At home, early that evening, Carl's doctor-landlord gave him the
message that a Miss Gertrude Cowles had called him up, but had
declined to leave a number. The landlord's look indicated that it was
no fault of his if Carl had friends who were such fools that they
didn't leave their numbers. Carl got even with him by going out to the
corner drug-store to telephone Gertie, instead of giving him a chance
to listen.
"Hello?" said Gertie over the telephone. "Oh, hello, Carl; I just
called up to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I
thought perhaps you might like to come up if you haven't anything
better to do."
Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole
evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Dunleavy and
English-basement houses with cream-colored drawing-rooms. But he went
up to Gertie's.
They were all there--Gertie and Adelaide, Ray and his mother, and Miss
Greene, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis; all playing parcheesi,
explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on
Sunday, but that parcheesi was "different." Ray winked at Carl as they
said it.
The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at
home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic
science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top
of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a
cockroach with a ruler.
As the others began to disappear, Gertie said to Carl: "Don't go till
I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday. Lots of news from
home. Joe Jordan is engaged!"
They were left alone. Gertie glanced at him intimately. He stiffened.
He knew that Gertie was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display
to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would
be the inevitable sequence of a friendship which Ruth or Olive could
take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man
just starting in business, was un-heroically afraid of matrimony.
Yet his stiffness of attitude disappeared when Gertie had read the
letter from Joralemon and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy: "I
can just see them out sleighing. Sometimes I wish I was out there.
Honest, Carl, for all the sea and the hills here, don't you wish
sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooded
bluff over a lake?"
"Yes!" he cried. "I've been away so long now that I don't ever feel
homesick for any particular part of the country; but just the same I
would like to see the lakes. And I do miss the prairies sometimes. Oh,
I was reading something the other day--fellow was trying to define the
different sorts of terrain--here it is, cut it out of the paper." He
produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a
clipping hacked from a newspaper with a nail-file, and read:
"'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their
promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in
small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long grasses
shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for
hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the
forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral to grave
saints of the open; all these I love, but nowhere do I find content
save on the mid-western prairie, where the light of sky and plain
drugs the senses, where the sound of meadow-larks at dawn fulfils my
desire for companionship, and the easy creak of the buggy, as we top
rise after rise, bespells me into an afternoon slumber which the
nervous town shall never know.'
"I cut the thing out because I was thinking that the prairies,
stretching out the way they do, make me want to go on and on, in an
aeroplane or any old thing. Lord, Lord! I guess before long I'll have
to be beating it again--like the guy in Kipling that always got sick
of reading the same page too long."
"Oh, but Carl, you don't mean to say you're going to give up your
business, when you're doing so well? And aviation shows what you can
do if you stick to a thing, Carl, and not just wander around like you
used to do. We do want to see you succeed."
His reply was rather weak: "Well, gee! I guess I'll succeed, all
right, but I don't see much use of succeeding if you have to be stuck
down in a greasy city street all your life."
"That's very true, Carl, but do you appreciate the city? Have you ever
been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or gone to a single symphony
concert at Carnegie Hall?"
Carl was convinced that Gertie was a highly superior person; that she
was getting far more of the good of New York than he.... He would take
her to a concert, have her explain the significance of the music.
It was never to occur sharply to him that, though Gertie referred
frequently to concerts and pictures, she showed no vast amount of
knowledge about them. She was a fixed fact in his mind; had been for
twenty years. He could have a surface quarrel with her because he knew
the fundamental things in her, and with these, he was sure, no one
could quarrel. His thoughts of Ruth and Olive were delightful
surprises; his impression of Gertie was stable as the Rockies.
* * * * *
Carl wasn't sure whether Upper West Side young ladies could be
persuaded to attend a theater party upon short acquaintance, but he
tried, and arranged a party of Ruth and Olive and himself, Walter
MacMonnies (in town on his way from Africa to San Diego), Charley
Forbes of the _Chronicle_ and, for chaperon, the cosmopolitan woman
whom he had met at Ruth's, and who proved to be a Mrs. Tirrell, a
dismayingly smart dressmaker.
When he called for Ruth he expected such a gay girl as had poured tea.
He was awed to find her a _grande dame_ in black velvet, more
dignified, apparently inches taller, and in a vice-regally bad temper.
As they drove off she declared:
"Sorry I'm in such a villainous temper. I hadn't a single pair of
decent white gloves, and I tore some old black Spanish lace on the
gown I was going to wear, and my entire family, whom God
unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, clustered about my door
while I was dressing and bawled in queries about laundry and other
horribly vulgar things."
Carl did not see much of the play. He was watching Ruth's eyes,
listening to her whispered comments. She declared that she was awed by
the presence of two aviators and a newspaper man. Actually, she was
working, working at bringing out MacMonnies, a shy, broad-shouldered,
inarticulate youth who supposed that he never had to talk.
Carl had planned to go to the Ritz for after-theater supper, but Ruth
and Olive persuaded him to take them to the cafe of the Rector's of
that time; for, they said, they had never been in a Broadway cafe, and
they wanted to see the famous actors with their make-ups off.
At the table Carl carried Ruth off in talk, like a young Lochinvar out
of the Middle West. Around them was the storm of highballs and brandy
and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar-smoke,
shirt-fronts, white shoulders, and drab waiters; yet here was a quiet
refuge for the eternal force of life....
