While scientists seek germs that shall change the world, while war
comes or winter takes earth captive, even while love visibly flowers,
a power, mighty as any of these, lashes its human pack-train on the
dusty road to futility. The Day's Work is the name of that power.
All these days of first love Carl had the office for lowering
background. The warm trust of Ruth's hand on a Saturday did not make
plans for the Touricar any the less pressing on a Monday. The tyranny
of nine to five is stronger, more insistent, in every department of
life, than the most officious oligarchy. Inspectors can be bribed,
judges softened, and recruiting sergeants evaded, but only the grace
of God will turn 3.30 into 5.30. And Mr. Ericson of the Touricar
Company, a not vastly important employee of the mothering VanZile
Corporation, was not entitled to go home at 3.30, as a really rational
man would have done when the sun gold-misted the windows and suggested
skating.
No longer was business essentially an adventure to Carl. Doubtless he
would have given it up and have gone to Palm Beach to fly a hydro for
Bagby, Jr., had there been no Ruth. Bagby wrote that he was coming
North, to prepare for the spring's experiments; wouldn't Carl consider
joining him?
Carl was now, between his salary and his investment in the Touricar
Company, making about four thousand dollars a year, and saving nearly
half of it, against the inevitable next change in his life, whatever
that should be. He would probably climb to ten thousand dollars in
five years. The Touricar was promising success. Several had been
ordered at the Automobile Show; the Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia
agents of the company reported interest. For no particular reason,
apparently, Milwaukee had taken them up first; three Milwaukee people
had ordered cars.... An artist was making posters with beautiful
gipsies and a Touricar and tourists whose countenances showed lively
appreciation of the efforts of the kind Touricar manufacturers to
please and benefit them. But the head salesman of the company laughed
at Carl when he suggested that the Touricar might not only bring them
money, but really take people off to a larger freedom:
"I don't care a hang where they go with the thing as long as they pay
for it. You can't be an idealist and make money. You make the money
and then you can have all the ideals you want to, and give away some
hospitals and libraries."
* * * * *
They walked and talked, Ruth and Carl. They threaded the
Sunday-afternoon throng on upper Broadway, where on every clear Sunday
all the apartment-dwellers (if they have remembered to have their
trousers pressed or their gloves cleaned in preparation) promenade
like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting
apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two
blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and
hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the
Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they
scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat,
and were thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause
makes honest friendship; but hating the same people makes alliances so
delightful that one can sit up late nights, talking.
At the opening of the flying season Carl took her to the Hempstead
Plains Aviation Field, and, hearing his explanations, she at last
comprehended emotionally that he really was an aviator.
They tramped through Staten Island; they had tea at the Manhattan.
Carl dined with Ruth and her father; once he took her brother, Mason,
to lunch at the Aero Club.
Ruth was ill in March; not with a mysterious and romantic malady, but
with grippe, which, she wrote Carl, made her hate the human race, New
York, charity, and Shakespeare. She could not decide whether to go to
Europe, or to die in a swoon and be buried under a mossy headstone.
He answered that he would go abroad for her; and every day she
received tokens bearing New York post-marks, yet obviously coming from
foreign parts: a souvenir card from the Piraeus, stating that Carl was
"visiting cousin T. Demetrieff Philopopudopulos, and we are enjoying
our drives so much. Dem. sends his love; wish you could be with us";
an absurd string of beads from Port Said and a box of Syrian sweets; a
Hindu puzzle guaranteed to amuse victims of the grippe, and
gold-fabric slippers of China; with long letters nonchalantly relating
encounters with outlaws and wrecks and new varieties of disease.
He called on her before her nose had quite lost the grippe or her
temper the badness.
Phil Dunleavy was there, lofty and cultured in evening clothes,
apparently not eager to go. He stayed till ten minutes to ten, and, by
his manner of cold surprise when Carl tried to influence the
conversation, was able to keep it to the Kreisler violin recitals, the
architecture of St. John the Divine's, and Whitney's polo, while Carl
tried not to look sulky, and manoeuvered to get out the excellent
things he was prepared to say on other topics; not unlike the small
boy who wants to interrupt whist-players and tell them about his new
skates. When Phil was gone Ruth sighed and said, belligerently:
"Poor Phil, he has to work so hard, and all the people at his office,
even the firm, are just as common as they can be; common as the
children at my beastly old settlement-house."
"What do you mean by 'common'?" bristled Carl.
"Not of our class."
"What do you mean by 'our class'?"
And the battle was set.
Ruth refused to withdraw "common." Carl recalled Abraham Lincoln and
Golden-Rule Jones and Walt Whitman on the subject of the Common
People, though as to what these sages had said he was vague. Ruth
burst out:
"Oh, you can talk all you like about theories, but just the same, in
real life most people are common as dirt. And just about as admissible
to Society. It's all very fine to be good to servants, but you would
be the first to complain if I invited the cook up here."
"Give her and her children education for three generations----"
She was perfectly unreasonable, and right in most of the things she
said. He was perfectly unreasonable, and right in all of the things he
said. Their argument was absurdly hot, and hurt them pathetically. It
was difficult, at first, for Carl to admit that he was at odds with
his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would
soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not
to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen
minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he
remembering the fact that she was a result of city life; she the fact
that he wasn't a product of city life.
And a fact which neither of them realized, save subconsciously, was in
the background: Carl himself had come in a few years from Oscar
Ericson's back yard to Ruth Winslow's library--he had made the step
naturally, as only an American could, but it was a step.
