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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 35 |
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_ PART III. THE ADVENTURE OF LOVE. 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 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 while I yearn over the window-boxes and try to look like Nicollette. Buy me a book with spring in it, and a princess, and a sky like this--cornflower blue with bunny-rabbit clouds." At least a few in the Avenue's flower-garden of pretty debutantes in pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes. "I wonder who they all are; they look like an aristocracy, useless but made of the very best materials," said Carl. "They're like maids of honor and young knights, disguised in modern costumes! They're charming!" "Charmingly useless," insisted our revolutionary, but he did not sound earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything less great than joy and life; a day for shameless luxuriating in the sun, and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted silk were silver things and jade; satin gowns and shoe-buckles of rhinestones. The sleek motor-cars whisked by in an incessant line; the traffic policemen nodded familiarly to hansom-drivers; pools on the asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze tasted of spring. Carl bought for her Yeats's poems, tucked it under his arm, and they trotted off. In Madison Square they saw a gallant and courtly old man with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and a smile of unquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissus in his buttonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs and smiled to see one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to build for himself and his sparrow bride a bungalow in the foot-hills of the Metropolitan Tower. "I love that old man!" exclaimed Ruth. "I do wish we could pick him up and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, 'I prithee, sir, of thy good will come thou forthfaring with two vagabonds who do quest high and low the land of Nowhere.' Something like that. Go on, Carl, be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of Arcadia. Go ask him." "Afraid to. Besides, he might monopolize you." "He'll go with us, without his knowing it, anyway. Isn't it strange how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without even speaking to them? You know them the rest of your life and play games with them." The Maison Epinay you must quest long, but great is your reward if you find it. Here is no weak remembrance of a lost Paris, but a French-Canadian's desire to express what he believes Paris must be; therefore a super-Paris, all in brown velvet and wicker tables, and at the back a long window edged with boxes red with geraniums, looking to a back-yard garden where rose-beds lead to a dancing-faun terminal in a shrine of ivy. They sipped grenadine, heavy essence of a thousand berries. They had the place to themselves, save for Tony the waiter, with his smile of benison; and Carl read from Yeats. He had heard of Yeats at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew and misty mere and the fluttering wings of Love till now. His hand rested on her gloved hand.... Tony the waiter re-re-rearranged the serving-table.... When Ruth broke the spell with, "You aren't very reverent with perfectly clean gloves," they chattered like blackbirds at sunset. Carl discovered that, being a New-Yorker, she knew part of it as intimately as though it were a village, and nothing about the rest. She had taught him Fifth Avenue; told him the history of the invasion by shops, the social differences between East and West; pointed out the pictures of friends in photographers' wall-cases. Now he taught her the various New Yorks he had discovered in lonely rambles. Together they explored Chelsea Village section, and the Oxford quadrangles of General Theological Seminary, where quiet meditation dwells in Tudor corridors; upper Greenwich Village, the home of Italian _tables d'hote_, clerks, social-workers, and radical magazines, of alley rookeries and the ancient Jewish burying-ground; lower Greenwich Village, where run-down American families with Italian lodgers live on streets named for kings, in wooden houses with gambrel roofs and colonial fanlights. From the same small-paned windows where frowsy Italian women stared down upon Ruth, Ruth's ancestors had leaned out to greet General George Washington. On an open wharf near Tenth Street they were bespelled by April. The Woolworth Tower, to the south, was an immortal shaft of ivory and gold against an unwinking blue sky, challenging the castles and cathedrals of the Old World, and with its supreme art dignifying the commerce which built and uses it. The Hudson was lustrous with sun, and a sweet wind sang from unknown Jersey hills across the river. Moored to the wharf was a coal-barge, with a tiny dwelling-cabin at whose windows white curtains fluttered. Beside the cabin was a garden tended by the bargeman's comely white-browed wife; a dozen daisies and geraniums in two starch-boxes. Forging down the river a scarred tramp steamer, whose rusty sides the sun turned to damask rose, bobbed in the slight swell, heading for open sea, with the British flag a-flicker and men chanting as they cleared deck. "I wish we were going off with her--maybe to Singapore or Nagasaki," Carl said, slipping his arm through hers, as they balanced on the stringpiece of the wharf, sniffing like deer at the breeze, which for a moment seemed to bear, from distant burgeoning woods, a shadowy hint of burning leaves--the perfume of spring and autumn, the eternal wander-call. "Yes!" Ruth mused; "and moonlight in Java, and the Himalayas on the horizon, and the Vale of Cashmir." "But I'm glad we have this. Blessed, it's a day planned for lovers like us." "Carl!" "Yes. Lovers. Courting. In spring. Like all lovers." "Really, Carl, even spring doesn't quite let me forget the _convenances_ are home waiting." "We're not lovers?" "No, we----" "Yet you enjoy to-day, don't you?" "Yes, but----" "And you'd