Lord it tires you so--aviation isn't
+all "brilliant risks" and "daring dives" and that kind of
+blankety-blank circus business, not by a long shot it ain't, lots of
+it is just sticking there and bucking the wind like a taxi driver
+speeding for a train in a storm. Tired to-night and mad.
+
+_September 5_: New York! I win! Plenty smashes but only got jarred. I
+beat out Beaufort by eight hours, and Aaron Solomons by nearly a day.
+Carmeau's machine hopelessly smashed in Columbus, but he was not hurt,
+but poor Tad Warren _killed_ crossing Illinois.
+
+_September 8_: Had no time to write about my reception here in New
+York till now.
+
+I've been worrying about poor Tad Warren's wife, bunch of us got
+together and made up a purse for her. Nothing more pathetic than these
+poor little women that poke down the cocktails to keep excited and
+then go to pieces.
+
+I don't believe I was very decent to Tad. Sitting here alone in a
+hotel room, it seems twice as lonely after the fuss and feathers these
+last few days, a fellow thinks of all the rotten things he ever did.
+Poor old Tad. Too late now to cheer him up. Too late. Wonder if they
+shouldn't have called off race when he was killed.
+
+Wish Istra wouldn't keep calling me up. Have I _got_ to be rude to
+her? I'd like to be decent to her, but I can't stand the cocktail
+life. Lord, that time she danced, though.
+
+Poor Tad was [See Transcriber's note.]
+
+Oh hell, to get back to the reception. It was pretty big. Parade of
+the Aero Club and Squadron A, me in an open-face hack, feeling like a
+boob while sixty leven billion people cheered. Then reception by
+mayor, me delivering letter from mayor of Chicago which I had cutely
+sneaked out in Chicago and mailed to myself here, N. Y. general
+delivery, so I wouldn't lose it on the way. Then biggest dinner I've
+ever seen, must have been a thousand there, at the Astor, me very
+natty in a new dress suit (hey bo, I fooled them, it was ready-made
+and cost me just $37.50 and fitted like my skin.)
+
+Mayor, presidents of boroughs of NY, district attorney, vice president
+of U.S., lieut. governor of NY, five or six senators, chief of
+ordnance, U.S.A., arctic explorers and hundreds like that, but most of
+all Forrest Haviland whom I got them to stick right up near me.
+Speeches mostly about me, I nearly rubbed the silver off my flossy new
+cigarette case keeping from looking foolish while they were telling
+about me and the future of aviation and all them interesting subjects.
+
+Forrest and I sneaked off from the reporters next afternoon, had quiet
+dinner down in Chinatown.
+
+We have a bully plan. If we can make it and if he can get leave we
+will explore the headwaters of the Amazon with a two-passenger Curtiss
+flying boat, maybe next year.
+
+Now the reception fans have done their darndest and all the excitement
+is over including the shouting and I'm starting for Newport to hold a
+little private meet of my own, backed by Thomas J. Watersell, the
+steel magnate, and by to-morrow night NY will forget me. I realized
+that after the big dinner. I got on the subway at Times Square, jumped
+quick into the car just as the doors were closing, and the guard
+yapped at me, "What are you trying to do, Billy, kill yourself?" He
+wasn't spending much time thinking about famous Hawk Ericson, and I
+got to thinking how comfortable NY will manage to go on being when
+they no longer read in the morning paper whether I dined with the
+governor, or with Martin Dockerill at Bazoo Junction Depot Lunch
+Counter.
+
+They forget us quick. And already there's a new generation of
+aviators. Some of the old giants are gone, poor Moisant and Hoxsey and
+Johnstone and the rest killed, and there's coming along a bunch of
+youngsters that can fly enough to grab the glory, and they spread out
+the glory pretty thin. They go us old fellows except Beachey a few
+better on aerial acrobatics, and that's what the dear pee-pul like.
+(For a socialist I certainly do despise the pee-pul's _taste_!) I
+won't do any flipflops in the air no matter what the county fair
+managers write me. Somehow I'd just as soon be alive and exploring the
+Amazon with old Forrest as dead after "brilliant feats of fearless
+daring." Go to it, kids, good luck, only test your supporting wires,
+and don't try to rival Lincoln Beachey, he's a genius.
+
+Glad got a secretary for a couple days to handle all this mail.
+Hundreds of begging letters and mash notes from girls since I won the
+big prize. Makes me feel funny! One nice thing out of the mail--letter
+from the Turk, Jack Terry, that I haven't seen since Plato. He didn't
+graduate, his old man died and he is assistant manager of quite a good
+sized fisheries out in Oregon, glad to hear from him again. Funny, I
+haven't thought of him for a year.
+
+I feel lonely and melancholy to-night in spite of all I do to cheer
+up. Let up after reception etc. I suppose. I feel like calling up
+Istra, after all, but mustn't. I ought to hit the hay, but I couldn't
+sleep. Poor Tad Warren.
+
+(_The following words appear at the bottom of a page, in a faint, fine
+handwriting unlike Mr. Ericson's usual scrawl.--The Editor_):
+
+Whatever spirits there be, of the present world or the future, take
+this prayer from a plain man who knows little of monism or trinity or
+logos, and give to Tad another chance, as a child who never grew up.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_September 11_: Off to Kokomo, to fly for Farmers' Alliance.
+
+Easy meet here (Newport, R.I.) yesterday, just straight flying and
+passenger carrying. Dandy party given for me after it, by Thomas J.
+Watersell, the steel man. Have read of such parties. Bird party, in a
+garden, Watersell has many acres in his place and big house with a
+wonderful brick terrace and more darn convenient things than I ever
+saw before, breakfast room out on the terrace and swimming pool and
+little gardens one outside of each guest room, rooms all have private
+doors, house is mission style built around patio. All the Newport
+swells came to party dressed as birds, and I had to dress as a hawk,
+they had the costume all ready, wonder how they got my measurements.
+Girls in the dance of the birds. Much silk stockings, very pretty. At
+end of dance they were all surrounding me in semi-circle I stood out
+on lawn beside Mrs. Watersell, and they bowed low to me, fluttering
+their silk wings and flashing out many colored electric globes
+concealed in wings and looked like hundreds of rainbow colored
+fireflies in the darkness. Just then the big lights were turned on
+again and they let loose hundreds of all kinds of birds, and they flew
+up all around me, surprised me to death. Then for grub, best
+sandwiches I ever ate.
+
+Felt much flattered by it all, somehow did not feel so foolish as at
+banquets with speeches.
+
+After the party was all over, quite late, I went with Watersell for a
+swim in his private pool. Most remarkable thing I ever saw. He said
+everybody has Roman baths and Pompei baths and he was going to go them
+one better, so he has an Egyptian bath, the pool itself like the
+inside of an ancient temple, long vista of great big green columns and
+a big idol at the end, and the pool all in green marble with lights
+underneath the water and among the columns, and the water itself just
+heat of air, so you can't tell where the water leaves off and the air
+above it begins, hardly, and feel as though you were swimming in air
+through a green twilight. Darndest sensation I ever felt, and the idol
+and columns sort of awe you.
+
+I enjoyed the swim and the room they gave me, but I had lost my
+tooth-brush and that kind of spoiled the end of the party.
+
+I noticed Watersell only half introduced his pretty daughter to me,
+they like me as a lion but----And yet they seem to like me personally
+well enough, too. If I didn't have old Martin trailing along, smoking
+his corn-cob pipe and saying what he thinks, I'd die of loneliness
+sometimes on the hike from meet to meet. Other times have jolly
+parties, but I'd like to sit down with the Cowleses and play poker and
+not have to explain who I am.
+
+Funny--never used to feel lonely when I was bumming around on freights
+and so on, not paying any special attention to anybody.
+
+_October 23_: I wonder how far I'll ever get as an aviator? The
+newspapers all praise me as a hero. Hero, hell! I'm a pretty steady
+flier but so would plenty of chauffeurs be. This hero business is
+mostly bunk, it was mostly chance my starting to fly at all. Don't
+suppose it is all accident to become as great a flier as Garros or
+Vedrines or Beachey, but I'm never going to be a Garros, I guess. Like
+the man that can jump twelve feet but never can get himself to go any
+farther.
+
+_December 1_: Carmeau killed yesterday, flying at San Antone. Motor
+backfire, machine caught fire, burned him to death in the air. He was
+the best teacher I could have had, patient and wise. I can't write
+about him. And I can't get this insane question out of my mind: Was
+his beard burned? I remember just how it looked, and think of that
+when all the time I ought to remember how clever and darn decent he
+was. Carmeau will never show me new stunts again.
+
+And Ely killed in October, Cromwell Dixon gone--the plucky youngster,
+Professor Montgomery, Nieuport, Todd Shriver whom Martin Dockerill and
+Hank Odell liked so much, and many others, all dead, like Moisant. I
+don't think I take any undue risks, but it makes me stop and think.
+And Hank Odell with a busted shoulder. Captain Paul Beck once told me
+he believed it was mostly carelessness, these accidents, and he
+certainly is a good observer, but when I think of a careful
+constructor like Nieuport----
+
+Punk money I'm making. Thank heaven there will be one more good year
+of the game, 1912, but I don't know about 1913. Looks like the
+exhibition game would blow up then--nearly everybody that wants to has
+seen an aeroplane fly once, now, and that's about all they want, so
+good bye aviation, except for military use and flying boats for
+sportsmen. At least good bye during a slump of several years.
+
+Hope to thunder Forrest and I will be able to make our South American
+hike, even if it costs every cent I have. That will be something like
+it, seeing new country instead of scrapping with fair managers about
+money.
+
+_December 22_: Hoorray! Christmas time at sea! Quite excite to smell
+the ocean again and go rolling down the narrow gangways between the
+white state-room doors. Off for a month's flying in Brazil and
+Argentine, with Tony Bean. Will look up data for coming exploration of
+Amazon headwaters. Martin Dockerill like a regular Beau Brummel in new
+white flannels, parading the deck, making eyes at pretty Greaser
+girls. It's good to be _going_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Feb. 22, 1912_: Geo. W's birthday. He'd have busted that no-lie
+proviso if he'd ever advertised an aero meet.
+
+Start of flight New Orleans to St. Louis. Looks like really big times,
+old fashioned jubilee all along the road and lots of prizes, though
+take a chance. Only measly little $2,500 prize guaranteed, but vague
+promises of winnings at towns all along, where stop for short
+exhibitions. Each of contestants has to fly at scheduled towns for
+percentage of gate receipts.
+
+_Feb. 23_: What a rotten flight to-day. Small crowd out to see me off.
+No sooner up than trouble with plugs. Wanted to land, but nothing but
+bayous, rice fields, cane breaks, and marshes. Farmer shot at my
+machine. Soon motor stopped on me and had to come down awhooping on a
+small plowed field. Smashed landing gear and got an awful jar. Nothing
+serious though. It was two hours before a local blacksmith and I
+repaired chassis and cleaned plugs. I started off after coaching three
+scared darkies to hold the tail, while the blacksmith spun the
+propeller. He would give it a couple of bats, then dodge out of the
+way too soon, while I sat there and tried not to look mad, which by
+gum I was plenty mad. Landed in this bum town, called ----, fourth in
+the race, and found sweet (?) refuge in this chills and fever hotel.
+Wish I was back in New Orleans. Cheer up, having others ahead of me in
+the race just adds a little zip to it. Watch me to-morrow. And I'm not
+the only hard luck artist. Aaron Solomons busted propeller and nearly
+got killed.
+
+_Later._ Cable. Tony Bean is dead. Killed flying. My god, Tony,
+impossible to think of him as dead, just a few days ago we were flying
+together and calling on senoritas and he playing the fiddle and
+laughing, always so polite, like he used to fiddle us into good nature
+when we got discouraged at Bagby's school. Seems like it was just
+couple minutes ago we drove in his big car through Avenida de Mayo and
+everybody cheered him, he was hero of Buenos Aires, yet he treated me
+as the Big Chief. Cablegram forwarded from New Orleans, dated
+yesterday, "Beanno killed fell 200 feet."
+
+And to-morrow I'll have to be out and jolly the rustic meet managers
+again. Want to go off some place and be quiet and think. Wish I could
+get away, be off to South America with Forrest.
+
+_February 24_: Rotten luck continues. Back in same town again! Got up
+yesterday and motor misfired, had to make quick landing in a bayou and
+haul out machine myself aided by scared kids. Got back here and found
+gasoline pipe fouled, small piece of tin stuck in it.
+
+Martin feels as bad as I do at Tony's death, tho he doesn't say much
+of anything. "Gosh, and Tony such a nice little cuss," was about all
+he said, but he looked white around the gills.
+
+_Feb. 25_: Another man has dropped out, I am third but still last in
+the race. Race fever got me to-day, didn't care for anything but
+winning, got off to a good start, then took chances, machine wobbled
+like a board in the surf. Am having some funny kind of chicken creole
+I guess it is for lunch, writing this in hotel dining room.
+
+_Later_: Passed Aaron Solomons, am now second in the race, landed here
+just three hours behind Walter MacMonnies. Three letters forwarded
+here, from Forrest, he is flying daily at army aviation camp, also
+from Gertie Cowles, she and her mother are in Minneapolis, attending a
+week of grand opera, also to my surprise short note from Jack Ryan,
+the grouch, saying he has given up flying and gone back into motor
+business.
+
+There won't be much more than money to pay expenses on this trip.
+
+Tomorrow I'll show them some real flying.
+
+_Later_: Telegram from a St. L. newspaper. Sweet business. Says that
+promoters of race have not kept promise to remove time limit as they
+promised. Doubt if either Walter MacMonnies or I can finish in time
+set.
+
+_Feb. 26_: Bad luck continues but made fast flight after two forced
+descents, one of them had to make difficult landing, plane down on
+railroad track, avoiding telegraph wires, and get machine off track as
+could hear train coming, awful job. Nerves not very good. Once when up
+at 200 ft. heighth from which Tony Bean fell, I saw his face right in
+air in front of me and jumped so I jerked the stuffings out of control
+wires.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_March 15_: Just out of hospital, after three weeks there, broken leg
+still in splints. Glad Walter MacM got thru in time limit, got prize.
+Too week and shaky write much, shoulder still hurts.
+
+_March 18_: How I came to fall (fall that broke my leg, three weeks
+ago) Was flying over rough country when bad gust came thru hill
+defile. Wing crumpled. Up at 400 ft. Machine plunged forward then
+sideways. Gosh, I thought, I'm gone, but will live as long as I can,
+even a few seconds more, and kept working with elevator, trying to
+right her even a little. Ground coming up fast. Must have jumped, I
+think. Landed in marsh, that saved my life, but woke up at doctor's
+house, leg busted and shoulder bad, etc. Machine shot to pieces, but
+Martin Dockerill has it pretty well repaired. He and the doc and I
+play poker every day, Martin always wins with his dog-gone funeral
+face no matter tho he has an ace full.
+
+_March 24_: Leg all right, pretty nearly. Rigged up steering bar so I
+can work it with one foot. Flew a mile to-day, went not badly. Hope to
+fly at Springfield, Ill. meet next week. Will be able to make Brazil
+trip with Forrest Haviland all right. The dear old boy has been
+writing to me every day while I've been on the bum. Newspapers have
+made a lot of my flying so soon again, several engagements and now
+things look bright again. Reading lots and chipper as can be.
+
+_March 25_: Forrest Haviland is dead He was killed to-day.
+
+_March 27_: Disposed of monoplane by telegraph. Got Martin job with
+Sunset Aviation Company.
+
+_March 28_: Started for Europe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_May 8, Paris_: Forrest and I would have met to-day in New York to
+perfect plans for Brazil trip.
+
+_May 10_: Am still trying to answer letter from Forrest's father.
+Can't seem to make it go right. If I could have seen Forrest again.
+But maybe they were right, holding funeral before I could get there.
+Captain Faber says Forrest was terribly crushed, falling from 1700 ft.
+I wish I didn't keep on thinking of plans for our Brazil trip, then
+remembering we won't make it after all. I don't think I will fly till
+fall, anyway, though I feel stronger now after rest in England,
+Titherington has beautiful place in Devonshire. England seems to stick
+to biplane, can't make them see monoplane. Don't think I shall fly
+before fall. To-day I would have been with Forrest Haviland in New
+York, I think he could have got leave for Brazil trip. We would taken
+Martin. Tony promised to meet us in Rio. I like France but can't get
+used to language, keep starting to speak Spanish. Maybe I'll fly here
+in France but certainly not for some time, though massage has fixed me
+all O.K. Am studying French. Maybe shall bicycle thru France. Mem.:
+Write to Colonel Haviland when I can.
+
+_Must_ when I can.
+
+
+
+
+Part III
+
+THE ADVENTURE OF LOVE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+In October, 1912, a young man came with an enthusiastic letter from
+the president of the Aero Club to old Stephen VanZile, vice-president
+and general manager of the VanZile Motor Corporation of New York. The
+young man was quiet, self-possessed, an expert in regard to motors,
+used to meeting prominent men. He was immediately set to work at a
+tentative salary of $2,500 a year, to develop the plans of what he
+called the "Touricar"--an automobile with all camping accessories,
+which should enable motorists to travel independent of inns, add the
+joy of camping to the joy of touring, and--a feature of nearly all
+inventions--add money to the purse of the inventor.
+
+The young man was Carl Ericson, whom Mr. VanZile had seen fly at New
+Orleans during the preceding February. Carl had got the idea of the
+Touricar while wandering by motor-cycle through Scandinavia and
+Russia.
+
+He was, at this time, twenty-seven years old; not at all remarkable in
+appearance nor to be considered handsome, but so clean, so well
+bathed, so well set-up and evenly tanned, that one thought of the
+swimming, dancing, tennis-playing city men of good summer resorts, an
+impression enhanced by his sleek corn-silk hair and small, pale
+mustache. His clothes came from London, his watch-chain was a thin
+line of platinum and gold, his cigarette-case of silver engraved in
+inconspicuous bands--a modest and sophisticated cigarette-case, which
+he had possessed long enough to forget that he had it. He was
+apparently too much the easy, well-bred, rather inexperienced Yale or
+Princeton man (not Harvard; there was a tiny twang in his voice, and
+he sometimes murmured "Gee!") to know much about life or work, as
+yet, and his smooth, rosy cheeks made it absurdly evident that he had
+not been away from the college insulation for more than two years.
+
+But when he got to work with draftsman and stenographers, when a curt
+kindliness filled his voice, he proved to be concentrated, unafraid of
+responsibility, able to keep many people busy; trained to something
+besides family tradition and the collegians' naive belief that it
+matters who wins the Next Game.
+
+His hands would have given away the fact that he had done things. They
+were large, broad; the knuckles heavy; the palms calloused by
+something rougher than oar and tennis-racket. The microscopic traces
+of black grease did not for months quite come out of the cracks in his
+skin. And two of his well-kept but thick nails had obviously been
+smashed.
+
+The men of the same rank as himself in the office, captains and first
+lieutenants of business, said that he "simply ate up work." They
+fancied, with the eager old-womanishness of office gossip, that he had
+a "secret sorrow," for, though he was pleasant enough, he kept very
+much to himself. The cause of his retirement from aviation was the
+theme of many romantic legends. They did not know precisely what it
+was he had done in the pre-historic period of a year before, but they
+treated him with reverence instead of the amused aloofness with which
+an office usually waits to see whether a new man will prove to be a
+fool or a "grouch," a clown or a good fellow. The stenographers and
+filing-girls and telephone-girls followed with yearning eyes the
+hero's straight back. The girl who discovered, in an old _New York
+Chronicle_ lining a bureau drawer, an interview with Carl, became very
+haughty over its possession and lent it only to her best lady friends.
+The older women, who knew that Carl had had a serious accident,
+whispered in cloak-room confidences, "Poor fellow, and so brave about
+it."
+
+Yet all the while Carl's china-blue eyes showed no trace of pain nor
+sorrow nor that detestable appeal for sympathy called "being brave
+about his troubles."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were many thoughtful features which fitted the Touricar for use
+in camping--extra-sized baggage-box whose triangular shape made the
+car more nearly streamline, special folding silk tents, folding
+aluminum cooking-utensils, electric stove run by current from the car,
+electric-battery light attached to a curtain-rod. But the distinctive
+feature, the one which Carl could patent, was the means by which a bed
+was made up inside the car as Pullman seats are turned into berths.
+The back of the front seat was hinged, and dropped back to horizontal.
+The upholstery back of the back seat could be taken out and also
+placed on the horizontal. With blankets spread on the level space thus
+provided, with the extra-heavy top and side curtains in place, and the
+electric light switched on, tourists had a refuge cleaner than a
+country hotel and safer than a tent....
+
+The first Touricar was being built. Carl was circularizing a list of
+possible purchasers, and corresponding with makers of camping goods.
+
+Because he was not office-broken he did not worry about the risks of
+the new enterprise. The stupid details of affairs had, for him, a
+soul--the Adventure of Business.
+
+To be consulted by draftsmen and shop foremen; to feel that if he
+should not arrive at 8.30 A.M. to the second the most important part
+of all the world's business would be halted and stenographers loll in
+expensive idleness; to have the chief, old VanZile, politely anxious
+as to how things were going; to plan ways of making a million dollars
+and not have the plans seem fantastic--all these made it interesting
+to overwork, and hypnotized Carl into a feeling of responsibility
+which was less spectacular than flying before thousands, but more in
+accordance with the spirit of the time and place.
+
+Inside the office--busy and reaching for success. Outside the
+office--frankly bored.
+
+Carl was a dethroned prince. He had been accustomed to a more than
+royal court of admirers. Now he was a nobody the moment he went twenty
+feet from his desk. He was forgotten. He did not seek out the many
+people he had met when he was an aviator and a somebody. He believed,
+perhaps foolishly, that they liked him only as a personage, not as a
+person. He sat lonely at dinner, in cheap restaurants with stains on
+the table-cloths, for he had put much of his capital into the new
+Touricar Company, mothered by the VanZile Corporation; and aeroplanes,
+accessories, traveling-expenses, and the like had devoured much of his
+large earnings at aviation before he had left the game.
+
+In his large, shabby, fairly expensive furnished room on Seventy-fifth
+Street he spent unwilling evenings, working on Touricar plans, or
+reading French--French technical motor literature, light novels,
+Balzac, anything.
+
+He tried to keep in physical form, and, much though the routine and
+silly gestures of gymnasium exercises bored him, he took them three
+times a week. He could not explain the reason, but he kept his
+identity concealed at the gymnasium, giving his name as "O. Ericson."
+
+Even at the Aero Club, where scores knew him by sight, he was a
+nobody. Aviation, like all pioneer arts, must look to the men who are
+doing new things or planning new things, not to heroes past. Carl was
+often alone at lunch at the club. Any group would have welcomed him,
+but he did not seek them out. For the first time he really saw the
+interior decorations of the club. In the old days he had been much too
+busy talking with active comrades to gaze about. But now he stared for
+five minutes together at the stamped-leather wall-covering of the
+dining-room. He noted, much too carefully for a happy man, the
+trophies of the lounging-room. But at one corner he never glanced. For
+here was a framed picture of the forgotten Hawk Ericson, landing on
+Governor's Island, winner of the flight from Chicago to New York....
+Such a beautiful swoop!...
+
+There is no doubt of the fact that he disliked the successful new
+aviators, and did so because he was jealous of them. He admitted the
+fact, but he could not put into his desire to be a good boy
+one-quarter of the force that inspired his resentment at being a
+lonely man and a nobody. But, since he knew he was envious, he was
+careful not to show it, not to inflict it upon others. He was gracious
+and added a wrinkle between his brows, and said "Gosh!" and "ain't"
+much less often.
+
+He had few friends these days. Death had taken many; and he was wary
+of lion-hunters, who in dull seasons condescend to ex-lions and
+dethroned princes. But he was fond of a couple of Aero Club men, an
+automobile ex-racer who was a selling-agent for the VanZile
+Corporation, and Charley Forbes, the bright-eyed, curly-headed, busy,
+dissipated little reporter who had followed him from Chicago to New
+York for the _Chronicle_. Occasionally one of the men with whom he had
+flown--Hank Odell or Walter MacMonnies or Lieutenant Rutledge of the
+navy--came to town, and Carl felt natural again. As for women, the
+only girl whom he had known well in years, Istra Nash, the painter,
+had gone to California to keep house for her father till she should
+have an excuse to escape to New York or Europe again.
+
+Inside the office--a hustling, optimistic young business man. For the
+rest of the time--a dethroned prince. Such was Carl Ericson in
+November, 1912, when a letter from Gertrude Cowles, which had pursued
+him all over America and Europe, finally caught him:
+
+---- West 157th St.
+
+NEW YORK.
+
+CARL DEAR,--Oh such excitement, we have come to _New York_ to live!
+Ray has such a good position with a big NY real estate co. & Mama & I
+are going to make a home for him even if it's only just a flat (but
+it's quite a big one & looks out on the duckiest old house that must
+have been adorning Harlem for heaven knows how long,) & our house has
+all modern conveniences, elevator & all.
+
+Think, Carl, I'm going to study dancing at Madame Vashkowska's
+school--she was with the Russian ballet & really is almost as
+wonderful a dancer as Isadora Duncan or Pavlova. Perhaps I'll teach
+all these ducky new dances to children some day. I'm just terribly
+excited to be here, like the silliest gushiest little girl in the
+world. And I do hope so much you will be able to come to NY & honor us
+with your presence at dinner, famous aviator--our Carl & we are so
+_proud_ of you--if you will still remember simple people like us do
+come _any time_. Wonder where you will be when this reaches you.
+
+I read in the papers that your accident isn't serious but I am
+worried, oh Carl you must take care of yourself.
+
+Yours as ever,
+
+GERTIE.
+
+P.S. Mama sends her best regards, so does Ray, he has a black mustache
+now, we tease him about it dreadfully.
+
+G.
+
+One minute after reading the letter, in his room, Carl was standing on
+the chaste black-and-white tiles of the highly respectable
+white-arched hall down-stairs asking Information for the telephone
+number of ---- West 157th Street, while his landlord, a dry-bearded
+goat of a physician who had failed in the practise of medicine and was
+now failing in the practise of rooming-houses, listened from the front
+of the hall.
+
+Glad to escape from the funereally genteel house, Carl hastily changed
+his collar and tie and, like the little boy Carl whom Gertie had
+known, dog-trotted to the subway, which was going to take him Home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Before the twelve-story Bendingo Apartments, Carl scanned the rows of
+windows which pierced the wall like bank-swallows' nests in a bold
+cliff.... One group of those windows was home--Joralemon and memories,
+Gertie's faith and understanding.... It was she who had always
+understood him.... In anticipation he loitered through the big,
+marble-and-stucco, rug and rubber-tree, negro hallboy and Jew tenant
+hallway.... What would the Cowleses be like, now?
+
+Gertie met him in the coat-smelling private hall of the Cowles
+apartment, greeted him with both hands clasping his, and her voice
+catching in, "Oh, _Carl_, it's so good to see you!" Behind Gertie was
+a swishing, stiff-backed Mrs. Cowles, piping in a high, worn voice:
+"Mr. Ericson! A friend from home! And such a famous friend!"
+
+Gertie drew him into the living-room. He looked at her.
+
+He found, not a girl, but a woman of thirty, plump, solid, with the
+tiniest wrinkles of past unhappiness or ennui at the corners of her
+mouth; but her eyes radiant with sweetness, and her hair appealingly
+soft and brown above her wide, calm forehead. She was gowned in
+lavender crepe de Chine, with panniers of satin elaborately sprinkled
+with little bunches of futurist flowers; long jet earrings; a low-cut
+neck that hinted of a comfortable bosom. Eyes shining, hands firm on
+his arm, voice ringing, she was unaffectedly glad to see him--her
+childhood playmate, whom she had not beheld for seven years.
