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The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life, a novel by Sinclair Lewis |
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Part 3. The Adventure Of Love - Chapter 28 |
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_ PART III. THE ADVENTURE OF LOVE. CHAPTER XXVIII He wanted to run forward, take their hands, cry, "At last!" He seemed to hear his voice wording it. But, not glancing at them again, he established himself on a chair by the doorway between the two rooms. It was safe to watch the two girls in this Babel, where words swarmed and battled everywhere in the air. Ruth was in a brown velvet frock whose golden tones harmonized with her brown hair. She was being enthusiastically talked at by a man to whom she listened with a courteously amused curiosity. Carl could fancy her nudging Olive, who sat beside her on the Jacobean settee and was attended by another talking-man. Carl told Ruth (though she did not know that he was telling her) that she had no right to be "so blasted New-Yorkishly superior and condescending," but he admitted that she was scarcely to blame, for the man made kindergarten gestures and emitted conversation like air from an exploded tire. The important thing was that he heard the man call her "Miss Winslow." "Great! Got her name--Ruth Winslow!" Watching the man's lips (occasionally trying to find an excuse for eavesdropping, and giving up the quest because there was no excuse), he discovered that Ruth was being honored with a thrilling account of aviation. The talking-man, it appeared, knew a great deal about the subject. Carl heard through a rift in the cloud of words that the man had once actually flown, as a passenger with Henry Odell! For five minutes on end, judging by the motions with which he steered a monoplane through perilous abysses, the reckless spirit kept flying (as a passenger). Ruth Winslow was obviously getting bored, and the man showed no signs of volplaning as yet. Olive's man departed, and Olive was also listening to the parlor aviator, who was unable to see that a terrific fight was being waged by the hands of the two girls in the space down between them. It was won by Ruth's hand, which got a death-grip on Olive's thumb, and held it, to Olive's agony, while both girls sat up straight and beamed propriety. Carl walked over and, smoothly ignoring the pocket entertainer, said: "So glad to see you, Miss Winslow. I think this is my dance?" "Y-yes?" from Miss Winslow, while the entertainer drifted off into the flotsam of the party. Olive went to join a group about the hostess, who had just come in to stir up mirth and jocund merriment in the dining-room, as it had settled down into a lower state of exhilaration than the canyons of talk-parties require. Said Carl to Ruth, "Not that there's any dancing, but I felt you'd get dizzy if you climbed any higher in that aeroplane." Ruth tried to look haughty, but her dark lashes went up and her unexpected blue eyes grinned at him boyishly. "Gee! she's clever!" Carl was thinking. Since, to date, her only remark had been "Y-yes?" he may have been premature. "That was a bully strangle hold you got on Miss Olive's hand, Miss Winslow." "You saw our hands?" "Perhaps.... Tell me a good way to express how superior you and I are to this fool party and its noise. Isn't it a fool party?" "I'm afraid it really is." "What's the purpose of it, anyway? Do the people have to come here and breathe this air, I wonder? I asked several people that, and I'm afraid they think I'm crazy." "But you are here? Do you come to Mrs. Salisbury's often?" "Never been before. Never seen a person here in my life before--except you and Miss Olive. Came on a bet. Chap bet I wouldn't dare come without being invited. I came. Bowed to the hostess and told her I was so sorry my play-rehearsals made me late, and she was _so_ glad I could come, _after all_--you know. She's never seen me in her life." "Oh? Are you a dramatist?" "I was--in the other room. But I was a doctor out in the hall and a sculptor on the stairs, so I'm getting sort of confused myself--as confused as you are, trying to remember who I am, Miss Winslow. You really don't remember me at all? Tea at--wasn't it at the Vanderbilt? or the Plaza?" "Oh yes, that must have been----I was trying to remember----" Carl grinned. "The chap who introduced me to you called me 'Mr. Um-m-m,' because he didn't remember my name, either. So you've never heard it. It happens to be Ericson.... I'm on a mission. Serious one. I'm planning to go out and buy a medium-sized bomb and blow up this bunch. I suspect there's poets around." "I do too," sighed Ruth. "I understand that Mrs. Salisbury always has seven lawyers and nineteen advertising men and a dentist and a poet and an explorer at her affairs. Are you the poet or the explorer?" "I'm the dentist. I think----You don't happen to have done any authoring, do you?" "Well, nothing except an epic poyem on Jonah and the Whale, which I wrote at the age of seven. Most of it consisted of a conversation between them, while Jonah was in the Whale's