The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
Ben Rusk was taking no part in the gaiety of Howard and Joe. The
serious man of letters was not easily led into paths of frivolity.
Carl swore to himself: "Ben 's the only guy I know that's got any
delicate feelings. He appreciates how Gertie feels when she's sick,
poor girl. He don't make a goat of himself, like Joe.... Or maybe he's
got a stomach-ache."
"Post-office!" cried Howard Griffin to the room at large. "Come on!
We're all of us going to be kids again, and play post-office. Who's
the first girl wants to be kissed?"
"The idea!" giggled Adelaide Benner.
"Me for Adelaide!" bawled Joe Jordan.
"Oh, Jo-oe, bet I kiss Gertie!" from Irving Lamb.
"The idea!"
"Just as if we were children----"
"He must think we're kids again----"
"Shamey! Winnie wants to be kissed, and Carl won't----"
"I don't, either, so there----"
"I think it's awful."
"Bet I kiss Gertie----"
Carl was furious at all of them as they strained their shoulders
forward from their chairs and laughed. He asked himself, "Haven't
these galoots got any sense?"
To speak so lightly of kissing Gertie! He stared at the smooth
rounding of her left cheek below the cheek-bone till it took a
separate identity, and its white softness filled the room.
Ten minutes afterward, playing "post-office," he was facing Gertie in
the semi-darkness of the sitting-room, authorized by the game to kiss
her; shut in with his divinity.
She took his hand. Her voice was crooning, "Are you going to kiss me
terribly hard?"
He tried to be gracefully mocking: "Oh yes! Sure! I'm going to eat you
alive."
She was waiting.
He wished that she would not hold his hand. Within he groaned, "Gee
whiz! I feel foolish!" He croaked: "Do you feel better, now? You'll
catch more cold in here, won't you? There's kind of a draught. Lemme
look at this window."
Crossing to the obviously tight window, he ran his finger along the
edge of the sash with infinite care. He trembled. In a second, _now_,
he had to turn and make light of the lips which he would fain have
approached with ceremony pompous and lingering.
Gertie flopped into a chair, laughing: "I believe you're afraid to
kiss me! 'Fraid cat! You'll never be a squire of dames, like those
actors are! All right for you!"
"I am not afraid!" he piped.... Even his prized semi-bass voice had
deserted him.... He rushed to the back of her chair and leaned over,
confused, determined. Hastily he kissed her. The kiss landed on the
tip of her cold nose.
And the whole party was tumbling in, crying:
"Time 's up! You can't hug her all evening!"
"Did you see? He kissed her on the nose!"
"Did he? Ohhhhh!"
"Time 's up. Can't try it again."
Joe Jordan, in the van, was dancing fantastically, scraping his
forefinger at Carl, in token of disgrace.
The riotous crowd, Gertie and Carl among them, flooded out again. To
show that he had not minded the incident of the misplaced kiss, Carl
had to be very loud and merry in the library for a few minutes; but
when the game of "post-office" was over and Mrs. Cowles asked Ray to
turn down the lamp in the sitting-room, Carl insisted:
"I'll do it, Mrs. Cowles; I'm nearer 'n Ray," and bolted.
He knew that he was wicked in not staying in the library and
continuing his duties to the party. He had to crowd into a minute all
his agonizing and be back at once.
It was beautiful in the stilly sitting-room, away from the noisy
crowd, to hear love's heart beating. He darted to the chair where
Gertie had sat and guiltily kissed its arm. He tiptoed to the table,
blew out the lamp, remembered that he should only have turned down the
wick, tried to raise the chimney, burnt his fingers, snatched his
handkerchief, dropped it, groaned, picked up the handkerchief, raised
the chimney, put it on the table, searched his pockets for a match,
found it, dropped it, picked it up from the floor, dropped his knife
from his pocket as he stooped, felt itchy about the scalp, picked up
the knife, relighted the lamp, exquisitely adjusted the chimney--and
again blew out the flame. And swore.
As darkness whirled into the room again the vision of Gertie came
nearer. Then he understood his illness, and gasped: "Great jumping
Jupiter on a high mountain! I guess--I'm--in--love! _Me!_"
The party was breaking up. Each boy, as he accompanied a girl from the
yellow lamplight into the below-zero cold, shouted and scuffled the
snow, to indicate that there was nothing serious in his attentions,
and immediately tried to manoeuver his girl away from the others.
Mrs. Cowles was standing in the hall--not hurrying the guests away,
you understand, but perfectly resigned to accepting any
farewells--when Gertie, moving gently among them with little sounds of
pleasure, penned Carl in a corner and demanded:
"Are you going to see some one home? I suppose you'll forget poor me
completely, now!"
"I will not!"
"I wanted to tell you what Ray and Mr. Griffin said about Plato and
about being lawyers. Isn't it nice you'll know them when you go to
Plato?"
"Yes, it 'll be great."
"Mr. Griffin 's going to be a lawyer and maybe Ray will, too, and why don't
you think about being one? You can get to be a judge and know all the best
people. It would be lovely.... Refining influences--they--that's----"
"I couldn't ever be a high-class lawyer like Griffin will," said Carl,
his head on one side, much pleased.
"You silly boy, of course you could. I think you've got just as much
brains as he has, and Ray says they all look up to him even in Plato.
And I don't see why Plato isn't just as good--of course it isn't as
large, but it's so select and the faculty can give you so much more
individual attention, and I don't see why it isn't every bit as good
as Yale and Michigan and all those Eastern colleges.... Howard--Mr.
