Carl wished that Adelaide Benner had never come from Joralemon to
study domestic science. He felt that he was a sullen brute, but he
could not master his helpless irritation as he walked with Adelaide
and Gertie Cowles through Central Park, on a snowy Sunday afternoon of
December. Adelaide assumed that one remained in the state of mind
called Joralemon all one's life; that, however famous he might be, the
son of Oscar Ericson was not sufficiently refined for Miss Cowles of
the Big House on the Hill, though he might improve under Cowles
influences. He was still a person who had run away from Plato! But
that assumption was far less irritating than one into which Adelaide
threw all of her faded yearning--that Gertie and he were in love.
Adelaide kept repeating, with coy slyness: "Isn't it too bad you two
have me in the way!" and: "Don't mind poor me. Auntie will turn her
back any time you want her to."
And Gertie merely blushed, murmuring, "Don't be a silly."
At Eightieth Street Adelaide announced: "Now I must leave you
children. I'm going over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I do love
to see art pictures. I've always wanted to. Now be as good as you can,
you two."
Gertie was mechanical about replying. "Oh, don't run away, Addy dear."
"Oh yes, you two will miss an old maid like me terribly!" And Adelaide
was off, a small, sturdy, undistinguished figure, with an unyielding
loyalty to Gertie and to the idea of marriage.
Carl looked at her bobbing back (with wrinkles in her cloth jacket
over the shoulders) as she melted into the crowd of glossy fur-trimmed
New-Yorkers. He comprehended her goodness, her devotion. He sighed,
"If she'd only stop this hinting about Gertie and me----" He was
repentant of his irritation, and said to Gertie, who was intimately
cuddling her arm into his: "Adelaide's an awfully good kid. Sorry she
had to go."
Gertie jerked her arm away, averted her profile, grated: "If you miss
her so much, perhaps you'd better run after her. Really, I wouldn't
interfere, not for _worlds_!"
"Why, hello, Gertie! What seems to be the matter? Don't I detect a
chill in the atmosphere? So sorry you've gone and gotten refined on
me. I was just going to suggest some low-brow amusement like tea at
the Casino."
"Well, you ought to know a lady doesn't----"
"Oh, now, Gertie dear, not 'lady.'"
"I don't think you're a bit nice, Carl Ericson, I don't, to be making
fun of me when I'm serious. And why haven't you been up to see us?
Mamma and Ray have spoken of it, and you've only been up once since my
party, and then you were----"
"Oh, please let's not start anything. Sorry I haven't been able to get
up oftener, but I've been taking work home. You know how it is--you
know when you get busy with your dancing-school----"
"Oh, I meant to tell you. I'm through, just _through_ with Vashkowska
and her horrid old school. She's a cat and I don't believe she ever
had anything to do with the Russian ballet, either. What do you think
she had the effrontery to tell me? She said that I wasn't practising
and really trying to learn anything. And I've been working myself
into----Really, my nerves were in such a shape, I would have been in
danger of a nervous breakdown if I had kept on. Tottykins told me how
she had a nervous breakdown, and had me see her doctor, such a dear,
Dr. St. Claire, so refined and sympathetic, and he told me I was right
in suspecting that nobody takes Vashkowska seriously any more, and,
besides, I don't think much of all this symbolistic dancing, anyway,
and at last I've found out what I really want to do. Oh, Carl, it's so
wonderful! I'm studying ceramics with Miss Deitz, she's so wonderful
and temperamental and she has the dearest studio on Gramercy Park. Of
course I haven't made anything yet, but I know I'm going to like it so
much, and Miss Deitz says I have a natural taste for vahzes and----"
"Huh? Oh yes, vases. I get you."
"(Don't be vulgar.)----I'm going to go down to her studio and work
every other day, and she doesn't think you have to work like a
scrubwoman to succeed, like that horrid Vashkowska did. Miss Deitz has
a temperament herself. And, oh, Carl, she says that 'Gertrude' isn't
suited to me (and 'Gertie' certainly isn't!) and she calls me
'Eltruda.' Don't you think that's a sweet name? Would you like to call
me 'Eltruda,' sometimes?"