+
+Mrs. Cowles was waiting for them to finish their greetings. Carl was
+startled to find Mrs. Cowles smaller than he had remembered, her hair
+nearly white and not perfectly matched, her face crisscrossed with
+wrinkles deeper than her age justified. But her old disapproval of
+Carl, son of a carpenter and cousin of a "hired girl," was gone. She
+even laughed mildly, like a kitten sneezing. And from a room somewhere
+beyond Ray shouted:
+
+"Be right there in a second, old man. Crazy to have a look at you."
+
+Carl did not really see the living-room, their background. Indeed, he
+never really saw it. There was nothing to see--chairs and a table and
+pictures of meadows and roses. It was comfortable, however, and had
+conveniences--a folding card-table, a cribbage-board, score-pads for
+whist and five hundred; a humidor of cigars; a large Morris chair and
+an ugly but well-padded couch of green tufted velvetine.
+
+They sat about in chairs, talking.
+
+Ray came in, slapped Carl on the back, roared: "Well, here's the
+stranger! Holy Mike! have you got a mustache, too? Better shave it off
+before Gert starts kidding you about it. Have a cigar?"
+
+Carl felt at home for the first time in a year; for the first time
+talked easily.
+
+"Say, Gertie, tell me about my folks, and Bone Stillman."
+
+"Why, I saw your father just before we left, Carl. You know he still
+does quite a little business. We got your mother to join the Nautilus
+Club--she doesn't go very often; but she had a nice paper about 'Java
+and Its Products,' and she helps us a lot with the rest-room. I
+haven't seen Mr. Stillman for a long, long time. Ray, what has----"
+
+Ray: "Why, I think old Bone's off on some expedition 'r other. Fellow
+told me Bone was some kind of a forest ranger or mine inspector, or
+some darn thing, up in the Big Woods. He must be pretty well along
+toward seventy now, at that."
+
+Carl: "So dad's getting along well. His letters aren't very
+committal.... Oh, say, Gertie, what ever became of Ben Rusk? I've lost
+track of him entirely."
+
+Gertie: "Why, didn't you know? He went to Rush Medical College. They
+say he did splendidly there; he stood awfully well in his classes, and
+now he's in practise with his father, home."
+
+Carl: "Rush?"
+
+Gertie: "Yes, you know, in Chi----"
+
+Carl: "Oh yes, sure; in Chicago; sure, I remember now; I saw it when I
+was there one time. Why! That's the school his father went to, wasn't
+it?"
+
+Ray: "Yes, sure, that's the one."
+
+The point seemed settled.
+
+Carl: "Well, well, so Ben _did_ study medicine, after----Oh, _say_,
+how's Adelaide Benner?"
+
+Gertie: "Why, you'll see her! She's coming to New York in just a
+couple of weeks to stay with us till she gets settled. Just think,
+she's to have a whole year here, studying domestic science, and then
+she's to have a perfectly dandy position teaching in the Fargo High
+School. I'm not supposed to tell--you mustn't breathe a _word_ of
+it----"
+
+Mrs. Cowles (interrupting): "Adelaide is a good girl....Ray! Don't
+tilt your chair!"
+
+Gertie: "Yes, _isn't_ she, mamma.... Well, I was just saying: between
+you and me, Carl, she is to have the position in Fargo all ready and
+waiting for her, though of course they can't announce it publicly,
+with all the cats that would like to get it, and all. Isn't that
+fine?"
+
+Carl: "Certainly is.... 'Member the time we had the May party at
+Adelaide's, and all I could get for my basket was rag babies and May
+flowers? Gee, but I felt out of it!"
+
+Gertie: "We did have some good parties, _didn't_ we!"
+
+Ray: "Don't call that much of a good party for Carl! Ring off, Gert;
+you got the wrong number that time, all right!"
+
+Gertie (flushing): "Oh, I _didn't_ mean----But we did have some good
+times. Oh, Carl, will you _ever_ forget the time you and I ran away
+when we were just babies?"
+
+Carl: "I'll never forget----"
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "I'll never forget that time! My lands! I thought I
+should die, I was so frightened."
+
+Carl: "You've forgiven me now, though, haven't you?"
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "My dear boy, of course I have!" (She wiped away a few
+tears with a gentlewoman handkerchief of lace and thin linen. Carl
+crossed the room and kissed her pale-veined, silvery old hand.
+Abashed, he subsided on the couch, and, trying to look as though he
+hadn't done it----)
+
+Carl: "Ohhhhh _say_, whatever did become of----Oh, I can't think of
+his name----Oh, _you_ know----I know his name well as I do my own, but
+it's slipped me, just for the moment----You know, he ran the
+billiard-parlor; the son of the----"
+
+(From Mrs. Cowles, a small, disapproving sound; from Ray, a grin of
+knowing naughtiness and a violent head-shake.)
+
+Gertie (gently): "Yes.... He--has left Joralemon.... Klemm, you mean."
+
+Carl (hastily, wondering what Eddie Klemm had done): "Oh, I see....
+Have there been many changes in Joralemon?"
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "Do you write to your father and mother, Carl? You ought
+to."
+
+Carl: "Oh yes, I write to them quite often, now, though for a time I
+didn't."
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "I'm glad, my boy. It's pretty good, after all, to have
+home folks that you can depend on, isn't it? When I first went to
+Joralemon, I thought it was a little pokey, but now I'm older, and
+I've been there so long and all, that I'm almost afraid of New York,
+and I declare I do get real lonely for home sometimes. I'd be glad to
+see Dr. Rusk--Ben's father, I mean, the old doctor--driving by, though
+of course you know I lived in Minneapolis a great many years, and I do
+feel I ought to take advantage of the opportunities here, and I've
+thought quite seriously about taking up French again, it's so long
+since I've studied it----You ought to study it; you will find it
+cultivates the mind. And you must be sure to write often to your
+mother; there's nothing you can depend on like a mother's love, my
+boy."
+
+Ray: "Say, look here, Carl, I want to hear something about all this
+aviation. How does it feel to fly, anyway? I'd be scared to death;
+it's funny, I can't look off the top of a sky-scraper without feeling
+as though I wanted to jump. Gosh! I----"
+
+Gertie: "Now you just let Carl tell us when he gets ready, you big,
+bad brother! Carl wants to hear all about Home first.... All these
+years!... You were asking about the changes. There haven't been so
+very many. You know it's a little slow there. Oh, of course, I almost
+forgot; why, you haven't been in Joralemon since they built up what
+used to be Tubbs's pasture."
+
+Carl: "Not the old pasture by the lake? Well, well! Is that a fact!
+Why, gee! I used to snare gophers there!"
+
+Gertie: "Oh yes. Why, you simply wouldn't _know_ it, Carl, it's so
+much changed. There must be a dozen houses on it, now. Why, there's
+cement walks and everything, and Mr. Upham has a house there, a real
+nice one, with a screened-in porch and everything.... Of course you
+know they've put in the sewer now, and there's lots of modern
+bath-rooms, and almost everybody has a Ford. We would have bought one,
+but planning to come away so soon----Oh yes, and they've added a
+fire-escape to the school-house."
+
+Carl: "Well, well!... Oh, say, Ray, how is Howard Griffin getting
+along?"
+
+Ray: "Why, Howard's graduated from Chicago Law School, and he's
+practising in Denver. Doing pretty well, I guess; settled down and got
+quite some real-estate holdings.... Have 'nother cigar, old man?...
+Say, speaking of Plato, of course you know they ousted old S. Alcott
+Woodski from the presidency, for heresy, something about baptism; and
+the dean succeeded him.... Poor old cuss, he wasn't as mean as the
+dean, anyway.... Say, Carl, I've always thought they gave you a pretty
+raw deal there----"
+
+Gertie (interrupting): "Perfectly dreadful!... Ray, _don't_ put your
+feet on that couch; I brushed it thoroughly, just this morning.... It
+was simply terrible, Carl; I've always said that if Plato couldn't
+appreciate her greatest son----"
+
+Mrs. Cowles (sleepily): "Outrageous.... And don't put your feet on
+that chair, Ray."
+
+Ray: "Oh, leave my feet alone!... Everybody knew you were dead right
+in standing up for Prof Frazer. You remember how I roasted all the
+fellows in Omega Chi when they said you were nutty to boost him? And
+when you stood up in Chapel----Lord! that was nervy."
+
+Gertie: "Indeed you were right, and now you've got so famous I
+guess----"
+
+Carl: "Oh, I ain't so----"
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "I was simply amazed.... Children, if you don't mind, I'm
+afraid I must leave you. Mr. Ericson, I'm so ashamed to be sleepy so
+early. When we lived in Minneapolis, before Mr. Cowles passed beyond,
+he was a regular night-hawk, and we used to sit--sit--" (a yawn)--"sit
+up till all hours. But to-night----"
+
+Gertie: "Oh, must you go so soon? I was just going to make Carl a
+rarebit. Carl has never seen one of my rarebits."
+
+Mrs. Cowles: "Make him one by all means, my dear, and you young people
+sit up and enjoy yourselves just as long as you like. Good night,
+all.... Ray, will you please be sure and see that that window is
+fastened before you go to bed? I get so nervous when----Mr. Ericson,
+I'm very proud to think that one of our Joralemon boys should have
+done so well. Sometimes I wonder if the Lord ever meant men to
+fly--what with so many accidents, and you know aviators often do get
+killed and all. I was reading the other day--such a large
+percentage----But we have been so proud that you should lead them all,
+I was saying to a lady on the train that we had a friend who was a
+famous aviator, and she was so interested to find that we knew you.
+Good night."
+
+They had the Welsh rarebit, with beer, and Carl helped to make it.
+Gertie summoned him into the scoured kitchen, saying, with a beautiful
+casualness, as she tied an apron about him:
+
+"We can't afford a hired girl (I suppose I should say a 'maid'),
+because mamma has put so much of our money into Ray's business, so you
+mustn't expect anything so very grand. But you'd like to help,
+wouldn't you? You're to chop the cheese. Cut it into weenty cubes."
+
+Carl did like to help. He boasted that he was the "champion
+cheese-chopper of Harlem and the Bronx, one-thirty-three ringside,"
+while Gertie was toasting crackers, and Ray was out buying bottles of
+beer in a newspaper. It all made Carl feel more than ever at home....
+It was good to be with people of such divine understanding that they
+knew what he meant when he said, "I suppose there _have_ been worse
+teachers than Prof Larsen----!"
+
+When the rabbit lay pale in death, a saddening _debacle_ of hardened
+cheese, and they sat with their elbows on the Modified Mission
+dining-table, Gertie exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, Ray, you _must_ do that new stunt of yours for Carl. It's
+screamingly funny, Carl."
+
+Ray rose, had his collar and tie off in two jocund jerks, buttoned his
+collar on backward, cheerily turned his waistcoat back side foremost,
+lengthened his face to an expression of unctuous sanctimoniousness,
+and turned about--transformed in one minute to a fair imitation of a
+stage curate. With his hands folded, Ray droned, "Naow, sistern, it
+behooveth us heuh in St. Timothee's Chutch," while Carl pounded the
+table in his delight at seeing old Ray, the broad-shouldered, the
+lady-killer, the capable business man, drop his eyes and yearn.
+
+"Now you must do a stunt!" shrieked Ray and Gertie; and Carl
+hesitatingly sang what he remembered of Forrest Haviland's foolish
+song:
+
+    "I went up in a balloon so big
+    The people on the earth they looked like a pig,
+    Like a mice, like a katydid, like flieses and like fleasen."
+
+Then, without solicitation, Gertie decided to dance "Gather the Golden
+Sheaves," which she had learned at the school of Mme. Vashkowska, late
+(though not very late) of the Russian ballet.
+
+She explained her work; outlined the theory of sensuous and esthetic
+dancing; mentioned the backgrounds of Bakst and the glories of
+Nijinsky; told her ambition to teach the New Dancing to children. Carl
+listened with awe; and with awe did he gaze as Gertie gathered the
+Golden Sheaves--purely hypothetical sheaves in a field occupying most
+of the living-room.
+
+After the stunts Ray delicately vanished. It was not so much that he
+statedly went off to bed as that, presently, he was not there. Gertie
+and Carl were snugly alone, and at last he talked--of Forrest Haviland
+and Tony Bean, of flying and falling, of excited crowds and the
+fog-filled air-lanes.
+
+In turn she told of her ambition to do something modern and urban. She
+had hesitated between dancing and making exotic jewelry; she was glad
+she had chosen the former; it was so human; it put one in touch with
+People.... She had recently gone to dinner with real Bohemians,
+spirits of fire, splendidly in contrast with the dull plodders of
+Joralemon. The dinner had been at a marvelous place on West Tenth
+Street--very foreign, every one drinking wine and eating spaghetti and
+little red herrings, and the women fearlessly smoking cigarettes--some
+of them. She had gone with a girl from Mme. Vashkowska's school, a
+glorious creature from London, Nebraska, who lived with the most
+fascinating girls at the Three Arts Club. They had met an artist with
+black hair and languishing eyes, who had a Yankee name, but sang
+Italian songs divinely, upon the slightest pretext, so bubbling was he
+with _joie de vivre_.
+
+Carl was alarmed. "Gosh!" he protested, "I hope you aren't going to
+have much to do with the long-haired bunch.... I've invented a name
+for them--'the Hobohemians.'"
+
+"Oh no-o! I don't take them seriously at all. I was just glad to go
+once."
+
+"Of course some of them are clever."
+
+"Oh yes, aren't they clever!"
+
+"But I don't think they last very well."
+
+"Oh no, I'm sure they don't last well. Oh no, Carl, I'm too old and
+fat to be a Bohemian--a Hobohemian, I mean, so----"
+
+"Nonsense! You look so--oh, thunder! I don't know just how to express
+it--well, so _real_! It's wonderfully comfortable to be with you-all
+again. I don't mean you're just the 'so good to her mother' sort, you
+understand. But I mean you're dependable as well as artistic."
+
+"Oh, indeed, I won't take them too seriously. Besides, I suppose lots
+of the people that go to Bohemian restaurants aren't really artists at
+all; they just go to see the artists; they're just as bromidic as can
+be----Don't you hate bromides? Of course I want to see some of that
+part of life, but I think----Oh, don't you think those artists and all
+are dreadfully careless about morals?"
+
+"Well----"
+
+"Yes," she breathed, reflectively. "No, I keep up with my church and
+all--indeed I do. Oh, Carl, you must come to our church--St. Orgul's.
+It's too sweet for anything. It's just two blocks from here; and it
+isn't so far up here, you know, not with the subway--not like
+commuting. It has the _loveliest_ chapel. And the most wonderful
+reredos. And the services are so inspiring and high-church; not like
+that horrid St. Timothy's at home. I do think a church service ought
+to be beautiful. Don't you? It isn't as though we were like a lot of
+poor people who have to have their souls saved in a mission.... What
+church do you attend? You _will_ come to St. Orgul's some time, won't
+you?"
+
+"Be glad to----Oh, say, Gertie, before I forget it, what is Semina
+doing now? Is she married?"
+
+Apropos of this subject, Gertie let it be known that she herself was
+not betrothed.
+
+Carl had not considered that question; but when he was back in his
+room he was glad to know that Gertie was free.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Omega Chi Delta Club, Carl lunched with Ray Cowles. Two nights
+later, Ray and Gertie took Carl and Gertie's friend, the glorious
+creature from London, Nebraska, to the opera. Carl did not know much
+about opera. In other words, being a normal young American who had
+been water-proofed with college culture, he knew absolutely nothing
+about it. But he gratefully listened to Gertie's clear explanation of
+why Mme. Vashkowska preferred Wagner to Verdi.
+
+He had, in the mean time, received a formal invitation for a party to
+occur at Gertie's the coming Friday evening.
+
+Thursday evening Gertie coached him in a new dance, the turkey trot.
+She also gave him a lesson in the Boston, with a new dip invented by
+Mme. Vashkowska, which was certain to sweep the country, because, of
+course, Vashkowska was the only genuinely qualified _maitresse de
+danse_ in America.
+
+It was a beautiful evening. Home! Ray came in, and the three of them
+had coffee and thin sandwiches. At Gertie's suggestion, Ray again
+turned his collar round and performed his "clergyman stunt." While the
+impersonation did not, perhaps, seem so humorous as before, Carl was
+amused; and he consented to sing the "I went up in a balloon so big"
+song, so that Ray might learn it and sing it at the office.
+
+It was captivating to have Gertie say, quietly, as he left: "I hope
+you'll be able to come to the party a little early to-morrow, Carl.
+You know we count on you to help us."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The party was on at the Cowles flat.
+
+People came. They all set to it, having a party, being lively and gay,
+whether they wanted to or not. They all talked at once, and had
+delicious shocks over the girl from London, Nebraska, who, having
+moved to Washington Place, just a block or two from ever so many
+artists, was now smoking a cigarette and, wearing a gown that was
+black and clinging. It was no news to her that men had a tendency to
+become interested in her ankles. But she still went to church and was
+accepted by quite the nicest of the St. Orgul's set, to whom Gertie
+had introduced her.
+
+She and Gertie were the only thoroughly qualified representatives of
+Art, but Beauty and Gallantry and Wit were common. The conspirators in
+holding a party were, on the male side:
+
+An insurance adjuster, who was a frat-brother to Carl and Ray, though
+he came from Melanchthon College. A young lawyer, ever so jolly, with
+a banjo. A bantling clergyman, who was spoken of with masculine
+approval because he smoked a pipe and said charmingly naughty things.
+Johnson of the Homes and Long Island Real Estate Company, and his
+brother, of the Martinhurst Development Company. Four older men,
+ranging from thin-haired to very bald, who had come with their wives
+and secretly looked at their watches while they talked brightly with
+one another's wives. Five young men whom Carl could not tell apart, as
+they all had smooth hair and eye-glasses and smart dress-shirts and
+obliging smiles and complimentary references to his aviating. He gave
+up trying to remember which was which.
+
+It was equally hard to remember which of the women Gertie knew as a
+result of her girlhood visit to New York, which from their membership
+in St. Orgul's Church, which from their relation to Minnesota. They
+all sat in rows on couches and chairs and called him "You wicked man!"
+for reasons none too clear to him. He finally fled from them and
+joined the group of young men, who showed an ill-bred and disapproved
+tendency to sneak off into Ray's room for a smoke. He did not,
+however, escape one young woman who stood out from the _melee_--a
+young woman with a personality almost as remarkable as that of the
+glorious creature from London, Nebraska. This was the more or less
+married young woman named Dorothy, and affectionately called
+"Tottykins" by all the St. Orgul's group. She was of the kind who look
+at men appraisingly, and expect them to come up, be unduly familiar,
+and be crushed. She had seven distinct methods of getting men to say
+indiscreet things, and three variations of reply, of which the
+favorite was to remark with well-bred calmness: "I'm afraid you have
+made a slight error, Mr. Uh---- I didn't quite catch your name?
+Perhaps they failed to tell you that I attend St. Orgul's evvvv'ry
+Sunday, and have a husband and child, and am not at all, really, you
+know. I hope that there has been nothing I said that has given you the
+idea that I have been looking for a flirtation."
+
+A thin, small female with bobbed hair was Tottykins, who kept her
+large husband and her fat, white grub of an infant somewhere in the
+back blocks. She fingered a long, gold, religious chain with her
+square, stubby hand, while she gazed into men's eyes with what she
+privately termed "daring frankness."
+
+Tottykins the fair; Tottykins the modern; Tottykins who had read
+_Three Weeks_ and nearly all of a wicked novel in French, and wore a
+large gold cross; Tottykins who worked so hard in her little flat
+that she had to rest all of every afternoon and morning; Tottykins the
+advanced and liberal--yet without any of the extremes of socialists
+and artists and vegetarians and other ill-conditioned persons who do
+not attend St. Orgul's; Tottykins the firmly domestic, whose husband
+grew more worried every year; Tottykins the intensely cultured and
+inquisitive about life, the primitively free and pervasively original,
+who announced in public places that she wanted always to live like the
+spirit of the Dancing Bacchante statue, but had the assistant rector
+of St. Orgul's in for coffee, every fourth Monday evening.
+
+Tottykins beckoned Carl to a corner and said, with her manner of
+amused condescension, "Now you sit right down here, Hawk Ericson, and
+tell me _all_ about aviation."
+
+Carl was not vastly sensitive. He had not disliked the nice young men
+with eye-glasses. Not till now did he realize how Tottykins's shrill
+references to the Dancing Bacchante and the Bacchanting of her
+mud-colored Dutch-fashioned hair had bored him. Ennui was not, of
+course, an excuse; but it was the explanation of why he answered in
+this wise (very sweetly, looking Tottykins in the eyes and patting her
+hand with a brother-like and altogether maddening condescension):
+
+"No, no, that isn't the way, Dorothy. It's quite _passe_ to ask me to
+tell you all about aviation. That isn't done, not in 1912. Oh
+Dor-o-thy! Oh no, no! No-o! No, no. First you should ask me if I'm
+afraid when I'm flying. Oh, always begin that way. Then you say that
+there's a curious fact about you--when you're on a high building and
+just look down once, then you get so dizzy that you want to jump.
+Then, after you've said that----Let's see. You're a church member,
+aren't you? Well then, next you'd say, 'Just how does it feel to be up
+in an aeroplane?' or if you don't say that then you've simply got to
+say, 'Just how does it feel to fly, anyway?' But if you're just
+_terribly_ interested, Dorothy, you might ask about biplanes _versus_
+monoplanes, and 'Do I think there'll ever be a flight across the
+Atlantic?' But whatever you do, Dorothy, don't fail to ask me if I'll
+give you a free ride when I start flying again. And we'll fly and
+fly----Like birds. You know. Or like the Dancing Bacchante.... That's
+the way to talk about aviation.... And now you tell me _all_ about
+babies!"
+
+"Really, I'm afraid babies is rather a big subject to tell all about!
+At a party! Really, you _know_----"
+
+That was the only time Carl was not bored at the party. And even then
+he had spiritual indigestion from having been rude.
+
+For the rest of the time:
+
+Every one knew everybody else, and took Carl aside to tell him that
+everybody was "the most conscientious man in our office, Ericson; why,
+the Boss would trust him with anything." It saddened Carl to hear the
+insurance adjuster boom, "Oh you Tottykins!" across the room, at
+ten-minute intervals, like a human fog-horn on the sea of ennui.
+
+They were all so uniformly polite, so neat-minded and church-going and
+dull. Nearly all the girls did their hair and coquetries one exactly
+like another. Carl is not to be pitied. He had the pleasure of
+martyrdom when he heard the younger Johnson tell of Martinhurst, the
+Suburb Beautiful. He believed that he had reached the nadir of
+boredom. But he was mistaken.
+
+After simple and pleasing refreshments of the wooden-plate and
+paper-napkin school, Gertie announced: "Now we're going to have some
+stunts, and you're each to give one. I know you all can, and if
+anybody tries to beg off--my, what will happen----! My brother has a
+new one----"
+
+For the third time that month, Carl saw Ray turn his collar round and
+become clerical, while every one rustled with delight, including the
+jolly bantling clergyman.
+
+And for the fourth time he saw Gertie dance "Gather the Golden
+Sheaves." She appeared, shy and serious, in bloomers and flat
+dancing-shoes, which made her ample calves bulge the more; she started
+at sight of the harvest moon (and well she may have been astonished,
+if she did, indeed, see a harvest moon there, above the gilded buffalo
+horns on the unit bookcase), rose to her toes, flapped her arms, and
+began to gather the sheaves to her breast, with enough plump and
+panting energy to enable her to gather at least a quarter-section of
+them before the whistle blew.
+
+It was not only esthetic, but Close to the Soil.
+
+Then, to banjo accompaniment, the insurance adjuster sighed for his
+old Kentucky home, which Carl judged to have been located in Brooklyn.
+The whole crowd joined in the chorus and----
+
+Suddenly, with a shock that made him despise himself for the cynical
+superiority which he had been enjoying, Carl remembered that Forrest
+Haviland, Tony Bean, Hank Odell, even surly Jack Ryan and the alien
+Carmeau, had sung "My Old Kentucky Home" on their last night at the
+Bagby School. He felt their beloved presences in the room. He had to
+fight against tears as he too joined in the chorus.... "Then weep no
+more, my lady."... He was beside a California poppy-field. The
+blossoms slumbered beneath the moon, and on his shoulder was the hand
+of Forrest Haviland....
+
+He had repented. He became part of the group. He spoke kindly to
+Tottykins. But presently Tottykins postponed her well-advertised
+return to her husband and baby, and gave a ten-minute dramatic recital
+from Byron; and the younger Johnson sang a Swiss mountaineer song with
+yodels.
+
+Gertie looked speculatively at Carl twice during this offering. He knew
+that the gods were plotting an abominable thing. She was going to call upon
+him for the "stunt" which had been inescapably identified with him, the
+song, "I went up in a balloon so big." He met the crisis heroically. He
+said loudly, as the shaky strains of the Swiss ballad died on the midnight
+mountain air of 157th Street (while the older men concealed yawns and
+applauded, and the family in the adjoining flat rapped on the radiator):
+"I'm sorry my throat 's so sore to-night. Otherwise I'd sing a song I
+learned from a fellow in California--balloon s' big."
+
+Gertie stared at him doubtfully, but passed to a kitten-faced girl
+from Minnesota, who was quite ready to give an imitation of a child
+whose doll has been broken. Her "stunt" was greeted with, "Oh, how
+cun-ning! Please do it again!"
+
+She prepared to do it again. Carl made hasty motions of departure,
+pathetically holding his throat.
+
+He did not begin to get restless till he had reached Ninety-sixth
+Street and had given up his seat in the subway to a woman who
+resembled Tottykins. He wondered if he had not been at the Old Home
+long enough. At Seventy-second Street, on an inspiration that came as
+the train was entering the station, he changed to a local and went
+down to Fifty-ninth Street. He found an all-night garage, hired a
+racing-car, and at dawn he was driving furiously through Long Island,
+a hundred miles from New York, on a roadway perilously slippery with
+falling snow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Carl wished that Adelaide Benner had never come from Joralemon to
+study domestic science. He felt that he was a sullen brute, but he
+could not master his helpless irritation as he walked with Adelaide
+and Gertie Cowles through Central Park, on a snowy Sunday afternoon of
+December. Adelaide assumed that one remained in the state of mind
+called Joralemon all one's life; that, however famous he might be, the
+son of Oscar Ericson was not sufficiently refined for Miss Cowles of
+the Big House on the Hill, though he might improve under Cowles
+influences. He was still a person who had run away from Plato! But
+that assumption was far less irritating than one into which Adelaide
+threw all of her faded yearning--that Gertie and he were in love.
+
+Adelaide kept repeating, with coy slyness: "Isn't it too bad you two
+have me in the way!" and: "Don't mind poor me. Auntie will turn her
+back any time you want her to."
+
+And Gertie merely blushed, murmuring, "Don't be a silly."
+
+At Eightieth Street Adelaide announced: "Now I must leave you
+children. I'm going over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I do love
+to see art pictures. I've always wanted to. Now be as good as you can,
+you two."
+
+Gertie was mechanical about replying. "Oh, don't run away, Addy dear."
+
+"Oh yes, you two will miss an old maid like me terribly!" And Adelaide
+was off, a small, sturdy, undistinguished figure, with an unyielding
+loyalty to Gertie and to the idea of marriage.
+
+Carl looked at her bobbing back (with wrinkles in her cloth jacket
+over the shoulders) as she melted into the crowd of glossy fur-trimmed
+New-Yorkers. He comprehended her goodness, her devotion. He sighed,
+"If she'd only stop this hinting about Gertie and me----" He was
+repentant of his irritation, and said to Gertie, who was intimately
+cuddling her arm into his: "Adelaide's an awfully good kid. Sorry she
+had to go."
