From Titherington, the aviator, in his Devonshire home, from a
millionaire amateur flier among the orange-groves at Pasadena, from
his carpenter father in Joralemon, and from Gertie in New York, Carl
had invitations for Christmas, but none that he could accept. VanZile
had said, pleasantly, "Going out to the country for Christmas?"
"Yes," Cal had lied.
Again he saw himself as the Dethroned Prince, and remembered that one
year ago, sailing for South America to fly with Tony Bean, he had been
the lion at a Christmas party on shipboard, while Martin Dockerill,
his mechanic, had been a friendly slave.
He spent most of Christmas Eve alone in his room, turning over old
letters, and aviation magazines with pictures of Hawk Ericson,
wondering whether he might not go back to that lost world. Josiah
Bagby, Jr., son of the eccentric doctor at whose school Carl had
learned to fly, was experimenting with hydroaeroplanes and with
bomb-dropping devices at Palm Beach, and imploring Carl, as the
steadiest pilot in America, to join him. The dully noiseless room
echoed the music of a steady motor carrying him out over a blue bay.
Carl's own answer to the tempter vision was: "Rats! I can't very well
leave the Touricar now, and I don't know as I've got my flying nerve
back yet. Besides, Ruth----"
Always he thought of Ruth, uneasy with the desire to be out dancing,
laughing, playing with her. He was tormented by a question he had been
threshing out for days: Might he permissibly have sent her a
Christmas present?
He went to bed at ten o'clock--on Christmas Eve, when the streets were
surging with voices and gay steps, when rollicking piano-tunes from
across the street penetrated even closed windows, and a German voice
as rich as milk chocolate was caressing, "_Oh Tannenbaum, oh
Tannenbaum, wie gruen sind deine Blaetter._"... Then slept for nine
hours, woke with rapturous remembrance that he didn't have to go to
the office, and sang "The Banks of the Saskatchewan" in his bath. When
he returned to the house, after breakfast, he found a letter from
Ruth:
The Day before Xmas & all thru the Mansion
The Maids with Turkey are Stirring--Please Pardon the Scansion.
DEAR PLAYMATE,--You said on our tramp that I would make a
good playmate, but I'm sure that I should be a very poor one
if I did not wish you a gloriously merry Xmas & a New Year
that will bring you all the dear things you want. I shall be
glad if you do not get this letter on Xmas day itself if
that means that you are off at some charming country house
having a most katische (is that the way it is spelled,
probably not) time. But if by any chance you _are_ in town,
won't you make your playmate's shout to you from her back
yard a part of your Xmas? She feels shy about sending this
effusive greeting with all its characteristic sloppiness of
writing, but she does want you to have a welcome to Xmas
fun, & won't you please give the Touricar a pair of warm
little slippers from
RUTH GAYLORD WINSLOW.
P.S. Mrs. Tirrell has sent me an angel miniature Jap garden,
with a tiny pergola & real dwarf trees & a bridge that you
expect an Alfred Noyes lantern on, & Oh Carl, an issa
goldfish in a pool!
MISS R. WINSLOW.
"'----all the dear things I want'!" Carl repeated, standing tranced in
the hall, oblivious of the doctor-landlord snooping at the back. "Ruth
blessed, do you know the thing I want most?... Say! Great! I'll
hustle out and send her all the flowers in the world. Or, no. I've got
it." He was already out of the house, hastening toward the subway.
"I'll send her one of these lingerie tea-baskets with all kinds of
baby pots of preserves and tea-balls and stuff.... Wonder what
Dunleavy sent her?... Rats! I don't care. Jiminy! I'm happy! Me to
Palm Beach to fly? Not a chance!"
He had Christmas dinner in state, with the California Exiles Club. He
was craftily careless about the manner in which he touched a letter in
his pocket for gloves, which tailors have been inspired to put on the
left side of dress-clothes.
