When Charles-Norton reached the street, a narrow side-street in which
like a glacier the ice of the whole winter was still heaped, a whiff of
soft air, perfumed with a suspicion of spring, struck him gently in the
face. He drew it in deep within his lungs, and exhaled it in a long sigh.
And then he stopped abruptly, and was standing very still, listening;
listening to this sigh, to the echo of it still within his consciousness,
as if testing it. He shook his head disapprovingly. "Gee," he said; "hope
I'm not getting discontented again!"
As if in response, another gentle gust came down the street; he caught
it as it came and drew it deep within him. His chest swelled, his eyes
brightened. And then suddenly he tensed; he rose a-tip-toe, heels close
together, his head went back; his hands stole to his armpits, and his
elbows began to wave up and down.
"Good Lord!" he ejaculated, catching himself up sharply; "here goes that
darned flapping again!"
He looked up and down the street, assuming a negligent attitude. His
forehead was red. "Nope," he said. No one had seen him. "_She_ saw me
this morning," he thought, and the red of his forehead came down to his
cheeks. "It's getting worse; a regular habit. Let me see--two, three; it
began three weeks ago----"
He shook his head perplexedly and resumed his way toward the Elevated
station.
"It may have been all right when I was a boy," he said to himself as he
swung along. "But now!
"Let me see. I was fourteen, the first time."
A picture rose before his eyes. It had happened in a far western land--a
land that now remained in his memory as a pool of gold beneath a
turquoise sky. He was lying there in the wild oats, upon his back, and
above him in the sky a hawk circled free. He watched it long thus,
relaxed in a sort of droning somnolence; then suddenly, to a particularly
fine spiral of the bird in the air, something like a convulsion had shot
through his body, and he had found himself erect, head back and chest
forward, his arms flapping----
"'Twas the day before I ran away with the circus," he soliloquized in the
midst of the throng milling up the Elevated station stairs. "And later,
when I had come back from the circus, I took that long bum on
brake-beams. And when I had come back from that, a little later I went
off in the forecastle of the 'Tropic Bird' to Tahiti. And each time that
flapping business came first. Every time I've done something wild and
foolish, I've flapped first like this. First I'd flap, then I'd feel like
doing something, I wouldn't know what, then I'd do it--and it would be
something foolish----"
The train slid up to the platform; he boarded it and by some miracle
found on the bench behind the door of the last car a narrow space in
which he squeezed himself.
"I'll have to stop it," he said decisively.
He drew from his breast pocket a note-book and a pencil. Opening the book
out across his knees, he bent over it and began to draw. He worked with
concentration, but seemingly with little result, for he drew only
detached lines. There were spirals, circles, ovals, parabolas; lines
that curved upward, broke, and curved again downward, like gothic arches;
lines that curved in gentle languor; lines that breathed like the
undulations of a peaceful sea; and then just zipping, swift, straight
lines that shot up to the upper end of the paper and seemed to continue
invisibly toward an altitudinous nowhere. This is all he drew, and yet as
he worked there was in his face the set of stubborn purpose, and in his
eyes the glow of aspiration. He tried to make each line beautiful and
firm and swift and pure. When he succeeded, he felt within him
the bubbling of a sweet contentment. This would be followed by
dissatisfaction, renewed yearning--and he would begin again.
"By Jove!" he muttered in sudden consternation, straightening away from
the book.
And then, "They began at the same time."
And a moment later, "And they are the same."
It had struck him abruptly that the strange urge which made him draw
lines was like that which at times convulsed his body into that
mysterious manifestation which, for the want of a better word, he called
his "flapping." The two things had begun together, and they were of the
same essence. The impulse which possessed him as he tried for beauty with
paper and pencil was the same which swelled his lungs and his heart,
which made him rise a-tip-toe and wave his arms. It came from a feeling
of subtle and inexplicable dissatisfaction; it was made of a vague and
vast longing. It was the same which, when a boy, had sent him to the
brake-beam, the circus, and the sea; it was to be distrusted.
He slammed the book shut and put it in his pocket. "No more of this," he
said.