+
+Gertie jerked her arm away, averted her profile, grated: "If you miss
+her so much, perhaps you'd better run after her. Really, I wouldn't
+interfere, not for _worlds_!"
+
+"Why, hello, Gertie! What seems to be the matter? Don't I detect a
+chill in the atmosphere? So sorry you've gone and gotten refined on
+me. I was just going to suggest some low-brow amusement like tea at
+the Casino."
+
+"Well, you ought to know a lady doesn't----"
+
+"Oh, now, Gertie dear, not 'lady.'"
+
+"I don't think you're a bit nice, Carl Ericson, I don't, to be making
+fun of me when I'm serious. And why haven't you been up to see us?
+Mamma and Ray have spoken of it, and you've only been up once since my
+party, and then you were----"
+
+"Oh, please let's not start anything. Sorry I haven't been able to get
+up oftener, but I've been taking work home. You know how it is--you
+know when you get busy with your dancing-school----"
+
+"Oh, I meant to tell you. I'm through, just _through_ with Vashkowska
+and her horrid old school. She's a cat and I don't believe she ever
+had anything to do with the Russian ballet, either. What do you think
+she had the effrontery to tell me? She said that I wasn't practising
+and really trying to learn anything. And I've been working myself
+into----Really, my nerves were in such a shape, I would have been in
+danger of a nervous breakdown if I had kept on. Tottykins told me how
+she had a nervous breakdown, and had me see her doctor, such a dear,
+Dr. St. Claire, so refined and sympathetic, and he told me I was right
+in suspecting that nobody takes Vashkowska seriously any more, and,
+besides, I don't think much of all this symbolistic dancing, anyway,
+and at last I've found out what I really want to do. Oh, Carl, it's so
+wonderful! I'm studying ceramics with Miss Deitz, she's so wonderful
+and temperamental and she has the dearest studio on Gramercy Park. Of
+course I haven't made anything yet, but I know I'm going to like it so
+much, and Miss Deitz says I have a natural taste for vahzes and----"
+
+"Huh? Oh yes, vases. I get you."
+
+"(Don't be vulgar.)----I'm going to go down to her studio and work
+every other day, and she doesn't think you have to work like a
+scrubwoman to succeed, like that horrid Vashkowska did. Miss Deitz has
+a temperament herself. And, oh, Carl, she says that 'Gertrude' isn't
+suited to me (and 'Gertie' certainly isn't!) and she calls me
+'Eltruda.' Don't you think that's a sweet name? Would you like to call
+me 'Eltruda,' sometimes?"
+
+"Look here, Gertie, I don't want to butt in, and I'm guessing at it,
+but looks to me as though one of these artistic grafters was working
+you. What do you know about this Deitz person? Has she done anything
+worth while? And honestly, Gertie----By the way, I don't want to be
+brutal, but I don't think I could stand 'Eltruda.' It sounds like
+'Tottykins.'"
+
+"Now really, Carl----"
+
+"Wait a second. How do you know you've got what you call a
+temperament? Go to it, and good luck, if you can get away with it. But
+how do you know it isn't simply living in a flat and not having any
+work to do _except_ developing a temperament? Why don't you try
+working with Ray in his office? He's a mighty good business man. This
+is just a sugges----"
+
+"Now really, this is----"
+
+"Look here, Gertie, the thing I've always admired about you is your
+wholesomeness and----"
+
+"'Wholesome!' Oh, that word! As Miss Deitz was saying just the other
+day, it's as bad----"
+
+"But you are wholesome, Gertie. That is, if you don't let New York
+turn your head; and if you'd use your ability on a real job, like
+helping Ray, or teaching--yes, or really sticking to your ceramics or
+dancing, and leave the temperament business to those who can get away
+with it. No, wait. I know I'm butting in; I know that people won't go
+and change their natures because I ask them to; but you see you--and
+Ray and Adelaide--you are the friends I depend on, and so I hate to
+see----"
+
+"Now, Carl dear, you might let me talk," said Gertie, in tones of
+maddening sweetness. "As I think it over, I don't seem to recall that
+you've been an authority on temperament for so very long. I seem to
+remember that you weren't so terribly wonderful in Joralemon! I'm glad
+to be the first to honor what you've done in aviation, but I don't
+know that that gives you the right to----"
+
+"Never said it did!" Carl insisted, with fictitious good humor.
+
+"----assume that you are an authority on temperament and art. I'm
+afraid that your head has been just a little turned by----"
+
+"Oh, hell.... Oh, I'm sorry. That just slipped."
+
+"It _shouldn't_ have slipped, you know. I'm _afraid_ it can't be
+passed over so _easily_." Gertie might have been a bustling Joralemon
+school-teacher pleasantly bidding the dirty Ericson boy, "Now go and
+wash the little hands."
+
+Carl said nothing. He was bored. He wished that he had not become
+entangled in their vague discussion of "temperament."
+
+Even more brightly Gertie announced: "I'm afraid you're not in a very
+good humor this afternoon. I'm sorry that my plans don't interest you.
+Of course, I should be very temperamental if I expected you to
+apologize for cursing and swearing, so I think I'll just leave you
+here, and when you feel better----" She was infuriatingly cheerful.
+"----I should be pleased to have you call me up. Good-by, Carl, and I
+hope that your walk will do you good."
+
+She turned into a footpath; left him muttering in tones of youthful
+injury, "Jiminy! I've done it now!"
+
+He was in Joralemon.
+
+A victoria drove by with a dowager who did not seem to be humbly
+courting the best set in Joralemon. A grin lightened Carl's face. He
+chuckled: "By golly! Gertie handled it splendidly! I'm to call up and
+be humble, and then--bing!--the least I can do is to propose and be
+led to the altar and teach a Sunday-school class at St. Orgul's for
+the rest of my life! Come hither, Hawk Ericson, let us hold council.
+Here's the way Gertie will dope it out, I guess. ('Eltruda!') I'll
+dine in solitary regret for saying 'hell'----No. First I'm to walk
+down-town, alone and busy repenting, and then I'll feed alone, and by
+eight o'clock I'll be so tired of myself that I'll call up and beg
+pretty. Rats! It's rotten mean to dope it out like that, but just the
+same----Me that have done what I've done--worried to death over one
+accidental 'hell'!... Hey there, you taxi!"
+
+Grandly he rode through the Park, and in an unrepentant manner bowed
+to every pretty woman he saw, to the disapproval of their silk-hatted
+escorts.
+
+He forgot the existence of Gertie Cowles and the Old Home Folks.
+
+But he really could not afford a taxicab, and he had to make up for it
+by economy. At seven-thirty he gloomily entered Miggleton's
+Restaurant, on Forty-second Street, the least unbearable of the
+"Popular Prices--Tables for Ladies" dens, and slumped down at a table
+near the window. There were few diners. Carl was as much a stranger as
+on the morning when he had first invaded New York, to find work with
+an automobile company, and had passed this same restaurant; still was
+he a segregated stranger, despite the fact that, two blocks away, in
+the Aero Club, two famous aviators were agreeing that there had never
+been a more consistently excellent flight in America than Hawk
+Ericson's race from Chicago to New York.
+
+Carl considered the delights of the Cowles flat, Ray's stories about
+Plato and business, and the sentimental things Gertie played on the
+guitar. He suddenly determined to go off some place and fly an
+aeroplane; as suddenly knew that he was not yet ready to return to the
+game. He read the _Evening Telegram_ and cheerlessly peered out of the
+window at the gray snow-veil which shrouded Forty-second Street.
+
+As he finished his dessert and stirred his coffee he stared into a
+street-car stalled in a line of traffic outside. Within the car, seen
+through the snow-mist, was a girl of twenty-two or three, with satiny
+slim features and ash-blond hair. She was radiant in white-fox furs.
+Carl craned to watch. He thought of the girl who, asking a direction
+before the Florida Lunch Room in Chicago, had inspired him to become a
+chauffeur.
+
+The girl in the street-car was listening to her companion, who was a
+dark-haired girl with humor and excitement about life in her face,
+well set-up, not tall, in a smartly tailored coat of brown pony-skin
+and a small hat that was all lines and no trimming. Both of them
+seemed amused, possibly by the lofty melancholy of a traffic policeman
+beside the car, who raised his hand as though he had high ideals and a
+slight stomach-ache. The dark-haired girl tapped her round knees with
+the joy of being alive.
+
+The street-car started. Carl was already losing in the city jungle the
+two acquaintances whom he had just made. The car stopped again, still
+blocked. Carl seized his coat, dropped a fifty-cent piece on the
+cashier's desk, did not wait for his ten cents change, ran across the
+street (barely escaping a taxicab), galloped around the end of the
+car, swung up on the platform.
+
+As he took a seat opposite the two girls he asked himself just what he
+expected to do now. The girls were unaware of his existence. And why
+had he hurried? The car had not started again. But he studied his
+unconscious conquests from behind his newspaper, vastly content.
+
+In the unnatural quiet of the stalled car the girls were irreverently
+discussing "George." He heard enough to know that they were of the
+rather smart, rather cultured class known as "New-Yorkers"--they might
+be Russian-American princesses or social workers or ill-paid
+governesses or actresses or merely persons with one motor-car and a
+useful papa in the family.
+
+But in any case they were not of the kind he could pick up.
+
+The tall girl of the ash-blond hair seemed to be named Olive, being
+quite unolive in tint, while her livelier companion was apparently
+christened Ruth. Carl wearied of Olive's changeless beauty as quickly
+as he did of her silver-handled umbrella. She merely knew how to
+listen. But the less spectacular, less beautiful, less languorous,
+dark-haired Ruth was born a good comrade. Her laughter marked her as
+one of the women whom earth-quake and flood and child-bearing cannot
+rob of a sense of humor; she would have the inside view, the
+sophisticated understanding of everything.
+
+The car was at last free of the traffic. It turned a corner and
+started northward. Carl studied the girls.
+
+Ruth was twenty-four, perhaps, or twenty-five. Not tall, slight enough
+to nestle, but strong and self-reliant. She had quantities of
+dark-brown hair, crisp and glinty, though not sleek, with eyebrows
+noticeably dark and heavy. Her smile was made irresistible by her
+splendidly shining teeth, fairly large but close-set and white; and
+not only the corners of her eyes joined in her smile, but even her
+nose, her delicate yet piquant nose, which could quiver like a
+deer's. When she laughed, Carl noted, Ruth had a trick of lifting her
+heavy lids quickly, and surprising one with a glint of blue eyes where
+brown were expected. Her smooth, healthy, cream-colored skin was rosy
+with winter, and looked as though in summer it would tan evenly,
+without freckles. Her chin was soft, but without a dimple, and her
+jaws had a clean, boyish leanness. Her smooth neck and delicious
+shoulders were curved, not fatly, but with youth and happiness. They
+were square, capable shoulders, with no mid-Victorian droop about
+them. Her waist was slender naturally, not from stays. Her short but
+not fat fingers were the ideal instruments for the piano. Slim were
+her crossed feet, and her unwrinkled pumps (foolish footgear for a
+snowy evening) seemed eager to dance.
+
+There was no hint of the coquette about her. Physical appeal this Ruth
+had, but it was the allure of sunlight and meadows, of tennis and a
+boat with bright, canted sails, not of boudoir nor garden
+dizzy-scented with jasmine. She was young and clean, sweet without
+being sprinkled with pink sugar; too young to know much about the
+world's furious struggle; too happy to have realized its inevitable
+sordidness; yet born a woman who would not always wish to be
+"protected," and round whom all her circle of life would center....
+
+So Carl inarticulately mused, with the intentness which one gives to
+strangers in a quiet car, till he laughed, "I feel as if I knew her
+like a book." The century's greatest problem was whether he would
+finally prefer her to Olive, if he knew them. If he could speak to
+them----But that was, in New York, more difficult than beating a
+policeman or getting acquainted with the mayor. He would lose them.
+
+Already they were rising, going out.
+
+He couldn't let them be lost. He glanced out of the window, sprang up
+with an elaborate pretense that he had come to his own street. He
+followed them out, still conning head-lines in his paper. His grave
+absorption said, plain that all might behold, that he was a
+respectable citizen to whom it would never occur to pursue strange
+young women.
+
+His new friends had been close to him in the illuminated car, but they
+were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar
+street-crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a
+street-sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the
+Fifties. As they turned east on Fifty-blankth Street he stopped under
+the street-light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it
+the address of that dear old friend, living on Fifty-blankth, on whom
+he was going to call. This was to convince the policeman of the
+perfect purity of his intentions. The fact that there was no policeman
+nearer than the man on fixed post a block away did not lessen Carl's
+pleasure in the make-believe. He industriously inspected the
+house-numbers as he followed the quickly moving girls, and frequently
+took out his watch. Nothing should make him late in calling on that
+dear old friend.
+
+Not since Adam glowered at the intruder Eve has a man been so darkly
+uninterested in two charmers. He stared clear through them; he looked
+over their heads; he observed objects on the other side of the street.
+He indignantly told the imaginary policemen who stopped him that he
+hadn't even seen the girls till this moment; that he was the victim of
+a plot.
+
+The block through which the cavalcade was passing was lined with
+shabby-genteel brownstone houses, with high stoops and haughty dark
+doors, and dressmakers' placards or doctors' cards in the windows.
+Carl was puzzled. The girls seemed rather too cheerful to belong in
+this decayed and gloomy block, which, in the days when horsehair
+furniture and bankers had mattered, had seemed imposing. But the girls
+ascended the steps of a house which was typical of the row, except
+that five motor-cars stood before it. Carl, passing, went up the
+steps of the next house and rang the bell.
+
+"What a funny place!" he heard one of the girls--he judged that it was
+Ruth--remark from the neighboring stoop. "It looks exactly like Aunt
+Emma when she wears an Alexandra bang. Do we go right up? Oughtn't we
+to ring? It ought to be the craziest party--anarchists----"
+
+"A party, eh?" thought Carl.
+
+"----ought to ring, I suppose, but----Yes, there's sure to be all
+sorts of strange people at Mrs. Hallet's----" said the voice of the
+other girl, then the door closed upon both of them.
+
+And an abashed Carl realized that a maid had opened the door of the
+house at which he himself had rung, and was glaring at him as he
+craned over to view the next-door stoop.
+
+"W-where----Does Dr. Brown live here?" he stuttered.
+
+"No, 'e don't," the maid snapped, closing the door.
+
+Carl groaned: "He don't? Dear old Brown? Not live here? Huh? What
+shall I do?"
+
+In remarkably good spirits he moved over in front of the house into
+which Ruth and Olive had gone. People were coming to the party in twos
+and threes. Yes. The men were in evening clothes. He had his
+information.
+
+Swinging his stick up to a level with his shoulder at each stride, he
+raced to Fifty-ninth Street and the nearest taxi-stand. He was whirled
+to his room. He literally threw his clothes off. He shaved hastily,
+singing, "Will You Come to the Ball," from "The Quaker Girl," and
+slipped into evening clothes and his suavest dress-shirt. Seizing
+things all at once--top-hat, muffler, gloves, pocketbook,
+handkerchief, cigarette-case, keys--and hanging them about him as he
+fled down the decorous stairs, he skipped to the taxicab and started
+again for Fifty-blankth Street.
+
+At the house of the party he stopped to find on the letter-box in the
+entry the name "Mrs. Hallet," mentioned by Olive. There was no such
+name. He tried the inner door. It opened. He cheerily began to mount
+steep stairs, which kept on for miles, climbing among slate-colored
+walls, past empty wall-niches with toeless plaster statues. The
+hallways, dim and high and snobbish, and the dark old double doors,
+scowled at him. He boldly returned the scowl. He could hear the
+increasing din of a talk-party coming from above. When he reached the
+top floor he found a door open on a big room crowded with shrilly
+chattering people in florid clothes. There was a hint of brassware and
+paintings and silken Turkish rugs.
+
+But no sight of Ruth or Olive.
+
+A maid was bobbing to him and breathing, "That way, please, at the end
+of the hall." He went meekly. He did not dare to search the clamorous
+crowd for the girls, as yet.
+
+He obediently added his hat and coat and stick to an
+uncomfortable-looking pile of wraps writhing on a bed in a small room
+that had a Copley print of Sargent's "Prophets," a calendar, and an
+unimportant white rocker.
+
+It was time to go out and face the party, but he had stage-fright.
+While climbing the stairs he had believed that he was in touch with
+the two girls, but now he was separated from them by a crowd, farther
+from them than when he had followed them down the unfriendly street.
+And not till now did he quite grasp the fact that the hostess might
+not welcome him. His glowing game was becoming very dull-toned. He
+lighted a cigarette and listened to the beating surf of the talk in
+the other room.
+
+Another man came in. Like all the rest, he gave up the brilliant idea
+of trying to find an unpreempted place for his precious newly ironed
+silk hat, and resignedly dumped it on the bed. He was a passable man,
+with a gentlemanly mustache and good pumps. Carl knew that fact
+because he was comparing his own clothes and deciding that he had none
+the worst of it. But he was relieved when the waxed mustache moved a
+couple of times, and its owner said, in a friendly way: "Beastly
+jam!... May I trouble you for a match?"
+
+Carl followed him out to the hostess, a small, busy woman who made a
+business of being vivacious and letting the light catch the fringes of
+her gold hair as she nodded. Carl nonchalantly shook hands with her,
+bubbling: "So afraid couldn't get here. My play----But at last----"
+
+He was in a panic. But the hostess, instead of calling for the police,
+gushed, "_So_ glad you _could_ come!" combining a kittenish mechanical
+smile for him with a glance over his shoulder at the temporary butler.
+"I want you to meet Miss Moeller, Mr.--uh--Mr----"
+
+"I knew you'd forget it!" Carl was brotherly and protecting in his
+manner. "Ericson, Oscar Ericson."
+
+"Oh, of course. How stupid of me! Miss Moeller, want you to meet Mr.
+Oscar Ericson--you know----"
+
+"S' happy meet you, Miss Mmmmmmm," said Carl, tremendously well-bred
+in manner. "Can we possibly go over and be clever in a corner, do you
+think?"
+
+He had heard Colonel Haviland say that, but his manner gave it no
+quotation-marks.
+
+Presumably he talked to Miss Moeller about something usual--the snow
+or the party or Owen Johnson's novels. Presumably Miss Moeller had
+eyes to look into and banalities to look away from. Presumably there
+was something in the room besides people and talk and rugs hung over
+the bookcases. But Carl never knew. He was looking for Ruth. He did
+not see her.
+
+Within ten minutes he had manoeuvered himself free of Miss Moeller
+and was searching for Ruth, his nerves quivering amazingly with the
+fear that she might already have gone.
+
+How would he ever find her? He could scarce ask the hostess, "Say,
+where's Ruth?"
+
+She was nowhere in the fog of people in the big room.... If he could
+find even Olive....
+
+Strolling, nodding to perfectly strange people who agreeably nodded
+back under the mistaken impression that they were glad to see him, he
+systematically checked up all the groups. Ruth was not among the
+punch-table devotees, who were being humorous and amorous over
+cigarettes; not among the Caustic Wits exclusively assembled in a
+corner; not among the shy sisters aligned on the davenport and
+wondering why they had come; not in the general maelstrom in the
+center of the room.
+
+He stopped calmly to greet the hostess again, remarking, "You look so
+beautifully sophisticated to-night," and listened suavely to her
+fluttering remarks. He was the picture of the cynical cityman who has
+to be nowhere at no especial time. But he was not cynical. He had to
+find Ruth!
+
+He escaped and, between the main room and the dining-room, penetrated
+a small den filled with witty young men, old stories, cigarette-smoke,
+and siphons. Then he charged into the dining-room, where there were
+candles and plate much like silver--and Ruth and Olive at the farther
+end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+He wanted to run forward, take their hands, cry, "At last!" He seemed
+to hear his voice wording it. But, not glancing at them again, he
+established himself on a chair by the doorway between the two rooms.
+
+It was safe to watch the two girls in this Babel, where words swarmed
+and battled everywhere in the air. Ruth was in a brown velvet frock
+whose golden tones harmonized with her brown hair. She was being
+enthusiastically talked at by a man to whom she listened with a
+courteously amused curiosity. Carl could fancy her nudging Olive, who
+sat beside her on the Jacobean settee and was attended by another
+talking-man. Carl told Ruth (though she did not know that he was
+telling her) that she had no right to be "so blasted New-Yorkishly
+superior and condescending," but he admitted that she was scarcely to
+blame, for the man made kindergarten gestures and emitted conversation
+like air from an exploded tire.
+
+The important thing was that he heard the man call her "Miss Winslow."
+
+"Great! Got her name--Ruth Winslow!"
+
+Watching the man's lips (occasionally trying to find an excuse for
+eavesdropping, and giving up the quest because there was no excuse),
+he discovered that Ruth was being honored with a thrilling account of
+aviation. The talking-man, it appeared, knew a great deal about the
+subject. Carl heard through a rift in the cloud of words that the man
+had once actually flown, as a passenger with Henry Odell! For five
+minutes on end, judging by the motions with which he steered a
+monoplane through perilous abysses, the reckless spirit kept flying
+(as a passenger). Ruth Winslow was obviously getting bored, and the
+man showed no signs of volplaning as yet. Olive's man departed, and
+Olive was also listening to the parlor aviator, who was unable to see
+that a terrific fight was being waged by the hands of the two girls in
+the space down between them. It was won by Ruth's hand, which got a
+death-grip on Olive's thumb, and held it, to Olive's agony, while both
+girls sat up straight and beamed propriety.
+
+Carl walked over and, smoothly ignoring the pocket entertainer, said:
+"So glad to see you, Miss Winslow. I think this is my dance?"
+
+"Y-yes?" from Miss Winslow, while the entertainer drifted off into the
+flotsam of the party. Olive went to join a group about the hostess,
+who had just come in to stir up mirth and jocund merriment in the
+dining-room, as it had settled down into a lower state of exhilaration
+than the canyons of talk-parties require.
+
+Said Carl to Ruth, "Not that there's any dancing, but I felt you'd get
+dizzy if you climbed any higher in that aeroplane."
+
+Ruth tried to look haughty, but her dark lashes went up and her
+unexpected blue eyes grinned at him boyishly.
+
+"Gee! she's clever!" Carl was thinking. Since, to date, her only
+remark had been "Y-yes?" he may have been premature.
+
+"That was a bully strangle hold you got on Miss Olive's hand, Miss
+Winslow."
+
+"You saw our hands?"
+
+"Perhaps.... Tell me a good way to express how superior you and I are
+to this fool party and its noise. Isn't it a fool party?"
+
+"I'm afraid it really is."
+
+"What's the purpose of it, anyway? Do the people have to come here and
+breathe this air, I wonder? I asked several people that, and I'm
+afraid they think I'm crazy."
+
+"But you are here? Do you come to Mrs. Salisbury's often?"
+
+"Never been before. Never seen a person here in my life before--except
+you and Miss Olive. Came on a bet. Chap bet I wouldn't dare come
+without being invited. I came. Bowed to the hostess and told her I was
+so sorry my play-rehearsals made me late, and she was _so_ glad I
+could come, _after all_--you know. She's never seen me in her life."
+
+"Oh? Are you a dramatist?"
+
+"I was--in the other room. But I was a doctor out in the hall and a
+sculptor on the stairs, so I'm getting sort of confused myself--as
+confused as you are, trying to remember who I am, Miss Winslow. You
+really don't remember me at all? Tea at--wasn't it at the Vanderbilt?
+or the Plaza?"
+
+"Oh yes, that must have been----I was trying to remember----"
+
+Carl grinned. "The chap who introduced me to you called me 'Mr.
+Um-m-m,' because he didn't remember my name, either. So you've never
+heard it. It happens to be Ericson.... I'm on a mission. Serious one.
+I'm planning to go out and buy a medium-sized bomb and blow up this
+bunch. I suspect there's poets around."
+
+"I do too," sighed Ruth. "I understand that Mrs. Salisbury always has
+seven lawyers and nineteen advertising men and a dentist and a poet
+and an explorer at her affairs. Are you the poet or the explorer?"
+
+"I'm the dentist. I think----You don't happen to have done any
+authoring, do you?"
+
+"Well, nothing except an epic poyem on Jonah and the Whale, which I
+wrote at the age of seven. Most of it consisted of a conversation
+between them, while Jonah was in the Whale's stomach, which I think
+showed agility on the part of the Whale."
+
+"Then maybe it's safe to say what I think of authors--and more or less
+of poets and painters and so on. One time I was in charge of some
+mechanical investigations, and a lot of writers used to come around
+looking for what they called 'copy.' That's where I first got my
+grouch on them, and I've never really got over it; and coming here
+to-night and hearing the littery talk I've been thinking how these
+authors have a sort of an admiration trust. They make authors the
+heroes of their stories and so on, and so they make people think that
+writing is sacred. I'm so sick of reading novels about how young Bill,
+as had a pure white soul, came to New York and had an 'orrible time
+till his great novel was accepted. Authors seem to think they're the
+only ones that have ideals. Now I'm in the automobile business, and I
+help to make people get out into the country--bet a lot more of them
+get out because of motoring than because of reading poetry about
+spring. But if I claimed a temperament because I introduce the
+motorist's soul to the daisy, every one would die laughing."
+
+"But don't you think that art is the--oh, the object of civilization
+and that sort of thing?"
+
+"I do _not_! Honestly, Miss Winslow, I think it would be a good stunt
+to get along without any art at all for a generation, and see what we
+miss. We probably need dance music, but I doubt if we need opera.
+Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays
+'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good
+shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction. I'd like to
+see all the shoemakers get together and refuse to make any more shoes
+till people promised to write reviews about them, like all these
+book-reviews. Then just as soon as people's shoes began to wear out
+they'd come right around, and you'd read about the new masterpieces of
+Mr. Regal and Mr. Walkover and Mr. Stetson."
+
+"Yes! I can imagine it. 'This laced boot is one of the most vital and
+gripping and wholesome shoes of the season.' And probably all the
+young shoemakers would sit around cafes, looking quizzical and
+artistic. But don't you think your theory is dangerous, Mr. Ericson?
+You give me an excuse for being content with being a commonplace
+Upper-West-Sider. And aren't authors better than commonplaceness?
+You're so serious that I almost suspect you of having started to be an
+author yourself."
+
+"Really not. As a matter of fact, I'm the kiddy in patched overalls
+you used to play with when you kept house in the willows."
+
+"Oh, of course! In the Forest of Arden! And you had a toad that you
+traded for my hair-ribbon."
+
+"And we ate bread and milk out of blue bowls!"
+
+"Oh yes!" she agreed, "blue bowls with bunny-rabbits painted on them."
+
+"And giants and a six-cylinder castle, with warders and a donjon keep.
+And Jack the Giant-killer. But certainly bunnies."
+
+"Do you really like bunnies?" Her voice caressed the word.
+
+"I like them so much that when I think of them I know that there's one
+thing worse than having a cut-rate literary salon, and that's to be
+too respectable----"
+
+"Too Upper-West-Side!"
+
+"----to dare to eat bread and milk out of blue bowls."
+
+"Yes, I think I shall have to admit you to the Blue Bowl League, Mr.
+Ericson. Speaking of which----Tell me, who did introduce us, you and
+me? I feel so apologetic for not remembering."
+
+"Mayn't I be a mystery, Miss Winslow? At least as long as I have this
+new shirt, which you observed with some approval while I was drooling
+on about authors? It makes me look like a count, you must admit. Or
+maybe like a Knight of the Order of the Bunny Rabbit. Please let me be
+a mystery still."
+
+"Yes, you may. Life has no mysteries left 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
+associations, and that we would seek the Primitive, and maybe even
+Life in the Raw. Olive knows a woman mountain-climber who always says
+she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We
+expected to have raw-meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the
+Savage Woman gave us Suchong and deviled-chicken sandwiches and pink
+cakes and Nabiscos, and told us how well her 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 noble race or something.