* * * * *
Twice Carl called at Ruth's in the two weeks after Christmas. Once she
declared that she was tired of modern life, that socialism and
agnosticism shocked her, that the world needed the courtly stiffness
of mid-Victorian days, as so ably depicted in the works of Mrs.
Florence Barclay--needed hair-cloth as a scourge for white
tango-dancing backs. As for her, Ruth announced, she was going to be
mid-Victorian just as soon as she could find a hair-locket, silk
mitts, and an elderly female tortoise-shell cat with an instinctive
sense of delicacy. She sat bolt-upright on the front of the most
impersonal French-gilt chair in the drawing-room and asserted that
Phil Dunleavy, with his safe ancestry of two generations of
wholesalers and strong probabilities about the respectability of still
another generation, was her ideal of a Christian gentleman. She wore a
full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the
middle, her right hand laid flat over her left in her lap. Her
vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter
sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself and tucked one smooth,
silk-clad, un-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered
her poise of a vicarage, remarking, "I have been subject to very
careless influences lately." She called him neither "Carl" nor "Mr.
Ericson" nor anything else, and he dared not venture on Ruth.
He went home in bewilderment. As he crossed Broadway he loitered
insolently, as though challenging the flying squadron of taxicabs to
run him down. "What do I care if they hit me?" he inquired, savagely,
of his sympathetic and applauding self. Every word she had said he
examined, finding double and triple meanings, warning himself not to
regard her mood seriously, but unable to make the warning take.
On his next call there was a lively Ruth who invited him up to the
library, read extracts from Stephen Leacock's _Nonsense Novels_;
turned companionably serious, and told him how divided were her
sympathies between her father--the conscientiously worried
employer--and a group of strikers in his factory. She made coffee in a
fantastic percolator, and played Debussy and ragtime. At ten-thirty,
the hour at which he had vehemently resolved to go, they were curled
in two big chairs eating chocolate peppermints and talking of
themselves apropos of astronomy and the Touricar and Lincoln Beachey's
daring and Mason Winslow and patriotism and Joralemon. Ruth's father
drifted in from his club at a quarter to eleven. Carl now met him for
the first time. He was a large-stomached, bald, sober, friendly man,
with a Gladstone collar, a huge watch-chain, kindly trousers and
painfully smart tan boots, a father of the kind who gives cigars and
non-committal encouragement to daughter's suitors.
* * * * *
It takes a voice with personality and modulations to make a
fifteen-minute telephone conversation tolerable, and youth to make it
possible. Ruth had both. For fifteen minutes she discussed with Carl
the question of whether she should go to Marion Browne's dinner-dance
at Delmonico's, as Phil wished, or go skeeing in the Westchester
Hills, as Carl wished, the coming Saturday--the first Saturday in
February, 1913. Carl won.
* * * * *
They arrived at a station in the Bedford Hills, bearing long,
carved-prowed Norwegian skees, which seemed to hypnotize the other
passengers. To Carl's joy (for he associated that suit with the
Palisades and their discovery of each other), Ruth was in her blue
corduroy, with high-lace boots and a gray sweater jacket of silky
wool. Carl displayed a tweed Norfolk jacket, a great sweater, and
mittens unabashed. He had a mysterious pack which, he informed the
excited Ruth, contained Roland's sword and the magic rug of Bagdad.
Together they were apple-cheeked, chattering children of outdoors.
For all the horizon's weight of dark clouds, clear sunshine lay on
clear snow as they left the train and trotted along the road, carrying
their skees beyond the outskirts of the town. Country sleigh-bells
chinkled down a hill; children shouted and made snow houses; elders
stamped their feet and clucked, "Fine day!" New York was far off and
ridiculously unimportant. Carl and Ruth reached an open sloping field,
where the snow that partly covered a large rock was melting at its
lacy, crystaled edges, staining the black rock to a shiny wetness that
was infinitely cheerful in its tiny reflection of the blue sky at the
zenith. On a tree whose bleak bark the sun had warmed, vagrant
sparrows in hand-me-down feathers discussed rumors of the
establishment of a bread-crumb line and the better day that was coming
for all proletarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out
against a red barn. The litter of corn-stalks and straw in a barn-yard
was transformed from disordered muck to a tessellation of warm silver
and old gold. Not the delicate red and browns and grays alone, but
everywhere the light, as well, caressed the senses. A distant dog
barked good-natured greeting to all the world. The thawing land
stirred with a promise that spring might in time return to lovers.