"Look here, Gertie, I don't want to butt in, and I'm guessing at it,
but looks to me as though one of these artistic grafters was working
you. What do you know about this Deitz person? Has she done anything
worth while? And honestly, Gertie----By the way, I don't want to be
brutal, but I don't think I could stand 'Eltruda.' It sounds like
'Tottykins.'"
"Now really, Carl----"
"Wait a second. How do you know you've got what you call a
temperament? Go to it, and good luck, if you can get away with it. But
how do you know it isn't simply living in a flat and not having any
work to do _except_ developing a temperament? Why don't you try
working with Ray in his office? He's a mighty good business man. This
is just a sugges----"
"Now really, this is----"
"Look here, Gertie, the thing I've always admired about you is your
wholesomeness and----"
"'Wholesome!' Oh, that word! As Miss Deitz was saying just the other
day, it's as bad----"
"But you are wholesome, Gertie. That is, if you don't let New York
turn your head; and if you'd use your ability on a real job, like
helping Ray, or teaching--yes, or really sticking to your ceramics or
dancing, and leave the temperament business to those who can get away
with it. No, wait. I know I'm butting in; I know that people won't go
and change their natures because I ask them to; but you see you--and
Ray and Adelaide--you are the friends I depend on, and so I hate to
see----"
"Now, Carl dear, you might let me talk," said Gertie, in tones of
maddening sweetness. "As I think it over, I don't seem to recall that
you've been an authority on temperament for so very long. I seem to
remember that you weren't so terribly wonderful in Joralemon! I'm glad
to be the first to honor what you've done in aviation, but I don't
know that that gives you the right to----"
"Never said it did!" Carl insisted, with fictitious good humor.
"----assume that you are an authority on temperament and art. I'm
afraid that your head has been just a little turned by----"
"Oh, hell.... Oh, I'm sorry. That just slipped."
"It _shouldn't_ have slipped, you know. I'm _afraid_ it can't be
passed over so _easily_." Gertie might have been a bustling Joralemon
school-teacher pleasantly bidding the dirty Ericson boy, "Now go and
wash the little hands."
Carl said nothing. He was bored. He wished that he had not become
entangled in their vague discussion of "temperament."
Even more brightly Gertie announced: "I'm afraid you're not in a very
good humor this afternoon. I'm sorry that my plans don't interest you.
Of course, I should be very temperamental if I expected you to
apologize for cursing and swearing, so I think I'll just leave you
here, and when you feel better----" She was infuriatingly cheerful.
"----I should be pleased to have you call me up. Good-by, Carl, and I
hope that your walk will do you good."
She turned into a footpath; left him muttering in tones of youthful
injury, "Jiminy! I've done it now!"
He was in Joralemon.
A victoria drove by with a dowager who did not seem to be humbly
courting the best set in Joralemon. A grin lightened Carl's face. He
chuckled: "By golly! Gertie handled it splendidly! I'm to call up and
be humble, and then--bing!--the least I can do is to propose and be
led to the altar and teach a Sunday-school class at St. Orgul's for
the rest of my life! Come hither, Hawk Ericson, let us hold council.
Here's the way Gertie will dope it out, I guess. ('Eltruda!') I'll
dine in solitary regret for saying 'hell'----No. First I'm to walk
down-town, alone and busy repenting, and then I'll feed alone, and by
eight o'clock I'll be so tired of myself that I'll call up and beg
pretty. Rats! It's rotten mean to dope it out like that, but just the
same----Me that have done what I've done--worried to death over one
accidental 'hell'!... Hey there, you taxi!"
Grandly he rode through the Park, and in an unrepentant manner bowed
to every pretty woman he saw, to the disapproval of their silk-hatted
escorts.
He forgot the existence of Gertie Cowles and the Old Home Folks.
But he really could not afford a taxicab, and he had to make up for it
by economy. At seven-thirty he gloomily entered Miggleton's
Restaurant, on Forty-second Street, the least unbearable of the
"Popular Prices--Tables for Ladies" dens, and slumped down at a table
near the window. There were few diners. Carl was as much a stranger as
on the morning when he had first invaded New York, to find work with
an automobile company, and had passed this same restaurant; still was
he a segregated stranger, despite the fact that, two blocks away, in
the Aero Club, two famous aviators were agreeing that there had never
been a more consistently excellent flight in America than Hawk
Ericson's race from Chicago to New York.