She was loftily polite. "I'm afraid you can't quite understand what
the niceties of life mean to people like Phil. I'm sorry he won't give
them up to the first truck-driver he meets, but I'm afraid he won't,
and occasionally it's necessary to face facts! Niceties of the kind he
has gr----"
"_Nice!_"
"Really----" Her heavy eyebrows arched in a frown.
"If you're going to get 'nice' on me, of course you'll have to be
condescending, and that's one thing I won't permit."
"I'm afraid you'll find that one has to permit a great many things.
Sometimes, apparently, I must permit great rudeness."
"Have I been rude? Have----"
"Yes. Very."
He could endure no more. "Good night!" he growled, and was gone.
He was frightened to find himself out of the house; the door closed
between them; no going back without ringing the bell. He couldn't go
back. He walked a block, slow, incredulous. He stood hesitant before
the nearest corner drug-store, shivering in the March wind, wondering
if he dared go into the store and telephone her. He was willing to
concede anything. He planned apt phrases to use. Surely everything
would be made right if he could only speak to her. He pictured himself
crossing the drug-store floor, entering the telephone-booth, putting
five cents in the slot. He stared at the red-and-green globes in the
druggist's window; inspected a display of soaps, and recollected the
fact that for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving-soap
and had had to use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a
shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I
_must_ try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for
thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that
soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave and angel, for
while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he
sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went
into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. There was no
sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly
ice-cream soda, and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank
it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he
knew not what.
He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her.
But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into
defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his
top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of
"niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go
anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and
comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the
results of losing his job, or of being robbed of his interests in the
Touricar. He glanced interestedly at a pretty girl; recklessly went
into a cigar-store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again.
As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went
over every word Ruth or he had said, and when he reached his room he
sat deep in an arm-chair, like a hurt animal crouching, his coat still
on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged, his legs
straight out before him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he
disconsolately contemplated a photograph of Forrest Haviland in
full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau among tangled ties,
stray cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff-buttons, and a
haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and
gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not
know how the play would end.
But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in
earnest.
Forrest's portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no
picture of Ruth, that he wanted one. Next time he saw her he would
ask her.... Then he remembered.
He took out his new cigar, turned it over and over gloweringly, and
chewed it without lighting it, the right corner of his mouth vicious
in appearance. But his tone was plaintive as he mourned, "How did it
all start, anyway?"
He drew off his top-coat and shoes, and put on his shabby though once
expensive slippers. Slowly. He lay on his bed. He certainly did not
intend to go to sleep--but he awoke at 2 A.M., dressed, the light
burning, his windows closed, feeling sweaty and hot and dirty and
dry-mouthed--a victim of all the woes since tall Troy burned. He
shucked off his clothes as you shuck an ear of corn.
When he awoke in the morning he lay as usual, greeting a shining new
day, till he realized that it was not a shining day; it was an ominous
day; everything was wrong. That something had happened--really
had--was a fact that sternly patrolled his room. His chief reaction
was not repentance nor dramatic interest, but a vexed longing to
unwish the whole affair. "Hang it!" he groaned.
Already he was eager to make peace. He sympathized with Ruth. "Poor
kid! it was rotten to row with her, her completely all in with the
grippe."
At three in the afternoon he telephoned to her house. "Miss Ruth," he
was informed, "was asleep; she was not very well."
Would the maid please ask Miss Ruth to call Mr. Ericson when she woke?
Certainly the maid would.
But by bedtime Ruth had not telephoned. Self-respect would not let him
call again, for days, and Ruth never called him.
He went about alternately resentful at her stubbornness and seeing
himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance,
on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She
was with Phil Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily,
oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of Carl Ericson.
That was the end, he knew. He watched them take a train; stood there
alone, due at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society, but suddenly not
wishing to go, not wishing to go anywhere nor do anything, friendless,
bored, driftwood in the city.
So easily had the Hawk swooped down into her life, coming by chance,
but glad to remain. So easily had he been driven away.
* * * * *
For three days he planned in a headachy way to make an end of his job
and join Bagby, Jr., in his hydroaeroplane experiments. He pictured
the crowd that would worship him. He told himself stories unhappy and
long about the renewed companionship of Ruth and Phil. He was sure
that he, the stranger, had been a fool to imagine that he could ever
displace Phil. On the third afternoon, suddenly, apparently without
cause, he bolted from the office, and at a public telephone-booth he
called Ruth. It was she who answered the telephone.
"May I come up to-night?" he said, urgently.
"Yes," she said. That was all.
When he saw her, she hesitated, smiled shamefacedly, and confessed
that she had wanted to telephone to him.
Together, like a stage chorus, they contested:
"I was grouchy----"
"I was beastly----"
"I'm honestly sorry----"
"'ll you forgive----"
"What was it all about?"
"Really, I do--not--know!"
"I agree with lots of the things you----"
"No, I agree with you, but just at the time--you know."
Her lively, defensive eyes were tender. He put his arm lightly about
her shoulders--lightly, but his finger-tips were sensitive to every
thread of her thin bodice that seemed tissue as warmly living as the
smooth shoulder beneath. She pressed her eyes against his coat, her
coiled dark hair beneath his chin. A longing to cry like a boy, and to
care for her like a man, made him reverent. The fear of Phil vanished.
Intensely conscious though he was of her hair and its individual
scent, he did not kiss it. She was sacred.
She sprang from him, and at the piano hammered out a rattling waltz.
It changed to gentler music, and under the shaded piano-lamp they were
silent, happy. He merely touched her hand, when he went, but he sang
his way home, wanting to nod to every policeman.
"I've found her again; it isn't merely play, now!" he kept repeating.
"And I've learned something. I don't really know what it is, but it's
as though I'd learned a new language. Gee! I'm happy!"