"Oh, to-day is beautiful as--as--it's beautiful as frosting on a
birthday-cake!" cried Ruth, as she slipped her feet into the straps of
her skees, preparing for her first lesson. "These skees seem so
dreadfully long and unmanageable, now I get them on. Like seven-foot
table-knives, and my silly feet like orange seeds in the middle of the
knives!"
The skees _were_ unmanageable.
One climbed up on the other, and Ruth tried to lift her own weight.
When she was sliding down a hillock they spread apart, eager to chase
things lying in entirely different directions. Ruth came down between
them, her pretty nose plowing the wet snow-crust. Carl, speeding
beside her, his obedient skees exactly parallel, lifted her and
brushed the snow from her furs and her nose. She was laughing.
Falling, getting up, learning at last the zest of coasting and of
handling those gigantic skates on level stretches, she accompanied him
from hill to hill, through fences, skirting thickets, till they
reached a hollow at the heart of a farm where a brooklet led into
deeper woods. The afternoon was passing; the swarthy clouds marched
grimly from the east; but the low sun red-lettered the day. The
country-bred Carl showed her how thin sheets of ice formed on the bank
of the stream and jutted out like shelves in an elfin cupboard,
delicate and curious-edged as Venetian glass; and how, through an
opening in the ice, she could spy upon a secret world of clear water,
not dead from winter, but alive with piratical black bugs over sand of
exquisitely pale gray, like Lilliputian submarines in a fairy sea.
A rabbit hopped away among the trees beyond them, and Carl, following
its trail, read to her the forest hieroglyphics--tracks of rabbit and
chipmunk and crow, of field-mouse and house-cat, in the snow-paved
city of night animals with its edifices of twiggy underbrush.
The setting sun was overclouded, now; the air sharp; the grove
uneasily quiet. Branches, contracting in the returning cold, ticked
like a solemn clock of the woodland; and about them slunk the homeless
mysteries that, at twilight, revisit even the tiniest forest, to wail
of the perished wilderness.
"I know there's Indians sneaking along in there," she whispered, "and
wolves and outlaws; and maybe a Hudson Bay factor coming, in a red
Mackinaw coat."
"And maybe a mounted policeman and a lost girl."
"Saying which," remarked Ruth, "the brave young man undid his pack and
disclosed to the admiring eyes of the hungry lass--meaning me,
especially the 'hungry'--the wonders of his pack, which she had been
covertly eying amid all the perils of the afternoon."
Carl did not know it, but all his life he had been seeking a girl who
would, without apologetic explanation, begin a story with herself and
him for its characters. He instantly continued her tale:
"And from the pack the brave young hero, whose new Norfolk jacket she
admired such a lot--as I said, from the pack he pulled two clammy,
blue, hard-boiled eggs and a thermos bottle filled with tea into which
I've probably forgotten to put any sugar."
"And then she stabbed him and went swiftly home!" Ruth concluded the
narration.... "Don't be frivolous about food. Just one hard-boiled egg
and you perish! None of these gentle 'convenient' shoe-box picnics for
me. Of course I ought to pretend that I have a bird-like appetite, but
as a matter of fact I could devour an English mutton-chop, four
kidneys, and two hot sausages, and then some plum-pudding and a box of
chocolates, assorted."
