Like a country small boy waiting for the coming of his city cousin,
who will surely have new ways of playing Indians, Carl prepared to see
Ruth Winslow and her background. What was she? Who? Where? He pictured
her as dwelling in everything from a millionaire's imitation chateau,
with footmen and automatic elevators, to a bachelor girl's flat in an
old-fashioned red-brick Harlem tenement. But more than that: What
would she herself be like against that background?
Monday he could think of nothing but the joy of having discovered a
playmate. The secret popped out from behind everything he did. Tuesday
he was worried by finding himself unable to remember whether Ruth's
hair was black or dark brown. Yet he could visualize Olive's
ash-blond. Why? Wednesday afternoon, when he was sleepy in the office
after eating too much beefsteak and kidney pie, drinking too much
coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes, at lunch with Mr. VanZile,
when he was tortured by the desire to lay his head on his arms and
yield to drowsiness, he was suddenly invaded by a fear that Ruth was
snobbish. It seemed to him that he ought to do something about it
immediately.
The rest of the week he merely waited to see what sort of person the
totally unknown Miss Ruth Winslow might be. His most active occupation
outside the office was feeling guilty over not telephoning to Gertie.
At 3.30 P.M., Sunday, he was already incased in funereal
morning-clothes and warning himself that he must not arrive at Miss
Winslow's before five. His clothes were new, stiff as though they
belonged to a wax dummy. Their lines were straight and without
individuality. He hitched his shoulders about and kept going to the
mirror to inspect the fit of the collar. He repeatedly re brushed his
hair, regarding the unclean state of his military brushes with
disgust. About six times he went to the window to see if it had
started to snow.
At ten minutes to four he sternly jerked on his coat and walked far
north of Ninety-second Street, then back.
He arrived at a quarter to five, but persuaded himself that this was a
smarter hour of arrival than five.
Ruth Winslow's home proved to be a rather ordinary
three-story-and-basement gray stone dwelling, with heavy Russian net
curtains at the broad, clear-glassed windows of the first floor, and
an attempt to escape from the stern drabness of the older type of New
York houses by introducing a box-stoop and steps with a carved stone
balustrade, at the top of which perched a meek old lion of 1890, with
battered ears and a truly sensitive stone nose. A typical house of the
very well-to-do yet not wealthy "upper middle class"; a house
predicating one motor-car, three not expensive maids, brief European
tours, and the best preparatory schools and colleges for the sons.
A maid answered the door and took his card--a maid in a frilly apron
and black uniform--neither a butler nor a slatternly Biddy. In the
hall, as the maid disappeared up-stairs, Carl had an impression of
furnace heat and respectability. Rather shy, uncomfortable, anxious to
be acceptable, warning himself that as a famous aviator he need not be
in awe of any one, but finding that the warning did not completely
take, he drew off his coat and gloves and, after a swift inspection of
his tie, gazed about with more curiosity than he had ever given to any
other house.
For all the stone lion in front, this was quite the old-line
English-basement house, with the inevitable front and back
parlors--though here they were modified into drawing-room and
dining-room. The walls of the hall were decked with elaborate,
meaningless scrolls in plaster bas-relief, echoed by raised circles on
the ceiling just above the hanging chandelier, which was expensive and
hideous, a clutter of brass and knobby red-and-blue glass. The floor
was of hardwood in squares, dark and richly polished, highly
self-respecting--a floor that assumed civic responsibility from a
republican point of view, and a sound conservative business
established since 1875 or 1880. By the door was a huge Japanese vase,
convenient either for depositing umbrellas or falling over in the
dark. Then, a long mirror in a dull-red mahogany frame, and a table of
mahogany so refined that no one would ever dream of using it for
anything more useful than calling-cards. It might have been the table
by the king's bed, on which he leaves his crown on a little purple
cushion at night. Solid and ostentatious.
The drawing-room, to the left, was dark and still and unsympathetic
and expensive; a vista of brocade-covered French-gilt chairs and a
marquetry table and a table of onyx top, on which was one book bound
in ooze calf, and one vase; cream-colored heavy carpet and a crystal
chandelier; fairly meretricious paintings of rocks, and thatched
cottages, and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of
them in large gilt frames protected by shadow-boxes. In a corner was a
cabinet of gilt and glass, filled with Dresden-china figurines and toy
tables and a carven Swiss musical powder-box. The fireplace was of
smooth, chilly white marble, with an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece,
and a fire-screen painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses,
making silken unreal love and scandalously neglecting silky unreal
sheep. By the hearth were shiny fire-irons which looked as though they
had never been used. The whole room looked as though it had never been
used--except during the formal calls of overdressed matrons with
card-cases and prejudices. The one human piece of furniture in the
room, a couch soft and slightly worn, on which lovers might have sat
and small boys bounced, was trying to appear useless, too, under its
row of stiff satin cushions with gold cords.... Well-dusted chairs on
which no one wished to sit; expensive fireplace that never shone;
prized pictures with less imagination than the engravings on a
bond--that drawing-room had the soul of a banker with side-whiskers.
