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.