The apparently satisfactory development of the Touricar in the late
spring of 1914 was the result of an uneconomical expenditure of energy
on the part of Carl. Personally he followed by letter the trail of
every amateur aviator, every motoring big-game hunter. He never let up
for an afternoon. VanZile had lost interest in the whole matter.
Whenever Carl thought of how much the development of the Touricar
business depended upon himself, he was uneasy about the future, and
bent more closely over his desk. On his way home, swaying on a subway
strap, his pleasant sensation of returning to Ruth was interrupted by
worry in regard to things he might have done at the office. Nights he
dreamed of lists of "prospects."
Late in May he was disturbed for several days by headaches, lassitude,
nausea. He lied to Ruth: "Guess I've eaten something at lunch that was
a little off. You know what these restaurants are." He admitted,
however, that he felt like a Symptom. He stuck to the office, though
his chief emotion about life and business was that he wished to go off
somewhere and lie down and die gently.
Directly after a Sunday bruncheon, at which he was silent and looked
washed out, he went to bed with typhoid fever.
For six weeks he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the
boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun.
That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the
specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the
intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one
splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed,
she mourned and mourned for her lost boy, while she hid her fear and
kept her blouses fresh and her hair well-coiffed, and mothered the
stern man who lay so dreadfully still in the bed.... He was not shaved
every day; he had a pale beard under his hollow cheeks.... Even when
he was out of delirium, even when he was comparatively strong, he
never said anything gaily foolish for the sake of being young and
noisy with her.
During convalescence Carl was so wearily gentle that she hoped the
little boy she loved was coming back to dwell in him. But the Hawk's
wings seemed broken. For the first time Carl was afraid of life. He
sat and worried, going over the possibilities of the Touricar, and the
positions he might get if the Touricar failed. He was willing to loaf
by the window all day, his eyes on a narrow, blood-red stripe in the
Navajo blanket on his knees, along which he incessantly ran a
finger-nail, back and forth, back and forth, for whole quarter-hours,
while she read aloud from Kipling and London and Conrad, hoping to
rekindle the spirit of daring.
One sweet drop was in their cup of iron. As woodland playmates they
could never have known such intimacy as hovered about them when she
rested her head lightly against his knees and they watched the Hudson,
the storms and flurries of light on its waves, the windy clouds and
the processional of barges, the beetle-like ferries and the great
steamers for Albany. They talked in half sentences, understanding the
rest: "Tough in winter----" "Might be good trip----" Carl's hand was
always demanding her thick hair, but he stroked it gently. The coarse,
wholesome vigor was drained from him; part even of his slang went with
it; his "Gee!" was not explosive.
He took to watching her like a solemn baby, when she moved about the
room; thus she found the little boy Carl again; laughed full-throated
and secretly cried over him, as his sternness passed into a wistful
obedience. He was not quite the same impudent boy whose naughtiness
she had loved. But the good child who came in his place did trust her
so, depend upon her so....
When Carl was strong enough they went for three weeks to Point
Pleasant, on the Jersey coast, where the pines and breakers from the
open sea healed his weakness and his multitudinous worries. They even
swam, once, and Carl played at learning two new dances, strangely
called the "fox trot" and the "lu lu fado." Their hotel was a vast
barn, all porches, white flannels, and handsome young Jews chattering
tremendously with young Jewesses; but its ball-room floor was smooth,
and Ruth had lacked music and excitement for so long that she danced
every night, and conducted an amiable flirtation with a mysterious
young man of Harvard accent, Jewish features, fine brown eyes, and
tortoise-shell-rimmed eye-glasses, while Carl looked on, a contented
wall-flower.
They came back to town with ocean breeze and pine scent in their
throats and sea-sparkle in their eyes--and Carl promptly tied himself
to the office desk as though sickness and recovery had never given him
a vision of play.
Ruth had not taken the Point Pleasant dances seriously, but as day on
day she stifled in a half-darkened flat that summer, she sometimes
sobbed at the thought of the moon-path on the sea, the reflection of
lights on the ball-room floor, the wavelike swish of music-mad feet.