stomach, which I think showed agility on the part of the Whale." "Then maybe it's safe to say what I think of authors--and more or less of poets and painters and so on. One time I was in charge of some mechanical investigations, and a lot of writers used to come around looking for what they called 'copy.' That's where I first got my grouch on them, and I've never really got over it; and coming here to-night and hearing the littery talk I've been thinking how these authors have a sort of an admiration trust. They make authors the heroes of their stories and so on, and so they make people think that writing is sacred. I'm so sick of reading novels about how young Bill, as had a pure white soul, came to New York and had an 'orrible time till his great novel was accepted. Authors seem to think they're the only ones that have ideals. Now I'm in the automobile business, and I help to make people get out into the country--bet a lot more of them get out because of motoring than because of reading poetry about spring. But if I claimed a temperament because I introduce the motorist's soul to the daisy, every one would die laughing." "But don't you think that art is the--oh, the object of civilization and that sort of thing?" "I do _not_! Honestly, Miss Winslow, I think it would be a good stunt to get along without any art at all for a generation, and see what we miss. We probably need dance music, but I doubt if we need opera. Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction. I'd like to see all the shoemakers get together and refuse to make any more shoes till people promised to write reviews about them, like all these book-reviews. Then just as soon as people's shoes began to wear out they'd come right around, and you'd read about the new masterpieces of Mr. Regal and Mr. Walkover and Mr. Stetson." "Yes! I can imagine it. 'This laced boot is one of the most vital and gripping and wholesome shoes of the season.' And probably all the young shoemakers would sit around cafes, looking quizzical and artistic. But don't you think your theory is dangerous, Mr. Ericson? You give me an excuse for being content with being a commonplace Upper-West-Sider. And aren't authors better than commonplaceness? You're so serious that I almost suspect you of having started to be an author yourself." "Really not. As a matter of fact, I'm the kiddy in patched overalls you used to play with when you kept house in the willows." "Oh, of course! In the Forest of Arden! And you had a toad that you traded for my hair-ribbon." "And we ate bread and milk out of blue bowls!" "Oh yes!" she agreed, "blue bowls with bunny-rabbits painted on them." "And giants and a six-cylinder castle, with warders and a donjon keep. And Jack the Giant-killer. But certainly bunnies." "Do you really like bunnies?" Her voice caressed the word. "I like them so much that when I think of them I know that there's one thing worse than having a cut-rate literary salon, and that's to be too respectable----" "Too Upper-West-Side!" "----to dare to eat bread and milk out of blue bowls." "Yes, I think I shall have to admit you to the Blue Bowl League, Mr. Ericson. Speaking of which----Tell me, who did introduce us, you and me? I feel so apologetic for not remembering." "Mayn't I be a mystery, Miss Winslow? At least as long as I have this new shirt, which you observed with some approval while I was drooling on about authors? It makes me look like a count, you must admit. Or maybe like a Knight of the Order of the Bunny Rabbit. Please let me be a mystery still." "Yes, you may. Life has no mysteries left except Olive's coiffure and your beautiful shirt.... Does one talk about shirts at a second meeting?" "Apparently one does." "Yes.... To-night, I _must_ have a mystery.... Do you swear, as a man of honor, that you are at this party dishonorably, uninvited?" "I do, princess." "Well, so am I! Olive was invited to come, with a man, but he was called away and she dragged me here, promising me I should see----" "Anarchists?" "Yes! And the only nice lovable crank I've found--except you, with your vulgar prejudice against the whole race of authors--is a dark-eyed female who sits on a couch out in the big room, like a Mrs. St. Simeon Stylites in a tight skirt, and drags you in by her glittering eye, looking as though she was going to speak about theosophy, and then asks you if you think a highball would help her cold." "I think I know the one you mean. When I saw her she was talking to a man whose beating whiskers dashed high on a stern and rock-bound face.... Thank you, I like that fairly well, too, but unfortunately I stole it from a chap named Haviland. My own idea of witty conversation: is 'Some car you got. What's your magneto?'" "Look. Olive Dunleavy seems distressed. The number of questions I shall have to answer about you!... Well, Olive and I felt very low in our minds to-day. We decided that we were tired of select associations, and that we would seek the Primitive, and maybe even Life in the Raw. Olive knows a woman mountain-climber who always says she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We