Carl by no means catalogued all the details, but he did get the effect
of ingrowing propriety. It is not certain that he thought the room in
bad taste. It is not certain that he had any artistic taste whatever;
or that his attack upon the pretensions of authors had been based on
anything more fundamental than a personal irritation due to having met
blatant camp-followers of the arts. And it is certain that one of his
reactions as he surveyed the abject respectability of that room was a
slight awe of the solidity of social position which it represented,
and which he consciously lacked. But, whether from artistic instinct
or from ignorance, he was sure that into the room ought to blow a
sudden great wind, with the scent of forest and snow. He shook his
head when the maid returned, and he followed her up-stairs. Surely a
girl reared here would never run away and play with him.
He heard lively voices from the library above. He entered a room to be
lived in and be happy in, with a jolly fire on the hearth and friendly
people on a big, brown davenport. Ruth Winslow smiled at him from
behind the Colonial silver and thin cups on the tea-table, and as he
saw her light-filled eyes, saw her cock her head gaily in welcome, he
was again convinced that he had found a playmate.
A sensation of being pleasantly accepted warmed him as she cried, "So
glad----" and introduced him, gave him tea and a cake with nuts in it.
From a wing-chair Carl searched the room and the people. There were
two paintings--a pale night sea and an arching Japanese bridge under
slanting rain, both imaginative and well-done. There was a mahogany
escritoire, which might have been stiff but was made human by
scattered papers on the great blotter and books crammed into the
shelves. Other books were heaped on a table as though people had been
reading them. Later he found how amazingly they were assorted--the
latest novel of Robert Chambers beside H. G. Wells's _First and Last
Things_; a dusty expensive book on Italian sculpture near a cheap
reprint of _Dodo_.
The chairs were capacious, the piano a workmanlike upright, not
dominating the room, but ready for music; and in front of the fire was
an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering
in his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the
room. They were New-Yorkers and, unlike over half of the population,
born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody
and remembers when Fourteenth Street was the shopping-center. Olive
Dunleavy was shinily present, her ash-blond hair in a new coiffure.
She was arguing with a man of tight morning-clothes and a high-bred
face about the merits of "Parsifal," which, Olive declared, no one
ever attended except as a matter of conscience.
"Now, Georgie," she said, "issa Georgie, you shall have your
opera--and you shall jolly well have it alone, too!" Olive was vivid
about it all, but Carl saw that she was watching him, and he was shy
as he wondered what Ruth had told her.
Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, a clear-faced, slender, well-bathed
boy of twenty-six, with too high a forehead, with discontent in his
face and in his thin voice, carelessly well-dressed in a soft-gray
suit and an impressionistic tie, was also inspecting Carl, while
talking to a pretty, commonplace, finishing-school-finished girl. Carl
instantly disliked Philip Dunleavy, and was afraid of his latent
sarcasm.
Indeed, Carl felt more and more that beneath the friendliness with
which he was greeted there was no real welcome as yet, save possibly
on the part of Ruth. He was taken on trial. He was a Mr. Ericson, not
any Mr. Ericson in particular.
Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl
himself was part of a hash-group--an older woman who seemed to know
Rome and Paris better than New York, and might be anything from a
milliner to a mondaine; a keen-looking youngster with tortoise-shell
spectacles; finally, Ruth's elder brother, Mason J. Winslow, Jr., a
tall, thin, solemn, intensely well-intentioned man of thirty-seven,
with a long, clean-shaven face, and a long, narrow head whose growing
baldness was always spoken of as a result of his hard work. Mason J.
Winslow, Jr., spoke hesitatingly, worried over everything, and stood
for morality and good business. He was rather dull in conversation,
rather kind in manner, and accomplished solid things by
unimaginatively sticking at them. He didn't understand people who did
not belong to a good club.
Carl contributed a few careful platitudes to a frivolous discussion of
whether it would not be advisable to solve the woman-suffrage question
by taking the vote away from men and women both and conferring it on
children. Mason Winslow ambled to the big table for a cigarette, and
Carl pursued him. While they stood talking about "the times are bad,"
Carl was spying upon Ruth, and the minute her current group wandered
off to the davenport he made a dash at the tea-table and got there
before Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, who was obviously
manoeuvering like himself. Philip gave him a covert "Who are you,
fellow?" glance, took a cake, and retired.
