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