"If this were a story," said Carl, knocking the crusted snow from dead
branches and dragging them toward the center of a small clearing, "the
young hero from Joralemon would now remind the city gal that 'tis only
among God's free hills that you can get an appetite, and then the
author would say, 'Nothing had ever tasted so good as those trout,
yanked from the brook and cooked to a turn on the sizzling coals. She
looked at the stalwart young man, so skilfully frying the flapjacks,
and contrasted him with the effeminate fops she had met on Fifth
Avenue.'... But meanwhile, squaw, you'd better tear some good dry
twigs off this bush for kindling."
Gathering twigs while Carl scrabbled among the roots for dry leaves,
Ruth went on again with their story: "'Yes,' said the fair maid o' the
wilds, obediently, bending her poor, patient back at the cruel behest
of the stern man of granite.... May I put something into the story
which will politely indicate how much the unfortunate lady appreciates
this heavenly snow-place in contrast to the beastly city, even though
she is so abominably treated?"
"Yes, but as I warned you, nothing about the effect of out-o'-doors on
the appetite. All you've got to do is to watch a city broker eat
fourteen pounds of steak, three pots of coffee, and four black cigars
at a Broadway restaurant to realize that the effeminate city man
occasionally gets up quite some appetite, too!"
"My dear," she wailed, "aside from the vulgarity of the thing--you
know that no one ever admits to a real interest in food--I am so
hungry that if there is any more mention of eating I shall go off in a
corner and howl. You know how those adorable German Christmas stories
always begin: '_Es war Weinachtsabend. Tiefer Schnee lag am Boden.
Durch das Wald kam ein armes Maedchen das weinte bitterlich._' The
reason why she weinted bitterlich was because her soul was hurt at
being kept out of the secret of the beautiful, beautiful food that was
hidden in the hero's pack. Now let's have no more imaginary menus.
Let's discuss Nijinsky and the musical asses till you are ready----"
"All ready now!" he proclaimed, kneeling by the pyramid of leaves,
twigs, and sticks he had been erecting. He lit a match and kindled a
leaf. Fire ran through the mass and rosy light brightened the
darkened snow. "By the way," he said, as with cold fingers he pulled
at the straps of his pack, "I'm beginning to be afraid that we'll be a
lot later getting home than we expected."
"Well, I suppose I'll go to sleep on the train, and wake up at every
station and wail and make you uncomfortable, and Mason will be grieved
and disapproving when I get home late, but just now I don't care. I
don't! It's _la belle aventure_! Carl, do you realize that never in my
twenty-four (almost twenty-five now!) never in all these years have I
been out like this in the wilds, in the dark, not even with Phil? And
yet I don't feel afraid--just terribly happy."
"You do trust me, don't you?"
"You know I do.... Yet when I realize that I really don't know you at
all----!"
He had brought out, from the pack, granite-ware plates and cups, a
stew-pan and a coffee-pot, a ruddied paper of meat and a can of peas,
rolls, Johnny-cake, maple syrup, a screw-top bottle of cream,
pasteboard boxes of salt and pepper and sugar. Lamb chops, coiled in
the covered stew-pan, loudly broiled in their own fat, and to them the
peas, heated in their can, were added when the coffee began to foam.
He dragged a large log to the side of the fire, and Ruth, there
sitting, gorged shamelessly. Carl himself did not eat reticently.
Light snow was falling now, driven by them on the rising wind. The
fire, where hot coals had piled higher and higher, was a refuge in the
midst of the darkness. Carl rolled up another log, for protection from
the weather, and placed it at right angles to the first.
"You were saying, at Mrs. Needham's, that we ought to have an old
farm-house," he remarked, while she snuggled before the fire, her back
against a log, her round knees up under her chin, her arms clasping
her legs. "Let's build one right here."
Instantly she was living it. In the angle between the logs she laid
out an outline of twigs, exclaiming: "Here is my room, with low
ceiling and exposed rafters and a big open fireplace. Not a single
touch of pale pink or rosebuds!"
"Then here's my room, with a work-bench and a bed nine feet long that
I can lose myself in."
