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