The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
myself know how much I wanted her. She's everything. She's sister and
chum and wife and everything."
"It's----But I am glad for you. Will you believe that? And perhaps you
understand how I felt, now. I'm very sorry I let myself go. I hope you
will----Oh, please go now."
He sprang up, only too ready to go. But first he kissed her hand with
a courtly reverence, and said, with a sweetness new to him: "Dear,
will you forgive me if I've ever hurt you? And will you believe how
very, very much I honor you? And when I see you again there won't
be--we'll both forget all about to-night, won't we? We'll just be the
old Carl and Gertie again. Tell me to come when----"
"Yes. I will. Goodnight."
"Good night, Gertie. God bless you."
* * * * *
He never remembered where he walked that night when he had left
Gertie. The exercise, the chill of the night, gradually set his numbed
mind working again. But it dwelt with Ruth, not with Gertie. Now that
he had given words to his longing for Ruth, to his pride in her, he
understood that he had passed the hidden border of that misty land
called "being in love," which cartographers have variously described
as a fruitful tract of comfortable harvests, as a labyrinth with walls
of rose and silver, and as a tenebrous realm of unhappy ghosts.
He stopped at a street corner where, above a saloon with a large
beer-sign, stretched dim tenement windows toward a dirty sky; and on
that drab corner glowed for a moment the mystic light of the Rose of
All the World--before a Tammany saloon! Chin high, yearning toward a
girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had
worshiped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant
over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic,
standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and a
cigars-and-stationery shop round the corner, was one with the young
priest saying mass, one with the suffragist woman defying a jeering
mob, one with Ruth Winslow listening to the ringing stars.
"God--help--me--to--be--worthy--of--her!"
Nothing more did he say, in words, yet he was changed for ever.
Changed. True that when he got home, half an hour later, and in the
dark ran his nose against an opened door, he said, "Damn it!" very
naturally. True that on Monday, back in the office that awaits its
victims equally after Sundays golden or dreary, he forgot Ruth's
existence for hours at a time. True that at lunch with two VanZile
automobile salesmen he ate _Wiener Schnitzel_ and shot dice for
cigars, with no signs of a mystic change. It is even true that, dining
at the Brevoort with Charley Forbes, he though of Istra Nash, and for
a minute was lonely for Istra's artistic dissipation. Yet the change
was there.
CHAPTER XXXIII
From Titherington, the aviator, in his Devonshire home, from a
millionaire amateur flier among the orange-groves at Pasadena, from
his carpenter father in Joralemon, and from Gertie in New York, Carl
had invitations for Christmas, but none that he could accept. VanZile
had said, pleasantly, "Going out to the country for Christmas?"
"Yes," Cal had lied.
Again he saw himself as the Dethroned Prince, and remembered that one
year ago, sailing for South America to fly with Tony Bean, he had been
the lion at a Christmas party on shipboard, while Martin Dockerill,
his mechanic, had been a friendly slave.
He spent most of Christmas Eve alone in his room, turning over old
letters, and aviation magazines with pictures of Hawk Ericson,
wondering whether he might not go back to that lost world. Josiah
Bagby, Jr., son of the eccentric doctor at whose school Carl had
learned to fly, was experimenting with hydroaeroplanes and with
bomb-dropping devices at Palm Beach, and imploring Carl, as the
steadiest pilot in America, to join him. The dully noiseless room
echoed the music of a steady motor carrying him out over a blue bay.
Carl's own answer to the tempter vision was: "Rats! I can't very well
leave the Touricar now, and I don't know as I've got my flying nerve
back yet. Besides, Ruth----"
Always he thought of Ruth, uneasy with the desire to be out dancing,
laughing, playing with her. He was tormented by a question he had been
threshing out for days: Might he permissibly have sent her a
Christmas present?
He went to bed at ten o'clock--on Christmas Eve, when the streets were
surging with voices and gay steps, when rollicking piano-tunes from
across the street penetrated even closed windows, and a German voice
as rich as milk chocolate was caressing, "_Oh Tannenbaum, oh
Tannenbaum, wie gruen sind deine Blaetter._"... Then slept for nine
hours, woke with rapturous remembrance that he didn't have to go to
the office, and sang "The Banks of the Saskatchewan" in his bath. When
he returned to the house, after breakfast, he found a letter from
Ruth:
The Day before Xmas & all thru the Mansion
The Maids with Turkey are Stirring--Please Pardon the Scansion.
DEAR PLAYMATE,--You said on our tramp that I would make a
good playmate, but I'm sure that I should be a very poor one
if I did not wish you a gloriously merry Xmas & a New Year
that will bring you all the dear things you want. I shall be
glad if you do not get this letter on Xmas day itself if
that means that you are off at some charming country house
having a most katische (is that the way it is spelled,
probably not) time. But if by any chance you _are_ in town,
won't you make your playmate's shout to you from her back
yard a part of your Xmas? She feels shy about sending this
effusive greeting with all its characteristic sloppiness of
writing, but she does want you to have a welcome to Xmas
fun, & won't you please give the Touricar a pair of warm
little slippers from
RUTH GAYLORD WINSLOW.
