The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life

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