While the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and
stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as
unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in
the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening
called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to
go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires. Carl tried to bring her
coolness. He ate only poached eggs on toast or soup and salad for
dinner, that he might not be torpid. He gave her moss-roses with drops
of water like dew on the stems. They sat out on the box-stoop--the
unfriendly New York street adopting for a time the frank
neighborliness of a village--and exclaimed over every breeze. They
talked about the charm of forty degrees below zero. That is,
sometimes. Their favorite topic was themselves.
She still insisted that she was not in love with him; hooted at the
idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to
some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were
engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the
windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to
sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till
his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into
his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into
warm slumber in the familiarity of his arms. Yet he dared not kiss her
throat, as he had done at Long Beach.
As lovers do, Carl had thought intently of her warning that she did
care for clothes, dancing, country clubs. Ruth would have been
caressingly surprised had she known the thought and worried
conscientiousness he gave to the problem of planning "parties" for
her. Ideas were always popping up in the midst of his work, and never
giving him rest till he had noted them down on memo.-papers. He
carried about, on the backs of envelopes, such notes as these:
Join country clb take R dances there?
Basket of fruit for R
Invite Mason W lunch
Orgnze Tcar tour NY to SF
Newspaper men on tour probly Forbes
Rem Walter's new altitude 16,954
R to Astor Roof
Rem country c
He did get a card to the Peace Waters Country Club and take Ruth to a
dance there. She seemed to know every other member, and danced
eloquently. He took her to the Josiah Bagbys' for dinner; to the
first-night of a summer musical comedy. But he was still the stranger
in New York, and "parties" are not to be had by tipping waiters and
buying tickets. Half of the half-dozen affairs which they attended
were of her inspiration; he was invited to go yachting at Larchmont,
motoring, swimming on Long Island, with friends of herself and her
brothers.
One evening that strikes into Carl's memories of those days of the
_pays du tendre_ is the evening on which Phil Dunleavy insisted on
celebrating a Yale baseball victory by taking them to dinner in the
oak-room of the Ritz-Carlton, under whose alabaster lights, among the
cosmopolites, they dined elaborately and smoked slim, imported
cigarettes. The thin music of violins took them into the lonely gray
groves of the Land of Wandering Tunes, till Phil began to talk,
disclosing to them a devotion to beauty, a satirical sense of humor,
and a final acceptance of Carl as his friend.
A hundred other "parties" Carl planned, while dining alone at inferior
restaurants. A hundred times he took a ten-cent dessert instead of an
exciting fifteen-cent strawberry shortcake, to save money for those
parties. (Out of such sordid thoughts of nickel coins is built a love
enduring, and even tolerable before breakfast coffee.)
Yet always to him their real life was in simple jaunts out of doors,
arranged without considering other people. Her father seemed glad of
that. He once said to Carl (giving him a cigar), "You children had
better not let Aunt Emma know that you are enjoying yourselves as you
want to! How is the automobile business going?"
* * * * *
It would be pleasant to relate that Carl was inspired by love to put
so much of that celebrated American quality "punch" into his work that
the Touricar was sweeping the market. Or to picture with quietly
falling tears the pathos of his business failure at the time when he
most needed money. As a matter of fact, the Touricar affairs were
going as, in real life, most businesses go--just fairly well. A few
cars were sold; there were prospects of other sales; the VanZile
Corporation neither planned to drop the Touricar, nor elected our
young hero vice-president of the corporation.
* * * * *
In June Gertrude Cowles and her mother left for Joralemon. Carl had,
since Christmas, seen them about once a month. Gertie had at first
represented an unhappy old friend to whom he had to be kind. Then, as
she seemed never to be able to give up the desire to see him tied
down, whether by her affection or by his work, Carl came to regard her
as an irritating foe to the freedom which he prized the more because
of the increasing bondage of the office. The last stage was pure
indifference to her. Gertie was either a chance for simple sweetness
which he failed to take, or she was a peril which he had escaped,
according to one's view of her; but in any case he had missed--or
escaped--her as a romantic hero escapes fire, flood, and plot. She
meant nothing to him, never could again. Life had flowed past her as,
except in novels with plots, most lives do flow past temporary and
fortuitous points of interest.... Gertie was farther from him now than
those dancing Hawaiian girls whom Ruth and he hoped some day to see.