P.S. Mrs. Tirrell has sent me an angel miniature Jap garden,
with a tiny pergola & real dwarf trees & a bridge that you
expect an Alfred Noyes lantern on, & Oh Carl, an issa
goldfish in a pool!
MISS R. WINSLOW.
"'----all the dear things I want'!" Carl repeated, standing tranced in
the hall, oblivious of the doctor-landlord snooping at the back. "Ruth
blessed, do you know the thing I want most?... Say! Great! I'll
hustle out and send her all the flowers in the world. Or, no. I've got
it." He was already out of the house, hastening toward the subway.
"I'll send her one of these lingerie tea-baskets with all kinds of
baby pots of preserves and tea-balls and stuff.... Wonder what
Dunleavy sent her?... Rats! I don't care. Jiminy! I'm happy! Me to
Palm Beach to fly? Not a chance!"
He had Christmas dinner in state, with the California Exiles Club. He
was craftily careless about the manner in which he touched a letter in
his pocket for gloves, which tailors have been inspired to put on the
left side of dress-clothes.
* * * * *
Twice Carl called at Ruth's in the two weeks after Christmas. Once she
declared that she was tired of modern life, that socialism and
agnosticism shocked her, that the world needed the courtly stiffness
of mid-Victorian days, as so ably depicted in the works of Mrs.
Florence Barclay--needed hair-cloth as a scourge for white
tango-dancing backs. As for her, Ruth announced, she was going to be
mid-Victorian just as soon as she could find a hair-locket, silk
mitts, and an elderly female tortoise-shell cat with an instinctive
sense of delicacy. She sat bolt-upright on the front of the most
impersonal French-gilt chair in the drawing-room and asserted that
Phil Dunleavy, with his safe ancestry of two generations of
wholesalers and strong probabilities about the respectability of still
another generation, was her ideal of a Christian gentleman. She wore a
full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the
middle, her right hand laid flat over her left in her lap. Her
vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter
sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself and tucked one smooth,
silk-clad, un-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered
her poise of a vicarage, remarking, "I have been subject to very
careless influences lately." She called him neither "Carl" nor "Mr.
Ericson" nor anything else, and he dared not venture on Ruth.
He went home in bewilderment. As he crossed Broadway he loitered
insolently, as though challenging the flying squadron of taxicabs to
run him down. "What do I care if they hit me?" he inquired, savagely,
of his sympathetic and applauding self. Every word she had said he
examined, finding double and triple meanings, warning himself not to
regard her mood seriously, but unable to make the warning take.
On his next call there was a lively Ruth who invited him up to the
library, read extracts from Stephen Leacock's _Nonsense Novels_;
turned companionably serious, and told him how divided were her
sympathies between her father--the conscientiously worried
employer--and a group of strikers in his factory. She made coffee in a
fantastic percolator, and played Debussy and ragtime. At ten-thirty,
the hour at which he had vehemently resolved to go, they were curled
in two big chairs eating chocolate peppermints and talking of
themselves apropos of astronomy and the Touricar and Lincoln Beachey's
daring and Mason Winslow and patriotism and Joralemon. Ruth's father
drifted in from his club at a quarter to eleven. Carl now met him for
the first time. He was a large-stomached, bald, sober, friendly man,
with a Gladstone collar, a huge watch-chain, kindly trousers and
painfully smart tan boots, a father of the kind who gives cigars and
non-committal encouragement to daughter's suitors.
* * * * *
It takes a voice with personality and modulations to make a
fifteen-minute telephone conversation tolerable, and youth to make it
possible. Ruth had both. For fifteen minutes she discussed with Carl
the question of whether she should go to Marion Browne's dinner-dance
at Delmonico's, as Phil wished, or go skeeing in the Westchester
Hills, as Carl wished, the coming Saturday--the first Saturday in
February, 1913. Carl won.
* * * * *
They arrived at a station in the Bedford Hills, bearing long,
carved-prowed Norwegian skees, which seemed to hypnotize the other
passengers. To Carl's joy (for he associated that suit with the
Palisades and their discovery of each other), Ruth was in her blue
corduroy, with high-lace boots and a gray sweater jacket of silky
wool. Carl displayed a tweed Norfolk jacket, a great sweater, and
mittens unabashed. He had a mysterious pack which, he informed the
excited Ruth, contained Roland's sword and the magic rug of Bagdad.
Together they were apple-cheeked, chattering children of outdoors.
For all the horizon's weight of dark clouds, clear sunshine lay on
clear snow as they left the train and trotted along the road, carrying
their skees beyond the outskirts of the town. Country sleigh-bells
chinkled down a hill; children shouted and made snow houses; elders
stamped their feet and clucked, "Fine day!" New York was far off and
ridiculously unimportant. Carl and Ruth reached an open sloping field,
where the snow that partly covered a large rock was melting at its
lacy, crystaled edges, staining the black rock to a shiny wetness that
was infinitely cheerful in its tiny reflection of the blue sky at the
zenith. On a tree whose bleak bark the sun had warmed, vagrant
sparrows in hand-me-down feathers discussed rumors of the
establishment of a bread-crumb line and the better day that was coming
for all proletarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out