Griffin--he says that he wouldn't ever have thought of being a lawyer
only a girl was such a good influence with him, and if you get to be a
famous man, too, maybe I'll have been just a teeny-weeny bit of an
influence, too, won't I?"
"Oh _yes_!"
"I must get back now and say good-by to my guests. Good night, Carl."
"I am going to study--you just watch me; and if I do get to go to
Plato----Oh, gee! you always have been a good influence----" He
noticed that Doris Carson was watching them. "Well, I gotta be going.
I've had a peach of a time. Good night."
Doris Carson was expectantly waiting for one of the boys to "see her
home," but Carl guiltily stole up to Ben Rusk and commanded:
"Le's hike, Fatty. Le's take a walk. Something big to tell you."
CHAPTER V
Carl kicked up the snow in moon-shot veils. The lake boomed. For all
their woolen mittens, ribbed red-cotton wristlets, and plush caps with
ear-laps, the cold seared them. Carl encouraged Ben to discourse of
Gertie and the delights of a long and hopeless love. He discovered
that, actually, Ben had suddenly fallen in love with Adelaide Benner.
"Gee!" he exulted. "Maybe that gives me a chance with Gertie, then.
But I won't let her know Ben ain't in love with her any more. Jiminy!
ain't it lucky Gertie liked me just when Ben fell in love with
somebody else! Funny the way things go; and her never knowing about
Ben." He laid down his cards. While they plowed through the hard
snow-drifts, swinging their arms against their chests like milkmen, he
blurted out all his secret: that Gertie was the "slickest girl in
town"; that no one appreciated her.
"Ho, ho!" jeered Ben.
"I thought you were crazy about her, and then you start kidding about
her! A swell bunch of chivalry you got, you and your Galahad! You----"
"Don't you go jumping on Galahad, or I'll fight!"
"He was all right, but you ain't," said Carl. "You hadn't ought to
ever sneer at love."
"Why, you said, just this afternoon----"
"You poor yahoo, I was only teasing you. No; about Gertie. It's like
this: she was telling me a lot about how Griffin 's going to be a
lawyer, about how much they make in cities, and I've about decided
I'll be a lawyer."
"Thought you were going to be a mechanical engineer?"
"Well, can't a fellow change his mind? When you're an engineer you're
always running around the country, and you never get shaved or
anything, and there ain't any refining influences----"
The absorbing game of "what we're going to be" made them forget snow
and cold-squeezed fingers. Ben, it was decided, was to own a newspaper
and support C. Ericson, Attorney-at-Law, in his dramatic run for state
senator.
Carl did not mention Gertie again. But it all meant Gertie.
* * * * *
Carl made his round trimming the arc-lights next day, apparently a
rudely healthy young person, but really a dreamer love-lorn and
misunderstood. He had found a good excuse for calling on Gertie, at
noon, and had been informed that Miss Gertrude was taking a nap. He
determined to go up the lake for rabbits. He doubted if he would ever
return, and wondered if he would be missed. Who would care if he froze
to death? He wouldn't! (Though he did seem to be taking certain
precautions, by donning a mackinaw coat, two pairs of trousers, two
pairs of woolen socks, and shoe-packs.)
He was graceful as an Indian when he swept, on skees he had made
himself, across miles of snow covering the lake and dazzling in the
diffused light of an even gray sky. The reeds by the marshy shore were
frost-glittering and clattered faintly. Marshy islands were lost in
snow. Hummocks and ice-jams and the weaving patterns of mink tracks
were blended in one white immensity, on which Carl was like a fly on a
plaster ceiling. The world was deserted. But Carl was not lonely. He
forgot all about Gertie as he cached his skees by the shore and
prowled through the woods, leaping on brush-piles and shooting quickly
when a rabbit ran out.
When he had bagged three rabbits he was besieged by the melancholy of
loneliness, the perfection of the silver-gowned Gertie. He wanted to
talk. He thought of Bone Stillman.
It was very likely that Bone was, as usual in winter, up beyond Big
Bend, fishing for pickerel with tip-ups. A never-stopping dot in the
dusk, Carl headed for Big Bend, three miles away.
The tip-up fisher watches a dozen tip-ups--short, automatic
fishing-rods, with lines running through the ice, the pivoted arm
signaling the presence of a fish at the bait. Sometimes, for warmth,
he has a tiny shanty, perhaps five feet by six in ground area, heated
by a powder-can stove. Bone Stillman often spent the night in his
movable shanty on the lake, which added to his reputation as village
eccentric. But he was more popular, now, with the local sporting
gentlemen, who found that he played a divine game of poker.
"Hello, son!" he greeted Carl. "Come in. Leave them long legs of yours
up on shore if there ain't room."
"Say, Bone, do you think a fellow ever ought to join a church?"
"Depends. Why?"
"Well, suppose he was going to be a lawyer and go in for politics?"
"Look here. What 're you thinking of becoming a lawyer for?"
"Didn't say I was."
"Of course you're thinking of it. Look here. Don't you know you've got a
chance of seeing the world? You're one of the lucky people that can have a
touch of the wanderlust without being made useless by it--as I have. You
may, you _may_ wander in thought as well as on freight-trains, and discover
something for the world. Whereas a lawyer----They're priests. They decide
what's holy and punish you if you don't guess right. They set up codes that
it takes lawyers to interpret, and so they perpetuate themselves. I don't
mean to say you're extraordinary in having a chance to wander. Don't get
the big-head over it. You're a pretty average young American. There's
plenty of the same kind. Only, mostly they get tied up to something before