"Then here outside my room," said Ruth, "I'm going to have a brick
terrace, and all around it heliotrope growing in pots on the brick
wall."
"I'm sorry, blessed, but you can't have a terrace. Don't you realize
that every brick would have to be carted two hundred miles through
this wilderness?"
"I don't care. If you appreciated me you'd carry them on your back, if
necessary."
"Well, I'll think it over, but----Oh, look here, I'm going to have a
porch made out of fresh saplings, outside of my room, and it 'll
overlook the hills, and it 'll have outdoor cots with olive-gray army
blankets over them, and when you wake up in the morning you'll see the
hills in the first sunlight."
"Glorious! I'll give up my terrace. Though I do think I was w'eedled
into it."
"Seriously, Ruth, wouldn't you like to have such a place, back in the
wilderness?"
"Love it! I'd be perfectly happy there. At least for a while. I
wouldn't care if I never saw another aigrette or a fat Rhine maiden
singing in thirty sharps."
"Listen, how would this be for a site? (Let me stick some more wood
there on your side of the fire.) Once when I was up in the high
Sierras, in California, I found a wooded bluff--you looked a thousand
feet straight down to a clear lake, green as mint-sauce pretty nearly,
not a wrinkle on it. There wasn't a sound anywhere except when the
leaves rustled. Then on the other side you looked way up to a peak
covered with snow, and a big eagle sailing overhead--sailing and
sailing, hour after hour. And you could smell the pine needles and
sit there and look way off----Would you like it?"
"Oh, I can't tell you how much!"
"Have to go there some day."
"When you're president of the VanZile Company you must give me a
Touricar to go in, and perhaps I shall let you go, too."
"Right! I'll be chauffeur and cook and everything." Quietly exultant
at her sweet, unworded promise of liking, he hastily said, to cover
that thrill, "Even a poor old low-brow mechanic like me does get a
kind of poetic fervor out of a view like that."
"But you aren't a low-brow mechanic. You make me so dreadfully weary
when you're mock-humble. As a matter of fact, you're a famous man and
I'm a poor little street waif. For instance, the way you talk about
socialism when you get interested and let yourself go. Really excited.
I'd always thought that aviators and other sorts of heroes were such
stolid dubs."
"Gee! it'd be natural enough if I did like to talk. Imagine the
training in being with the English superintendent at the mine, that I
was telling you about, and hearing Frazer lecture, and knowing Tony
Bean with his South-American interests, and most of all, of course,
knowing Forrest Haviland. If I had any pep in me----Course I'm
terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help wading right in and
wanting to talk to everybody about everything."
"Yes. Yes. Of course I'm abominably slangy, too. I wonder if every one
isn't, except in books.... We've left our house a little unfinished,
Carl."
"I'm afraid we'll have to, blessed. We'll have to be going. It's past
seven, now; and we must be sure to catch the 8.09 and get back to town
about nine."
"I can't tell you how sorry I am we must leave our house in the
wilds."
"You really have enjoyed it?" He was cleaning the last of the dishes
with snow, and packing them away. "Do you know," he said, cautiously,
"I always used to feel that a girl--you say you aren't in society, but
I mean a girl like you--I used to think it was impossible to play with
such a girl unless a man was rich, which I excessively am not, with my
little money tied up in the Touricar. Yet here we have an all-day
party, and it costs less than three really good seats at the theater."
"I know. Phil is always saying that he is too poor to have a good
time, and yet his grandmother left him fifteen thousand dollars
capital in his own right, besides his allowance from his father and
his salary from the law firm; and he infuriates me sometimes--aside
from the tactlessness of the thing--by quite plainly suggesting that
I'm so empty-headed that I won't enjoy going out with him unless he
spends a lot of money and makes waiters and ushers obsequious. There
are lots of my friends who think that way, both the girls and the men.