The flat was hot, dead. The summer heat was unrelenting as bedclothes
drawn over the head and lashed down. Flies in sneering circles mocked
the listless hand she flipped at them. Too hot to wear many clothes,
yet hating the disorder of a flimsy negligee, she panted by a window,
while the venomous sun glared on tin roofs, and a few feet away
snarled the ceaseless trrrrrr of a steam-riveter that was erecting new
flats to shut off their view of the Hudson. In the lava-paved back
yard was the insistent filelike voice of the janitor's son, who kept
piping: "Haaay, Bil-lay, hey; Billy's got a girl! Hey, Billy's got a
girl! Haaay, Bil-lay!" She imagined herself going down and
slaughtering him; vividly saw herself waiting for the elevator,
venturing into the hot sepulcher of the back areaway, and there
becoming too languid to complete the task of ridding the world of the
dear child. She was horrified to discover what she had been imagining,
and presently imagined it all over again.
Two blocks across from her, seen through the rising walls of the new
apartment-houses, were the drab windows of a group of run-down
tenements, which broke the sleek respectability of the well-to-do
quarter. In those windows Ruth observed foreign-looking, idle women,
not very clean, who had nothing to do after they had completed half an
hour of slovenly housework in the morning. They watched their
neighbors breathlessly. They peered out with the petty virulent
curiosity of the workless at whatever passed in the streets below
them. Fifty times a day they could be seen to lean far out on their
fire-escapes and follow with slowly craning necks and unblinking eyes
the passing of something--ice-wagons, undertakers' wagons, ole-clo'
men, Ruth surmised. The rest of the time, ragged-haired and greasy of
wrapper, gum-chewing and yawning, they rested their unlovely stomachs
on discolored sofa-cushions on the window-sills and waited for
something to appear. Two blocks away they were--yet to Ruth they
seemed to be in the room with her, claiming her as one of their
sisterhood. For now she was a useless woman, as they were. She raged
with the thought that she might grow to be like them in every
respect--she, Ruth Winslow!... She wondered if any of them were
Norwegians named Ericson.... With the fascination of dread she watched
them as closely as they watched the world with the hypnotization of
unspeakable hopelessness.... She had to find her work, something for
which the world needed her, lest she be left here, useless and
unhappy in a flat. In her kitchen she was merely an intruder on the
efficient maid, and there was no nursery.
She sat apprehensively on the edge of a chair, hating the women at the
windows, hating the dull, persistent flies, hating the wetness of her
forehead and the dampness of her palm; repenting of her hate and
hating again--and taking another cold bath to be fresh for the
home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother and whom, of
all the world, she did not hate.
Even on the many cool days when the streets and the flat became
tolerable and the vulture women of the tenements ceased to exist for
her, Ruth was not much interested, whether she went out or some one
came to see her. Every one she knew, except for the Dunleavys and a
few others, was out of town, and she was tired of Olive Dunleavy's
mirth and shallow gossip. After her days with Carl in the valley of
the shadow, Olive was to her a stranger giggling about strange people.
Phil was rather better. He occasionally came in for tea, poked about,
stared at the color prints, and said cryptic things about feminism and
playing squash.
Her settlement-house classes were closed for the summer. She brooded
over the settlement work and accused herself of caring less for people
than for the sensation of being charitable. She wondered if she was a
hypocrite.... Then she would take another cold bath to be fresh for
the home-coming of Carl, the tired man whom she had to mother, and
toward whom, of all the world's energies, she knew that she was not
hypocritical.
This is not the story of Ruth Winslow, but of Carl Ericson. Yet Ruth's
stifling days are a part of it, for her unhappiness meant as much to
him as it did to her. In the swelter of his office, overlooking
motor-hooting, gasoline-reeking Broadway, he was aware that Ruth was
in the flat, buried alive. He made plans for her going away, but she
refused to desert him. He tried to arrange for a week more of holiday
for them both; he could not; he came to understand that he was now
completely a prisoner of business.