Carl considered the delights of the Cowles flat, Ray's stories about
Plato and business, and the sentimental things Gertie played on the
guitar. He suddenly determined to go off some place and fly an
aeroplane; as suddenly knew that he was not yet ready to return to the
game. He read the _Evening Telegram_ and cheerlessly peered out of the
window at the gray snow-veil which shrouded Forty-second Street.
As he finished his dessert and stirred his coffee he stared into a
street-car stalled in a line of traffic outside. Within the car, seen
through the snow-mist, was a girl of twenty-two or three, with satiny
slim features and ash-blond hair. She was radiant in white-fox furs.
Carl craned to watch. He thought of the girl who, asking a direction
before the Florida Lunch Room in Chicago, had inspired him to become a
chauffeur.
The girl in the street-car was listening to her companion, who was a
dark-haired girl with humor and excitement about life in her face,
well set-up, not tall, in a smartly tailored coat of brown pony-skin
and a small hat that was all lines and no trimming. Both of them
seemed amused, possibly by the lofty melancholy of a traffic policeman
beside the car, who raised his hand as though he had high ideals and a
slight stomach-ache. The dark-haired girl tapped her round knees with
the joy of being alive.
The street-car started. Carl was already losing in the city jungle the
two acquaintances whom he had just made. The car stopped again, still
blocked. Carl seized his coat, dropped a fifty-cent piece on the
cashier's desk, did not wait for his ten cents change, ran across the
street (barely escaping a taxicab), galloped around the end of the
car, swung up on the platform.
As he took a seat opposite the two girls he asked himself just what he
expected to do now. The girls were unaware of his existence. And why
had he hurried? The car had not started again. But he studied his
unconscious conquests from behind his newspaper, vastly content.
In the unnatural quiet of the stalled car the girls were irreverently
discussing "George." He heard enough to know that they were of the
rather smart, rather cultured class known as "New-Yorkers"--they might
be Russian-American princesses or social workers or ill-paid
governesses or actresses or merely persons with one motor-car and a
useful papa in the family.
But in any case they were not of the kind he could pick up.
The tall girl of the ash-blond hair seemed to be named Olive, being
quite unolive in tint, while her livelier companion was apparently
christened Ruth. Carl wearied of Olive's changeless beauty as quickly
as he did of her silver-handled umbrella. She merely knew how to
listen. But the less spectacular, less beautiful, less languorous,
dark-haired Ruth was born a good comrade. Her laughter marked her as
one of the women whom earth-quake and flood and child-bearing cannot
rob of a sense of humor; she would have the inside view, the
sophisticated understanding of everything.
The car was at last free of the traffic. It turned a corner and
started northward. Carl studied the girls.
Ruth was twenty-four, perhaps, or twenty-five. Not tall, slight enough
to nestle, but strong and self-reliant. She had quantities of
dark-brown hair, crisp and glinty, though not sleek, with eyebrows
noticeably dark and heavy. Her smile was made irresistible by her
splendidly shining teeth, fairly large but close-set and white; and
not only the corners of her eyes joined in her smile, but even her
nose, her delicate yet piquant nose, which could quiver like a
deer's. When she laughed, Carl noted, Ruth had a trick of lifting her
heavy lids quickly, and surprising one with a glint of blue eyes where
brown were expected. Her smooth, healthy, cream-colored skin was rosy
with winter, and looked as though in summer it would tan evenly,
without freckles. Her chin was soft, but without a dimple, and her
jaws had a clean, boyish leanness. Her smooth neck and delicious
shoulders were curved, not fatly, but with youth and happiness. They
were square, capable shoulders, with no mid-Victorian droop about
them. Her waist was slender naturally, not from stays. Her short but
not fat fingers were the ideal instruments for the piano. Slim were
her crossed feet, and her unwrinkled pumps (foolish footgear for a
snowy evening) seemed eager to dance.
