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

three degrees of marquetry, three electroliers, four punch-bowls, three sets of almond-dishes, a pair of bird-carvers that did not carve, a bust of Dante in New Art marble, or a de luxe set of De Maupassant translated by a worthy lady with a French lexicon. Instead, they bought what they wanted--rather an impertinent thing to do, but, like most impertinences, thoroughly worth while. Their living-room was their own. Carl's bedroom was white and simple, though spotty with aviation medals and silver cups and monoplanes sketchily rendered in gold, and signed photographs of aviators. Ruth's bedroom was also plain and white and dull Japanese gray, a simple room with that simplicity of hand-embroidery, real lace, and fine linen appreciated by exclamatory women friends. She taught Carl to say "dahg" instead of "dawg" for "dog"; "wawta" instead of "wotter" for "water." Whether she was more correct in her pronunciation or not does not matter; New York said "dahg," and it amused him just then to be very Eastern. She taught him the theory of house-lighting. Carl had no fanatical objection to unshaded incandescent bulbs glaring from the ceiling. But he came to like the shaded electric lamps which Ruth installed in the living-room. When she introduced four candles as sole lighting of the dining-room table, however, he grumbled loudly at his inability to see what he was eating. She retired to her bedroom, and he huffily went out to get a cigar. At the cigar-counter he repented of all the unkind things he had ever done or could possibly do, and returned to eat humble pie--and eat it by candle-light. Inside of two weeks one of the things which Carl Ericson had always known was that the harmonious candle-light brought them close together at dinner. The teaching, in this Period of Adjustments, was not all on Ruth's part. It was due to Carl's insistence that she tried to discover what her theological beliefs really were. She admitted that only at twilight vespers, with a gale of violins in an arched roof, did she really worship in church. She did not believe that priests and ministers, who seemed to be ordinary men as regards earthly things, had any extraordinary knowledge of the mysteries of heaven. Yet she took it for granted that she was a good Christian. She rarely disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic. Of the four it was Carl who seemed to have the greatest interest in religions. He blurted out such monologues as, "I wonder if it isn't pure egotism that makes a person believe that the religion he is born to is the best? _My_ country, _my_ religion, _my_ wife, _my_ business--we think that whatever is ours is necessarily sacred, or, in other words, that we are gods--and then we call it faith and patriotism! The Hindu or the Christian is equally ready to prove to you--and mind you, he may be a wise old man with a beard--that his national religion is obviously the only one. Find out what you yourself really do think, and if you turn out a Sun-worshiper or a Hard-shell Baptist, why, good luck. If you don't think for yourself, then you're admitting that your theory of happiness is the old dog asleep in the sun. And maybe he is happier than the student. But I think you like to experiment with life." His arguments were neither original nor especially logical; they were largely given to him by Bone Stillman, Professor Frazer, and chance paragraphs in stray radical magazines. But to Ruth, politely reared in a house with three maids, where it was as tactless to discuss God as to discuss sex, his defiances seemed terrifyingly new.... She was not the first who had complacently gone to church after reading Bernard Shaw.... But she did try to follow Carl's loose reasoning; to find out what she thought and what the spiritual fashions of her neighborhood made her think she thought. The process gave her many anxious hours of alternating impatience with fixed religious dogmas, and loneliness for the comfortable refuge of a personal God, whose yearning had spoken to her in the Gregorian chant. She could never get herself to read more than two chapters of any book on the subject, nor did she get much light from conversation. One set of people supposed that Christianity had so entirely disappeared from intelligent circles that it was not worth discussion; another set supposed that no one but cranks ever thought of doubting the essentials of Christianity, and that, therefore, it was not worth discussion; and to a few superb women whom she knew, their religion was too sweet a reality to be subjected to the noisy chatter of discussion. Gradually Ruth forgot to think often of the matter, but it was always back in her mind. * * * * * They were happy, Carl and Ruth. To their flat came such of Ruth's friends as she kept because she liked them for themselves, with a fantastic assortment of personages and awkward rovers whom the ex-aviator knew. The Ericsons made an institution of "bruncheon"--breakfast-luncheon--at which coffee and eggs and deviled kidneys, a table of auction bridge and a davenport of talk and a wing-chair of Sunday papers, were to be had on Sunday morning from ten to one. At bruncheon Walter MacMonnies told to Florence Crewden his experiences in exploring Southern Greenland by aeroplane with the Schliess-Banning expedition. At bruncheon Bobby Winslow, now an interne, talked baseball with Carl. At bruncheon Phil Dunleavy regarded cynically all the people he did not know and played piquet in a corner with