He was in a rut, both sides of which were hedged with "back work that
had piled up on him." He had no desire, no ambition, no interest,
except in Ruth and in making the Touricar pay.
The Touricar Company had never paid expenses as yet. How much longer
would old VanZile be satisfied with millions to come in the
future--perhaps?
Carl even took work home with him, though for Ruth's sake he wanted to
go out and play. It really was for her sake; he himself liked to play,
but the disease of perpetual overwork had hold of him. He was glad to
have her desert him for an evening now and then and go out to the
Peace Waters Country Club for a dance with Phil and Olive Dunleavy.
She felt guilty when she came home and found him still making
calculations. But she hummed waltzes while she put on a thin, blue
silk dressing-gown and took down her hair.
"I _can't_ stand this grubby, shut-in prison," she finally snapped at
him, on an evening when he would not go to the first night of a
roof-garden.
He snarled back: "You don't have to! Why don't you go with your
bloomin' Phil and Olive? Of course, I don't ever want to go myself!"
"See here, my friend, you have been taking advantage for a long time
now of the fact that you were ill. I'm not going to be your nurse
indefinitely." She slammed her bedroom door.
Later she came stalking out, very dignified, and left the flat. He
pretended not to see her. But as soon as the elevator door had clanged
and the rumbling old car had begun to carry her down, away from him,
the flat was noisy with her absence. She came home eagerly sorry--to
find an eagerly sorry Carl. Then, while they cried together, and he
kissed her lips, they made a compact that no matter for what reason
or through whose fault they might quarrel, they would always settle it
before either went to bed.... But they were uncomfortably polite for
two days, and obviously were so afraid that they might quarrel that
they were both prepared to quarrel.
Carl had been back at work for less than one month, but he hoped that
the Touricar was giving enough promise now of positive success to
permit him to play during the evening. He rented a VanZile car for
part time; planned week-end trips; hoped they could spend----
Then the whole world exploded.
Just at the time when the investigation of Twilight Sleep indicated
that the world might become civilized, the Powers plunged into a war
whose reason no man has yet discovered. Carl read the head-lines on
the morning of August 5th, 1914, with a delusion of not reading
"news," but history, with himself in the history book.
Ten thousand books record the Great War, and how bitterly Europe
realized it; this is to record that Carl, like most of America, did
not comprehend it, even when recruits of the Kaiser marched down
Broadway with German and American flags intertwined, even when his
business was threatened. It was too big for his imagination.
Every noon he bought half a dozen newspaper extras and hurried down to
the bulletin-boards on the _Times_ and _Herald_ buildings. He
pretended that he was a character in one of the fantastic novels about
a world-war when he saw such items as "Russians invading Prussia,"
"Japs will enter war," "Aeroplane and submarine attack English
cruiser."
"Rats!" he said, "I'm dreaming. There couldn't be a war like that.
We're too civilized. I can prove the whole thing 's impossible."
In the world-puzzle nothing confused Carl more than the question of
socialism. He had known as a final fact that the alliance of French
and German socialist workmen made war between the two nations
absolutely impossible--and his knowledge was proven ignorance, his
faith folly. He tentatively bought a socialist magazine or two, to
find some explanation, and found only greater confusion on the part of
the scholars and leaders of the party. They, too, did not understand
how it had all happened; they stood amid the ruins of international
socialism, sorrowing. If their faith was darkened, how much more so
was Carl's vague untutored optimism about world-brotherhood.
He had two courses--to discard socialism as a failure, or to stand by
it as a course of action which was logical but had not, as yet, been
able to accomplish its end. He decided to stand by it; he could not
see himself plunging into the unutterable pessimism of believing that
all of mankind were such beast fools that, after this one great sin,
they could not repent and turn from tribal murder. And what other
remedy was there? If socialism had not prevented the war, neither had
monarchy nor bureaucracy, bourgeois peace movements, nor the church.
* * * * *
With a whole world at war, Carl thought chiefly of his own business.
