The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
pretending, as he had pretended with Eve L'Ewysse.
Happy. But hungry!
Mrs. Needham should have been graciously absent by the time they
reached her house--a suburban residence with a large porch. But, as
they approached, Ruth cried:
"'Shhhh! There seems to be somebody moving around in the living room.
I don't believe Laura 's gone yet. That would spoil it. Come on. Let's
peep. Let's be Indian scouts!"
Cautioning each other with warning pats, they tiptoed guiltily to the
side of the house and peered in at the dining-room window, where the
shade was raised a couple of inches above the sill. A noise at the
back of the house made them start and flatten against the wall.
"Big chief," whispered Carl, "the redskins are upon us! But old Brown
Barrel shall make many an one bite the dust!"
"Hush, silly.... Oh, it's just the maid. See, she's looking at the
clock and wondering why we don't get here."
"But maybe Mrs. Needham 's in the other room."
"No. Because the maid's sniffing around--there, she's reading a
post-card some one left on the side-table. Oh yes, and she's chewing
gum. Laura has certainly departed. Probably Laura is chewing gum
herself at the present moment, now that she's out from under the eye
of her maid. Laura always was ree-fined, but I wouldn't trust her to
be proof against the feeling of wild dissipation you can get out of
chewing gum, if you live in Winklehurst."
They had rung the door-bell on the porch by now.
"I'm so glad," said Ruth, "that Laura is gone. She is very
literal-minded. She might not understand that we could be hastily
married and even lease a house, this way, and still be only tea
acquaintances."
The maid had not yet answered. Waiting in the still porch, winter
everywhere beyond it, Carl was all excited anticipation. He hastily
pressed her hand, and she lightly returned the pressure, laughing,
breathing quickly. They started like convicted lovers as the maid
opened the door. The consciousness of their starting made them the
more embarrassed, and they stammered before the maid. Ruth fled
up-stairs, while Carl tried to walk up gravely, though he was tingling
with the game.
When he had washed (discovering, as every one newly discovers after
every long, chilly walk, that water from the cold tap feels amazingly
warm on hands congealed by the tramp), and was loitering in the upper
hall, Ruth called to him from Mrs. Needham's room:
"I think you'll find hair-brushes and things in Jack's room, to the
right. Oh, I am very stupid; I forgot this was our house; I mean in
your room, of course."
He had a glimpse of her, twisting up a strand of naturally wavy brown
hair, a silver-backed hair-brush bright against it, her cheeks flushed
to an even crimson, her blue corduroy jacket off, and, warmly intimate
in its stead, a blouse of blue satin, opening in a shallow triangle at
her throat. With a tender big-brotherliness he sought the room that
was his, not Jack's. No longer was this the house of Other People, but
one in which he belonged.
"No," he heard himself explain, "she isn't beautiful. Istra Nash was
nearer that. But, golly! she is such a good pal, and she is beautiful
if an English lane is. Oh, stop rambling.... If I could kiss that
little honey place at the base of her throat...."
"Yes, Miss Winslow. Coming. _Am_ I ready for dinner? Watch me!"
She confided as he came out into the hall, "Isn't it terribly
confusing to have our home and even three toby-children all ready-made
for us, this way!"
Her glance--eyes that always startled him with blue where dark-brown
was expected; even teeth showing; head cocked sidelong; cheeks burning
with fire of December snow--her glance and all her manner trusted him,
the outlaw. It was not as an outsider, but as her comrade that he
answered:
"Golly! have we a family, too? I always forget. So sorry. But you
know--get so busy at the office----"
"Why, I _think_ we have one. I'll go look in the nursery and make
sure, but I'm almost positive----"
"No, I'll take your word for it. You're around the house more than I
am.... But, oh, say, speaking of that, that reminds me: Woman, if you
think that I'm going to buy you a washing-machine this year, when I've
already bought you a napkin-ring and a portrait of Martha
Washington----"
"_Oh weh!_ I knew I should have a cruel husband who----Joy! I think
the maid is prowling about and trying to listen. 'Shhh! The story
Laura will get out of her!"
While the maid served dinner, there could scarce have been a more
severely correct pair, though Carl did step on her toe when she was
saying to the maid, in her best offhand manner, "Oh, Leah, will you
please tell Mrs. Needham that I stole a handkerchief from my--I mean
from her room?"
But when the maid had been unable to find any more imaginary crumbs to
brush off the table, and had left them alone with their hearts and the
dessert, a most rowdy young "married couple" quarreled violently over
the washing-machine he still refused to buy for her.
Carl insisted that, as suburbanites, they had to play cards, and he
taught her pinochle, which he had learned from the bartender of the
Bowery saloon. But the cards dropped from their fingers, and they sat
before the gas-log in the living-room, in a lazy, perfect happiness,
when she said:
"All the while we've been playing cards--and playing the still more
dangerous game of being married--I've been thinking how glad I am to
know about your life. Somehow----I wonder if you have told so very
many?"
"Practically no one."
"I do----I'm really not fishing for compliments, but I do want to be
found understanding----"
"There's never been any one so understanding."
Silent then. Carl glanced about the modern room. Ruth's eyes followed.
She nodded as he said:
"But it's really an old farm-house out in the hills where the snow is
deep; and there's logs in the fireplace."
"Yes, and rag carpets."