+But even she was disappointed in Chinatown.
+
+"We had expected opium-fiends, like the melodramas they used to have
+on Fourteenth Street, before the movies came. But we had a
+disgustingly clean table, with a mad, reckless picture worked in silk,
+showing two doves and a boiled lotos flower, hanging near us, to
+intimidate us. The waiter was a Harvard graduate, I know--perhaps
+Oxford--and he said, 'May I sugges' ladies velly nize China dinner?'
+He suggested chow-main--we thought it would be either birds' nests or
+rats' tails, and it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous
+sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like
+ourselves, except for a Jap, with his cunnin' Sunday tie, and his
+little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky.
+And he was 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
+snobbish. It seemed to him that he ought to do something about it
+immediately.
+
+The rest of the week he merely waited to see what sort of person the
+totally unknown Miss Ruth Winslow might be. His most active occupation
+outside the office was feeling guilty over not telephoning to Gertie.
+
+At 3.30 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-basement gray stone dwelling, with heavy Russian net
+curtains at the broad, clear-glassed windows of the first floor, and
+an attempt to escape from the stern drabness of the older type of New
+York houses by introducing a box-stoop and steps with a carved stone
+balustrade, at the top of which perched a meek old lion of 1890, with
+battered ears and a truly sensitive stone nose. A typical house of the
+very well-to-do yet not wealthy "upper middle class"; a house
+predicating one motor-car, three not expensive maids, brief European
+tours, and the best preparatory schools and colleges for the sons.
+
+A maid answered the door and took his card--a maid in a frilly apron
+and black uniform--neither a butler nor a slatternly Biddy. In the
+hall, as the maid disappeared up-stairs, Carl had an impression of
+furnace heat and respectability. Rather shy, uncomfortable, anxious to
+be acceptable, warning himself that as a famous aviator he need not be
+in awe of any one, but finding that the warning did not completely
+take, he drew off his coat and gloves and, after a swift inspection of
+his tie, gazed about with more curiosity than he had ever given to any
+other house.
+
+For all the stone lion in front, this was quite the old-line
+English-basement house, with the inevitable 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 brass and knobby red-and-blue glass. The floor
+was of hardwood in squares, dark and richly polished, highly
+self-respecting--a floor that assumed civic responsibility from a
+republican point of view, and a sound conservative business
+established since 1875 or 1880. By the door was a huge Japanese vase,
+convenient either for depositing umbrellas or falling over in the
+dark. Then, a long mirror in a dull-red mahogany frame, and a table of
+mahogany so refined that no one would ever dream of using it for
+anything more useful than calling-cards. It might have been the table
+by the king's bed, on which he leaves his crown on a little purple
+cushion at night. Solid and ostentatious.
+
+The drawing-room, to the left, was dark and still and unsympathetic
+and expensive; a vista of brocade-covered French-gilt chairs and a
+marquetry table and a table of onyx top, on which was one book bound
+in ooze calf, and one vase; cream-colored heavy carpet and a crystal
+chandelier; fairly meretricious paintings of rocks, and thatched
+cottages, and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of
+them in large gilt frames protected by shadow-boxes. In a corner was a
+cabinet of gilt and glass, filled with Dresden-china figurines and toy
+tables and a carven Swiss musical powder-box. The fireplace was of
+smooth, chilly white marble, with an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece,
+and a fire-screen painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses,
+making silken unreal love and scandalously neglecting silky unreal
+sheep. By the hearth were shiny fire-irons which looked as though they
+had never been used. The whole room looked as though it had never been
+used--except during the formal calls of overdressed matrons with
+card-cases and prejudices. The one human piece of furniture in the
+room, a couch soft and slightly worn, on which lovers might have sat
+and small boys bounced, was trying to appear useless, too, under its
+row of stiff satin cushions with gold cords.... Well-dusted chairs on
+which no one wished to sit; expensive fireplace that never shone;
+prized pictures with less imagination than the engravings on a
+bond--that drawing-room had the soul of a banker with side-whiskers.
+
+Carl by no means catalogued all the details, but he did get the effect
+of ingrowing propriety. It is not certain that he thought the room in
+bad taste. It is not certain that he had any artistic taste whatever;
+or that his attack upon the pretensions of authors had been based on
+anything more fundamental than a personal irritation due to having met
+blatant camp-followers of the arts. And it is certain that one of his
+reactions as he surveyed the abject respectability of that room was a
+slight awe of the solidity of social position which it represented,
+and which he consciously lacked. But, whether from artistic instinct
+or from ignorance, he was sure that into the room ought to blow a
+sudden great wind, with the scent of forest and snow. He shook his
+head when the maid returned, and he followed her up-stairs. Surely a
+girl reared here would never run away and play with him.
+
+He heard lively voices from the library above. He entered a room to be
+lived in and be happy in, with a jolly fire on the hearth and friendly
+people on a big, brown davenport. Ruth Winslow smiled at him from
+behind the Colonial silver and thin cups on the tea-table, and as he
+saw her light-filled eyes, saw her cock her head gaily in welcome, he
+was again convinced that he had found a playmate.
+
+A sensation of being pleasantly accepted warmed him as she cried, "So
+glad----" and introduced him, gave him tea and a cake with nuts in it.
+From a wing-chair Carl searched the room and the people. There were
+two paintings--a pale night sea and an arching Japanese bridge under
+slanting rain, both imaginative and well-done. There was a mahogany
+escritoire, which might have been stiff but was made human by
+scattered papers on the great blotter and books crammed into the
+shelves. Other books were heaped on a table as though people had been
+reading them. Later he found how amazingly they were assorted--the
+latest novel of Robert Chambers beside H. G. Wells's _First and Last
+Things_; a dusty expensive book on Italian sculpture near a cheap
+reprint of _Dodo_.
+
+The chairs were capacious, the piano a workmanlike upright, not
+dominating the room, but ready for music; and in front of the fire was
+an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering
+in his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the
+room. They were New-Yorkers and, unlike over half of the population,
+born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody
+and remembers when Fourteenth Street was the shopping-center. Olive
+Dunleavy was shinily present, her ash-blond hair in a new coiffure.
+She was arguing with a man of tight morning-clothes and a high-bred
+face about the merits of "Parsifal," which, Olive declared, no one
+ever attended except as a matter of conscience.
+
+"Now, Georgie," she said, "issa Georgie, you shall have your
+opera--and you shall jolly well have it alone, too!" Olive was vivid
+about it all, but Carl saw that she was watching him, and he was shy
+as he wondered what Ruth had told her.
+
+Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, a clear-faced, slender, well-bathed
+boy of twenty-six, with too high a forehead, with discontent in his
+face and in his thin voice, carelessly well-dressed in a soft-gray
+suit and an impressionistic tie, was also inspecting Carl, while
+talking to a pretty, commonplace, finishing-school-finished girl. Carl
+instantly disliked Philip Dunleavy, and was afraid of his latent
+sarcasm.
+
+Indeed, Carl felt more and more that beneath the friendliness with
+which he was greeted there was no real welcome as yet, save possibly
+on the part of Ruth. He was taken on trial. He was a Mr. Ericson, not
+any Mr. Ericson in particular.
+
+Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl
+himself was part of a hash-group--an older woman who seemed to know
+Rome and Paris better than New York, and might be anything from a
+milliner to a mondaine; a keen-looking youngster with tortoise-shell
+spectacles; finally, Ruth's elder brother, Mason J. Winslow, Jr., a
+tall, thin, solemn, intensely well-intentioned man of thirty-seven,
+with a long, clean-shaven face, and a long, narrow head whose growing
+baldness was always spoken of as a result of his hard work. Mason J.
+Winslow, Jr., spoke hesitatingly, worried over everything, and stood
+for morality and good business. He was rather dull in conversation,
+rather kind in manner, and accomplished solid things by
+unimaginatively sticking at them. He didn't understand people who did
+not belong to a good club.
+
+Carl contributed a few careful platitudes to a frivolous discussion of
+whether it would not be advisable to solve the woman-suffrage question
+by taking the vote away from men and women both and conferring it on
+children. Mason Winslow ambled to the big table for a cigarette, and
+Carl pursued him. While they stood talking about "the times are bad,"
+Carl was spying upon Ruth, and the minute her current group wandered
+off to the davenport he made a dash at the tea-table and got there
+before Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, who was obviously
+manoeuvering like himself. Philip gave him a covert "Who are you,
+fellow?" glance, took a cake, and retired.
+
+From his wicker chair facing Ruth's, Carl said, gloomily, "It isn't
+done."
+
+"Yes," said Ruth, "I know it, but still some very smart people are
+doing it this season."
+
+"But do you think the woman that writes 'What the man will wear' in
+the theater programs would stand for it?"
+
+"Not," gravely considered Ruth, "if there were black stitching on the
+dress-glove. Yet there is some authority for frilled shirts."
+
+"You think it might be considered then?"
+
+"I will not come between you and your haberdasher, Mr. Ericson."
+
+"This is a foolish conversation. But since you think the better
+classes do it--gee! it's getting hard for me to keep up this kind of
+'Dolly Dialogue.' What I wanted to do was to request you to give me
+concisely but fully a sketch of 'Who is Miss Ruth Winslow?' and save
+me from making any pet particular breaks. And hereafter, I warn you,
+I'm going to talk like my cousin, the carpet-slipper model."
+
+"Name, Ruth Winslow. Age, between twenty and thirty. Father, Mason
+Winslow, manufacturing contractor for concrete. Brothers, Mason
+Winslow, Jr., whose poor dear head is getting somewhat bald, as you
+observe, and Bobby Winslow, ne'er-do-weel, who is engaged in
+subverting discipline at medical school, and who dances divinely. My
+mother died three years ago. I do nothing useful, but I play a good
+game of bridge and possess a voice that those as know pronounce
+passable. I have a speaking knowledge of French, a reading knowledge
+of German, and a singing knowledge of Italian. I am wearing an
+imported gown, for which the House of Winslow will probably never pay.
+I live in this house, and am Episcopalian--not so much High Church as
+highly infrequent church. I regard the drawing-room down-stairs as the
+worst example of late-Victorian abominations in my knowledge, but I
+shall probably never persuade father to change it because Mason thinks
+it is sacred to the past. My ambition in life is to be catty to the
+Newport set after I've married an English diplomat with a divine
+mustache. Never having met such a personage outside of _Tatler_ and
+_Vogue_, I can't give you very many details regarding him. Oh yes, of
+course, he'll have to play a marvelous game of polo and have a chateau
+in Provence and also a ranch in Texas, where I shall wear
+riding-breeches and live next to Nature and have a Chinese cook in
+blue silk. I think that's my whole history. Oh, I forgot. I play at
+the piano and am very ignorant, and completely immersed in the worst
+traditions of the wealthy Micks of the Upper West Side, and I always
+pretend that I live here instead of on the Upper East Side because
+'the air is better.'"
+
+"What is this Upper West Side? Is it a state of mind?"
+
+"Indeed it is not. It's a state of pocketbook. The Upper West Side is
+composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in
+society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue.
+You know everybody and went to school with everybody and played in the
+Park with everybody, and mostly your papa is in wholesale trade and
+haughty about people in retail. You go to Europe one summer and to the
+Jersey coast the next. All your clothes and parties and weddings and
+funerals might be described as 'elegant.' That's the Upper West Side.
+Now the dread truth about you.... Do you know, after the unscrupulous
+way in which you followed up a mere chance introduction at a tea
+somewhere, I suspect you to be a well-behaved young man who leads an
+entirely blameless life. Or else you'd never dare to jump the fence
+and come and play in my back yard when all the other boys politely
+knock at the front door and get sent home."
+
+"Me--well, I'm a wage-slave of the VanZile Motor people, in charge of
+the Touricar department. Age, twenty-eight--almost. Habits, all
+bad.... No, I'll tell you. I'm one of those stern, silent men of
+granite you read about, and only my man knows the human side of me,
+because all the guys on Wall Street tremble in me presence."
+
+"Yes, but then how can you belong to the Blue Bowl Sodality?"
+
+"Um, Yes----I've got it. You must have read novels in which the stern,
+silent man of granite has a secret tenderness in his heart, and he
+keeps the band of the first cigar he ever smoked in a little safe in
+the wall, and the first dollar he ever made in a frame--that's me."
+
+"Of course! The cigar was given him by his flaxen-haired sweetheart
+back in Jenkins Corners, and in the last chapter he goes back and
+marries her."
+
+"Not always, I hope!" Of what Carl was thinking is not recorded.
+"Well, as a matter of fact, I've been a fairly industrious young man
+of granite the last few months, getting out the Touricar."
+
+"What is a Touricar? It sounds like an island inhabited by cannibals,
+exports hemp and cocoanut, see pink dot on the map, nor' by nor'east
+of Mogador."
+
+Carl explained.
+
+"I'm terribly interested," said Ruth. (But she made it sound as though
+she really was.) "I think it's so wonderful.... I want to go off
+tramping through the Berkshires. I'm so tired of going to the same old
+places."
+
+"Some time, when you're quite sure I'm an estimable young Y. M. C. A.
+man, I'm going to try to persuade you to come out for a real tramp."
+
+She seemed to be considering the idea, not seriously, but----
+
+Philip Dunleavy eventuated.
+
+For some time Philip had been showing signs of interest in Ruth and
+Carl. Now he sauntered to the table, begged for another cup of tea,
+said agreeable things in regard to putting orange marmalade in tea,
+and calmly established himself. Ruth turned toward him.
+
+Carl had fancied that there was, for himself, in Ruth's voice,
+something more friendly, in her infectious smile something more
+intimate than she had given the others, but when she turned precisely
+the same cheery expression upon Philip, Carl seemed to have lost
+something which he had trustingly treasured for years. He was the more
+forlorn as Olive Dunleavy joined them, and Ruth, Philip, and Olive
+discussed the engagement of one Mary Meldon. Olive recalled Miss
+Meldon as she had been in school days at the Convent of the Sacred
+Heart. Philip told of her flirtations at the old Long Beach Hotel.
+
+The names of New York people whom they had always known; the names of
+country clubs--Baltusrol and Meadow Brook and Peace Waters; the names
+of streets, with a sharp differentiation between Seventy-fourth Street
+and Seventy-fifth Street; Durland's Riding Academy, the Rink of a
+Monday morning, and other souvenirs of a New York childhood; the score
+of the last American polo team and the coming dances--these things
+shut Carl out as definitely as though he were a foreigner. He was
+lonely. He disliked Phil Dunleavy's sarcastic references. He wanted to
+run away.
+
+Ruth seemed to realize that Carl was shut out. Said she to Phil
+Dunleavy: "I wish you could have seen Mr. Ericson save my life last
+Sunday. I had an experience."
+
+"What was that?" asked the man whom Olive called "Georgie," joining
+the tea-table set.
+
+The whole room listened as Ruth recounted the trip to Chinatown, Mrs.
+Salisbury's party, and the hero who had once been a passenger in an
+aeroplane.
+
+Throughout she kept turning toward Carl. It seemed to reunite him to
+the company. As she closed, he said:
+
+"The thing that amused me about the parlor aviator was his laying down
+the law that the Atlantic will be crossed before the end of 1913, and
+his assumption that we'll all have aeroplanes in five years. I know
+from my own business, the automobile business, about how much such
+prophecies are worth."
+
+"Don't you think the Atlantic will be crossed soon?" asked the
+keen-looking man with the tortoise-shell spectacles.
+
+Phil Dunleavy broke in with an air of amused sophistication: "I think
+the parlor aviator was right. Really, you know, aviation is too
+difficult a subject for the layman to make any predictions
+about--either what it can or can't do."
+
+"Oh yes," admitted Carl; and the whole room breathed. "Oh yes."
+
+Dunleavy went on in his thin, overbred, insolent voice, "Now I have it
+on good authority, from a man who's a member of the Aero Club, that
+next year will be the greatest year aviation has ever known, and that
+the Wrights have an aeroplane up their sleeve with which they'll cross
+the Atlantic without a stop, during the spring of 1914 at the very
+latest."
+
+"That's unfortunate, because the aviation game has gone up completely
+in this country, except for hydro-aeroplaning and military aviation,
+and possibly it never will come back," said Carl, a hint of pique in
+his voice.
+
+"What is your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring
+round on his slender left little finger and the whole room waited,
+testing this positive-spoken outsider.
+
+"Well," drawled Carl, "I have fairly good authority. Walter
+MacMonnies, for instance, and he is probably the best flier in the
+country to-day, except for Lincoln Beachey."
+
+"Oh yes, he's a good flier," said Phil, contemptuously, with a shadowy
+smile for Ruth. "Still, he's no better than Aaron Solomons, and he
+isn't half so great a flier as that chap with the same surname as your
+own, Hawk Ericson, whom I myself saw coming up the Jersey coast when
+he won that big race to New York.... You see, I've been following this
+aviation pretty closely."
+
+Carl saw Ruth's head drop an inch, and her eyes 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-shell spectacles. "Of
+course! I remember your picture, now."
+
+Phil was open-mouthed. Ruth laughed. The rest of the room gasped.
+Mason Winslow, long and bald, was worrying over the question of How to
+Receive Aviators at Tea.
+
+And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing the jam.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+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.
+
+"Hello?" said Gertie over the telephone. "Oh, hello, Carl; I just
+called up to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I
+thought perhaps you might like to come up if you haven't anything
+better to do."
+
+Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole
+evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Dunleavy and
+English-basement houses with cream-colored drawing-rooms. But he went
+up to Gertie's.
+
+They were all there--Gertie and Adelaide, Ray and his mother, and Miss
+Greene, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis; all playing parcheesi,
+explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on
+Sunday, but that parcheesi was "different." Ray winked at Carl as they
+said it.
+
+The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at
+home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic
+science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top
+of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a
+cockroach with a ruler.
+
+As the others began to disappear, Gertie said to Carl: "Don't go till
+I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday. Lots of news from
+home. Joe Jordan is engaged!"
+
+They were left alone. Gertie glanced at him intimately. He stiffened.
+He knew that Gertie was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display
+to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would
+be the inevitable sequence of a friendship which Ruth or Olive could
+take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man
+just starting in business, was un-heroically afraid of matrimony.
+
+Yet his stiffness of attitude disappeared when Gertie had read the
+letter from Joralemon and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy: "I
+can just see them out sleighing. Sometimes I wish I was out there.
+Honest, Carl, for all the sea and the hills here, don't you wish
+sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooded
+bluff over a lake?"
+
+"Yes!" he cried. "I've been away so long now that I don't ever feel
+homesick for any particular part of the country; but just the same I
+would like to see the lakes. And I do miss the prairies sometimes. Oh,
+I was reading something the other day--fellow was trying to define the
+different sorts of terrain--here it is, cut it out of the paper." He
+produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a
+clipping hacked from a newspaper with a nail-file, and read:
+
+"'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their
+promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in
+small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long grasses
+shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for
+hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the
+forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral to grave
+saints of the open; all these 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 God
+unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, clustered about my door
+while I was dressing and bawled in queries about laundry and other
+horribly vulgar things."
+
+Carl did not see much of the play. He was watching Ruth's eyes,
+listening to her whispered comments. She declared that she was awed by
+the presence of two aviators and a newspaper man. Actually, she was
+working, working at bringing out MacMonnies, a shy, broad-shouldered,
+inarticulate youth who supposed that he never had to talk.
+
+Carl had planned to go to the Ritz for after-theater supper, but Ruth
+and Olive persuaded him to take them to the 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 highballs and brandy
+and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar-smoke,
+shirt-fronts, white shoulders, and drab waiters; yet here was a quiet
+refuge for the eternal force of life....
+
+Carl was asking: "Would you rather be a perfect lady and have blue
+bowls with bunnies on them for your very worst dissipation, or be like
+your mountain-climbing woman and have anarchists for friends one day
+and be off hiking through the clouds the next?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the 'nice things
+of life,' but I do get tired of being nice. Especially when I have a
+bad temper, as I had to-night. I'm not at all imprisoned in a harem,
+and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been
+brought up to look at things that aren't 'like the home life of our
+dear Queen' as impossible, and I'm quite sure that father believes
+that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be
+rich. But I've been reading; and I've made--to you it may seem silly
+to call it a discovery, but to me it's the greatest discovery I've
+ever made: that people are just people, all of them--that the little
+mousey clerk may be a hero, and the hero may be a nobody--that the
+motorman that lets his beastly car spatter mud on my nice new velvet
+skirt may be exactly the same sort of person as the swain who
+commiserates with me in his cunnin' Harvard accent. Do you think
+that?"
+
+"I know it. Most of my life I've been working with men with dirty
+finger-nails, and the only difference between them and the men with
+clean nails is a nail-cleaner, and that costs just ten cents at the
+corner drug-store. Seriously--I remember a cook I used to talk to on
+my way down to Panama once----"
+
+("Panama! How I'd like to go there!")
+
+"----and he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met."
+
+"Yes, but generally do you find very much--oh, courtesy and that sort
+of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself 'the
+better class'?"
+
+"No, I don't."
+
+"You don't? Why, I thought--the way you spoke----"
+
+"Why, blessed, what in the world would be the use of their trying to
+climb if they already had all the rich have? You can't be as gracious
+as the man that's got nothing else to do, when you're about one jump
+ahead of the steam-roller every second. That's why they ought 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."
+
+"Does Dunleavy think much?"
+
+She raised her eyebrows a bit, but hesitated. "Oh yes--no, I don't
+suppose he does. Or anyway, mostly about the violin. He played a lot
+when he was in Yale."
+
+Thus was Carl encouraged to be fatuous, and he said, in a manner which
+quite dismissed Phil Dunleavy: "I don't believe he's very deep.
+Ra-ther light, I'd say."
+
+Her eyebrows had ascended farther. "Do you think so? I'm sorry."
+
+"Why sorry?"
+
+"Oh, he's always been rather a friend of mine. Olive and Phil and I
+roller-skated together at the age of eight."
+
+"But----"
+
+"And I shall probably--marry--Phil--some day before long." She turned
+abruptly to Charley Forbes with a question.
+
+Lost, already lost, was the playmate; a loss that disgusted him with
+life. He beat his spirit, cursed himself as a clumsy mechanic. He
+listened to Olive only by self-compulsion. It was minutes before he
+had the ability and the chance to say to Ruth:
+
+"Forgive me--in the name of the Blue Bowl. Mr. Dunleavy was rather
+rude to me, and I've been just as rude--and to you! And without his
+excuse. For he naturally would want to protect you from a wild aviator
+coming from Lord knows where."
+
+"You are forgiven. And Phil _was_ rude. And you're not a
+Lord-knows-where, I'm sure."
+
+Almost brusquely Carl demanded: "Come for a long tramp with me, on the
+Palisades. Next Saturday, if you can and if it's a decent day.... You
+said you liked to run away.... And we can be back before dinner, if
+you like."
+
+"Why--let me think it over. Oh, I _would_ like to. I've always wanted
+to do just that--think of it, the Palisades just opposite, and I
+never see them except for a walk of half a mile or so when I stay with
+a friend of mine, Laura Needham, at Winklehurst, up on the Palisades.
+My mother never approved of a wilder wilderness than Central Park and
+the habit----I've never been able to get Olive to explore. But it
+isn't conventional to go on long tramps with even the nicest new
+Johnnies, is it?"
+
+"No, but----"
+
+"I know. You'll say, 'Who makes the convention?' and of course there's
+no answer but 'They.' But They are so all-present. They----Oh yes,
+yes, yes, I will go! But you will let me get back by dinner-time,
+won't you? Will you call for me about two?... And can you----I wonder
+if a hawk out of the windy skies can understand how daring a dove out
+of Ninety-second Street feels at going walking on the Palisades?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+The 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 know exactly 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 husband at 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; that _is_ good 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 of
+pure-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 dissipation you 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. _Am_ I 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, I _think_ we 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 play cards, 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 front of 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?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+For 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, you know! 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 new things 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 and _more_ I'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,
+_anybody_ would 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 elite 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 the _nicest_
+people 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 crystallized in
+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 ate _Wiener Schnitzel_ and shot dice 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+From 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 for days: 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 gruen sind deine Blaetter._"... 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 Mansion
+    The 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 you _are_ in 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!
+
+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 you know 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 influences lately." 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's _Nonsense 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 Debussy 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 Westchester
+Hills, 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 skees _were_ unmanageable.
+
+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 then the
+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 Maedchen 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 the mass 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's _la 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 after hour. 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 the last 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 that _no_ man--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 dropped his burden and faced her in the
+low firelight. "Ruth, you won't make up your mind to marry Phil till
+you're _sure_, 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."
+
+"You _won't_ let 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 yourself by 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, _please_
+don'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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+While scientists seek germs that shall change the world, while war
+comes or winter takes earth captive, even while love visibly flowers,
+a power, mighty as any of these, lashes its human pack-train on the
+dusty road to futility. The Day's Work is the name of that power.
+
+All these days of first love Carl had the office for lowering
+background. The warm trust of Ruth's hand on a Saturday did not make
+plans for the Touricar any the less pressing on a Monday. The tyranny
+of nine to five is stronger, more insistent, in every department of
+life, than the most officious oligarchy. Inspectors can be bribed,
+judges softened, and recruiting sergeants evaded, but only the grace
+of God will turn 3.30 into 5.30. And Mr. Ericson of the Touricar
+Company, a not vastly important employee of the mothering VanZile
+Corporation, was not entitled to go home at 3.30, as a really rational
+man would have done when the sun gold-misted the windows and suggested
+skating.
+
+No longer was business essentially an adventure to Carl. Doubtless he
+would have given it up and have gone to Palm Beach to fly a hydro for
+Bagby, Jr., had there been no Ruth. Bagby wrote that he was coming
+North, to prepare for the spring's experiments; wouldn't Carl consider
+joining him?
+
+Carl was now, between his salary and his investment in the Touricar
+Company, making about four thousand dollars a year, and saving nearly
+half of it, against the inevitable next change in his life, whatever
+that should be. He would probably climb to ten thousand dollars in
+five years. The Touricar was promising success. Several had been
+ordered at the Automobile Show; the Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia
+agents of the company reported interest. For no particular reason,
+apparently, Milwaukee had taken them up first; three Milwaukee people
+had ordered cars.... An artist was making posters with beautiful
+gipsies and a Touricar and tourists whose countenances showed lively
+appreciation of the efforts of the kind Touricar manufacturers to
+please and benefit them. But the head salesman of the company laughed
+at Carl when he suggested that the Touricar might not only bring them
+money, but really take people off to a larger freedom:
+
+"I don't care a hang where they go with the thing as long as they pay
+for it. You can't be an idealist and make money. You make the money
+and then you can have all the ideals you want to, and give away some
+hospitals and libraries."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They walked and talked, Ruth and Carl. They threaded the
+Sunday-afternoon throng on upper Broadway, where on every clear Sunday
+all the apartment-dwellers (if they have remembered to have their
+trousers pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation) promenade
+like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting
+apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two
+blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and
+hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the
+Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they
+scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat,
+and were thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause
+makes honest friendship; but hating the same people makes alliances so
+delightful that one can sit up late nights, talking.
+
+At the opening of the flying season Carl took her to the Hempstead
+Plains Aviation Field, and, hearing his explanations, she at last
+comprehended emotionally that he really was an aviator.
+
+They tramped through Staten Island; they had tea at the Manhattan.
+Carl dined with Ruth and her father; once he took her brother, Mason,
+to lunch at the Aero Club.
+
+Ruth was ill in March; not with a mysterious and romantic malady, but
+with grippe, which, she wrote Carl, made her hate the human race, New
+York, charity, and Shakespeare. She could not decide whether to go to
+Europe, or to die in a swoon and be buried under a mossy headstone.