He was not abnormal. The press was filled with bewildered queries as
to what would happen to America. For two weeks the automobile business
seemed dead, save for a grim activity in war-trucks. VanZile called in
Carl and shook his head over the future of the Touricar, now that all
luxuries were threatened.
But the Middle West promised a huge crop and prosperity. The East
followed; then, slowly, the South, despite the closed outlet for its
cotton crop. Within a few weeks all sorts of motor-cars were selling
well, especially expensive cars. It was apparent that automobiles were
no longer merely luxuries. There was even a promise of greater trade
than ever, so rapidly were all the cars of the warring nations being
destroyed.
But, once VanZile had considered the possibility of letting go his
Touricar interest in order to be safe, he seemed always to be
considering it. Carl read fate in VanZile's abstracted manner. And if
VanZile withdrew, Carl's own stock would be worthless. But he stuck at
his work, with something of a boy's frightened stubbornness and
something of a man's quiet sternness. Fear was never far from him. In
an aeroplane he had never been greatly frightened; he could himself,
by his own efforts, fight the wind. But how could he steer a world-war
or a world-industry?
He tried to conceal his anxiety from Ruth, but she guessed it. She
said, one evening: "Sometimes I think we two are unusual, because we
really want to be free. And then a thing like this war comes and our
bread and butter and little pink cakes are in danger, and I realize
we're not free at all; that we're just like all the rest, prisoners,
dependent on how much the job brings and how fast the subway runs. Oh,
sweetheart, we mustn't forget to be just a bit mad, no matter how
serious things become." Standing very close to him, she put her head
on his shoulder.
"Sure mustn't. Must stick by each other all the more when the world
takes a run and jumps on us."
"Indeed we will!"
* * * * *
Unsparingly the war's cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along
the edge of a business precipice, looking down. He became so
accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with
the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called
"courage," began to come to life again, laughing, "Let the darned old
business bust, if she's going to."
Only, it refused to bust.
It kept on trembling, while Carl became nervous again, then gaily
defiant, then nervous again, till the alternation of gloom and bravado
disgusted him and made Ruth wonder whether he was an office-slave or a
freebooter. As he happened to be both at the time, it was hard for
him to be either convincingly. She accused him of vacillating; he
retorted; the suspense kept them both raw....
To add to their difficulties of adjustment to each other, and to the
ego-mad world, Ruth's sense of established amenities was shocked by
the reappearance of Carl's pioneering past as revealed in the lively
but vulgar person of Martin Dockerill, Carl's former aviation
mechanic.
Martin Dockerill was lanky and awkward as ever, he still wrote
post-cards to his aunt in Fall River, and admired burlesque-show
choruses, but he no longer played the mouth-organ (publicly), for he
had become so well-to-do as to be respectable. As foreign agent for
the Des Moines Auto-Truck Company he had toured Europe, selling
war-trucks, or lorries, as the English called them, first to the
Balkan States, then to Italy, Russia, and Turkey. He was for a time
detailed to the New York office.
It did not occur either to him nor to Carl that he was not "welcome to
drop in any time; often as possible," to slap Carl on the back, loudly
recollect the time when he had got drunk and fought with a policeman
in San Antonio, or to spend a whole evening belligerently discussing
the idea of war or types of motor-trucks when Ruth wistfully wanted
Carl to herself. Martin supposed, because she smiled, that she was as
interested as Carl in his theories about aeroplane-scouting in war.
Ruth knew that most of Carl's life had been devoted to things quite
outside her own sphere of action, but she had known it without feeling
it. His talk with Martin showed her how sufficient his life had been
without her. She began to worry lest he go back to aviation.
So began their serious quarrels; there were not many of them, and they
were forgotten out of existence in a day or two; but there were at
least three pitched battles during which both of them believed that
"this ended everything." They quarreled always about the one thing
which had intimidated them before--the need of quarreling; though
apropos of this every detail of life came up: Ruth's conformities; her
fear that he would fly again; her fear that the wavering job was
making him indecisive.
And Martin Dockerill kept coming, as an excellent starting-point for
dissension.
