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