The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would
soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not
to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen
minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he
remembering the fact that she was a result of city life; she the fact
that he wasn't a product of city life.
And a fact which neither of them realized, save subconsciously, was in
the background: Carl himself had come in a few years from Oscar
Ericson's back yard to Ruth Winslow's library--he had made the step
naturally, as only an American could, but it was a step.
She was loftily polite. "I'm afraid you can't quite understand what
the niceties of life mean to people like Phil. I'm sorry he won't give
them up to the first truck-driver he meets, but I'm afraid he won't,
and occasionally it's necessary to face facts! Niceties of the kind he
has gr----"
"_Nice!_"
"Really----" Her heavy eyebrows arched in a frown.
"If you're going to get 'nice' on me, of course you'll have to be
condescending, and that's one thing I won't permit."
"I'm afraid you'll find that one has to permit a great many things.
Sometimes, apparently, I must permit great rudeness."
"Have I been rude? Have----"
"Yes. Very."
He could endure no more. "Good night!" he growled, and was gone.
He was frightened to find himself out of the house; the door closed
between them; no going back without ringing the bell. He couldn't go
back. He walked a block, slow, incredulous. He stood hesitant before
the nearest corner drug-store, shivering in the March wind, wondering
if he dared go into the store and telephone her. He was willing to
concede anything. He planned apt phrases to use. Surely everything
would be made right if he could only speak to her. He pictured himself
crossing the drug-store floor, entering the telephone-booth, putting
five cents in the slot. He stared at the red-and-green globes in the
druggist's window; inspected a display of soaps, and recollected the
fact that for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving-soap
and had had to use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a
shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I
_must_ try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for
thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that
soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave and angel, for
while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he
sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went
into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. There was no
sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly
ice-cream soda, and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank
it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he
knew not what.
He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her.
But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into
defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his
top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of
"niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go
anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and
comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the
results of losing his job, or of being robbed of his interests in the
Touricar. He glanced interestedly at a pretty girl; recklessly went
into a cigar-store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again.
As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went
over every word Ruth or he had said, and when he reached his room he
sat deep in an arm-chair, like a hurt animal crouching, his coat still
on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged, his legs
straight out before him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he
disconsolately contemplated a photograph of Forrest Haviland in
full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau among tangled ties,
stray cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff-buttons, and a
haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and
gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not
know how the play would end.
But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in
earnest.
Forrest's portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no
picture of Ruth, that he wanted one. Next time he saw her he would
ask her.... Then he remembered.
He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over gloweringly, and
chewed it without lighting it, the right corner of his mouth vicious
in appearance. But his tone was plaintive as he mourned, "How did it
all start, anyway?"
He drew off his top-coat and shoes, and put on his shabby though once
expensive slippers. Slowly. He lay on his bed. He certainly did not
intend to go to sleep--but he awoke at 2 A.M., dressed, the light
burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and
dry-mouthed--a victim of all the woes since tall Troy burned. He
shucked off his clothes as you shuck an ear of corn.
When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual, greeting a shining new
day, till he realized that it was not a shining day; it was an ominous
day; everything was wrong. That something had happened--really
had--was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His chief reaction
was not repentance nor dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to
unwish the whole affair. "Hang it!" he groaned.
Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth. "Poor
kid! it was rotten to row with her, her completely all in with the
grippe."
At three in the afternoon he telephoned to her house. "Miss Ruth," he
was informed, "was asleep; she was not very well."
Would the maid please ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ericson when she woke?
Certainly the maid would.
But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him
call again, for days, and Ruth never called him.
He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing
himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance,
on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She
was with Phil Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily,
oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of Carl Ericson.
That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train; stood there
alone, due at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, but suddenly not
wishing to go, not wishing to go anywhere nor do anything, friendless,
bored, driftwood in the city.
So easily had the Hawk swooped down into her life, coming by chance,
but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away.
* * * * *
For three days he planned in a headachy way to make an end of his job
and join Bagby, Jr., in his hydroaeroplane experiments. He pictured
the crowd that would worship him. He told himself stories unhappy and
long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure
that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever
displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without
cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he
called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.
"May I come up to-night?" he said, urgently.
"Yes," she said. That was all.
When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed
that she had wanted to telephone to him.
Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:
"I was grouchy----"
"I was beastly----"
"I'm honestly sorry----"
"'ll you forgive----"
"What was it all about?"
"Really, I do--not--know!"
"I agree with lots of the things you----"
"No, I agree with you, but just at the time--you know."
Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about
her shoulders--lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every
thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the
smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her
coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to
care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished.
Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual
scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.
She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz.
It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano-lamp they were
silent, happy. He merely touched her hand, when he went, but he sang
his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman.
"I've found her again; it isn't merely play, now!" he kept repeating.
"And I've learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it's
as though I'd learned a new language. Gee! I'm happy!"
CHAPTER XXXV
On an April Saturday morning Carl rose with a feeling of spring. He
wanted to be off in the Connecticut hills, among the silvery-gray
worm-fences, with larks rising on the breeze and pools a-ripple and
yellow crocus-blossoms afire by the road, where towns white and sleepy
woke to find the elms misted with young green. Would there be any
crocuses out as yet? That was the only question worth solving in the
world, save the riddle of Ruth's heart. The staid brownstone houses of
the New York streets displayed few crocuses and fewer larks, yet over
them to-day was the bloom of romance. Carl walked down to the
automobile district past Central Park, sniffing wistfully at the damp
grass, pale green amid old gray; marveling how a bare patch of brown
earth, without a single blade of grass, could smell so stirringly of
coming spring. A girl on Broadway was selling wild violets, white and
purple, and in front of wretched old houses down a side-street, in the
negro district, a darky in a tan derby and a scarlet tie was caroling:
"Mandy, in de spring
De mocking-birds do sing,
An' de flowers am so sweet along de ol' bayou----"
Above the darky's head, elevated trains roared on the Fifty-third
Street trestle, and up Broadway streaked a stripped motor-car, all
steel chassis and grease-mottled board seat and lurid odor of
gasoline. But sparrows splashed in the pools of sunshine; in a lull
the darky's voice came again, chanting passionately, "In de spring,
spring, _spring_!" and Carl clamored: "I've _got_ to get out to-day.
Terrible glad it's a half-holiday. Wonder if I dare telephone to
Ruth?"
At a quarter to three they were rollicking down the "smart side" of
Fifth Avenue. One could see that they were playmates, by her dancing
steps and his absorption in her. He bent a little toward her, quick to
laugh with her.
Ruth was in a frock of flowered taffeta. "I won't wait till Easter to
show off my spring clothes. It isn't done any more," she said. "It's
as stupid as Bobby's not daring to wear a straw hat one single day
after September fifteenth. Is an aviator brave enough to wear his
after the fifteenth?... Think! I didn't know you then--last September.
I can't understand it."
"But I knew you, blessed, because I was sure spring was coming again,
and that distinctly implied Ruth."
"Of course it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the Spirit of Spring.
Last Wednesday, when I lost my marquise ring, I was the spirit of
vitriol, but now----I'm a poet. I've thought it all out and decided
that I shall be the American Sappho. At any moment I am quite likely
to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb and indite
several stanzas on the back of a calling-card, while the crowd galumps
around me in an awed ring.... I feel like kidnapping you and making
you take me aeroplaning, but I'll compromise. You're to buy me a book
and take me down to the Maison Epinay for tea, and read me poetry