rather be loafing on a dirty wharf, looking at a tramp steamer, than taking tea at the Plaza?" "Yes, just now, perhaps----" "And you're protesting because you feel it's proper to----" "It----" "And you really trust me so much that you're having difficulty in seeming alarmed?" "Really----" "And you'd rather play around with me than any of the Skull and Bones or Hasty Pudding men you know? Or foreign diplomats with spade beards?" "At least they wouldn't----" "Oh yes they would, if you'd let them, which you wouldn't.... So, to sum up, then, we _are_ lovers and it's spring and you're glad of it, and as soon as you get used to it you'll be glad I'm so frank. Won't you?" "I will not be bullied, Carl! You'll be having me married to you before I can scream for help, if I don't start at once." "Probably." "Indeed you will not! I haven't the slightest intention of letting you get away with being masterful." "Yes, I know, blessed; these masterful people bore me, too. But aren't we modern enough so we can discuss frankly the question of whether I'd better propose to you, some day?" "But, boy, what makes you suppose that I have any information on the subject? That I've ever thought of it?" "I credit you with having a reasonable knowledge that there are such things as marriage." "Yes, but----Oh, I'm very confused. You've bullied me into such a defensive position that my instinct is to deny everything. If you turned on me suddenly and accused me of wearing gloves I'd indignantly deny it." "Meantime, not to change the subject, I'd better be planning and watching for a suitable day for proposing, don't you think? Consider it. Here's this young Ericson--some sort of a clerk, I believe--no, don't _think_ he's a university man----You know; discuss it clearly. Think it might be better to propose to-day? I ask your advice as a woman." "Oh, Carl dear, I think not to-day. I'm sorry, but I really don't think so." "But some time, perhaps?" "Some time, perhaps!" Then she fled from him and from the subject. They talked, after that, only of the sailors that loafed on West Street, but in their voices was content. They crossed the city, and on Brooklyn Bridge watched the suburbanites going home, crowding surface-car and elevated. From their perch on the giant spider's web of steel, they saw the Long Island Sound steamers below them, passing through a maelstrom of light on waves that trembled like quicksilver. They found a small Italian restaurant, free of local-color hounds and what Carl called "hobohemians," and discovered _fritto misto_ and Chianti and _zabaglione_--a pale-brown custard flavored like honey and served in tall, thin, curving glasses--while the fat proprietress, in a red shawl and a large brooch, came to ask them, "Everyt'ing all-aright, eh?" Carl insisted that Walter MacMonnies, the aviator, had once tried out a motor that was exactly like her, including the Italian accent. There was simple and complete bliss for them in the dingy pine-and-plaster room, adorned with fly-specked calendars and pictures of Victor Emmanuel and President McKinley, copies of the _Bolletino Della Sera_ and large vinegar bottles. The theater was their destination, but they first loitered up Broadway, shamelessly stopping to stare at shop windows, pretending to be Joe the shoe-clerk and Becky the cashier furnishing a Bronx flat. Whether it was anything but a game to Ruth will never be known; but to Carl there was a hidden high excitement in planning a flower-box for the fire-escape. Apropos of nothing, she said, as they touched elbows with the sweethearting crowd: "You were right. I'm sorry I ever felt superior to what I called 'common people.' People! I love them all. It's----Come, we must hurry. I hate to miss that one perfect second when the orchestra is quiet and the lights wink at you and the curtain's going up." During the second act of the play, when the heroine awoke to love, Carl's hand found hers. And it must have been that night when, standing between the inner and outer doors of her house, Carl put his arms about her, kissed her hair, timidly kissed her sweet, cold cheek, and cried, "Bless you, dear." But, for some reason, he does not remember when he did first kiss her, though he had looked forward to that miracle for weeks. He does not understand the reason; but there is the fact. Her kisses were big things to him, yet possibly there were larger psychological changes which occulted everything else, at first. But it must have been on that night that he first kissed her. For certainly it was when he called on her a week later that he kissed her for the second time. They had been animated but decorous, that evening a week later. He had tried to play an improvisation called "The Battle of San Juan Hill," with a knowledge of the piano limited to the fact that if you struck alternate keys at the same time, there appeared not to be a discord. "I must go now," he said, slowly, as though the bald words had a higher significance. She tried to look at him, and could not. His arms circled her, with frightened happiness. She tilted back her head, and there was the ever-new surprise of blue irises under dark brows. Uplifted wonder her eyes spoke. His head drooped till he kissed her lips. The two bodies clamored for each other. But she unwound his arms, crying, "No, no, no!" He was enfolded by a sensation that they had instantly changed from friendly strangers to intimate lovers, as she said: "I don't understand it, Carl. I've never let a man kiss me like that. Oh, I suppose I've flirted, like most girls, and been kissed sketchily at silly dances. But this----Oh, Carl, Carl dear, don't ever kiss me again till--oh, not till I _know_. Why, I'm scarcely acquainted with you! I do know how dear you are, but it appals me when I think of how little background you have for me. Dear, I don't want to be sordid and spoil this moment, but I do know that when you're gone I'll be a coward and remember that there are families and things, and want to wait till I know how they like you, at the very least. Good night, and I----" "Good night, dear blessed. I know." _ |
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