From his wicker chair facing Ruth's, Carl said, gloomily, "It isn't
done."
"Yes," said Ruth, "I know it, but still some very smart people are
doing it this season."
"But do you think the woman that writes 'What the man will wear' in
the theater programs would stand for it?"
"Not," gravely considered Ruth, "if there were black stitching on the
dress-glove. Yet there is some authority for frilled shirts."
"You think it might be considered then?"
"I will not come between you and your haberdasher, Mr. Ericson."
"This is a foolish conversation. But since you think the better
classes do it--gee! it's getting hard for me to keep up this kind of
'Dolly Dialogue.' What I wanted to do was to request you to give me
concisely but fully a sketch of 'Who is Miss Ruth Winslow?' and save
me from making any pet particular breaks. And hereafter, I warn you,
I'm going to talk like my cousin, the carpet-slipper model."
"Name, Ruth Winslow. Age, between twenty and thirty. Father, Mason
Winslow, manufacturing contractor for concrete. Brothers, Mason
Winslow, Jr., whose poor dear head is getting somewhat bald, as you
observe, and Bobby Winslow, ne'er-do-weel, who is engaged in
subverting discipline at medical school, and who dances divinely. My
mother died three years ago. I do nothing useful, but I play a good
game of bridge and possess a voice that those as know pronounce
passable. I have a speaking knowledge of French, a reading knowledge
of German, and a singing knowledge of Italian. I am wearing an
imported gown, for which the House of Winslow will probably never pay.
I live in this house, and am Episcopalian--not so much High Church as
highly infrequent church. I regard the drawing-room down-stairs as the
worst example of late-Victorian abominations in my knowledge, but I
shall probably never persuade father to change it because Mason thinks
it is sacred to the past. My ambition in life is to be catty to the
Newport set after I've married an English diplomat with a divine
mustache. Never having met such a personage outside of _Tatler_ and
_Vogue_, I can't give you very many details regarding him. Oh yes, of
course, he'll have to play a marvelous game of polo and have a chateau
in Provence and also a ranch in Texas, where I shall wear
riding-breeches and live next to Nature and have a Chinese cook in
blue silk. I think that's my whole history. Oh, I forgot. I play at
the piano and am very ignorant, and completely immersed in the worst
traditions of the wealthy Micks of the Upper West Side, and I always
pretend that I live here instead of on the Upper East Side because
'the air is better.'"
"What is this Upper West Side? Is it a state of mind?"
"Indeed it is not. It's a state of pocketbook. The Upper West Side is
composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in
society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue.
You know everybody and went to school with everybody and played in the
Park with everybody, and mostly your papa is in wholesale trade and
haughty about people in retail. You go to Europe one summer and to the
Jersey coast the next. All your clothes and parties and weddings and
funerals might be described as 'elegant.' That's the Upper West Side.
Now the dread truth about you.... Do you know, after the unscrupulous
way in which you followed up a mere chance introduction at a tea
somewhere, I suspect you to be a well-behaved young man who leads an
entirely blameless life. Or else you'd never dare to jump the fence
and come and play in my back yard when all the other boys politely
knock at the front door and get sent home."
"Me--well, I'm a wage-slave of the VanZile Motor people, in charge of
the Touricar department. Age, twenty-eight--almost. Habits, all
bad.... No, I'll tell you. I'm one of those stern, silent men of
granite you read about, and only my man knows the human side of me,
because all the guys on Wall Street tremble in me presence."
"Yes, but then how can you belong to the Blue Bowl Sodality?"
"Um, Yes----I've got it. You must have read novels in which the stern,
silent man of granite has a secret tenderness in his heart, and he
keeps the band of the first cigar he ever smoked in a little safe in
the wall, and the first dollar he ever made in a frame--that's me."
"Of course! The cigar was given him by his flaxen-haired sweetheart
back in Jenkins Corners, and in the last chapter he goes back and
marries her."
"Not always, I hope!" Of what Carl was thinking is not recorded.
"Well, as a matter of fact, I've been a fairly industrious young man
of granite the last few months, getting out the Touricar."
"What is a Touricar? It sounds like an island inhabited by cannibals,
exports hemp and cocoanut, see pink dot on the map, nor' by nor'east
of Mogador."
Carl explained.
"I'm terribly interested," said Ruth. (But she made it sound as though
she really was.) "I think it's so wonderful.... I want to go off
tramping through the Berkshires. I'm so tired of going to the same old
places."