expected to have raw-meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the Savage Woman gave us Suchong and deviled-chicken sandwiches and pink cakes and Nabiscos, and told us how well her son was doing in his Old French course at Columbia. So we got lower and lower in our minds, and we decided we had to go down to Chinatown for dinner. We went, too! I've done a little settlement work----Dear me, I'm telling you too much about myself, O Man of Mystery! It isn't quite done, I'm afraid." "Please, Miss Winslow! In the name of the--what was it--Order of the Blue Bowl?" He was making a mental note that Olive's last name was Dunleavy. "Well, I've done some settlement work----Did you ever do any, by any chance?" "I once converted a Chinaman to Lutheranism; I think that was my nearest approach," said Carl. "My work was the kind where you go in and look at three dirty children and teach them that they'll be happy if they're good, when you know perfectly well that their only chance to be happy is to be bad as anything and sneak off to go swimming in the East River. But it kept me from being very much afraid of the Bowery (we went down on the surface cars), but Olive was scared beautifully. There was the dearest, most inoffensive old man in the most perfect state of intoxication sitting next to us in the car, and when Olive moved away from him he winked over at me and said, 'Honor your shruples, ma'am, ver' good form.' I think Olive thought he was going to murder us--she was sure he was the wild, dying remnant of a noble race or something. But even she was disappointed in Chinatown. "We had expected opium-fiends, like the melodramas they used to have on Fourteenth Street, before the movies came. But we had a disgustingly clean table, with a mad, reckless picture worked in silk, showing two doves and a boiled lotos flower, hanging near us, to intimidate us. The waiter was a Harvard graduate, I know--perhaps Oxford--and he said, 'May I sugges' ladies velly nize China dinner?' He suggested chow-main--we thought it would be either birds' nests or rats' tails, and it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like ourselves, except for a Jap, with his cunnin' Sunday tie, and his little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky. And he was reading _The Presbyterian_!... Then we came up here, and it doesn't seem so very primitive here, either. It's most aggravating.... It seems to me I've been telling you an incredible lot about our silly adventures--you're probably the man who won the Indianapolis motor-race or discovered electricity or something." Through her narrative, her eyes had held his, but now she glanced about, noted Olive, and seemed uneasy. "I'm afraid I'm nothing so interesting," he said; "but I have wanted to see new places and new things--and I've more or less seen 'em. When I've got tired of one town, I've simply up and beat it, and when I got there--wherever there was--I've looked for a job. And----Well, I haven't lost anything by it." "Have you really? That's the most wonderful thing to do in the world. My travels have been Cook's tours, with our own little Thomas Cook _and_ Son right in the family--I've never even had the mad freedom of choosing between a tour of the Irish bogs and an educational pilgrimage to the shrines of celebrated brewers. My people have always chosen for me. But I've wanted----One doesn't merely _go_ without having an objective, or an excuse for going, I suppose." "I do," declared Carl. "But----May I be honest?" "Yes." Intimacy was about them. They were two travelers from a far land, come together in the midst of strangers. "I speak of myself as globe-trotting," said Carl. "I have been. But for a good many weeks I've been here in New York, knowing scarcely any one, and restless, yet I haven't felt like hiking off, because I was sick for a time, and because a chap that was going to Brazil with me died suddenly." "To Brazil? Exploring?" "Yes--just a stab at it, pure amateur.... I'm not at all sure I'm just making-believe when I speak of blue bowls and so on. Tell me. In the West, one would speak of 'seeing the girls home.' How would one say that gracefully in New-Yorkese, so that I might have the chance to beguile Miss Olive Dunleavy and Miss Ruth Winslow into letting me see them home?" "Really, we're not a bit afraid to go home alone." "I won't tease, but----May I come to your house for tea, some time?" She hesitated. It came out with a rush. "Yes. Do come up. N-next Sunday, if you'd like." She bobbed her head to Olive and rose. "And the address?" he insisted. "---- West Ninety-second Street.... Good night. I have enjoyed the blue bowl." Carl made his decent devoirs to his hostess and tramped up-town through the flying snow, swinging his stick like an orchestra conductor, and whistling a waltz. As he reached home he thought again of his sordid parting with Gertie in the Park--years ago, that afternoon. But the thought had to wait in the anteroom of his mind while he rejoiced over the fact that he was to see his new playmate the coming Sunday. _ |
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