Ruth did not dislike Martin's roughness, but when the ex-mechanic
discovered that he was making more money than was Carl, and asked
Carl, in her presence, if he'd like a loan, then she hated Martin, and
would give no reason. She became unable to see him as anything but a
boor, an upstart servant, whose friendship with Carl indicated that
her husband, too, was an "outsider." Believing that she was superbly
holding herself in, she asked Carl if there was not some way of
tactfully suggesting to Martin that he come to the flat only once in
two weeks, instead of two or three times a week. Carl was angry. She
said furiously what she really thought, and retired to Aunt Emma's for
the evening. When she returned she expected to find Carl as repentant
as herself. Unfortunately that same Carl who had declared that it was
pure egotism to regard one's own religion or country as necessarily
sacred, regarded his own friends as sacred--a noble faith which is an
important cause of political graft. He was ramping about the
living-room, waiting for a fight--and he got it.
Their moment of indiscretion. The inevitable time when, believing
themselves fearlessly frank, they exaggerated every memory of an
injury. Ruth pointed out that Carl had disliked Florence Crewden as
much as she had disliked Martin. She renewed her accusation that he
was vacillating; scoffed at Walter MacMonnies (whom she really liked),
Gertie Cowles (whom she had never met), and even, hesitatingly, Carl's
farmer relatives.
And Carl was equally unpleasant. At her last thrust he called her a
thin-blooded New-Yorker and slammed his bedroom door. They had broken
their pledge not to go to bed on a quarrel.
He was gone before she came out to breakfast in the morning.
In the evening they were perilously polite again. Martin Dockerill
appeared and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind
had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she
could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks
wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the
British Aero Corps, to get life's supreme sensation--scouting ten
thousand feet in air, while dozens of batteries fired at him; a
nose-to-earth volplane. The thinking Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth
knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer--and as one who was not
merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured. And Martin
Dockerill seemed so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might
go.
Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter-of-fact chatter about
a kind of wandering which shut her out as completely as did the
project of war. "I don't know," said he, "but what the biggest fun in
chasing round the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where
you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of
greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a hand-out and sneak on a
blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every
brakie and constabule out after you. That's living!"
When Martin was gone Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended
to be absorbed in a magazine. He took from the mess of papers and
letters that lived in his inside coat pocket a war-map he had clipped
from a newspaper, and drew tactical lines on it. From his room he
brought a small book he had bought that day. He studied it intently.
Ruth managed to see that the title of the book was _Aeroplanes and
Air-Scouting in the European Armies_.
She sprang up, cried: "Hawk! Why are you reading that?"
"Why shouldn't I read it?"
"You don't mean to---- You----"
"Oh no, I don't suppose I'd have the nerve to go and enlist now.
You've already pointed out to me that I've been getting cold feet."
"But why do you shut me out? Why do you?"
"Oh, good Lord! have we got to go all over that again? We've gone over
it and over it and over it till I'm sick of telling you it isn't
true."
"I'm very sorry, Hawk. Thank you for making it clear to me that I'm a
typical silly wife."
"And thank you for showing me I'm a clumsy brute. You've done it quite
often now. Of course it doesn't mean anything that I've given up
aviation."
"Oh, don't be melodramatic. Or if you must be, don't fail to tell me
that I've ruined your life."
"Very well. I won't say anything, then, Ruth."
"Don't look at me like that, Hawk. So hard. Studying me.... Can't you
understand---- Haven't you any perception? Can't you understand how
hard it is for me to come to you like this, after last night, and
try----"
"Very nice of you," he said, grimly.
With one cry of "Oh!" she ran into her bedroom.
He could hear her sobbing; he could feel her agony dragging him to
her. But no woman's arms should drug his anger, this time, to let it
ache again. For once he definitely did not want to go to her. So
futile to make up and quarrel, make up and quarrel. He was impatient
that her distant sobs expressed so clearly a wordless demand that he
come to her and make peace. "Hell!" he crawked; jerked his top-coat
from its nail, and left the flat--eleven o'clock of a chilly November
evening.