+
+He answered that he would go abroad for her; and every day she
+received tokens bearing New York post-marks, yet obviously coming from
+foreign parts: a souvenir card from the Piraeus, stating that Carl was
+"visiting cousin T. Demetrieff Philopopudopulos, and we are enjoying
+our drives so much. Dem. sends his love; wish you could be with us";
+an absurd string of beads from Port Said and a box of Syrian sweets; a
+Hindu puzzle guaranteed to amuse victims of the grippe, and
+gold-fabric slippers of China; with long letters nonchalantly relating
+encounters with outlaws and wrecks and new varieties of disease.
+
+He called on her before her nose had quite lost the grippe or her
+temper the badness.
+
+Phil Dunleavy was there, lofty and cultured in evening clothes,
+apparently not eager to go. He stayed till ten minutes to ten, and, by
+his manner of cold surprise when Carl tried to influence the
+conversation, was able to keep it to the Kreisler violin recitals, the
+architecture of St. John the Divine's, and Whitney's polo, while Carl
+tried not to look sulky, and manoeuvered to get out the excellent
+things he was prepared to say on other topics; not unlike the small
+boy who wants to interrupt whist-players and tell them about his new
+skates. When Phil was gone Ruth sighed and said, belligerently:
+
+"Poor Phil, he has to work so hard, and all the people at his office,
+even the firm, are just as common as they can be; common as the
+children at my beastly old settlement-house."
+
+"What do you mean by 'common'?" bristled Carl.
+
+"Not of our class."
+
+"What do you mean by 'our class'?"
+
+And the battle was set.
+
+Ruth refused to withdraw "common." Carl recalled Abraham Lincoln and
+Golden-Rule Jones and Walt Whitman on the subject of the Common
+People, though as to what these sages had said he was vague. Ruth
+burst out:
+
+"Oh, you can talk all you like about theories, but just the same, in
+real life most people are common as dirt. And just about as admissible
+to Society. It's all very fine to be good to servants, but you would
+be the first to complain if I invited the cook up here."
+
+"Give her and her children education for three generations----"
+
+She was perfectly unreasonable, and right in most of the things she
+said. He was perfectly unreasonable, and right in all of the things he
+said. Their argument was absurdly hot, and hurt them pathetically. It
+was difficult, at first, for Carl to admit that he was at odds with
+his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would
+soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not
+to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen
+minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he
+remembering the fact that she was a result of city life; she the fact
+that he wasn't a product of city life.
+
+And a fact which neither of them realized, save subconsciously, was in
+the background: Carl himself had come in a few years from Oscar
+Ericson's back yard to Ruth Winslow's library--he had made the step
+naturally, as only an American could, but it was a step.
+
+She was loftily polite. "I'm afraid you can't quite understand what
+the niceties of life mean to people like Phil. I'm sorry he won't give
+them up to the first truck-driver he meets, but I'm afraid he won't,
+and occasionally it's necessary to face facts! Niceties of the kind he
+has gr----"
+
+"_Nice!_"
+
+"Really----" Her heavy eyebrows arched in a frown.
+
+"If you're going to get 'nice' on me, of course you'll have to be
+condescending, and that's one thing I won't permit."
+
+"I'm afraid you'll find that one has to permit a great many things.
+Sometimes, apparently, I must permit great rudeness."
+
+"Have I been rude? Have----"
+
+"Yes. Very."
+
+He could endure no more. "Good night!" he growled, and was gone.
+
+He was frightened to find himself out of the house; the door closed
+between them; no going back without ringing the bell. He couldn't go
+back. He walked a block, slow, incredulous. He stood hesitant before
+the nearest corner drug-store, shivering in the March wind, wondering
+if he dared go into the store and telephone her. He was willing to
+concede anything. He planned apt phrases to use. Surely everything
+would be made right if he could only speak to her. He pictured himself
+crossing the drug-store floor, entering the telephone-booth, putting
+five cents in the slot. He stared at the red-and-green globes in the
+druggist's window; inspected a display of soaps, and recollected the
+fact that for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving-soap
+and had had to use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a
+shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I
+_must_ try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for
+thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that
+soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave and angel, for
+while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he
+sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went
+into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. There was no
+sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly
+ice-cream soda, and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank
+it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he
+knew not what.
+
+He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her.
+But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into
+defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his
+top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of
+"niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go
+anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and
+comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the
+results of losing his job, or of being robbed of his interests in the
+Touricar. He glanced interestedly at a pretty girl; recklessly went
+into a cigar-store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again.
+
+As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went
+over every word Ruth or he had said, and when he reached his room he
+sat deep in an arm-chair, like a hurt animal crouching, his coat still
+on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged, his legs
+straight out before him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he
+disconsolately contemplated a photograph of Forrest Haviland in
+full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau among tangled ties,
+stray cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff-buttons, and a
+haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and
+gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not
+know how the play would end.
+
+But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in
+earnest.
+
+Forrest's portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no
+picture of Ruth, that he wanted one. Next time he saw her he would
+ask her.... Then he remembered.
+
+He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over gloweringly, and
+chewed it without lighting it, the right corner of his mouth vicious
+in appearance. But his tone was plaintive as he mourned, "How did it
+all start, anyway?"
+
+He drew off his top-coat and shoes, and put on his shabby though once
+expensive slippers. Slowly. He lay on his bed. He certainly did not
+intend to go to sleep--but he awoke at 2 A.M., dressed, the light
+burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and
+dry-mouthed--a victim of all the woes since tall Troy burned. He
+shucked off his clothes as you shuck an ear of corn.
+
+When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual, greeting a shining new
+day, till he realized that it was not a shining day; it was an ominous
+day; everything was wrong. That something had happened--really
+had--was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His chief reaction
+was not repentance nor dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to
+unwish the whole affair. "Hang it!" he groaned.
+
+Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth. "Poor
+kid! it was rotten to row with her, her completely all in with the
+grippe."
+
+At three in the afternoon he telephoned to her house. "Miss Ruth," he
+was informed, "was asleep; she was not very well."
+
+Would the maid please ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ericson when she woke?
+
+Certainly the maid would.
+
+But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him
+call again, for days, and Ruth never called him.
+
+He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing
+himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance,
+on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She
+was with Phil Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily,
+oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of Carl Ericson.
+
+That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train; stood there
+alone, due at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, but suddenly not
+wishing to go, not wishing to go anywhere nor do anything, friendless,
+bored, driftwood in the city.
+
+So easily had the Hawk swooped down into her life, coming by chance,
+but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For three days he planned in a headachy way to make an end of his job
+and join Bagby, Jr., in his hydroaeroplane experiments. He pictured
+the crowd that would worship him. He told himself stories unhappy and
+long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure
+that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever
+displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without
+cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he
+called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.
+
+"May I come up to-night?" he said, urgently.
+
+"Yes," she said. That was all.
+
+When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed
+that she had wanted to telephone to him.
+
+Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:
+
+"I was grouchy----"
+
+"I was beastly----"
+
+"I'm honestly sorry----"
+
+"'ll you forgive----"
+
+"What was it all about?"
+
+"Really, I do--not--know!"
+
+"I agree with lots of the things you----"
+
+"No, I agree with you, but just at the time--you know."
+
+Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about
+her shoulders--lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every
+thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the
+smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her
+coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to
+care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished.
+Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual
+scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.
+
+She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz.
+It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano-lamp they were
+silent, happy. He merely touched her hand, when he went, but he sang
+his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman.
+
+"I've found her again; it isn't merely play, now!" he kept repeating.
+"And I've learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it's
+as though I'd learned a new language. Gee! I'm happy!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+On an April Saturday morning Carl rose with a feeling of spring. He
+wanted to be off in the Connecticut hills, among the silvery-gray
+worm-fences, with larks rising on the breeze and pools a-ripple and
+yellow crocus-blossoms afire by the road, where towns white and sleepy
+woke to find the elms misted with young green. Would there be any
+crocuses out as yet? That was the only question worth solving in the
+world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The staid brownstone houses of
+the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over
+them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the
+automobile district past Central Park, sniffing wistfully at the damp
+grass, pale green amid old gray; marveling how a bare patch of brown
+earth, without a single blade of grass, could smell so stirringly of
+coming spring. A girl on Broadway was selling wild violets, white and
+purple, and in front of wretched old houses down a side-street, in the
+negro district, a darky in a tan derby and a scarlet tie was caroling:
+
+    "Mandy, in de spring
+    De mocking-birds do sing,
+    An' de flowers am so sweet along de ol' bayou----"
+
+Above the darky's head, elevated trains roared on the Fifty-third
+Street trestle, and up Broadway streaked a stripped motor-car, all
+steel chassis and grease-mottled board seat and lurid odor of
+gasoline. But sparrows splashed in the pools of sunshine; in a lull
+the darky's voice came again, chanting passionately, "In de spring,
+spring, _spring_!" and Carl clamored: "I've _got_ to get out to-day.
+Terrible glad it's a half-holiday. Wonder if I dare telephone to
+Ruth?"
+
+At a quarter to three they were rollicking down the "smart side" of
+Fifth Avenue. One could see that they were playmates, by her dancing
+steps and his absorption in her. He bent a little toward her, quick to
+laugh with her.
+
+Ruth was in a frock of flowered taffeta. "I won't wait till Easter to
+show off my spring clothes. It isn't done any more," she said. "It's
+as stupid as Bobby's not daring to wear a straw hat one single day
+after September fifteenth. Is an aviator brave enough to wear his
+after the fifteenth?... Think! I didn't know you then--last September.
+I can't understand it."
+
+"But I knew you, blessed, because I was sure spring was coming again,
+and that distinctly implied Ruth."
+
+"Of course it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the Spirit of Spring.
+Last Wednesday, when I lost my marquise ring, I was the spirit of
+vitriol, but now----I'm a poet. I've thought it all out and decided
+that I shall be the American Sappho. At any moment I am quite likely
+to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb and indite
+several stanzas on the back of a calling-card, while the crowd galumps
+around me in an awed ring.... I feel like kidnapping you and making
+you take me aeroplaning, but I'll compromise. You're to buy me a book
+and take me down to the Maison Epinay for tea, and read me poetry
+while I yearn over the window-boxes and try to look like Nicollette.
+Buy me a book with spring in it, and a princess, and a sky like
+this--cornflower blue with bunny-rabbit clouds."
+
+At least a few in the Avenue's flower-garden of pretty debutantes in
+pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots
+were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes.
+
+"I wonder who they all are; they look like an aristocracy, useless
+but made of the very best materials," said Carl.
+
+"They're like maids of honor and young knights, disguised in modern
+costumes! They're charming!"
+
+"Charmingly useless," insisted our revolutionary, but he did not sound
+earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything less
+great than joy and life; a day for shameless luxuriating in the sun,
+and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted
+silk were silver things and jade; satin gowns and shoe-buckles of
+rhinestones. The sleek motor-cars whisked by in an incessant line; the
+traffic policemen nodded familiarly to hansom-drivers; pools on the
+asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze
+tasted of spring.
+
+Carl bought for her Yeats's poems, tucked it under his arm, and they
+trotted off. In Madison Square they saw a gallant and courtly old man
+with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and
+a smile of unquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissus in his
+buttonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs and smiled to see
+one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to
+build for himself and his sparrow bride a bungalow in the foot-hills
+of the Metropolitan Tower.
+
+"I love that old man!" exclaimed Ruth. "I do wish we could pick him up
+and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, 'I prithee, sir,
+of thy good will come thou forthfaring with two vagabonds who do quest
+high and low the land of Nowhere.' Something like that. Go on, Carl,
+be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of
+Arcadia. Go ask him."
+
+"Afraid to. Besides, he might monopolize you."
+
+"He'll go with us, without his knowing it, anyway. Isn't it strange
+how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without
+even speaking to them? You know them the rest of your life and play
+games with them."
+
+The Maison Epinay you must quest long, but great is your reward if you
+find it. Here is no weak remembrance of a lost Paris, but a
+French-Canadian's desire to express what he believes Paris must be;
+therefore a super-Paris, all in brown velvet and wicker tables, and at
+the back a long window edged with boxes red with geraniums, looking to
+a back-yard garden where rose-beds lead to a dancing-faun terminal in
+a shrine of ivy.
+
+They sipped grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had
+the place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of
+benison; and Carl read from Yeats.
+
+He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew
+and misty mere and the fluttering wings of Love till now.
+
+His hand rested on her gloved hand.... Tony the waiter
+re-re-rearranged the serving-table.... When Ruth broke the spell with,
+"You aren't very reverent with perfectly clean gloves," they chattered
+like blackbirds at sunset.
+
+Carl discovered that, being a New-Yorker, she knew part of it as
+intimately as though it were a village, and nothing about the rest.
+She had taught him Fifth Avenue; told him the history of the invasion
+by shops, the social differences between East and West; pointed out
+the pictures of friends in photographers' wall-cases. Now he taught
+her the various New Yorks he had discovered in lonely rambles.
+Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford
+quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation
+dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of
+Italian _tables d'hote_, clerks, social-workers, and radical
+magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground;
+lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian
+lodgers live on streets named for kings, in wooden houses with
+gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights. From the same small-paned
+windows where frowsy Italian women stared down upon Ruth, Ruth's
+ancestors had leaned out to greet General George Washington.
+
+On an open wharf near Tenth Street they were bespelled by April. The
+Woolworth Tower, to the south, was an immortal shaft of ivory and gold
+against an unwinking blue sky, challenging the castles and cathedrals
+of the Old World, and with its supreme art dignifying the commerce
+which built and uses it. The Hudson was lustrous with sun, and a sweet
+wind sang from unknown Jersey hills across the river. Moored to the
+wharf was a coal-barge, with a tiny dwelling-cabin at whose windows
+white curtains fluttered. Beside the cabin was a garden tended by the
+bargeman's comely white-browed wife; a dozen daisies and geraniums in
+two starch-boxes.
+
+Forging down the river a scarred tramp steamer, whose rusty sides the
+sun turned to damask rose, bobbed in the slight swell, heading for
+open sea, with the British flag a-flicker and men chanting as they
+cleared deck.
+
+"I wish we were going off with her--maybe to Singapore or Nagasaki,"
+Carl said, slipping his arm through hers, as they balanced on the
+stringpiece of the wharf, sniffing like deer at the breeze, which for
+a moment seemed to bear, from distant burgeoning woods, a shadowy hint
+of burning leaves--the perfume of spring and autumn, the eternal
+wander-call.
+
+"Yes!" Ruth mused; "and moonlight in Java, and the Himalayas on the
+horizon, and the Vale of Cashmir."
+
+"But I'm glad we have this. Blessed, it's a day planned for lovers
+like us."
+
+"Carl!"
+
+"Yes. Lovers. Courting. In spring. Like all lovers."
+
+"Really, Carl, even spring doesn't quite let me forget the
+_convenances_ are home waiting."
+
+"We're not lovers?"
+
+"No, we----"
+
+"Yet you enjoy to-day, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"And you'd rather be loafing on a dirty wharf, looking at a tramp
+steamer, than taking tea at the Plaza?"
+
+"Yes, just now, perhaps----"
+
+"And you're protesting because you feel it's proper to----"
+
+"It----"
+
+"And you really trust me so much that you're having difficulty in
+seeming alarmed?"
+
+"Really----"
+
+"And you'd rather play around with me than any of the Skull and Bones
+or Hasty Pudding men you know? Or foreign diplomats with spade
+beards?"
+
+"At least they wouldn't----"
+
+"Oh yes they would, if you'd let them, which you wouldn't.... So, to
+sum up, then, we _are_ lovers and it's spring and you're glad of it,
+and as soon as you get used to it you'll be glad I'm so frank. Won't
+you?"
+
+"I will not be bullied, Carl! You'll be having me married to you
+before I can scream for help, if I don't start at once."
+
+"Probably."
+
+"Indeed you will not! I haven't the slightest intention of letting you
+get away with being masterful."
+
+"Yes, I know, blessed; these masterful people bore me, too. But aren't
+we modern enough so we can discuss frankly the question of whether I'd
+better propose to you, some day?"
+
+"But, boy, what makes you suppose that I have any information on the
+subject? That I've ever thought of it?"
+
+"I credit you with having a reasonable knowledge that there are such
+things as marriage."
+
+"Yes, but----Oh, I'm very confused. You've bullied me into such a
+defensive position that my instinct is to deny everything. If you
+turned on me suddenly and accused me of wearing gloves I'd indignantly
+deny it."
+
+"Meantime, not to change the subject, I'd better be planning and
+watching for a suitable day for proposing, don't you think? Consider
+it. Here's this young Ericson--some sort of a clerk, I believe--no,
+don't _think_ he's a university man----You know; discuss it clearly.
+Think it might be better to propose to-day? I ask your advice as a
+woman."
+
+"Oh, Carl dear, I think not to-day. I'm sorry, but I really don't
+think so."
+
+"But some time, perhaps?"
+
+"Some time, perhaps!" Then she fled from him and from the subject.
+
+They talked, after that, only of the sailors that loafed on West
+Street, but in their voices was content.
+
+They crossed the city, and on Brooklyn Bridge watched the suburbanites
+going home, crowding surface-car and elevated. From their perch on the
+giant spider's web of steel, they saw the Long Island Sound steamers
+below them, passing through a maelstrom of light on waves that
+trembled like quicksilver.
+
+They found a small Italian restaurant, free of local-color hounds and
+what Carl called "hobohemians," and discovered _fritto misto_ and
+Chianti and _zabaglione_--a pale-brown custard flavored like honey and
+served in tall, thin, curving glasses--while the fat proprietress, in
+a red shawl and a large brooch, came to ask them, "Everyt'ing
+all-aright, eh?" Carl insisted that Walter MacMonnies, the aviator,
+had once tried out a motor that was exactly like her, including the
+Italian accent. There was simple and complete bliss for them in the
+dingy pine-and-plaster room, adorned with fly-specked calendars and
+pictures of Victor Emmanuel and President McKinley, copies of the
+_Bolletino Della Sera_ and large vinegar bottles.
+
+The theater was their destination, but they first loitered up
+Broadway, shamelessly stopping to stare at shop windows, pretending
+to be Joe the shoe-clerk and Becky the cashier furnishing a Bronx
+flat. Whether it was anything but a game to Ruth will never be known;
+but to Carl there was a hidden high excitement in planning a
+flower-box for the fire-escape.
+
+Apropos of nothing, she said, as they touched elbows with the
+sweethearting crowd: "You were right. I'm sorry I ever felt superior
+to what I called 'common people.' People! I love them all.
+It's----Come, we must hurry. I hate to miss that one perfect second
+when the orchestra is quiet and the lights wink at you and the
+curtain's going up."
+
+During the second act of the play, when the heroine awoke to love,
+Carl's hand found hers.
+
+And it must have been that night when, standing between the inner and
+outer doors of her house, Carl put his arms about her, kissed her
+hair, timidly kissed her sweet, cold cheek, and cried, "Bless you,
+dear." But, for some reason, he does not remember when he did first
+kiss her, though he had looked forward to that miracle for weeks. He
+does not understand the reason; but there is the fact. Her kisses were
+big things to him, yet possibly there were larger psychological
+changes which occulted everything else, at first. But it must have
+been on that night that he first kissed her. For certainly it was when
+he called on her a week later that he kissed her for the second time.
+
+They had been animated but decorous, that evening a week later. He had
+tried to play an improvisation called "The Battle of San Juan Hill,"
+with a knowledge of the piano limited to the fact that if you struck
+alternate keys at the same time, there appeared not to be a discord.
+
+"I must go now," he said, slowly, as though the bald words had a
+higher significance. She tried to look at him, and could not. His arms
+circled her, with frightened happiness. She tilted back her head, and
+there was the ever-new surprise of blue irises under dark brows.
+Uplifted wonder her eyes spoke. His head drooped till he kissed her
+lips. The two bodies clamored for each other. But she unwound his
+arms, crying, "No, no, no!"
+
+He was enfolded by a sensation that they had instantly changed from
+friendly strangers to intimate lovers, as she said: "I don't
+understand it, Carl. I've never let a man kiss me like that. Oh, I
+suppose I've flirted, like most girls, and been kissed sketchily at
+silly dances. But this----Oh, Carl, Carl dear, don't ever kiss me
+again till--oh, not till I _know_. Why, I'm scarcely acquainted with
+you! I do know how dear you are, but it appals me when I think of how
+little background you have for me. Dear, I don't want to be sordid and
+spoil this moment, but I do know that when you're gone I'll be a
+coward and remember that there are families and things, and want to
+wait till I know how they like you, at the very least. Good night, and
+I----"
+
+"Good night, dear blessed. I know."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+There were, as Ruth had remarked, families.
+
+When Carl was formally invited to dine at the Winslows', on a night
+late in April, his only anxiety was as to the condition of his
+dinner-coat. He arrived in a state of easy briskness, planning apt and
+sensible remarks about the business situation for Mason and Mr.
+Winslow. As the maid opened the door Carl was wondering if he would be
+able to touch Ruth's hand under the table. He had an anticipatory
+fondness for all of the small friendly family group which was about to
+receive him.
+
+And he was cast into a den of strangers, most of them comprised in the
+one electric person of Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow.
+
+Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow was the general-commanding in whatsoever
+group she was placed by Providence (with which she had strong
+influence). At a White House reception she would pleasantly but firmly
+have sent the President about his business, and have taken his place
+in the receiving line. Just now she sat in a pre-historic S chair,
+near the center of the drawing-room, pumping out of Phil Dunleavy most
+of the facts about his chiefs' private lives.
+
+Aunt Emma had the soul of a six-foot dowager duchess, and should have
+had an eagle nose and a white pompadour. Actually, she was of medium
+height, with a not unduly maternal bosom, a broad, commonplace face,
+hair the color of faded grass, a blunt nose with slightly enlarged
+pores, and thin lips that seemed to be a straight line when seen from
+in front, but, seen in profile, puffed out like a fish's. She had a
+habit of nodding intelligently even when she was not listening, and
+another habit of rubbing her left knuckles with the fingers of her
+right hand. Not imposing in appearance was Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow,
+but she was born to discipline a court.
+
+An impeccable widow was she, speaking with a broad A, and dressed
+exquisitely in a black satin evening gown.
+
+By such simple-hearted traits as being always right about unimportant
+matters and idealistically wrong about important matters, politely
+intruding into everything, being earnest about the morality of the
+poor and auction bridge and the chaperonage of nice girls, possessing
+a working knowledge of Wagner and Rodin, wearing fifteen-dollar
+corsets, and believing on her bended knees that the Truegates and
+Winslows were the noblest families in the Social Register, Aunt Emma
+Truegate Winslow had persuaded the whole world, including even her
+near-English butler, that she was a superior woman. Family tradition
+said that she had only to raise a finger to get into really smart
+society. Upon the death of Ruth's mother, Aunt Emma had taken it as
+one of her duties, along with symphony concerts and committees, to
+rear Ruth properly. She had been neglecting this duty so far as to
+permit the invasion of a barbarian named Ericson only because she had
+been in California with her young son, Arthur. Just now, while her
+house was being opened, she was staying at the Winslows', with Arthur
+and a peculiarly beastly Japanese spaniel named Taka-San.
+
+She was introduced at Carl, she glanced him over, and passed him on to
+Olive Dunleavy, all in forty-five seconds. When Carl had recovered
+from a sensation of being a kitten drowned in a sack, he said
+agreeable things to Olive, and observed the situation in the
+drawing-room.
+
+Phil was marked out for Aunt Emma's favors; Mr. Winslow sat in a
+corner, apparently crushed, with restorative conversation administered
+by Ruth; Mason Winslow was haltingly attentive to a plain,
+well-dressed, amiable girl named Florence Crewden, who had
+prematurely gray hair, the week-end habit, and a weakness for baby
+talk. Ruth's medical-student brother, Bobby Winslow, was not there.
+The more he saw of Bobby's kind Aunt Emma, the more Carl could find it
+in his heart to excuse Bobby for having escaped the family dinner.
+
+Carl had an uncomfortable moment when Aunt Emma and Mr. Winslow asked
+him questions about the development of the Touricar. But before he
+could determine whether he was being deliberately inspected by the
+family the ordeal was over.
+
+As they went in to dinner, Mr. Winslow taking in Aunt Emma like a
+small boy accompanying the school principal, Ruth had the chance to
+whisper: "My Hawk, be good. Please believe I'm not responsible. It's
+all Aunt Emma's doing, this dreadfully stately family dinner. Don't
+let her bully you. I'm frightened to death and----Yes, Phil, I'm
+coming."
+
+The warning did not seem justified in view of the attractive
+table--candles, cut glass, a mound of flowers on a beveled mirror,
+silvery linen, and grape-fruit with champagne. Carl was at one side of
+Aunt Emma, but she seemed more interested in Mr. Winslow, at the end
+of the table; and on his other side Carl had a safe companion in Olive
+Dunleavy. Across from him were Florence Crewden, Phil, and Ruth--Ruth
+shimmering in a gown of yellow satin, which broke the curves of her
+fine, flushed shoulders only by a narrow band.
+
+The conversation played with people. Florence Crewden told, to
+applause and laughter, of an exploratory visit to the College of the
+City of New York, and her discovery of a strange race, young Jews
+mostly, who went to college to study, and had no sense of the nobility
+of "making" fraternities.
+
+"Such outsiders!" she said. "Can't you imagine the sort of a party
+they'd have--they'd all stand around and discuss psychology and
+dissecting puppies and Greek roots! Phil, I think it would be a
+lovely punishment for you to have to join them--to work in a
+laboratory all day and wear a celluloid collar."
+
+"Oh, I know their sort; 'greasy grinds' we used to call them; there
+were plenty of them in Yale," condescended Phil.
+
+"Maybe they wear celluloid collars--if they do--because they're poor,"
+protested Ruth.
+
+"My dear child," sniffed Aunt Emma, "with collars only twenty-five
+cents apiece? Don't be silly!"
+
+Mr. Winslow declared, with portly timidity, "Why, Em, my collars don't
+cost me but fifteen----"
+
+"Mason dear, let's not discuss it at dinner.... Tell me, all of you,
+the scandal I've missed by going to California. Which reminds me; did
+I tell you I saw that miserable Amy Baslin, you remember, that married
+the porter or the superintendent or something in her father's factory?
+I saw her and her husband at Pasadena, and they seemed to be happy. Of
+course Amy would put the best face she could on it, but they must have
+been miserably unhappy--such a sad affair, and she could have married
+quite decently."
+
+"What do you mean by 'decently'?" Ruth demanded.
+
+Carl was startled. He had once asked Ruth the same question about the
+same phrase.
+
+Aunt Emma revolved like a gun-turret getting Ruth's range, and
+remarked, calmly: "My dear child, you know quite well what I mean.
+Don't, I beg of you, bring any socialistic problems to dinner till you
+have really learned something about them.... Now I want to hear all
+the nice scandals I have missed."
+
+There were not many she had missed; but she kept the conversation
+sternly to discussions of people whose names Carl had never heard.
+Again he was obviously an Outsider. Still ignoring Carl, Aunt Emma
+demanded of Ruth and Phil, sitting together opposite her:
+
+"Tell me about the good times you children have been having, Ruthie.
+I am so glad that Phil and you finally went to the William Truegates'.
+And your letter about the Beaux Arts festival was charming, Ruthie. I
+quite envied you and Phil."