Carl was asking: "Would you rather be a perfect lady and have blue
bowls with bunnies on them for your very worst dissipation, or be like
your mountain-climbing woman and have anarchists for friends one day
and be off hiking through the clouds the next?"
"Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the 'nice things
of life,' but I do get tired of being nice. Especially when I have a
bad temper, as I had to-night. I'm not at all imprisoned in a harem,
and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been
brought up to look at things that aren't 'like the home life of our
dear Queen' as impossible, and I'm quite sure that father believes
that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be
rich. But I've been reading; and I've made--to you it may seem silly
to call it a discovery, but to me it's the greatest discovery I've
ever made: that people are just people, all of them--that the little
mousey clerk may be a hero, and the hero may be a nobody--that the
motorman that lets his beastly car spatter mud on my nice new velvet
skirt may be exactly the same sort of person as the swain who
commiserates with me in his cunnin' Harvard accent. Do you think
that?"
"I know it. Most of my life I've been working with men with dirty
finger-nails, and the only difference between them and the men with
clean nails is a nail-cleaner, and that costs just ten cents at the
corner drug-store. Seriously--I remember a cook I used to talk to on
my way down to Panama once----"
("Panama! How I'd like to go there!")
"----and he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met."
"Yes, but generally do you find very much--oh, courtesy and that sort
of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself 'the
better class'?"
"No, I don't."
"You don't? Why, I thought--the way you spoke----"
"Why, blessed, what in the world would be the use of their trying to
climb if they already had all the rich have? You can't be as gracious
as the man that's got nothing else to do, when you're about one jump
ahead of the steam-roller every second. That's why they ought to
_take_ things. If I were a union man, I wouldn't trust all these
writers and college men and so on, that try to be sympathetic. Not for
one minute. They mean well, but they can't get what it means to a real
workman to have to be up at five every winter morning, with no heat in
the furnished housekeeping room; or to have to see his Woman sick
because he can't afford a doctor."
So they talked, boy and girl, wondering together what the world really
is like.
"I want to find out what we can do with life!" she said. "Surely it's
something more than working to get tired, and then resting to go back
to work. But I'm confused about things." She sighed. "My settlement
work--I went into it because I was bored. But it did make me realize
how many people are hungry. And yet we just talk and talk and
talk--Olive and I sit up half the night when she comes to my house,
and when we're not talking about the new negligees we're making and
the gorgeous tea-gowns we're going to have when we're married, we
rescue the poor and think we're dreadfully advanced, but does it do
any good to just talk?--Dear me, I split that poor infinitive right
down his middle."
"I don't know. But I do know I don't want to be just stupidly
satisfied, and talking does keep me from that, anyway. See here, Miss
Winslow, suppose some time I suggested that we become nice and earnest
and take up socialism and single tax and this--what is it?--oh,
syndicalism--and really studied them, would you do it? Make each other
study?"
"Love to."
"Does Dunleavy think much?"
She raised her eyebrows a bit, but hesitated. "Oh yes--no, I don't
suppose he does. Or anyway, mostly about the violin. He played a lot
when he was in Yale."
Thus was Carl encouraged to be fatuous, and he said, in a manner which
quite dismissed Phil Dunleavy: "I don't believe he's very deep.
Ra-ther light, I'd say."
Her eyebrows had ascended farther. "Do you think so? I'm sorry."
"Why sorry?"
"Oh, he's always been rather a friend of mine. Olive and Phil and I
roller-skated together at the age of eight."
"But----"
"And I shall probably--marry--Phil--some day before long." She turned
abruptly to Charley Forbes with a question.
Lost, already lost, was the playmate; a loss that disgusted him with
life. He beat his spirit, cursed himself as a clumsy mechanic. He
listened to Olive only by self-compulsion. It was minutes before he
had the ability and the chance to say to Ruth:
"Forgive me--in the name of the Blue Bowl. Mr. Dunleavy was rather
rude to me, and I've been just as rude--and to you! And without his
excuse. For he naturally would want to protect you from a wild aviator
coming from Lord knows where."
"You are forgiven. And Phil _was_ rude. And you're not a
Lord-knows-where, I'm sure."
Almost brusquely Carl demanded: "Come for a long tramp with me, on the
Palisades. Next Saturday, if you can and if it's a decent day.... You
said you liked to run away.... And we can be back before dinner, if
you like."
"Why--let me think it over. Oh, I _would_ like to. I've always wanted
to do just that--think of it, the Palisades just opposite, and I
never see them except for a walk of half a mile or so when I stay with
a friend of mine, Laura Needham, at Winklehurst, up on the Palisades.
My mother never approved of a wilder wilderness than Central Park and
the habit----I've never been able to get Olive to explore. But it
isn't conventional to go on long tramps with even the nicest new
Johnnies, is it?"
"No, but----"
"I know. You'll say, 'Who makes the convention?' and of course there's
no answer but 'They.' But They are so all-present. They----Oh yes,
yes, yes, I will go! But you will let me get back by dinner-time,
won't you? Will you call for me about two?... And can you----I wonder
if a hawk out of the windy skies can understand how daring a dove out
of Ninety-second Street feels at going walking on the Palisades?"