Ruth's father. Carl and Ruth joined the Peace Waters Country Club, and in the spring of 1914 went there nearly every Saturday afternoon for tennis and a dance. Carl refused golf, however; he always repeated a shabby joke about the shame of taking advantage of such a tiny ball. He seemed content to stick to office, home, and tennis-court. It was Ruth who planned their week-end trips, proposed at 8 A.M. Saturday, and begun at two that afternoon. They explored the tangled rocks and woods of Lloyd's Neck, on Long Island, sleeping in an abandoned shack, curled together like kittens. They swooped on a Dutch village in New Jersey, spent the night with an old farmer, and attended the Dutch Reformed church. They tramped from New Haven to Hartford, over Easter. Carl was always ready for their gipsy journeys; he responded to Ruth's visions of foaming South Sea isles; but he rarely sketched such pictures himself. He had given all of himself to joy in Ruth. Like many men called "adventurers," he was ready for anything but content with anything. It was Ruth who was finding new voyages. She kept up her settlement work and progressed to an active interest in the Women's Trade Union League and took part in picketing during a Panama Hat-Workers' strike. She may have had more curiosity than principle, but she did badger policemen pluckily. She was studying Italian, the Montessori method, cooking. She taught new dishes to her maid. She adopted a careless suggestion of Carl and voluntarily increased the maid's salary, thereby shaking the rock-ribbed foundations of Upper West Side society. In nothing did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither "the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly and tinily telling her difficulties with household work. When a purring, baby-talking acquaintance gurgled: "How did the Ruthie bride spend her morning? Did she cook some little dainty for her husband? Nothing bourgeois, I'm _sure_!" in reply Ruth pleasantly observed: "Not a chance. The Ruthie bride cussed out the janitor for not shooting up a dainty cabbage on the dumb-waiter, and then counted up her husband's cigarette coupons and skipped right down to the premium parlors with 'em and got him a pair of pale-blue Boston garters and a cunning granite-ware stew-pan, and then sponged lunch off Olive Dunleavy. But nothing bourgeois!" Such experiences, told to Carl, he found diverting. He seemed, in the spring of 1914, to want no others. CHAPTER XLI The apparently satisfactory development of the Touricar in the late spring of 1914 was the result of an uneconomical expenditure of energy on the part of Carl. Personally he followed by letter the trail of every amateur aviator, every motoring big-game hunter. He never let up for an afternoon. VanZile had lost interest in the whole matter. Whenever Carl thought of how much the development of the Touricar business depended upon himself, he was uneasy about the future, and bent more closely over his desk. On his way home, swaying on a subway strap, his pleasant sensation of returning to Ruth was interrupted by worry in regard to things he might have done at the office. Nights he dreamed of lists of "prospects." Late in May he was disturbed for several days by headaches, lassitude, nausea. He lied to Ruth: "Guess I've eaten something at lunch that was a little off. You know what these restaurants are." He admitted, however, that he felt like a Symptom. He stuck to the office, though his chief emotion about life and business was that he wished to go off somewhere and lie down and die gently. Directly after a Sunday bruncheon, at which he was silent and looked washed out, he went to bed with typhoid fever. For six weeks he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun. That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed, she mourned and mourned for her lost boy, while she hid her fear and kept her blouses fresh and her hair well-coiffed, and mothered the stern man who lay so dreadfully still in the bed.... He was not shaved every day; he had a pale beard under his hollow cheeks.... Even when he was out of delirium, even when he was comparatively strong, he never said anything gaily foolish for the sake of being young and noisy with her. During convalescence Carl was so wearily gentle that she hoped the little boy she loved was coming back to dwell in him. But the Hawk's wings seemed broken. For the first time Carl was afraid of life. He sat and worried, going over the possibilities of the Touricar, and the positions he might get if the Touricar failed. He was willing to loaf by the window all day, his eyes on a narrow, blood-red stripe in the Navajo blanket on his knees, along which he incessantly ran a finger-nail, back and forth, back and forth, for whole quarter-hours, while she read aloud from Kipling and London and Conrad, hoping to rekindle the spirit of daring. One sweet drop was in their cup of iron. As woodland playmates they could never have known such intimacy as hovered about them when she rested her head lightly against his knees and they watched the Hudson, the storms and flurries of light on its waves, the windy clouds and the processional of barges, the beetle-like ferries and the great steamers for Albany. They talked in half sentences, understanding the rest: "Tough in winter----" "Might be good trip----" Carl's hand was always demanding her thick hair, but he stroked it gently. The coarse, wholesome vigor was drained from him; part even of his slang went with it; his "Gee!" was not explosive.