+
+The dragon continued talking to Ruth, while Carl listened, in the
+interstices of his chatter to Olive:
+
+"I hope you haven't been giving all your time and beauty-sleep doing
+too much of that settlement work, Ruthie--and Heaven only knows what
+germs you will get there--of course I should be the first to praise
+any work for the poor, ungrateful and shiftless though they are--what
+with my committees and the Truegate Temperance Home for Young Working
+Girls--it's all very well to be sympathetic with them, but when it
+comes to a settlement-house, and Heaven knows I have given them all
+the counsel and suggestions I could, though some of the professional
+settlement workers are as pert as they can be, and I really do believe
+some of them think they are trying to end poverty entirely, just as
+though the Lord would have sent poverty into the world if He didn't
+have a very good reason for it--you will remember the Bible says, 'The
+poor you always have with you,' and as Florence Barclay says in her
+novels, which may seem a little sentimental, but they are of such a
+good moral effect, you can't supersede the Scriptures even in the most
+charming social circles. To say nothing of the blessings of poverty,
+I'm sure they're much happier than we are, with our onerous duties,
+I'm sure that if any of these ragamuffin anarchists and socialists and
+anti-militarists want to take over my committees they are welcome, if
+they'll take over the miserable headaches and worried hours they give
+me, trying to do something for the poor, they won't even be clean but
+even in model tenements they will put coal in the bath-tubs. And so I
+do hope you haven't just been wearing yourself to a bone working for
+ungrateful dirty little children, Ruthie."
+
+"No, auntie dear, I've been quite as discreet as any Winslow should
+be. You see, I'm selfish, too. Aren't I, Carl?"
+
+"Oh, very."
+
+Aunt Emma seemed to remember, then, that some sort of a man, whose
+species she didn't quite know, sat next to her. She glanced at Carl,
+again gave him up as an error in social judgment, and went on:
+
+"No, Ruthie, not selfish so much as thoughtless about the duties of a
+family like ours--and I was always the first to say that the Winslows
+are as fine a stock as the Truegates. And I am going to see that you
+go out more the rest of this year, Ruthie. I want you and Phil to plan
+right now to attend the Charity League dances next season. You must
+learn to concentrate your attention----"
+
+"Auntie dear, please leave my wickedness till the next time we----"
+
+"My dear child, now that I have the chance to get all of us
+together--I'm sure Mr. Ericson will pardon the rest of us our little
+family discussions--I want to take you and Master Phil to task
+together. You are both of you negligent of social duties--duties they
+are, Ruthie, for man was not born to serve alone--though Phil is far
+better than you, with your queer habits, and Heaven only knows where
+you got them, neither your father nor your dear sainted mother was
+slack or selfish----"
+
+"Dear auntie, let's admit that I'm a black sheep with a little black
+muzzle and a habit of butting all sorts of ash-cans; and let Phil go
+on his social way rejoicing."
+
+Ruth was jaunty, but her voice was strained, and she bit her lip with
+staccato nervousness when she was not speaking. Carl ventured to face
+the dragon.
+
+"Mrs. Winslow, I'm sure Ruth has been better than you think; she has
+been learning all these fiendishly complicated new dances. You know a
+poor business man like myself finds them----"
+
+"Yes," said Aunt Emma, "I am sure she will always remember that she
+is a Winslow, and must carry on the family traditions, but sometimes I
+am afraid she gets under bad influences, because of her good nature."
+She said it loudly. She looked Carl in the eye.
+
+The whole table stopped talking. Carl felt like a tramp who has kicked
+a chained bulldog and discovers that the chain is broken.
+
+He wanted to be good; not make a scene. He noticed with intense
+indignation that Phil was grinning. He planned to get Phil off in a
+corner, not necessarily a dark corner, and beat him. He wanted to
+telegraph Ruth; dared not. He realized, in a quarter-second, that he
+must have been discussed by the Family, and did not like it.
+
+Every one seemed to be waiting for him to speak. Awkwardly he said,
+wondering all the while if she meant what her tone said she meant, by
+"bad influences":
+
+"Yes, but----Just going to say----I believe settlement work is a good
+influence----"
+
+"Please don't discuss----" Ruth was groaning, when Aunt Emma sternly
+interrupted:
+
+"It is good of you to take up the cudgels, Mr. Ericson, and please
+don't misjudge me--of course I realize that I am only a silly old
+woman and that my passion to see the Winslows keep to their fine
+standards is old-fashioned, but you see it is a hobby of mine that
+I've devoted years to, and you who haven't known the Winslows so very
+long----" Her manner was almost courteous.
+
+"Yes, that's so," Carl mumbled, agreeably, just as she dropped the
+courtesy and went on:
+
+"----you can't judge--in fact (this is nothing personal, you know) I
+don't suppose it's possible for Westerners to have any idea how
+precious family ideals are to Easterners. Of course we're probably
+silly about them, and it's splendid, your wheat-lands, and not caring
+who your grandfather was; but to make up for those things we do have
+to protect what we have gained through the generations."
+
+Carl longed to stand up, to defy them all, to cry: "If you mean that
+you think Ruth has to be protected against me, have the decency to say
+so." Yet he kept his voice gentle:
+
+"But why be narrowed to just a few families in one's interests? Now
+this settlement----"
+
+"One isn't narrowed. There are plenty of _good_ families for Ruth to
+consider when it comes time for my little girl to consider alliances
+at all!" Aunt Emma coldly stated.
+
+"I _will_ shut up!" he told himself. "I will shut up. I'll see this
+dinner through, and then never come near this house again." He tried
+to look casual, as though the conversation was safely finished. But
+Aunt Emma was waiting for him to go on. In the general stillness her
+corsets creaked with belligerent attention. He played with his fork in
+a "Well, if that's how you feel about it, perhaps it would be better
+not to discuss it any further, my dear madam," manner, growing every
+second more flushed, embarrassed, sick, angry; trying harder every
+second to look unconcerned.
+
+Aunt Emma hawked a delicate and ladylike hawk in her patrician throat,
+prefatory to a new attack. Carl knew he would be tempted to retort
+brutally.
+
+Then from the door of the dining-room whimpered the high voice of an
+excited child:
+
+"Oh, mamma, oh, Cousin Ruthie, nurse says Hawk Ericson is here! I want
+to see him!"
+
+Every one turned toward a boy of five or six, round as a baby chicken,
+in his fuzzy miniature pajamas, protectingly holding a cotton monkey
+under his arm, sturdy and shy and defiant.
+
+"Why, Arthur!" "Why, my son!" "Oh, the darling baby!" from the table.
+
+"Come here, Arthur, and let's hear your troubles before nurse nabs
+you, old son," said Phil, not at all condescendingly, rising from the
+table, holding out his arms.
+
+"No, no! You just let me go! I want to see Hawk Ericson. Is that Hawk
+Ericson?" demanded the son of Aunt Emma, pointing at Carl.
+
+"Yes, sweetheart," said Ruth, softly, proudly.
+
+Running madly about the end of the table, Arthur jumped at Carl's lap.
+
+Carl swung him up and inquired, "What is it, old man?"
+
+"Are you Hawk Ericson?"
+
+"At your commands, cap'n."
+
+Aunt Emma rose and said, masterfully, "Come, little son, now you've
+seen Mr. Ericson it's up to beddie again, up--to--beddie."
+
+"No, no; please no, mamma! I've never seen a' aviator before, not in
+all my life, and you promised me 'cross your heart, at Pasadena you
+did, I could see one."
+
+Arthur's face showed signs of imminent badness.
+
+"Well, you may stay for a while, then," said Aunt Emma, weakly,
+unconscious that her sway had departed from her, while the rest of the
+table grinned, except Carl, who was absorbed in Arthur's ecstasy.
+
+"I'm going to be a' aviator, too; I think a' aviator is braver than
+anybody. I'd rather be a' aviator than a general or a policeman or
+anybody. I got a picture of you in my scrap-book--you got a funny hat
+like Cousin Bobby wears when he plays football in it. Shall I get you
+the picture in my scrap-book?... Honest, will you give me another?"
+
+Aunt Emma made one more attempt to coax Arthur up to bed, but his
+Majesty refused, and she compromised by scolding his nurse and sending
+up for his dressing-gown, a small, blue dressing-gown on which yellow
+ducks and white bunny-rabbits paraded proudly.
+
+"Like our blue bowl!" Carl remarked to Ruth.
+
+Not till after coffee in the drawing-room would Arthur consent to go
+to bed. This real head of the Emma Winslow family was far too much
+absorbed in making Carl tell of his long races, and "Why does a
+flying-machine fly? What's a wind pressure? Why does the wind shove
+up? Why is the wings curved? Why does it want to catch the wind?" The
+others listened, including even Aunt Emma.
+
+Carl went home early. Ruth had the opportunity to confide:
+
+"Hawk dear, I can't tell you how ashamed I am of my family for
+enduring anybody so rude and opinionated as Aunt Emma. But--it's all
+right, now, isn't it?... No, no, don't kiss me, but--dear dreams,
+Hawk."
+
+Phil's voice, from behind, shouted: "Oh, Ericson! Just a second."
+
+Carl was not at all pleased. He remembered that Phil had listened with
+obvious amusement to his agonized attempt to turn Aunt Emma's attacks.
+
+Said Phil, while Ruth disappeared: "Which way you going? Walk to the
+subway with you. You win, old man. I admire your nerve for facing Aunt
+Emma. What I wanted to say----I hope to thunder you don't think I was
+in any way responsible for Mrs. Winslow's linking me and Ruth that way
+and----Oh, you understand. I admire you like the devil for knowing
+what you want and going after it. I suppose you'll have to convince
+Ruth yet, but, by Jove! you've convinced me! Glad you had Arthur for
+ally. They don't make kiddies any better. God! if I could have a son
+like that----I turn off here. G-good luck, Ericson."
+
+"Thanks a lot, Phil."
+
+"Thanks. Good night, Carl."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+Long Beach, on the first hot Sunday of May, when motorists come out
+from New York, half-ready to open asphalt hearts to sea and sky.
+Carl's first sight of it, save from an aeroplane, and he was mad-happy
+to find real shore so near the city.
+
+Ruth and he were picnicking, vulgar and unashamed, among the dunes at
+the end of the long board-walk, like the beer-drinking, pickle-eating
+parties of fishermen and the family groups with red table-cloths,
+grape-basket lunches, and colored Sunday supplements. Ruth declared
+that she preferred them to the elegant loungers who were showing off
+new motor-coats on the board-walk. But Carl and she had withdrawn a
+bit from the crowds, and in the dunes had made a nest, with a book and
+a magazine and a box of chocolates and Carl's collapsible lunch-kit.
+
+Not New York only, but all of Ruth's relatives were forgot. Aunt Emma
+Truegate Winslow was a myth of the dragon-haunted past. Here all was
+fresh color and free spaces looking to open sea. Behind the dunes,
+with their traceries of pale grass, reveled the sharp, unshadowed
+green of marshes, and an inland bay that was blue as bluing, a
+startling blue, bordered by the emerald marshes. To one side--afar,
+not troubling their peace--were the crimson roofs of fantastic houses,
+like chalets and California missions and villas of the Riviera, with
+gables and turrets of red tiles.
+
+Before their feet was the cream-colored beach, marked by ridges of
+driftwood mixed with small glistening shells, long ranks of
+pale-yellow seaweed, and the delicate wrinkles in the sand that were
+the tracks of receding waves. The breakers left the beach wet and
+shining for a moment, like plates of raw-colored copper, making one
+cry out with its flashing beauty. Then, at last, the eyes lifted to
+unbroken bluewater--nothing between them and Europe save rolling waves
+and wave-crests like white plumes. The sea was of a diaphanous blue
+that shaded through a bold steel blue and a lucent blue enamel to a
+rich ultramarine which absorbed and healed the office-worn mind. The
+sails of tacking sloops were a-blossom; sea-gulls swooped; a tall
+surf-fisherman in red flannel shirt and shiny black hip-boots strode
+out into the water and cast with a long curve of his line; cumulus
+clouds, whose pure white was shaded with a delicious golden tone, were
+baronial above; and out on the sky-line the steamers raced by.
+
+Round them was the warm intimacy of the dune sands; beyond was
+infinite space calling to them to be big and unafraid.
+
+Talking, falling into silences touched with the mystery of sun and
+sea, they confessed youth's excited wonder about the world; Carl
+sitting cross-legged, rubbing his ankles, a springy figure in blue
+flannel and a daring tie; while Ruth, in deep-rose linen, her throat
+bright and bare, lay with her chin in her hands, a flush beneath the
+gentle brown of her cheeks, her white-clad ankles crossed under her
+skirt, slender against the gray sand, thoughtful of eye, lost in
+happiness.
+
+"Some day," Carl was musing, "your children and mine will say, 'You
+certainly lived in the most marvelous age in the world.' Think of it.
+They talk about the romance of the Crusades and the Romans and all
+that, but think of the miracles we've seen already, and we're only
+kids. Aviation and the automobile and wireless and moving pictures
+and electric locomotives and electric cooking and the use of radium
+and the X-ray and the linotype and the submarine and the labor
+movement--the I. W. W. and syndicalism and all that--not that I know
+anything about the labor movement, but I suppose it's the most
+important of all. And Metchnikoff and Ehrlich. Oh yes, and a good
+share of the development of the electric light and telephone and the
+phonograph.... Golly! In just a few years!"
+
+"Yes," Ruth added, "and Montessori's system of education--that's what
+I think is the most important.... See that sail-boat, Hawk! Like a
+lily. And the late-afternoon gold on those marshes. I think this salt
+breeze blows away all the bad Ruth.... Oh! Don't forget the attempts
+to cure cancer and consumption. So many big things starting right now,
+while we're sitting here."
+
+"Lord! what an age! Romance--why, there's more romance in a wireless
+spark--think of it, little lonely wallowing steamer, at night, out in
+the dark, slamming out a radio like forty thousand tigers
+spitting--and a man getting it here on Long Island. More romance than
+in all the galleons that ever sailed the purple tropics, which they
+mostly ain't purple, but dirty green. Anything 's possible now. World
+cools off--a'right, we'll move on to some other planet. It gets me
+going. Don't have to believe in fairies to give the imagination a job,
+to-day. Glad I've been an aviator; gives me some place in it all,
+anyway."
+
+"I'm glad, too, Hawk, terribly glad."
+
+The sun was crimsoning; the wind grew chilly. The beach was scattered
+with camp-fires. Their own fire settled into compact live coals which,
+in the dusk of the dune-hollow, spread over the million bits of quartz
+a glow through which pirouetted the antic sand-fleas. Carl's cigarette
+had the fragrance that comes only from being impregnated with the
+smoke of an outdoor fire. The waves were lyric, and a group at the
+next fire crooned "Old Black Joe." The two lovers curled in their
+nest. Hand moved toward hand.
+
+Ruth whispered: "It's sweet to be with all these people and their
+fires.... Will I really learn not to be supercilious?"
+
+"Honey! You--supercilious? Democracy---- Oh, the dickens! let's not
+talk about theories any more, but just about Us!"
+
+Her hand, tight-coiled as a snail-shell, was closed in his.
+
+"Your hand is asleep in my hand's arms," he whispered. The ball of his
+thumb pressed her thumb, and he whispered once more: "See. Now our
+hands are kissing each other--we--we must watch them better.... Your
+thumb is like a fairy." Again his thumb, hardened with file and wrench
+and steering-wheel, touched hers. It was startlingly like a kiss of
+real lips.
+
+Lightly she returned the finger-kiss, answering diffidently, "Our
+hands are mad--silly hands to think that Long Beach is a tropical
+jungle."
+
+"You aren't angry at them?"
+
+"N-no."
+
+He cradled her head on his shoulder, his hand gripping her arm till
+she cried, "You hurt me." He kissed her cheek. She drew back as far as
+she could. Her hand, against his chest, held him away for a minute.
+Her defense suddenly collapsed, and she was relaxed and throbbing in
+his arms. He slipped his fingers under her chin, and turned up her
+face till he could kiss her lips. He had not known the kiss of man and
+woman could be so long, so stirring. Yet at first he was disappointed.
+This was, after all, but a touch--just such a touch as finger against
+finger. But her lips grew more intense against his, returning and
+taking the kiss; both of them giving and receiving at once.
+
+Wondering at himself for it, Carl thought of other things. He was
+amazed that, while their lips were hot together, he worried as to what
+train Ruth ought to take, after dinner. Yet, with such thoughts
+conferring, he was in an ecstasy beyond sorrow; praying that to her,
+as to him, there was no pain but instead a rapture in the sting of her
+lips, as her teeth cut a little into them.... A kiss--thing that the
+polite novels sketch as a second's unbodied bliss--how human it was,
+with teeth and lips to consider; common as eating--and divine as
+martyrdom. His lips were saying to her things too vast and extravagant
+for a plain young man to venture upon in words:
+
+"Lady, to you I chant my reverence and faith everlasting, in such
+unearthly music as the angels use when with lambent wings they salute
+the marching dawn." Such lyric tributes, and an emotion too subtle to
+fit into any words whatever, his lips were saying....
+
+Then she was drawing back, rending the kiss, crying, "You're almost
+smothering me!"
+
+With his arms easily about her, but with her weight against his
+shoulder, they and their love veiled from the basket-parties by the
+darkness, he said, quiveringly: "See, my arms are a little house for
+you, just as my hand was a little house for your hand, once. My arms
+are the walls, and your head and mine together are the roof."
+
+"I love the little house."
+
+"No. Say, 'I love _you_."'
+
+"No."
+
+"Say it."
+
+"No."
+
+"Please----"
+
+"Oh, Hawk dear, I couldn't even if--just now, I do want to say it, but
+I want to be fair. I am terribly happy to be in the house of Hawk's
+arms. I'm not afraid in it, even out here on the dark dunes--which
+Aunt Emma wouldn't--somehow--approve! But I do want to be fair to you,
+and I'm afraid I'm not, when I let you love me this way. I don't want
+to hurt you. Ever. Perhaps it's egotistical of me, but I'm afraid you
+would be hurt if I let you kiss me and then afterward I decided I
+didn't love you at all."
+
+"But can't you, some day----"
+
+"Oh, I don't know, I don't _know_! I'm not sure I know what love is.
+I'm not sure it's love that makes me happy (as I really am) when you
+kiss me. Perhaps I'm just curious, and experimenting. I was quite
+conscious, when you kissed me then; quite conscious and curious; and
+once I caught myself wondering for half a second what train we'd take.
+I was ashamed of that, but I wasn't ashamed of taking mental notes and
+learning what these 'kisses,' that we mention so glibly, really are.
+Just experimenting, you see. And if you were _too_ serious about our
+kiss, it wouldn't be at all fair to you."
+
+"I'm glad you're frank, blessed, and I guess I understand pretty well
+how you feel, but, after all, I'm fairly simple about such things.
+Blessed, blessed, I don't really know a thing but 'I love you.'"
+
+His arms were savage again; he kissed her, kissed her lips, kissed the
+hollow of her throat. Then he lifted her from the ground and would not
+set her down till she had kissed him back.
+
+"You frightened me a lot, then," she said. "Did the child want to
+impress Ruth with his mighty strength? Well, she shall be impressed.
+Hawk, I do hope--I do hate myself for not knowing my mind. I will try
+not to experiment. I want you to be happy. I do want to be honest with
+you. If I'm honest, will you try not to be too impatient till I do
+know just what I want?... Oh, I'm sick of the modern lover! I talk and
+talk about love; it seems as though we'd lost the power to be simple,
+like the old ballads. Or weren't the ballad people really simple,
+either? You say you are; so I think you will have to run away with
+me.... But not till after dinner! Come."
+
+The moon was rising. Swinging hands, they tramped toward the
+board-walk. The crunch of their feet in the sand was the rhythmic
+spell of a magician, which she broke when she sighed:
+
+"Should I have let you kiss me, out here in the wilds? Will you
+respect me after it?"
+
+"Princess, you're all the respect there is in the world."
+
+"It seems so strange. We were absorbed in war and electricity and
+then----"
+
+"Love is war and electricity, or else it's dull, and I don't think we
+two 'll ever get dull--if you do decide you can love me. We'll wander:
+cabin in the Rockies, with forty mountains for our garden fence, and
+an eagle for our suburban train."
+
+"And South Sea islands silhouetted at sunset!... Look! That moon!... I
+always imagine it so clearly when I hear Hawaiian singers on the
+Victrola--and a Hawaiian beach, with fireflies in the jungle behind
+and a phosphorescent sea in front and native girls dancing in
+garlands."
+
+"Yes! And Paris boulevards and a mysterious castle in the Austrian
+mountains, with a hidden treasure in dark, secret dungeons, and heavy
+iron armor; and then, bing! a brand-new prairie town in Saskatchewan
+or Dakota, with brand-new sunlight on the fresh pine shacks, and
+beyond the town the plains with brand-new grass rolling."
+
+"But seriously, Hawk, would you want to go to all those places, if you
+were married? Would you, practically? You know, even rich
+globe-trotters go to the same sorts of places, mostly. And we wouldn't
+even be rich, would we?"
+
+"No, just comfortable; maybe five thousand a year."
+
+"Well, would you really want to keep on going, and take your wife? Or
+would you settle down like the rest, and spend money so you could keep
+in shape to make money to spend to keep in shape?"
+
+"Seriously I would keep going--if I had the right girl to go with me.
+It would be mighty important which one, though, I guess--and by that I
+mean you. Once, when I quit flying, I thought that maybe I'd stop
+wandering and settle down, maybe even marry a Joralemon kind of a
+girl. But I was meant to hike for the hiking's sake.... Only, not
+alone any more. I _need_ you.... We'd go and go. No limit.... And we
+wouldn't just go places, either; we'd be different things. We'd be
+Connecticut farmers one year, and run a mine in Mexico the next, and
+loaf in Paris the next, if we had the money."
+
+"Sometimes you almost tempt me to like you."
+
+"Like me now!"
+
+"No, not now, but---- Here's the board-walk."
+
+"Where's those steps? Oh yes. Gee! I hate to leave the water without
+having had a swim. Wish we'd had one. Dare you to go wading!"
+
+"Oh, ought I to, do you think? Wading would be silly. And nice."
+
+"Course you oughtn't. Come on. Don't you remember how the sand feels
+between your toes?"
+
+The moon brooded upon the lulled waves, and quested among the ridges
+of driftwood for pearly shells. The pools left by the waves were
+enticing. Ruth retreated into the shelter of the board-walk and came
+shyly out, clutching her skirts, her feet and ankles silver in the
+light.
+
+"The sand does feel good, but uh! it's getting colder and colder!" she
+wailed, as she cautiously advanced into the water. "I'll think up
+punishments for you. You've not only caused me to be cold, but you've
+made me abominably self-conscious."
+
+"Don't be self-conscious, blessed. We are just children exploring." He
+splashed out, coat off, trousers rolled to the knee above his thin,
+muscular legs, galloping along the edge of the water like a large
+puppy, while she danced after him.
+
+They were stilled to the persuasive beauty of the night. Music from
+the topaz jeweled hotels far down the beach wove itself into the peace
+on land and sea. A fish lying on shore was turned by the moon into
+ivory with carven scales. Before them, reaching to the ancient towers
+of England and France and the islands of the sea, was the whispering
+water. A tenderness that understood everything, made allowance for
+everything in her and in himself, folded its wings round him as he
+scanned her that stood like a slender statue of silver--dark hair
+moon-brightened, white arms holding her skirts, white legs round which
+the spent waves sparkled with unworldly fire. He waded over to her and
+timidly kissed the edge of her hair.
+
+She rubbed her cheek against his. "Now we must run," she said. She
+quickly turned back to the shadow of the board-walk, to draw on her
+stockings and shoes, kneeling on the sand like the simple maid of the
+ballads which she had been envying.
+
+They tramped along the board-walk, with heels clicking like castanets,
+conscious that the world was hushed in night's old enchantment.
+
+As they had answered to companionship with the humble picnic-parties
+among the dunes, so now they found it amusing to dine among the
+semi-great and the semi-motorists at the Nassau. Ruth had a distinct
+pleasure when T. Wentler, horse-fancier, aviation enthusiast,
+president of the First State Bank of Sacramento, came up, reminded
+Carl of their acquaintanceship at the Oakland-Berkeley Aero Meet, and
+begged Ruth and Carl to join him, his wife, and Senator Leeford, for
+coffee.
+
+As they waited for their train, quiet after laughter, Ruth remarked:
+"It was jolly to play with the Personages. You haven't seen much of
+the frivolous side of me. It's pretty important. You don't know how
+much soul satisfaction I get out of dancing all night and playing
+tennis with flanneled oafs and eating _marrons glaces_ and chatting in
+a box at the opera till I spoil the entire evening for all the German
+music-lovers, and talking to all the nice doggies from the Tennis and
+Racquet Club whenever I get invited to Piping Rock or Meadow Brook or
+any other country club that has ancestors. I want you to take
+warning."
+
+"Did you really miss Piping Rock much to-day?".
+
+"No--but I might to-morrow, and I might get horribly bored in our
+cabin in the Rockies and hate the stony old peaks, and long for tea
+and scandal in a corner at the Ritz."
+
+"Then we'd hike on to San Francisco; have tea at the St. Francis or
+the Fairmont or the Palace; then beat it for your Hawaii and fireflies
+in the bush."
+
+"Perhaps, but suppose, just suppose we were married, and suppose the
+Touricar didn't go so awfully well, and we had to be poor, and
+couldn't go running away, but had to stick in one beastly city flat
+and economize! It's all very well to talk of working things out
+together, but think of not being able to have decent clothes, and
+going to the movies every night--ugh! When I see some of the girls who
+used to be so pretty and gay, and they went and married poor men--now
+they are so worn and tired and bedraggled and perambulatorious, and
+they worry about Biddies and furnaces and cabbages, and their hair is
+just scratched together, with the dubbest hats--I'd rather be an idle
+rich."
+
+"If we got stuck like that, I'd sell out and we'd hike to the mountain
+cabin, anyway, say go up in the Santa Lucias, and keep wild bees."
+
+"And probably get stung--in the many subtle senses of that word. And
+I'd have to cook and wash. That would be fun _as_ fun, but to have to
+do it----"
+
+"Ruth, honey, let's not worry about it now, anyhow. I don't believe
+there's much danger. And don't let's spoil this bully day."
+
+"It has been sweet. I won't croak any more."
+
+"There's the train coming."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+While the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and
+stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as
+unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in
+the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening
+called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to
+go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires. Carl tried to bring her
+coolness. He ate only poached eggs on toast or soup and salad for
+dinner, that he might not be torpid. He gave her moss-roses with drops
+of water like dew on the stems. They sat out on the box-stoop--the
+unfriendly New York street adopting for a time the frank
+neighborliness of a village--and exclaimed over every breeze. They
+talked about the charm of forty degrees below zero. That is,
+sometimes. Their favorite topic was themselves.
+
+She still insisted that she was not in love with him; hooted at the
+idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to
+some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were
+engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the
+windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to
+sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till
+his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into
+his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into
+warm slumber in the familiarity of his arms. Yet he dared not kiss her
+throat, as he had done at Long Beach.
+
+As lovers do, Carl had thought intently of her warning that she did
+care for clothes, dancing, country clubs. Ruth would have been
+caressingly surprised had she known the thought and worried
+conscientiousness he gave to the problem of planning "parties" for
+her. Ideas were always popping up in the midst of his work, and never
+giving him rest till he had noted them down on memo.-papers. He
+carried about, on the backs of envelopes, such notes as these:
+
+Join country clb take R dances there?
+Basket of fruit for R
+Invite Mason W lunch
+Orgnze Tcar tour NY to SF
+Newspaper men on tour probly Forbes
+Rem Walter's new altitude 16,954
+R to Astor Roof
+Rem country c
+
+He did get a card to the Peace Waters Country Club and take Ruth to a
+dance there. She seemed to know every other member, and danced
+eloquently. He took her to the Josiah Bagbys' for dinner; to the
+first-night of a summer musical comedy. But he was still the stranger
+in New York, and "parties" are not to be had by tipping waiters and
+buying tickets. Half of the half-dozen affairs which they attended
+were of her inspiration; he was invited to go yachting at Larchmont,
+motoring, swimming on Long Island, with friends of herself and her
+brothers.
