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