There was no hint of the coquette about her. Physical appeal this Ruth
had, but it was the allure of sunlight and meadows, of tennis and a
boat with bright, canted sails, not of boudoir nor garden
dizzy-scented with jasmine. She was young and clean, sweet without
being sprinkled with pink sugar; too young to know much about the
world's furious struggle; too happy to have realized its inevitable
sordidness; yet born a woman who would not always wish to be
"protected," and round whom all her circle of life would center....
So Carl inarticulately mused, with the intentness which one gives to
strangers in a quiet car, till he laughed, "I feel as if I knew her
like a book." The century's greatest problem was whether he would
finally prefer her to Olive, if he knew them. If he could speak to
them----But that was, in New York, more difficult than beating a
policeman or getting acquainted with the mayor. He would lose them.
Already they were rising, going out.
He couldn't let them be lost. He glanced out of the window, sprang up
with an elaborate pretense that he had come to his own street. He
followed them out, still conning head-lines in his paper. His grave
absorption said, plain that all might behold, that he was a
respectable citizen to whom it would never occur to pursue strange
young women.
His new friends had been close to him in the illuminated car, but they
were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar
street-crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a
street-sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the
Fifties. As they turned east on Fifty-blankth Street he stopped under
the street-light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it
the address of that dear old friend, living on Fifty-blankth, on whom
he was going to call. This was to convince the policeman of the
perfect purity of his intentions. The fact that there was no policeman
nearer than the man on fixed post a block away did not lessen Carl's
pleasure in the make-believe. He industriously inspected the
house-numbers as he followed the quickly moving girls, and frequently
took out his watch. Nothing should make him late in calling on that
dear old friend.
Not since Adam glowered at the intruder Eve has a man been so darkly
uninterested in two charmers. He stared clear through them; he looked
over their heads; he observed objects on the other side of the street.
He indignantly told the imaginary policemen who stopped him that he
hadn't even seen the girls till this moment; that he was the victim of
a plot.
The block through which the cavalcade was passing was lined with
shabby-genteel brownstone houses, with high stoops and haughty dark
doors, and dressmakers' placards or doctors' cards in the windows.
Carl was puzzled. The girls seemed rather too cheerful to belong in
this decayed and gloomy block, which, in the days when horsehair
furniture and bankers had mattered, had seemed imposing. But the girls
ascended the steps of a house which was typical of the row, except
that five motor-cars stood before it. Carl, passing, went up the
steps of the next house and rang the bell.
"What a funny place!" he heard one of the girls--he judged that it was
Ruth--remark from the neighboring stoop. "It looks exactly like Aunt
Emma when she wears an Alexandra bang. Do we go right up? Oughtn't we
to ring? It ought to be the craziest party--anarchists----"
"A party, eh?" thought Carl.
"----ought to ring, I suppose, but----Yes, there's sure to be all
sorts of strange people at Mrs. Hallet's----" said the voice of the
other girl, then the door closed upon both of them.
And an abashed Carl realized that a maid had opened the door of the
house at which he himself had rung, and was glaring at him as he
craned over to view the next-door stoop.
"W-where----Does Dr. Brown live here?" he stuttered.
"No, 'e don't," the maid snapped, closing the door.
Carl groaned: "He don't? Dear old Brown? Not live here? Huh? What
shall I do?"
In remarkably good spirits he moved over in front of the house into
which Ruth and Olive had gone. People were coming to the party in twos
and threes. Yes. The men were in evening clothes. He had his
information.
Swinging his stick up to a level with his shoulder at each stride, he
raced to Fifty-ninth Street and the nearest taxi-stand. He was whirled
to his room. He literally threw his clothes off. He shaved hastily,
singing, "Will You Come to the Ball," from "The Quaker Girl," and
slipped into evening clothes and his suavest dress-shirt. Seizing
things all at once--top-hat, muffler, gloves, pocketbook,
handkerchief, cigarette-case, keys--and hanging them about him as he
fled down the decorous stairs, he skipped to the taxicab and started
again for Fifty-blankth Street.