+
+One evening that strikes into Carl's memories of those days of the
+_pays du tendre_ is the evening on which Phil Dunleavy insisted on
+celebrating a Yale baseball victory by taking them to dinner in the
+oak-room of the Ritz-Carlton, under whose alabaster lights, among the
+cosmopolites, they dined elaborately and smoked slim, imported
+cigarettes. The thin music of violins took them into the lonely gray
+groves of the Land of Wandering Tunes, till Phil began to talk,
+disclosing to them a devotion to beauty, a satirical sense of humor,
+and a final acceptance of Carl as his friend.
+
+A hundred other "parties" Carl planned, while dining alone at inferior
+restaurants. A hundred times he took a ten-cent dessert instead of an
+exciting fifteen-cent strawberry shortcake, to save money for those
+parties. (Out of such sordid thoughts of nickel coins is built a love
+enduring, and even tolerable before breakfast coffee.)
+
+Yet always to him their real life was in simple jaunts out of doors,
+arranged without considering other people. Her father seemed glad of
+that. He once said to Carl (giving him a cigar), "You children had
+better not let Aunt Emma know that you are enjoying yourselves as you
+want to! How is the automobile business going?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would be pleasant to relate that Carl was inspired by love to put
+so much of that celebrated American quality "punch" into his work that
+the Touricar was sweeping the market. Or to picture with quietly
+falling tears the pathos of his business failure at the time when he
+most needed money. As a matter of fact, the Touricar affairs were
+going as, in real life, most businesses go--just fairly well. A few
+cars were sold; there were prospects of other sales; the VanZile
+Corporation neither planned to drop the Touricar, nor elected our
+young hero vice-president of the corporation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In June Gertrude Cowles and her mother left for Joralemon. Carl had,
+since Christmas, seen them about once a month. Gertie had at first
+represented an unhappy old friend to whom he had to be kind. Then, as
+she seemed never to be able to give up the desire to see him tied
+down, whether by her affection or by his work, Carl came to regard her
+as an irritating foe to the freedom which he prized the more because
+of the increasing bondage of the office. The last stage was pure
+indifference to her. Gertie was either a chance for simple sweetness
+which he failed to take, or she was a peril which he had escaped,
+according to one's view of her; but in any case he had missed--or
+escaped--her as a romantic hero escapes fire, flood, and plot. She
+meant nothing to him, never could again. Life had flowed past her as,
+except in novels with plots, most lives do flow past temporary and
+fortuitous points of interest.... Gertie was farther from him now than
+those dancing Hawaiian girls whom Ruth and he hoped some day to see.
+Yet by her reaching out for his liberty Gertie had first made him
+prize Ruth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The 1st of July, 1913, Ruth left for the Patton Kerrs' country house
+in the Berkshires, near Pittsfield. Carl wrote to her every day. He
+told her, apropos of Touricars and roof-gardens and aviation records
+and Sunday motor-cycling with Bobby Winslow, that he loved her; he
+even made, at the end of his letters, the old-fashioned lines of
+crosses to represent kisses. Whenever he hinted how much he missed
+her, how much he wanted to feel her startle in his arms, he wondered
+what she would read out of it; wondered if she would put the letter
+under her pillow.
+
+She answered every other day with friendly letters droll in their
+descriptions of the people she met. His call of love she did not
+answer--directly. But she admitted that she missed their playtimes;
+and once she wrote to him, late on a cold Berkshire night, with a
+black rain and wind like a baying bloodhound:
+
+     It is so still in my room & so wild outside that I am
+     frightened. I have tried to make myself smart in a blue silk
+     dressing gown & a tosh lace breakfast cap, & I will write
+     neatly with a quill pen from the Mayfair, but just the same
+     I am a lonely baby & I want you here to comfort me. Would
+     you be too shocked to come? I would put a Navajo blanket on
+     my bed & a papier mache Turkish dagger & head of Othello
+     over my bed & pretend it was a cozy corner, that is of
+     course if they still have papier mache ornaments, I suppose
+     they still live in Harlem & Brooklyn. We would sit _very_
+     quietly in two wicker chairs on either side of my fireplace
+     & listen to the swollen brook in the ravine just below my
+     window. But with no Hawk here the wind keeps wailing that
+     Pan is dead & that there won't ever again be any sunshine on
+     the valley. Dear, it really _isn't_ safe to be writing like
+     this, after reading it you will suppose that it's just you
+     that I am lonely for, but of course I'd be glad for Phil or
+     Puggy Crewden or your nice solemn Walter MacMonnies or _any_
+     suitor who would make foolish noises & hide me from the
+     wind's hunting. Now I will seal this up & _NOT_ send it in
+     the morning.
+
+Your playmate Ruth
+
+     Here is one small kiss on the forehead but remember it is
+     just because of the wind & rain.
+
+Presumably she did mail the letter. At least, he received it.
+
+He carried her letters in the side-pocket of his coat till the
+envelopes were worn at the edges and nearly covered with smudged
+pencil-notes about things he wanted to keep in mind and would, of
+course, have kept in mind without making notes. He kept finding new
+meanings in her letters. He wanted them to indicate that she loved
+him; and any ambiguous phrase signified successively that she loved,
+laughed at, loathed, and loved him. Once he got up from bed to take
+another look at a letter and see whether she had said, "I hope you had
+a dear good time at the Explorers' Club dinner," or "I hope you had a
+good time, dear."
+
+Carl was entirely sincere in his worried investigation of her state of
+mind. He knew that both Ruth and he had the instability as well as the
+initiative of the vagabond. As quickly as they had claimed each other,
+so quickly could either of them break love's alliance, if bored. Carl
+himself, being anything but bored, was as faithfully devoted as the
+least enterprising of moral young men, He forgot Gertie, did not write
+to Istra Nash the artist, and when the VanZile office got a new
+telephone-girl, a tall, languorous brunette with shadowy eyes and fine
+cheeks, he did not even smile at her.
+
+But--was Ruth so bound? She still refused to admit even that she could
+fall in love. He knew that Ruth and he were not romantic characters,
+but every-day people with a tendency to quarrel and demand and be
+slack. He knew that even if the rose dream came true, there would be
+drab spots in it. And now that she was away, with Lenox and polo to
+absorb her, could the gauche, ignorant Carl Ericson, that he privately
+knew himself to be, retain her interest?
+
+Late in July he received an invitation to spend a week-end, Friday to
+Tuesday, with Ruth at the Patton Kerrs'.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+The brief trip to the Berkshires was longer than any he had taken
+these nine months. He looked forward animatedly to the journey,
+remembering details of travel--such trivial touches as the oval brass
+wash-bowls of a Pullman sleeper, and how, when the water is running
+out, the inside of the bowl is covered with a whitish film of water,
+which swiftly peels off. He recalled the cracked white paint of a
+steamer's ventilator; the abruptly stopping zhhhhh of a fog-horn; the
+vast smoky roof of a Philadelphia train-shed, clamorous with the
+train-bells of a strange town, giving a sense of mystery to the
+traveler stepping from the car for a moment to stretch his legs; an
+ugly junction station platform, with resin oozing from the heavy
+planks in the spring sun; the polished binnacle of the S.S. _Panama_.
+
+He expected keen joy in new fields and hills. Yet all the way north he
+was trying to hold the train back. In a few minutes, now, he would see
+Ruth. And at this hour he did not even know definitely that he liked
+her.
+
+He could not visualize her. He could see the sleeve of her blue
+corduroy jacket; her eyes he could not see. She was a stranger. Had he
+idealized her? He was apologetic for his unflattering doubt, but of
+what sort _was_ she?
+
+The train was stopping at her station with rattling windows and a
+despairing grind of the wheels. Carl seized his overnight bag and
+suit-case with fictitious enthusiasm. He was in a panic. Emerging
+from the safe, impersonal train upon the platform, he saw her.
+
+She was waving to him from a one-seated phaeton, come alone to meet
+him--and she was the adorable, the perfect comrade. He thought
+jubilantly as he strode along the platform: "She's wonderful. Love
+her? Should say I do!"
+
+While they drove under the elms, past white cottages and the village
+green, while they were talking so lightly and properly that none of
+the New England gossips could be wounded in the sense of propriety,
+Carl was learning her anew. She was an outdoor girl now, in
+low-collared blouse and white linen skirt. He rejoiced in her
+modulating laugh; the contrast of blue eyes and dark brows under her
+Panama hat; her full dark hair, with a lock sun-drenched; her bare
+throat, boyishly brown, femininely smooth; the sweet, clean,
+fine-textured girl flesh of the hollow of one shoulder faintly to be
+seen in the shadow of her broad, drooping collar; one hand, with a
+curious ring of rose quartz and steel points, excitedly pounding a
+tattoo of greeting with the whip-handle; her spirited irreverences
+regarding the people they passed; chatter which showed the world
+transformed as through ruby glass--a Ruth radiant, understanding, his
+comrade. She was all that he had believed during her absence and
+doubted while he was coming to her. But he had no time to repent of
+his doubt, now, so busily was he exulting to himself, slipping a hand
+under her arm: "Love her? I--should--say--I--do!"
+
+The carriage rolled out of town with the rhythmic creak of a country
+buggy, climbed a hill range by means of the black, oily state road,
+and turned upon a sandy side-road. A brook ran beside them. Sunny
+fields alternated with woods leaf-floored, quiet, holy--miraculous
+after the weary city. Below was a vista of downward-sloping fields,
+divided by creeper-covered stone walls; then a sun-meshed valley set
+with ponds like shining glass dishes on a green table-cloth; beyond
+all, a long reach of hillsides covered with unbroken fleecy forest,
+like green down....
+
+"So much unspoiled country, and yet there's people herded in subways!"
+complained Carl.
+
+They drove along a level road, lined with wild raspberry-bushes and
+full of a thin jade light from the shading maples. They gossiped of
+the Patton Kerrs and the Berkshires; of the difference between the
+professional English week-ender and the American, who still has
+something of the naive provincial delight of "going visiting"; of New
+York and the Dunleavys. But their talk lulled to a nervous hush. It
+seemed to him that a great voice cried from the clouds: "It is beside
+_Ruth_ that you are sitting; Ruth whose arm you feel!" In silence he
+caught her left hand.
+
+As he slowly drew back her hand and the reins with it, to stop the
+ambling horse, the two children stared straight at each other, hungry,
+tremulously afraid. Their kiss--not only their lips, but their spirits
+met without one reserve. A straining long kiss, as though they were
+forcing their lips into one body of living flame. A kiss in which his
+eyes were blind to the enchantment of the jade light about them, his
+ears deaf to brook and rustling forest. All his senses were
+concentrated on the close warmth of her misty lips, the curve of her
+young shoulder, her woman sweetness and longing. Then his senses
+forgot even her lips, and floated off into a blurred trance of
+bodiless happiness--the kiss of Nirvana. No foreign thought of trains
+or people or the future came now to drag him to earth. It was the most
+devoted, most sacred moment he had known.
+
+As he became again conscious of lips and cheek and brave shoulders and
+of her wide-spread fingers gripping his upper arm, she was slowly
+breaking the spell of the kiss. But again and again she kissed him,
+hastily, savage tokens of rejoicing possession.
+
+She cried: "I do know now! I do love you!"
+
+"Blessed----"
+
+In silence they stared into the woods while her fingers smoothed his
+knuckles. Her eyes were faint with tears, in the magic jade light.
+
+"I didn't know a kiss could be like that," she marveled, presently. "I
+wouldn't have believed selfish Ruth could give all of herself."
+
+"Yes! It was the whole universe."
+
+"Hawk dear, I wasn't experimenting, that time. I'm glad, glad! To know
+I can really love; not just curiosity!... I've wanted you so all day.
+I thought four o'clock wouldn't ever come--and oh, darling, my dear,
+dear Hawk, I didn't even know for sure I'd like you when you came!
+Sometimes I wanted terribly to have your silly, foolish, childish,
+pale hair on my breast--such hair! lady's hair!--but sometimes I
+didn't want to see you at all, and I was frightened at the thought of
+your coming, and I fussed around the house till Mrs. Pat laughed at me
+and accused me of being in love, and I denied it--and she was right!"
+
+"Blessed, I was scared to death, all the way up here. I didn't think
+you could be as wonderful as I knew you were! That sounds mixed
+but---- Oh, blessed, blessed, you really love me? You really love me?
+It's hard to believe I've actually heard you say it! And I love you so
+completely. Everything."
+
+"I love you!... That is such an adorable spot to kiss, just below your
+ear," she said. "Darling, keep me safe in the little house of arms,
+where there's only room for you and me--no room for offices or Aunt
+Emmas!... But not now. We must hurry on.... If a wagon had been coming
+along the road----!"
+
+As they entered the rhododendron-lined drive of the Patton Kerr place,
+Carl remembered a detail, not important, but usual. "Oh yes," he said,
+"I've forgotten to propose."
+
+"Need you? Proposals sound like contracts and all those other dull
+forms; not like--that kiss.... See! There's Pat Kerr, Jr., waving to
+us. You can just make him out, there on the upper balcony. He is the
+darlingest child, with ash-blond hair cut Dutch style. I wonder if you
+didn't look like him when you were a boy, with your light hair?"
+
+"Not a chance. I was a grubby kid. Made noises.... Gee! what a bully
+place. And the house!... Will you marry me?"
+
+"Yes, I will!... It _is_ a dear place. Mrs. Pat is----"
+
+"When?"
+
+"----always fussing over it; she plants narcissuses and crocuses in
+the woods, so you find them growing wild."
+
+"I like those awnings. Against the white walls.... May I consider that
+we are engaged then, Miss Winslow--engaged for the next marriage?"
+
+"Oh no, no, not engaged, dear. Don't you know it's one of my
+principles----"
+
+"But look----"
+
+"----not to be engaged, Hawk? Everybody brings the cunnin' old jokes
+out of the moth-balls when you're engaged. I'll marry you, but----"
+
+"Marry me next month--August?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"September?"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"Please, Ruthie. Aw yes, September. Nice month, September is. Autumn.
+Harvest moon. And apples to swipe. Come on. September."
+
+"Well, perhaps September. We'll see. Oh, Hawk dear, can you conceive
+of us actually sitting here and solemnly discussing being _married_?
+Us, the babes in the wood? And I've only known you three days or so,
+seems to me.... Well, as I was saying, _perhaps_ I'll marry you in
+September (um! frightens me to think of it; frightens me and awes me
+and amuses me to death, all at once). That is, I shall marry you
+unless you take to wearing pearl-gray derbies or white evening ties
+with black edging, or kill Mason in a duel, or do something equally
+disgraceful. But engaged I will not be. And we'll put the money for a
+diamond ring into a big davenport.... Are we going to be dreadfully
+poor?"
+
+"Oh, not pawn-shop poor. I made VanZile boost my salary, last week,
+and with my Touricar stock I'm getting a little over four thousand
+dollars a year."
+
+"Is that lots or little?"
+
+"Well, it 'll give us a decent apartment and a nearly decent maid, I
+guess. And if the Touricar keeps going, we can beat it off for a year,
+wandering, after maybe three four years."
+
+"I hope so. Here we are! That's Mrs. Pat waiting for us."
+
+The Patton Kerr house, set near the top of the highest hill in that
+range of the Berkshires, stood out white against a slope of crisp
+green; an old manor house of long lines and solid beams, with striped
+awnings of red and white, and in front a brick terrace, with
+basket-chairs, a swinging couch, and a wicker tea-table already
+welcomingly spread with a service of Royal Doulton. From the terrace
+one saw miles of valley and hills, and villages strung on a rambling
+river. The valley was a golden bowl filled with the peace of
+afternoon; a world of sun and listening woods.
+
+On the terrace waited a woman of thirty-five, of clever face a bit
+worn at the edges, carefully coiffed hair, and careless white blouse
+with a tweed walking-skirt. She was gracefully holding out her hand,
+greeting Carl, "It's terribly good of you to come clear out into our
+wilderness." She was interrupted by the bouncing appearance of a
+stocky, handsome, red-faced, full-chinned, curly-black-haired man of
+forty, in riding-breeches and boots and a silk shirt; with him an
+excited small boy in rompers--Patton Kerr, Sr. and Jr.
+
+"Here you are!" Senior observantly remarked. "Glad to see you,
+Ericson. You and Ruthie been a deuce of a time coming up from town.
+Holding hands along the road, eh? Lord! these aviators!"
+
+"Pat!"
+
+"Animal!"
+
+----protested Mrs. Kerr and Ruth, simultaneously.
+
+"All right. I'll be good. Saw you fly at Nassau Boulevard, Ericson.
+Turned my horn loose and hooted till they thought I was a militant,
+like Ruthie here. Lord! what flying, what flying! I'd like to see you
+race Weymann and Vedrines.... Ruthie, will you show Mr. Ericson where
+his room is, or has poor old Pat got to go and drag a servant away
+from reading _Town Topics_, heh?"
+
+"I will, Pat," said Ruth.
+
+"I will, daddy," cried Pat, Jr.
+
+"No, my son, I guess maybe Ruthie had better do it. There's a certain
+look in her eyes----"
+
+"Basilisk!"
+
+"Salamander!"
+
+Ruth and Carl passed through the wide colonial hall, with mahogany
+tables and portraits of the Kerrs and the sword of Colonel Patton. At
+the far end was an open door, and a glimpse of an old-fashioned garden
+radiant with hollyhocks and Canterbury bells. It was a world of utter
+content. As they climbed the curving stairs Ruth tucked her arm in
+his, saying:
+
+"Now do you see why I won't be engaged? Pat Kerr is the best chum in
+the world, yet he finds even a possible engagement wildly
+humorous--like mothers-in-law or poets or falling on your ear."
+
+"But gee! Ruth, you _are_ going to marry me?"
+
+"You little child! My little boy Hawk! Of course I'm going to marry
+you. Do you think I would miss my chance of a cabin in the Rockies?...
+My famous Hawk what everybody cheered at Nassau Boulevard!" She opened
+the door of his room with a deferential, "Thy chamber, milord!... Come
+down quickly," she said. "We mustn't miss a moment of these days....
+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 spaces. 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.
+
+Saturday, 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 shore. 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 cumbersome. So I put on a boy's
+bathing-suit under my dress--and--I'm terribly embarrassed."
+
+"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
+sturdily 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
+shells 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 class 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 talcum 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 Japanese 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 spaciousness 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 assembled 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 basement; 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
+assured 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 muffin-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
+Maupassant 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 Japanese 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
+pronunciation 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
+gods--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-shell 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 God as
+to discuss sex, 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 God, 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
+assortment of personages and awkward rovers whom the ex-aviator knew. The
+Ericsons made an institution 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 Saturday 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. Saturday,
+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.
+She may have had more curiosity than principle, but she did badger
+policemen pluckily. She was studying Italian, the Montessori method,
+cooking. She taught new dishes to her maid. She adopted a careless
+suggestion of Carl and voluntarily increased the maid's salary,
+thereby shaking the rock-ribbed foundations of Upper West Side
+society.
+
+In nothing did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither
+"the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which
+recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends
+expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her
+honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly
+and tinily telling her difficulties with household work.
+
+When a purring, baby-talking acquaintance gurgled: "How did the Ruthie
+bride spend her morning? Did she cook some little dainty for her
+husband? Nothing bourgeois, I'm _sure_!" in reply Ruth pleasantly
+observed: "Not a chance. The Ruthie bride cussed out the janitor for
+not shooting up a dainty cabbage on the dumb-waiter, and then counted
+up her husband's cigarette coupons and skipped right down to the
+premium parlors with 'em and got him a pair of pale-blue Boston
+garters and a cunning granite-ware stew-pan, and then sponged lunch
+off Olive Dunleavy. But nothing bourgeois!"
+
+Such experiences, told to Carl, he found diverting. He seemed, in the
+spring of 1914, to want no others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+
+The apparently satisfactory development of the Touricar in the late
+spring of 1914 was the result of an uneconomical expenditure of energy
+on the part of Carl. Personally he followed by letter the trail of
+every amateur aviator, every motoring big-game hunter. He never let up
+for an afternoon. VanZile had lost interest in the whole matter.
+Whenever Carl thought of how much the development of the Touricar
+business depended upon himself, he was uneasy about the future, and
+bent more closely over his desk. On his way home, swaying on a subway
+strap, his pleasant sensation of returning to Ruth was interrupted by
+worry in regard to things he might have done at the office. Nights he
+dreamed of lists of "prospects."
+
+Late in May he was disturbed for several days by headaches, lassitude,
+nausea. He lied to Ruth: "Guess I've eaten something at lunch that was
+a little off. You know what these restaurants are." He admitted,
+however, that he felt like a Symptom. He stuck to the office, though
+his chief emotion about life and business was that he wished to go off
+somewhere and lie down and die gently.
+
+Directly after a Sunday bruncheon, at which he was silent and looked
+washed out, he went to bed with typhoid fever.
+
+For six weeks he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the
+boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun.
+That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the
+specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the
+intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one
+splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed,
+she mourned and mourned for her lost boy, while she hid her fear and
+kept her blouses fresh and her hair well-coiffed, and mothered the
+stern man who lay so dreadfully still in the bed.... He was not shaved
+every day; he had a pale beard under his hollow cheeks.... Even when
+he was out of delirium, even when he was comparatively strong, he
+never said anything gaily foolish for the sake of being young and
+noisy with her.
+
+During convalescence Carl was so wearily gentle that she hoped the
+little boy she loved was coming back to dwell in him. But the Hawk's
+wings seemed broken. For the first time Carl was afraid of life. He
+sat and worried, going over the possibilities of the Touricar, and the
+positions he might get if the Touricar failed. He was willing to loaf
+by the window all day, his eyes on a narrow, blood-red stripe in the
+Navajo blanket on his knees, along which he incessantly ran a
+finger-nail, back and forth, back and forth, for whole quarter-hours,
+while she read aloud from Kipling and London and Conrad, hoping to
+rekindle the spirit of daring.
+
+One sweet drop was in their cup of iron. As woodland playmates they
+could never have known such intimacy as hovered about them when she
+rested her head lightly against his knees and they watched the Hudson,
+the storms and flurries of light on its waves, the windy clouds and
+the processional of barges, the beetle-like ferries and the great
+steamers for Albany. They talked in half sentences, understanding the
+rest: "Tough in winter----" "Might be good trip----" Carl's hand was
+always demanding her thick hair, but he stroked it gently. The coarse,
+wholesome vigor was drained from him; part even of his slang went with
+it; his "Gee!" was not explosive.
+
+He took to watching her like a solemn baby, when she moved about the
+room; thus she found the little boy Carl again; laughed full-throated
+and secretly cried over him, as his sternness passed into a wistful
+obedience. He was not quite the same impudent boy whose naughtiness
+she had loved. But the good child who came in his place did trust her
+so, depend upon her so....
+
+When Carl was strong enough they went for three weeks to Point
+Pleasant, on the Jersey coast, where the pines and breakers from the
+open sea healed his weakness and his multitudinous worries. They even
+swam, once, and Carl played at learning two new dances, strangely
+called the "fox trot" and the "lu lu fado." Their hotel was a vast
+barn, all porches, white flannels, and handsome young Jews chattering
+tremendously with young Jewesses; but its ball-room floor was smooth,
+and Ruth had lacked music and excitement for so long that she danced
+every night, and conducted an amiable flirtation with a mysterious
+young man of Harvard accent, Jewish features, fine brown eyes, and
+tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses, while Carl looked on, a contented
+wall-flower.
+
+They came back to town with ocean breeze and pine scent in their
+throats and sea-sparkle in their eyes--and Carl promptly tied himself
+to the office desk as though sickness and recovery had never given him
+a vision of play.
+
+Ruth had not taken the Point Pleasant dances seriously, but as day on
+day she stifled in a half-darkened flat that summer, she sometimes
+sobbed at the thought of the moon-path on the sea, the reflection of
+lights on the ball-room floor, the wavelike swish of music-mad feet.
+
+The flat was hot, dead. The summer heat was unrelenting as bedclothes
+drawn over the head and lashed down. Flies in sneering circles mocked
+the listless hand she flipped at them. Too hot to wear many clothes,
+yet hating the disorder of a flimsy negligee, she panted by a window,
+while the venomous sun glared on tin roofs, and a few feet away
+snarled the ceaseless trrrrrr of a steam-riveter that was erecting new
+flats to shut off their view of the Hudson. In the lava-paved back
+yard was the insistent filelike voice of the janitor's son, who kept
+piping: "Haaay, Bil-lay, hey; Billy's got a girl! Hey, Billy's got a
+girl! Haaay, Bil-lay!" She imagined herself going down and
+slaughtering him; vividly saw herself waiting for the elevator,
+venturing into the hot sepulcher of the back areaway, and there
+becoming too languid to complete the task of ridding the world of the
+dear child. She was horrified to discover what she had been imagining,
+and presently imagined it all over again.
+
+Two blocks across from her, seen through the rising walls of the new
+apartment-houses, were the drab windows of a group of run-down
+tenements, which broke the sleek respectability of the well-to-do
+quarter. In those windows Ruth observed foreign-looking, idle women,
+not very clean, who had nothing to do after they had completed half an
+hour of slovenly housework in the morning. They watched their
+neighbors breathlessly. They peered out with the petty virulent
+curiosity of the workless at whatever passed in the streets below
+them. Fifty times a day they could be seen to lean far out on their
+fire-escapes and follow with slowly craning necks and unblinking eyes
+the passing of something--ice-wagons, undertakers' wagons, ole-clo'
+men, Ruth surmised. The rest of the time, ragged-haired and greasy of
+wrapper, gum-chewing and yawning, they rested their unlovely stomachs
+on discolored sofa-cushions on the window-sills and waited for
+something to appear. Two blocks away they were--yet to Ruth they
+seemed to be in the room with her, claiming her as one of their
+sisterhood. For now she was a useless woman, as they were. She raged
+with the thought that she might grow to be like them in every
+respect--she, Ruth Winslow!... She wondered if any of them were
+Norwegians named Ericson.... With the fascination of dread she watched
+them as closely as they watched the world with the hypnotization of
+unspeakable hopelessness.... She had to find her work, something for
+which the world needed her, lest she be left here, useless and
+unhappy in a flat. In her kitchen she was merely an intruder on the
+efficient maid, and there was no nursery.
+
+She sat apprehensively on the edge of a chair, hating the women at the
+windows, hating the dull, persistent flies, hating the wetness of her
+forehead and the dampness of her palm; repenting of her hate and
+hating again--and taking another cold bath to be fresh for the
+home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother and whom, of
+all the world, she did not hate.
+
+Even on the many cool days when the streets and the flat became
+tolerable and the vulture women of the tenements ceased to exist for
+her, Ruth was not much interested, whether she went out or some one
+came to see her. Every one she knew, except for the Dunleavys and a
+few others, was out of town, and she was tired of Olive Dunleavy's
+mirth and shallow gossip. After her days with Carl in the valley of
+the shadow, Olive was to her a stranger giggling about strange people.
+Phil was rather better. He occasionally came in for tea, poked about,
+stared at the color prints, and said cryptic things about feminism and
+playing squash.
+
+Her settlement-house classes were closed for the summer. She brooded
+over the settlement work and accused herself of caring less for people
+than for the sensation of being charitable. She wondered if she was a
+hypocrite.... Then she would take another cold bath to be fresh for
+the home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother, and
+toward whom, of all the world's energies, she knew that she was not
+hypocritical.
+
+This is not the story of Ruth Winslow, but of Carl Ericson. Yet Ruth's
+stifling days are a part of it, for her unhappiness meant as much to
+him as it did to her. In the swelter of his office, overlooking
+motor-hooting, gasoline-reeking Broadway, he was aware that Ruth was
+in the flat, buried alive. He made plans for her going away, but she
+refused to desert him. He tried to arrange for a week more of holiday
+for them both; he could not; he came to understand that he was now
+completely a prisoner of business.