A certain confidence, though, came gradually into his eyes. "After all,
these things do not mean much now," he thought. "I was a boy, then, and
unhappy. I am a man, now, and happy."
His mind idled back over the two years since his marriage, over the warm
coziness of the last two years. What a wife, this little Dolly! What a
little swaddler! She wrapped up everything as in cotton--all the
asperities of Life, and the asperities of Charles-Norton himself also.
Gone for the two years had been the old uncertainties, the vague
tumults, the blind surges. Yes, he was happy.
This word happy, for the second time on his tongue, set him a-dreaming.
A picture came floating before his eyes. And curiously enough, it was
not of Dolly, nor of the padded little flat----
It was of a boy, a boy in blue overalls and cotton shirt, lying on his
back amid the wild oats of a golden land, his eyes to the sky, watching
up there the free wide circle of a hawk----
"Soy, Mister, wot the deuce do you think you're doing?" shouted a husky
and protesting voice in his ear.
And Charles-Norton came back precipitously to the present. By his side a
pale youth was squirming indignantly. Charles-Norton's elbow was in the
youth's ribs, and his elbow was still stirring with the last oscillation
of the movement that had agitated it. "Soy," cried the youth in disgust;
"d'yous think you's a chicken?"
"I beg your pardon," said Charles-Norton, in an agony of humility; "I beg
your pardon."
But the youth refused to be mollified. Though he said nothing more, he
kept upon Charles-Norton the snarl of his pale face and at regular
intervals rubbed his ribs as though they pained him exceedingly.
Charles-Norton was glad to reach his station.
That morning, in his glass cage, he muddled his columns several times. He
was far from an admirable accountant at his best; but this day he was
what he termed "the limit." Totals fled him like birds, with a whir of
wings. A sun-gleam hypnotized him once, for he did not know how long; and
his nose, a little later, followed for several gymnastic minutes the
flutter of a white moth.
At lunch, in Konrad's Bakery, he found himself seated, by a singular
chance, next to the very same youth whose ribs he had crushed on the
Elevated a few hours before. The young man was in more amiable mood. He
grinned. "Don't you flap again and spill me coffee, Mr. Chicken," he
said, with delicate persiflage.
"I won't," said Charles-Norton. "I'll buy you another cup if I do."
"Got a dollar?" asked the youth, irrelevantly. His thin, pale nose
quivered a bit.
"I don't know," said Charles-Norton, hesitatingly. Dollars were big in
his budget. "Why?"
The youth drew from a pocket a yellow cardboard. "Got a lottery ticket I
want to sell," he said easily. "Little Texas. Hundred Thousand first
prize and lots of other prizes. Got to sell it to pay me lunch. Played
the ponies yesterday."
Charles-Norton eyed the ticket doubtfully. Usually, he would not have
considered the matter a moment. But somehow the incident of the morning
had placed him at a disadvantage toward the pale youth. Vaguely he was
moved by a wish to regain by some act the respect of this exacting
person. He bought the ticket.
"Maybe this was the foolish act that all this flapping announced," he
said to himself, once outside, in answer to a not uncertain prick of his
marital conscience. "Buying this ticket is like buying a lightning-rod;
it may draw off the lightning!"
But his singular malady, during the afternoon, did not disappear. It
waxed, in fact; it passed the borders of the spiritual and assumed
physical symptoms. "Dolly," he said, when he was again within the warmth
of the little flat in the evening; "Dolly, would you mind looking at my
shoulders after a while?"
"Why, of course, I'll look at them, Goosie," answered Dolly, immediately
alert at the possibility of doing something for the big man; "what is the
matter with your shoulders, Goosie?"
"I don't know," he said, sinking a bit wearily into the Morris chair.
"They pain; just like rheumatism or growing pain. And they tickle too,
Dolly; they tickle all the time." He crossed his arms, raising a hand to
each shoulder, and rubbed them with a shiver of delight. "It's a
nuisance," he said.
"Well, we'll see about it right away," said Dolly. "Right after supper."
Her eyes grew big with concern. "You may have caught cold. Come on,
dear," she said, brightening; "I've the dandiest, deliciousest soup,
right out of the _Ladies' Home Journal_, for you!"