"Some time, when you're quite sure I'm an estimable young Y. M. C. A.
man, I'm going to try to persuade you to come out for a real tramp."
She seemed to be considering the idea, not seriously, but----
Philip Dunleavy eventuated.
For some time Philip had been showing signs of interest in Ruth and
Carl. Now he sauntered to the table, begged for another cup of tea,
said agreeable things in regard to putting orange marmalade in tea,
and calmly established himself. Ruth turned toward him.
Carl had fancied that there was, for himself, in Ruth's voice,
something more friendly, in her infectious smile something more
intimate than she had given the others, but when she turned precisely
the same cheery expression upon Philip, Carl seemed to have lost
something which he had trustingly treasured for years. He was the more
forlorn as Olive Dunleavy joined them, and Ruth, Philip, and Olive
discussed the engagement of one Mary Meldon. Olive recalled Miss
Meldon as she had been in school days at the Convent of the Sacred
Heart. Philip told of her flirtations at the old Long Beach Hotel.
The names of New York people whom they had always known; the names of
country clubs--Baltusrol and Meadow Brook and Peace Waters; the names
of streets, with a sharp differentiation between Seventy-fourth Street
and Seventy-fifth Street; Durland's Riding Academy, the Rink of a
Monday morning, and other souvenirs of a New York childhood; the score
of the last American polo team and the coming dances--these things
shut Carl out as definitely as though he were a foreigner. He was
lonely. He disliked Phil Dunleavy's sarcastic references. He wanted to
run away.
Ruth seemed to realize that Carl was shut out. Said she to Phil
Dunleavy: "I wish you could have seen Mr. Ericson save my life last
Sunday. I had an experience."
"What was that?" asked the man whom Olive called "Georgie," joining
the tea-table set.
The whole room listened as Ruth recounted the trip to Chinatown, Mrs.
Salisbury's party, and the hero who had once been a passenger in an
aeroplane.
Throughout she kept turning toward Carl. It seemed to reunite him to
the company. As she closed, he said:
"The thing that amused me about the parlor aviator was his laying down
the law that the Atlantic will be crossed before the end of 1913, and
his assumption that we'll all have aeroplanes in five years. I know
from my own business, the automobile business, about how much such
prophecies are worth."
"Don't you think the Atlantic will be crossed soon?" asked the
keen-looking man with the tortoise-shell spectacles.
Phil Dunleavy broke in with an air of amused sophistication: "I think
the parlor aviator was right. Really, you know, aviation is too
difficult a subject for the layman to make any predictions
about--either what it can or can't do."
"Oh yes," admitted Carl; and the whole room breathed. "Oh yes."
Dunleavy went on in his thin, overbred, insolent voice, "Now I have it
on good authority, from a man who's a member of the Aero Club, that
next year will be the greatest year aviation has ever known, and that
the Wrights have an aeroplane up their sleeve with which they'll cross
the Atlantic without a stop, during the spring of 1914 at the very
latest."
"That's unfortunate, because the aviation game has gone up completely
in this country, except for hydro-aeroplaning and military aviation,
and possibly it never will come back," said Carl, a hint of pique in
his voice.
"What is your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring
round on his slender left little finger and the whole room waited,
testing this positive-spoken outsider.
"Well," drawled Carl, "I have fairly good authority. Walter
MacMonnies, for instance, and he is probably the best flier in the
country to-day, except for Lincoln Beachey."
"Oh yes, he's a good flier," said Phil, contemptuously, with a shadowy
smile for Ruth. "Still, he's no better than Aaron Solomons, and he
isn't half so great a flier as that chap with the same surname as your
own, Hawk Ericson, whom I myself saw coming up the Jersey coast when
he won that big race to New York.... You see, I've been following this
aviation pretty closely."
Carl saw Ruth's head drop an inch, and her eyes close to a slit as
she inspected him with sudden surprise. He knew that it had just
occurred to her who he was. Their eyes exchanged understanding. "She
does get things," he thought, and said, lightly:
"Well, I honestly hate to take the money, Mr. Dunleavy, but I'm in a
position to know that MacMonnies is a better flier to-day than Ericson
is, be----"
"But see here----"
"----because I happen to _be_ Hawk Ericson."
"What a chump I am!" groaned the man in tortoise-shell spectacles. "Of
course! I remember your picture, now."
Phil was open-mouthed. Ruth laughed. The rest of the room gasped.
Mason Winslow, long and bald, was worrying over the question of How to
Receive Aviators at Tea.
And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing the jam.