They never seem to realize that if they were just human beings, as you
and I have been to-day, and not hide-bound members of the
dance-and-tea league, they could beat that beastly artificial old
city.... Phil once told me that _no_ man--mind you, no one at
all--could possibly marry on less than fifteen thousand dollars a
year. Simply proved it beyond a question."
"That lets me out."
"Phil said that no one could possibly live on the West Side--of course
the fact that he and I are both living on the West Side doesn't
count--and the cheapest good apartments near Fifth Avenue cost four
thousand dollars a year. And then one can't possibly get along with
less than two cars and four maids and a chauffeur. Can't be done!"
"He's right. Fawncy! Only three maids. Might as well be dead."
The pack was ready, now; he was swinging it to his back and preparing
to stamp out the fire. But he dropped his burden and faced her in the
low firelight. "Ruth, you won't make up your mind to marry Phil till
you're _sure_, will you? You'll play with me awhile, won't you? Can't
we explore a few more----"
She laughed nervously, trying to look at him. "As I said, Phil won't
condescend to consider poor me till he has his fifteen thousand
dollars a year, and that won't be for some time, I think, considering
he is too well-bred to work hard."
"But seriously, you will----Oh, I don't know how to put it. You will
let me be your playmate, even as much as Phil is, while we're
still----"
"Carl, I've never played as much with any one as with you. You make
most of the men I know seem very unenterprising. It frightens me.
Perhaps I oughtn't to let you jump the fence so easily."
"You _won't_ let Phil lock you up for a while?"
"No.... Mustn't we be going?"
"Thank you for letting the outlaw come to your party. The fire's out.
Come."
With the quenching of the fire they were left in smothering darkness.
"Where do we go?" she worried. "I feel completely lost. I can't make
out a thing. I feel so lost and so blind, after looking at the fire."
Her voice betrayed that he was suddenly a stranger to her.
With hasty assurance he said: "Sit tight! See. We head for that tall
oak, up the slope, then through the clearing, keeping to the right.
You'll be able to see the oak as soon as you get the firelight out of
your eyes. Remember I used to hunt every fall, as a kid, and come back
through the dark. Don't worry."
"I can just make out the tree now."
"Right. Now for it."
"Let me carry my skees."
"No, you just watch your feet." His voice was pleasant, quiet, not too
intimate. "Don't try to guide yourself by your eyes. Let your feet
find the safe ground. Your eyes will fool you in the dark."
It was a hard pull, the way back. Encumbered with pack and two pairs
of skees, which they dared not use in the darkness, he could not give
her a helping hand. The snow was still falling, not very thick nor
savagely wind-borne, yet stinging their eyes as they crossed open
moors and the wind leaped at them. Once Ruth slipped, on a rock or a
chunk of ice, and came down with an infuriating jolt. Before he could
drop the skees she struggled up and said, dryly:
"Yes, it did hurt, and I know you're sorry, and there's nothing you
can do."
Carl grinned and kept silence, though with one hand, as soon as he
could get it free from the elusive skees, he lightly patted her
shoulder.
She was almost staggering, so cold was she and so tired, and so heavy
was the snow caked on her boots, when they came to a sharp rise, down
which shone the radiance of an incandescent light.
"Road's right up there, blessed," he cried, cheerily.
"Oh, I can't----Yes, I will----"
He dropped the skees, put one arm about her shoulders and one about
her knees, and almost before she had finished crying, "Oh no, _please_
don't carry me!" he was half-way up the slope. He set her down safe by
the road.
They caught the 8.09 train with two minutes to spare. Its warmth and
the dingy softness of the plush seats seemed palatial.
Ruth rubbed her cold hands with a smile deprecating, intimate; and her
shoulder drooped toward him. Her whole being seemed turned toward him.
He cuddled her right hand within his, murmuring: "See, my hand's a
house where yours can keep warm." Her fingers curled tight and rested
there contentedly. Like a drowsy kitten she looked down at their two
hands. "A little brown house!" she said.