At the house of the party he stopped to find on the letter-box in the
entry the name "Mrs. Hallet," mentioned by Olive. There was no such
name. He tried the inner door. It opened. He cheerily began to mount
steep stairs, which kept on for miles, climbing among slate-colored
walls, past empty wall-niches with toeless plaster statues. The
hallways, dim and high and snobbish, and the dark old double doors,
scowled at him. He boldly returned the scowl. He could hear the
increasing din of a talk-party coming from above. When he reached the
top floor he found a door open on a big room crowded with shrilly
chattering people in florid clothes. There was a hint of brassware and
paintings and silken Turkish rugs.
But no sight of Ruth or Olive.
A maid was bobbing to him and breathing, "That way, please, at the end
of the hall." He went meekly. He did not dare to search the clamorous
crowd for the girls, as yet.
He obediently added his hat and coat and stick to an
uncomfortable-looking pile of wraps writhing on a bed in a small room
that had a Copley print of Sargent's "Prophets," a calendar, and an
unimportant white rocker.
It was time to go out and face the party, but he had stage-fright.
While climbing the stairs he had believed that he was in touch with
the two girls, but now he was separated from them by a crowd, farther
from them than when he had followed them down the unfriendly street.
And not till now did he quite grasp the fact that the hostess might
not welcome him. His glowing game was becoming very dull-toned. He
lighted a cigarette and listened to the beating surf of the talk in
the other room.
Another man came in. Like all the rest, he gave up the brilliant idea
of trying to find an unpreempted place for his precious newly ironed
silk hat, and resignedly dumped it on the bed. He was a passable man,
with a gentlemanly mustache and good pumps. Carl knew that fact
because he was comparing his own clothes and deciding that he had none
the worst of it. But he was relieved when the waxed mustache moved a
couple of times, and its owner said, in a friendly way: "Beastly
jam!... May I trouble you for a match?"
Carl followed him out to the hostess, a small, busy woman who made a
business of being vivacious and letting the light catch the fringes of
her gold hair as she nodded. Carl nonchalantly shook hands with her,
bubbling: "So afraid couldn't get here. My play----But at last----"
He was in a panic. But the hostess, instead of calling for the police,
gushed, "_So_ glad you _could_ come!" combining a kittenish mechanical
smile for him with a glance over his shoulder at the temporary butler.
"I want you to meet Miss Moeller, Mr.--uh--Mr----"
"I knew you'd forget it!" Carl was brotherly and protecting in his
manner. "Ericson, Oscar Ericson."
"Oh, of course. How stupid of me! Miss Moeller, want you to meet Mr.
Oscar Ericson--you know----"
"S' happy meet you, Miss Mmmmmmm," said Carl, tremendously well-bred
in manner. "Can we possibly go over and be clever in a corner, do you
think?"
He had heard Colonel Haviland say that, but his manner gave it no
quotation-marks.
Presumably he talked to Miss Moeller about something usual--the snow
or the party or Owen Johnson's novels. Presumably Miss Moeller had
eyes to look into and banalities to look away from. Presumably there
was something in the room besides people and talk and rugs hung over
the bookcases. But Carl never knew. He was looking for Ruth. He did
not see her.
Within ten minutes he had manoeuvered himself free of Miss Moeller
and was searching for Ruth, his nerves quivering amazingly with the
fear that she might already have gone.
How would he ever find her? He could scarce ask the hostess, "Say,
where's Ruth?"
She was nowhere in the fog of people in the big room.... If he could
find even Olive....
Strolling, nodding to perfectly strange people who agreeably nodded
back under the mistaken impression that they were glad to see him, he
systematically checked up all the groups. Ruth was not among the
punch-table devotees, who were being humorous and amorous over
cigarettes; not among the Caustic Wits exclusively assembled in a
corner; not among the shy sisters aligned on the davenport and
wondering why they had come; not in the general maelstrom in the
center of the room.
He stopped calmly to greet the hostess again, remarking, "You look so
beautifully sophisticated to-night," and listened suavely to her
fluttering remarks. He was the picture of the cynical cityman who has
to be nowhere at no especial time. But he was not cynical. He had to
find Ruth!
He escaped and, between the main room and the dining-room, penetrated
a small den filled with witty young men, old stories, cigarette-smoke,
and siphons. Then he charged into the dining-room, where there were
candles and plate much like silver--and Ruth and Olive at the farther
end.