Yet by her reaching out for his liberty Gertie had first made him
prize Ruth.
* * * * *
The 1st of July, 1913, Ruth left for the Patton Kerrs' country house
in the Berkshires, near Pittsfield. Carl wrote to her every day. He
told her, apropos of Touricars and roof-gardens and aviation records
and Sunday motor-cycling with Bobby Winslow, that he loved her; he
even made, at the end of his letters, the old-fashioned lines of
crosses to represent kisses. Whenever he hinted how much he missed
her, how much he wanted to feel her startle in his arms, he wondered
what she would read out of it; wondered if she would put the letter
under her pillow.
She answered every other day with friendly letters droll in their
descriptions of the people she met. His call of love she did not
answer--directly. But she admitted that she missed their playtimes;
and once she wrote to him, late on a cold Berkshire night, with a
black rain and wind like a baying bloodhound:
It is so still in my room & so wild outside that I am
frightened. I have tried to make myself smart in a blue silk
dressing gown & a tosh lace breakfast cap, & I will write
neatly with a quill pen from the Mayfair, but just the same
I am a lonely baby & I want you here to comfort me. Would
you be too shocked to come? I would put a Navajo blanket on
my bed & a papier mache Turkish dagger & head of Othello
over my bed & pretend it was a cozy corner, that is of
course if they still have papier mache ornaments, I suppose
they still live in Harlem & Brooklyn. We would sit _very_
quietly in two wicker chairs on either side of my fireplace
& listen to the swollen brook in the ravine just below my
window. But with no Hawk here the wind keeps wailing that
Pan is dead & that there won't ever again be any sunshine on
the valley. Dear, it really _isn't_ safe to be writing like
this, after reading it you will suppose that it's just you
that I am lonely for, but of course I'd be glad for Phil or
Puggy Crewden or your nice solemn Walter MacMonnies or _any_
suitor who would make foolish noises & hide me from the
wind's hunting. Now I will seal this up & _NOT_ send it in
the morning.
Your playmate Ruth
Here is one small kiss on the forehead but remember it is
just because of the wind & rain.
Presumably she did mail the letter. At least, he received it.
He carried her letters in the side-pocket of his coat till the
envelopes were worn at the edges and nearly covered with smudged
pencil-notes about things he wanted to keep in mind and would, of
course, have kept in mind without making notes. He kept finding new
meanings in her letters. He wanted them to indicate that she loved
him; and any ambiguous phrase signified successively that she loved,
laughed at, loathed, and loved him. Once he got up from bed to take
another look at a letter and see whether she had said, "I hope you had
a dear good time at the Explorers' Club dinner," or "I hope you had a
good time, dear."
Carl was entirely sincere in his worried investigation of her state of
mind. He knew that both Ruth and he had the instability as well as the
initiative of the vagabond. As quickly as they had claimed each other,
so quickly could either of them break love's alliance, if bored. Carl
himself, being anything but bored, was as faithfully devoted as the
least enterprising of moral young men, He forgot Gertie, did not write
to Istra Nash the artist, and when the VanZile office got a new
telephone-girl, a tall, languorous brunette with shadowy eyes and fine
cheeks, he did not even smile at her.
But--was Ruth so bound? She still refused to admit even that she could
fall in love. He knew that Ruth and he were not romantic characters,
but every-day people with a tendency to quarrel and demand and be
slack. He knew that even if the rose dream came true, there would be
drab spots in it. And now that she was away, with Lenox and polo to
absorb her, could the gauche, ignorant Carl Ericson, that he privately
knew himself to be, retain her interest?
Late in July he received an invitation to spend a week-end, Friday to
Tuesday, with Ruth at the Patton Kerrs'.