"And, oh, Ruth, listen, a bob-sled with----Golly! I suppose it is a
little premature to call you 'Ruth,' but after our being married all
evening I don't see how I can call you 'Miss Winslow.'"
"No, I'm afraid it would scarcely be proper, under the circumstances.
Then I must be 'Mrs. Ericson.' Ooh! It makes me think of Norse galleys
and northern seas. Of course--your galley was the aeroplane.... 'Mrs.
Eric----'" Her voice ran down; she flushed and said, defensively:
"What time is it? I think we must be starting. I telephoned I would be
home by ten." Her tone was conventional as her words.
But as they stood waiting for a trolley-car to the New York ferry, on
a street corner transformed by an arc-light that swung in the wind and
cast wavering films of radiance among the vague wintry trees of a
wood-lot, Ruth tucked her arm under his, small beside his great
ulster, and sighed like a child:
"I am ver-ee cold!"
He rubbed her hand protectingly, her mouselike hand in its fur-lined
glove. His canny, self-defensive, Scotchlike Norse soul opened its
gates. He knew a longing to give, a passion to protect her, a whelming
desire to have shy secrets with this slim girl. All the poetry in the
world sounded its silver harps within him because his eyes were opened
and it was given to him to see her face. Gently he said:
"Yes, it's cold, and there's big gray ghosts hiding there in the
trees, with their leathery wings, that were made out of sea-fog by the
witches, folded in front of them, and they're glumming at us over the
bony, knobly joints on top their wings, with big, round platter eyes.
And the wind is calling us--it's trying to snatch us out on the arctic
snow-fields, to freeze us. But I'll fight them all off. I won't let
them take you, Ruth."
"I'm sure you won't, Carl."
"And--oh--you won't let Phil Dunleavy keep you from running away, not
for a while yet?"
"M-maybe not."
The sky had cleared. She tilted up her chin and adored the
stars--stars like the hard, cold, fighting sparks that fly from a
trolley-wire. Carl looked down fondly, noting how fair-skinned was her
forehead in contrast to her thick, dark brows, as the arc-light's
brilliance rested on her worshiping face--her lips a-tremble and
slightly parted. She raised her arms, her fingers wide-spread,
praising the star-gods. She cried only, "Oh, all this----" but it was
a prayer to a greater god Pan, shaking his snow-incrusted beard to the
roar of northern music. To Carl her cry seemed to pledge faith in the
starred sky and the long trail and a glorious restlessness that by a
dead fireplace of white, smooth marble would never find content.
"Like sword-points, those stars are," he said, then----
Then they heard the trolley-car's flat wheels grinding on a curve. Its
search-light changed the shadow-haunted woodland to a sad group of
scanty trees, huddling in front of an old bill-board, with its top
broken and the tattered posters flapping. The wanderers stepped from
the mystical romance of the open night into the exceeding realism of
the car--highly realistic wooden floor with small, muddy pools from
lumps of dirty melting snow, hot air, a smell of Italian workmen, a
German conductor with the sniffles, a row of shoes mostly wet and all
wrinkled. They had to stand. Most realistic of all, they read the
glossy car-signs advertising soap and little cigars, and the
enterprising local advertisement of "Wm. P. Smith & Sons, All Northern
New Jersey Real Estate, Cheaper Than Rent." So, instantly, the
children of the night turned into two sophisticated young New-Yorkers
who, apologizing for fresh-air yawns, talked of the theatrical season.
But for a moment a strange look of distance dwelt in Ruth's eyes, and
she said: "I wonder what I can do with the winter stars we've found?
Will Ninety-second Street be big enough for them?"
CHAPTER XXXII
For a week--the week before Christmas--Carl had seen neither Ruth nor
Gertie; but of the office he had seen too much. They were "rushing
work" on the Touricar to have it on the market early in 1913. Every
afternoon or evening he left the office with his tongue scaly from too
much nervous smoking; poked dully about the streets, not much desiring
to go any place, nor to watch the crowds, after all the curiosity had
been drawn out of him by hours of work. Several times he went to a
super-movie, a cinema palace on Broadway above Seventy-second Street,
with an entrance in New York Colonial architecture, and crowds of
well-to-do Jewish girls in opera-cloaks.
On the two bright mornings of the week he wanted to play truant from
the office, to be off with Ruth over the hills and far away. Both
mornings there came to him a picture of Gertie, wanting to slip out
and play like Ruth, but having no chance. He felt guilty because he
had never bidden Gertie come tramping, and guiltily he recalled that
it was with her that the boy Carl had gone to seek-our-fortunes. He
told himself that he had been depending upon Gertie for the
bread-and-butter of friendship, and begging for the opportunity to
give the stranger, Ruth Winslow, dainties of which she already had too
much.
When he called, Sunday evening, he found Gertie alone, reading a
love-story in a woman's magazine.
"I'm so glad you came," she said. "I was getting quite lonely." She
was as gratefully casual as ever.
"Say, Gertie, I've got a plan. Wouldn't you like to go for some good
long hikes in the country?"
"Oh yes; that would be fine when spring comes."
"No; I mean now, in the winter."
She looked at him heavily. "Why, isn't it pretty cold, don't you
think?"
He prepared to argue, but he did not think of her as looking heavily.
He did not draw swift comparisons between Gertie's immobility and
Ruth's lightness. He was used to Gertie; was in her presence
comfortably understanding and understood; could find whatever he