+
+He was in a rut, both sides of which were hedged with "back work that
+had piled up on him." He had no desire, no ambition, no interest,
+except in Ruth and in making the Touricar pay.
+
+The Touricar Company had never paid expenses as yet. How much longer
+would old VanZile be satisfied with millions to come in the
+future--perhaps?
+
+Carl even took work home with him, though for Ruth's sake he wanted to
+go out and play. It really was for her sake; he himself liked to play,
+but the disease of perpetual overwork had hold of him. He was glad to
+have her desert him for an evening now and then and go out to the
+Peace Waters Country Club for a dance with Phil and Olive Dunleavy.
+She felt guilty when she came home and found him still making
+calculations. But she hummed waltzes while she put on a thin, blue
+silk dressing-gown and took down her hair.
+
+"I _can't_ stand this grubby, shut-in prison," she finally snapped at
+him, on an evening when he would not go to the first night of a
+roof-garden.
+
+He snarled back: "You don't have to! Why don't you go with your
+bloomin' Phil and Olive? Of course, I don't ever want to go myself!"
+
+"See here, my friend, you have been taking advantage for a long time
+now of the fact that you were ill. I'm not going to be your nurse
+indefinitely." She slammed her bedroom door.
+
+Later she came stalking out, very dignified, and left the flat. He
+pretended not to see her. But as soon as the elevator door had clanged
+and the rumbling old car had begun to carry her down, away from him,
+the flat was noisy with her absence. She came home eagerly sorry--to
+find an eagerly sorry Carl. Then, while they cried together, and he
+kissed her lips, they made a compact that no matter for what reason
+or through whose fault they might quarrel, they would always settle it
+before either went to bed.... But they were uncomfortably polite for
+two days, and obviously were so afraid that they might quarrel that
+they were both prepared to quarrel.
+
+Carl had been back at work for less than one month, but he hoped that
+the Touricar was giving enough promise now of positive success to
+permit him to play during the evening. He rented a VanZile car for
+part time; planned week-end trips; hoped they could spend----
+
+Then the whole world exploded.
+
+Just at the time when the investigation of Twilight Sleep indicated
+that the world might become civilized, the Powers plunged into a war
+whose reason no man has yet discovered. Carl read the head-lines on
+the morning of August 5th, 1914, with a delusion of not reading
+"news," but history, with himself in the history book.
+
+Ten thousand books record the Great War, and how bitterly Europe
+realized it; this is to record that Carl, like most of America, did
+not comprehend it, even when recruits of the Kaiser marched down
+Broadway with German and American flags intertwined, even when his
+business was threatened. It was too big for his imagination.
+
+Every noon he bought half a dozen newspaper extras and hurried down to
+the bulletin-boards on the _Times_ and _Herald_ buildings. He
+pretended that he was a character in one of the fantastic novels about
+a world-war when he saw such items as "Russians invading Prussia,"
+"Japs will enter war," "Aeroplane and submarine attack English
+cruiser."
+
+"Rats!" he said, "I'm dreaming. There couldn't be a war like that.
+We're too civilized. I can prove the whole thing 's impossible."
+
+In the world-puzzle nothing confused Carl more than the question of
+socialism. He had known as a final fact that the alliance of French
+and German socialist workmen made war between the two nations
+absolutely impossible--and his knowledge was proven ignorance, his
+faith folly. He tentatively bought a socialist magazine or two, to
+find some explanation, and found only greater confusion on the part of
+the scholars and leaders of the party. They, too, did not understand
+how it had all happened; they stood amid the ruins of international
+socialism, sorrowing. If their faith was darkened, how much more so
+was Carl's vague untutored optimism about world-brotherhood.
+
+He had two courses--to discard socialism as a failure, or to stand by
+it as a course of action which was logical but had not, as yet, been
+able to accomplish its end. He decided to stand by it; he could not
+see himself plunging into the unutterable pessimism of believing that
+all of mankind were such beast fools that, after this one great sin,
+they could not repent and turn from tribal murder. And what other
+remedy was there? If socialism had not prevented the war, neither had
+monarchy nor bureaucracy, bourgeois peace movements, nor the church.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a whole world at war, Carl thought chiefly of his own business.
+He was not abnormal. The press was filled with bewildered queries as
+to what would happen to America. For two weeks the automobile business
+seemed dead, save for a grim activity in war-trucks. VanZile called in
+Carl and shook his head over the future of the Touricar, now that all
+luxuries were threatened.
+
+But the Middle West promised a huge crop and prosperity. The East
+followed; then, slowly, the South, despite the closed outlet for its
+cotton crop. Within a few weeks all sorts of motor-cars were selling
+well, especially expensive cars. It was apparent that automobiles were
+no longer merely luxuries. There was even a promise of greater trade
+than ever, so rapidly were all the cars of the warring nations being
+destroyed.
+
+But, once VanZile had considered the possibility of letting go his
+Touricar interest in order to be safe, he seemed always to be
+considering it. Carl read fate in VanZile's abstracted manner. And if
+VanZile withdrew, Carl's own stock would be worthless. But he stuck at
+his work, with something of a boy's frightened stubbornness and
+something of a man's quiet sternness. Fear was never far from him. In
+an aeroplane he had never been greatly frightened; he could himself,
+by his own efforts, fight the wind. But how could he steer a world-war
+or a world-industry?
+
+He tried to conceal his anxiety from Ruth, but she guessed it. She
+said, one evening: "Sometimes I think we two are unusual, because we
+really want to be free. And then a thing like this war comes and our
+bread and butter and little pink cakes are in danger, and I realize
+we're not free at all; that we're just like all the rest, prisoners,
+dependent on how much the job brings and how fast the subway runs. Oh,
+sweetheart, we mustn't forget to be just a bit mad, no matter how
+serious things become." Standing very close to him, she put her head
+on his shoulder.
+
+"Sure mustn't. Must stick by each other all the more when the world
+takes a run and jumps on us."
+
+"Indeed we will!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unsparingly the war's cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along
+the edge of a business precipice, looking down. He became so
+accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with
+the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called
+"courage," began to come to life again, laughing, "Let the darned old
+business bust, if she's going to."
+
+Only, it refused to bust.
+
+It kept on trembling, while Carl became nervous again, then gaily
+defiant, then nervous again, till the alternation of gloom and bravado
+disgusted him and made Ruth wonder whether he was an office-slave or a
+freebooter. As he happened to be both at the time, it was hard for
+him to be either convincingly. She accused him of vacillating; he
+retorted; the suspense kept them both raw....
+
+To add to their difficulties of adjustment to each other, and to the
+ego-mad world, Ruth's sense of established amenities was shocked by
+the reappearance of Carl's pioneering past as revealed in the lively
+but vulgar person of Martin Dockerill, Carl's former aviation
+mechanic.
+
+Martin Dockerill was lanky and awkward as ever, he still wrote
+post-cards to his aunt in Fall River, and admired burlesque-show
+choruses, but he no longer played the mouth-organ (publicly), for he
+had become so well-to-do as to be respectable. As foreign agent for
+the Des Moines Auto-Truck Company he had toured Europe, selling
+war-trucks, or lorries, as the English called them, first to the
+Balkan States, then to Italy, Russia, and Turkey. He was for a time
+detailed to the New York office.
+
+It did not occur either to him nor to Carl that he was not "welcome to
+drop in any time; often as possible," to slap Carl on the back, loudly
+recollect the time when he had got drunk and fought with a policeman
+in San Antonio, or to spend a whole evening belligerently discussing
+the idea of war or types of motor-trucks when Ruth wistfully wanted
+Carl to herself. Martin supposed, because she smiled, that she was as
+interested as Carl in his theories about aeroplane-scouting in war.
+
+Ruth knew that most of Carl's life had been devoted to things quite
+outside her own sphere of action, but she had known it without feeling
+it. His talk with Martin showed her how sufficient his life had been
+without her. She began to worry lest he go back to aviation.
+
+So began their serious quarrels; there were not many of them, and they
+were forgotten out of existence in a day or two; but there were at
+least three pitched battles during which both of them believed that
+"this ended everything." They quarreled always about the one thing
+which had intimidated them before--the need of quarreling; though
+apropos of this every detail of life came up: Ruth's conformities; her
+fear that he would fly again; her fear that the wavering job was
+making him indecisive.
+
+And Martin Dockerill kept coming, as an excellent starting-point for
+dissension.
+
+Ruth did not dislike Martin's roughness, but when the ex-mechanic
+discovered that he was making more money than was Carl, and asked
+Carl, in her presence, if he'd like a loan, then she hated Martin, and
+would give no reason. She became unable to see him as anything but a
+boor, an upstart servant, whose friendship with Carl indicated that
+her husband, too, was an "outsider." Believing that she was superbly
+holding herself in, she asked Carl if there was not some way of
+tactfully suggesting to Martin that he come to the flat only once in
+two weeks, instead of two or three times a week. Carl was angry. She
+said furiously what she really thought, and retired to Aunt Emma's for
+the evening. When she returned she expected to find Carl as repentant
+as herself. Unfortunately that same Carl who had declared that it was
+pure egotism to regard one's own religion or country as necessarily
+sacred, regarded his own friends as sacred--a noble faith which is an
+important cause of political graft. He was ramping about the
+living-room, waiting for a fight--and he got it.
+
+Their moment of indiscretion. The inevitable time when, believing
+themselves fearlessly frank, they exaggerated every memory of an
+injury. Ruth pointed out that Carl had disliked Florence Crewden as
+much as she had disliked Martin. She renewed her accusation that he
+was vacillating; scoffed at Walter MacMonnies (whom she really liked),
+Gertie Cowles (whom she had never met), and even, hesitatingly, Carl's
+farmer relatives.
+
+And Carl was equally unpleasant. At her last thrust he called her a
+thin-blooded New-Yorker and slammed his bedroom door. They had broken
+their pledge not to go to bed on a quarrel.
+
+He was gone before she came out to breakfast in the morning.
+
+In the evening they were perilously polite again. Martin Dockerill
+appeared and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind
+had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she
+could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks
+wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the
+British Aero Corps, to get life's supreme sensation--scouting ten
+thousand feet in air, while dozens of batteries fired at him; a
+nose-to-earth volplane. The thinking Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth
+knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer--and as one who was not
+merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured. And Martin
+Dockerill seemed so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might
+go.
+
+Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter-of-fact chatter about
+a kind of wandering which shut her out as completely as did the
+project of war. "I don't know," said he, "but what the biggest fun in
+chasing round the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where
+you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of
+greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a hand-out and sneak on a
+blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every
+brakie and constabule out after you. That's living!"
+
+When Martin was gone Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended
+to be absorbed in a magazine. He took from the mess of papers and
+letters that lived in his inside coat pocket a war-map he had clipped
+from a newspaper, and drew tactical lines on it. From his room he
+brought a small book he had bought that day. He studied it intently.
+Ruth managed to see that the title of the book was _Aeroplanes and
+Air-Scouting in the European Armies_.
+
+She sprang up, cried: "Hawk! Why are you reading that?"
+
+"Why shouldn't I read it?"
+
+"You don't mean to---- You----"
+
+"Oh no, I don't suppose I'd have the nerve to go and enlist now.
+You've already pointed out to me that I've been getting cold feet."
+
+"But why do you shut me out? Why do you?"
+
+"Oh, good Lord! have we got to go all over that again? We've gone over
+it and over it and over it till I'm sick of telling you it isn't
+true."
+
+"I'm very sorry, Hawk. Thank you for making it clear to me that I'm a
+typical silly wife."
+
+"And thank you for showing me I'm a clumsy brute. You've done it quite
+often now. Of course it doesn't mean anything that I've given up
+aviation."
+
+"Oh, don't be melodramatic. Or if you must be, don't fail to tell me
+that I've ruined your life."
+
+"Very well. I won't say anything, then, Ruth."
+
+"Don't look at me like that, Hawk. So hard. Studying me.... Can't you
+understand---- Haven't you any perception? Can't you understand how
+hard it is for me to come to you like this, after last night, and
+try----"
+
+"Very nice of you," he said, grimly.
+
+With one cry of "Oh!" she ran into her bedroom.
+
+He could hear her sobbing; he could feel her agony dragging him to
+her. But no woman's arms should drug his anger, this time, to let it
+ache again. For once he definitely did not want to go to her. So
+futile to make up and quarrel, make up and quarrel. He was impatient
+that her distant sobs expressed so clearly a wordless demand that he
+come to her and make peace. "Hell!" he crawked; jerked his top-coat
+from its nail, and left the flat--eleven o'clock of a chilly November
+evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+Dizzy with all the problems of life, he did not notice where he went.
+He walked blocks; took a trolley-car; got off to buy a strong cigar;
+took the next trolley that came along; was carried across the
+Fifty-ninth Street bridge to Long Island. At the eighth or tenth stop
+he hurried out of the car just as it was starting again. He wondered
+why he had been such a fool as to leave it in a dark street of
+flat-faced wooden houses with dooryards of trampled earth and a
+general air of poverty, goats, and lunch-pails. He tramped on, a
+sullen and youthless man. Presently he was in shaggy, open country.
+
+He was frightened by his desertion of Ruth, but he did not want to go
+back, nor even telephone to her. He had to diagram where and what and
+why he was; determine what he was to do.
+
+He disregarded the war as a cause of trouble. Had there been no extra
+business-pressure caused by the war, there would have been some other
+focus for their misunderstandings. They would have quarreled over
+clothes and aviation, Aunt Emma and Martin Dockerill, poverty and
+dancing, quite the same.
+
+Walking steadily, with long periods when he did not think, but stared
+at the dusty stars or the shaky, ill-lighted old houses, he alined her
+every fault, unhappily rehearsed every quarrel in which she had been
+to blame, his lips moving as he emphasized the righteous retorts he
+was almost certain he had made. It was not hard to find faults in her.
+Any two people who have spent more than two days together already have
+the material for a life-long feud, in traits which at first were
+amusing or admirable. Ruth's pretty manners, of which Carl had been
+proud, he now cited as snobbish affectation. He did not spare his
+reverence, his passion, his fondness. He mutilated his soul like a
+hermit. He recalled her pleasure in giving him jolly surprises, in
+writing unexpected notes addressed to him at the office, as fussy
+discontent with a quiet, normal life; he regarded her excitement over
+dances as evidence that she was so dependent on country-club society
+that he would have to spend the rest of his life drudging for her.
+
+He wanted to flee. He saw the whole world as a conspiracy of secret,
+sinister powers that are concealed from the child, but to the man are
+gradually revealed by a pitiless and never-ending succession of
+misfortunes. He would never be foot-loose again. His land of heart's
+desire would be the office.
+
+But the ache of disappointment grew dull. He was stunned. He did not
+know what had happened; did not even know precisely how he came to be
+walking here. Now and then he remembered anew that he had sharply left
+Ruth--Ruth, his dear girl!--remembered that she was not at hand, ready
+to explain with love's lips the somber puzzles of life. He was
+frightened again, and beginning to be angry with himself for having
+been angry with Ruth.
+
+He had walked many miles. Brown fields came up at him through the
+paling darkness. A sign-board showed that he was a few miles from
+Mineola. Letting the coming dawn uplift him, he tramped into Mineola,
+with a half-plan of going on to the near-by Hempstead Plains Aviation
+Field, to see if there was any early-morning flying. It would be bully
+to see a machine again!
+
+At a lunch-wagon he ordered buckwheat-cakes and coffee. Sitting on a
+high stool before a seven-inch shelf attached to the wall, facing an
+array of salt-castors and catsup-bottles and one of those colored
+glass windows with a portrait of Washington which give to all
+lunch-wagons their air of sober refinement, Carl ate solemnly,
+meditatively.... It did not seem to him an ignoble setting for his
+grief; but he was depressed when he came out to a drab first light of
+day that made the street seem hopeless and unrested after the night.
+The shops were becoming visible, gray and chilly, like a just-awakened
+janitor in slippers, suspenders, and tousled hair. The pavement was
+wet. Carl crossed the street, stared at the fly-specked cover of a
+magazine six months old that lay in a shop window lighted by one
+incandescent. He gloomily planned to go back and have another cup of
+coffee on the shelf before Washington's glassy but benign face.
+
+But he looked down the street, and all the sky was becoming a delicate
+and luminous blue.
+
+He trotted off toward Hempstead Plains.
+
+The Aviation Field was almost abandoned. Most of the ambitious line of
+hangars were empty, now, with faded grass thick before the great doors
+that no one ever opened. A recent fire had destroyed a group of five
+hangars.
+
+He found one door open, and three sleepy youngsters in sweaters and
+khaki trousers bringing out a monoplane.
+
+Carl watched them start, bobbed his chin to the music of the motor,
+saw the machine canter down the field and ascend from dawn to the
+glory of day. The rising sun picked out the lines of the uninclosed
+framework and hovered on the silvery wing-surface. The machine circled
+the field at two hundred feet elevation, smoothly, peacefully. And
+peace beyond understanding came to Carl.
+
+He studied the flight. "Mm. Good and steady. Banks a little sharp, but
+very thorough. Firs' rate. I believe I could get more speed out of her
+if I were flying. Like to try."
+
+Wonderingly he realized that he did not want to fly; that only his
+lips said, "Like to try." He was almost as much an outsider to
+aviation as though he had never flown. He discovered that he was
+telling Ruth this fact, in an imaginary conversation; was commenting
+for her on dawn-sky and the plains before him and his alienation from
+exploits in which she could not share.
+
+The monoplane landed with a clean volplane. The aviator and his
+mechanicians were wheeling it toward the hangar. They glanced at him
+uninterestedly. Carl understood that, to them, he was a Typical
+Bystander, here where he had once starred.
+
+The aviator stared again, let go the machine, walked over, exclaiming:
+"Say, aren't you Hawk Ericson? This is an honor. I heard you were
+somewhere in New York. Just missed you at the Aero Club one night.
+Wanted to ask you about the Bagby hydro. Won't you come in and have
+some coffee and sinkers with us? Proud to have you. My name 's Berry."
+
+"Thanks. Be glad to."
+
+While the youngsters were admiring him, hearing of the giants of
+earlier days, while they were drinking inspiration from this veteran
+of twenty-nine, they were in turn inspiring Carl by their faith in
+him. He had been humble. They made him trust himself, not
+egotistically, but with a feeling that he did matter, that it was
+worth while to be in tune with life.
+
+Yet all the while he knew that he wanted to be by himself, because he
+could thus be with the spirit of Ruth. And he knew, subconsciously,
+that he was going to hurry back to Mineola and telephone to her.
+
+As he dog-trotted down the road, he noted the old Dutch houses for
+her; picked out the spot where he had once had a canvas hangar, and
+fancied himself telling her of those days. He did not remember that at
+this hangar he had known Istra, Istra Nash, the artist, whose name he
+scarce recalled. Istra was an incident; Ruth was the meaning of his
+life.
+
+And the solution of his problem came, all at once, when suddenly it
+was given to him to understand what that problem was.
+
+Ruth and he had to be up and away, immediately; go any place, do
+anything, so long as they followed new trails, and followed them
+together. He knew positively, after his lonely night, that he could
+not be happy without her as comrade in the freedom he craved. And he
+also knew that they had not done the one thing for which their
+marriage existed. They were not just a man and a woman. They were a
+man and a woman who had promised to find new horizons for each other.
+
+However much he believed in the sanctity of love's children, Carl also
+believed that merely to be married and breed casual children and die
+is a sort of suspended energy which has no conceivable place in this
+over-complex and unwieldy world. He had no clear nor ringing message,
+but he did have, just then, an overpowering conviction that Ruth and
+he--not every one, but Ruth and he, at least--had a vocation in
+keeping clear of vocations, and that they must fulfil it.
+
+Over the telephone he said: "Ruth dear, I'll be right there. Walked
+all night. Got straightened out now. I'm out at Mineola. It's all
+right with me now, blessed. I want so frightfully much to make it all
+right with you. I'll be there in about an hour."
+
+She answered "Yes" so non-committally that he was smitten by the fact
+that he had yet to win forgiveness for his frenzy in leaving her; that
+he must break the shell of resentment which would incase her after a
+whole night's brooding between sullen walls.
+
+On the train, unconscious of its uproar, he was bespelled by his new
+love. During a few moments of their lives, ordinary real people,
+people real as a tooth-brush, do actually transcend the coarsely
+physical aspects of sex and feeding, and do approximate to the
+unwavering glow of romantic heroes. Carl was no more a romantic
+hero-lover than, as a celebrated aviator, he had been a
+hero-adventurer. He was a human being. He was not even admirable,
+except as all people are admirable, from the ash-man to the king.
+There had been nothing exemplary in his struggle to find adjustment
+with his wife; he had been bad in his impatience just as he had been
+good in his boyish affection; in both he had been human. Even now,
+when without reserve he gave himself up to love, he was aware that he
+would ascend, not on godlike pinions, but by a jerky old
+apartment-house elevator, to make peace with a vexed girl who was also
+a human being, with a digestive system and prejudices. Yet with a joy
+that encompassed all the beauty of banners and saluting swords,
+romantic towers and a fugitive queen, a joy transcending trains and
+elevators and prejudices, Carl knew that human girl as the symbol of
+man's yearning for union with the divine; he desired happiness for her
+with a devotion great as the passion in Galahad's heart when all night
+he knelt before the high altar.
+
+He came slowly up to their apartment-house. If it were only possible
+for Ruth to trust him, now----
+
+Mingled with his painfully clear remembrance of all the sweet things
+Ruth was and had done was a tragic astonishment that he--this same he
+who was all hers now--could possibly have turned impatiently from her
+sobs. Yet it would have been for good, if only she would trust him.
+
+Not till he left the elevator, on their floor, did he comprehend that
+Ruth might not be awaiting him; might have gone. He looked
+irresolutely at the grill of the elevator door, shut on the black
+shaft.
+
+"She was here when I telephoned----"
+
+He waited. Perhaps she would peep out to see if it was he who had come
+up in the elevator.
+
+She did not appear.
+
+He walked the endless distance of ten feet to their door, unlocked it,
+labored across the tiny hall into the living-room. She was there. She
+stood supporting herself by the back of the davenport, her eyes
+red-edged and doubtful, her face tightened, expressing enmity or dread
+or shy longing. He held out his hands, like a prisoner beseeching
+royal mercy. She in turn threw out her arms. He could not say one
+word. The clumsy signs called "words" could not tell his emotion. He
+ran to her, and she welcomed his arms. He held her, abandoned himself
+utterly to her kiss. His hard-driving mind relaxed; relaxed was her
+body in his arms. He knew, not merely with his mind, but with the
+vaster powers that drive mind and emotion and body, that Ruth, in her
+disheveled dressing-gown, was the glorious lover to whom he had been
+hastening this hour past. All the love which civilization had tried to
+turn into Normal Married Life had escaped Efficiency's pruning-hook,
+and had flowered.
+
+"It's all right with me, now," she said; "so wonderfully all right."
+
+"I want to explain. Had to be by myself; find out. Must have seemed so
+unspeakably r----"
+
+"Oh, don't, don't explain! Our kiss explained."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While they talked on the davenport together, reaching out again and
+again for the hands that now really were there, Ruth agreed with Carl
+that they must be up and away, not wait till it should be too late.
+She, too, saw how many lovers plan under the June honeymoon to sail
+away after a year or two and see the great world, and, when they
+wearily die, know that it will still be a year or two before they can
+flee to the halcyon isles.
+
+But she did insist that they plan practically; and it was she who
+wondered: "But what would happen if everybody went skipping off like
+us? Who'd bear the children and keep the fields plowed to feed the
+ones that ran away?"
+
+"Golly!" cried Carl, "wish that were the worst problem we had! Maybe a
+thousand years from now, when every one is so artistic that they want
+to write books, it will be hard to get enough drudges. But now----
+Look at any office, with the clerks toiling day after day, even the
+unmarried ones. Look at all the young fathers of families, giving up
+everything they want to do, to support children who'll do the same
+thing right over again with _their_ children. Always handing on the
+torch of life, but never getting any light from it. People don't run
+away from slavery often enough. And so they don't ever get to do real
+work, either!"
+
+"But, sweetheart, what if we should have children some day? You
+know---- Of course, we haven't been ready for them yet, but some day
+they might come, anyhow, and how could we wander round----"
+
+"Oh, probably they will come some day, and then we'll take our dose of
+drudgery like the rest. There's nothing that our dear civilization
+punishes as it does begetting children. For poisoning food by
+adulterating it you may get fined fifty dollars, but if you have
+children they call it a miracle--as it is--and then they get busy and
+condemn you to a lifetime of being scared by the boss."
+
+"Well, darling, please don't blame it on me."
+
+"I didn't mean to get so oratorical, blessed. But it does make me mad
+the way the state punishes one for being willing to work and have
+children. Perhaps if enough of us run away from nice normal grinding,
+we'll start people wondering just why they should go on toiling to
+produce a lot of booze and clothes and things that nobody needs."
+
+"Perhaps, my Hawk.... Don't you think, though, that we might be bored
+in your Rocky Mountain cabin, if we were there for months and months?"
+
+"Yes, I suppose so," Carl mused. "The rebellion against stuffy
+marriage has to be a whole lot wider than some little detail like
+changing from city to country. Probably for some people the happiest
+thing 'd be to live in a hobohemian flat and have parties, and for
+some to live in the suburbs and get the missus elected president of
+the Village Improvement Society. For us, I believe, it's change and
+_keep going_."
+
+"Yes, I do think so. Hawk, my Hawk, I lay awake nearly all night last
+night, realizing that we _are_ one, not because of a wedding ceremony,
+but because we can understand each other's make-b'lieves and
+seriousnesses. I knew that no matter what happened, we had to try
+again.... I saw last night, by myself, that it was not a question of
+finding out whose fault a quarrel was; that it wasn't anybody's
+'fault,' but just conditions.... And we'll change them.... We won't be
+afraid to be free."
+
+"We won't! Lord! life's wonderful!"
+
+"Yes! When I think of how sweet life can be--so wonderfully sweet--I
+know that all the prophets must love human beings, oh, so terribly, no
+matter how sad they are about the petty things that lives are wasted
+over.... But I'm not a prophet. I'm a girl that's awfully much in
+love, and, darling, I want you to hold me close."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three months later, in February, 1915, Ruth and Carl sailed for Buenos
+Ayres, America's new export-market. Carl was the Argentine Republic
+manager for the VanZile Motor Corporation, possessed of an unimportant
+salary, a possibility of large commissions, and hopes like comets.
+Their happiness seemed a thing enchanted. They had not quarreled
+again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The S.S. _Sangrael_, for Buenos Ayres and Rio, had sailed from snow
+into summer. Ruth and Carl watched isles of palms turn to fantasies
+carved of ebony, in the rose and garnet sunset waters, and the vast
+sky laugh out in stars. Carl was quoting Kipling:
+
+    "The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
+    And the deuce knows what we may do--
+    But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the
+        out trail,
+    We're down, hull down on the Old Trail--the trail that is always new."
+
+"Anyway," he commented, "deuce only knows what we'll do after
+Argentine, and I don't care. Do you?"
+
+Her clasping hand answered, as he went on:
+
+"Oh, say, bles-sed! I forgot to look in the directory before we left
+New York to see if there wasn't a Society for the Spread of Madness
+among the Respectable. It might have sent us out as missionaries....
+There's a flying-fish; and to-morrow I won't have to watch clerks
+punch a time-clock; and you can hear a sailor shifting the
+ventilators; and there's a little star perched on the fore-mast;
+singing; but the big thing is that you're here beside me, and we're
+_going_. How bully it is to be living, if you don't have to give up
+living in order to make a living."
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trail of the Hawk, by Sinclair Lewis
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