Free Air Part 27

there was no climb! Unconsciously Claire had hesitated before das.h.i.+ng at each sharp upsloping bend; had lost headway while she was wondering, "Suppose the car went off this curve?" Milt never sped up, but he never slackened. His driving was as rhythmical as music.

They were so packed in that he could scarcely reach gear lever and hand-brake. He halted on a level, and curtly asked, "That trap-door in the back of the car--convertible extra seat?"

"Yes, but we almost never use it, and it's stuck. Can't get it open."

"I'll open it all right! Got a big screwdriver? Want you sit back there.

Need elbow room."

"Perhaps I'd better drive with Mr. Pinky."

"Nope. Don't think better."

With one yank he opened the trap-door, revealing a folding seat, which she meekly took. Back there, she reflected, "How strong his back looks.

Funny how the little silvery hairs grow at the back of his neck."

They came to a settlement and the red cedar bungalow of Dr. Hooker Beach. The moment Claire saw the doctor's thin demanding face, she trusted him. He spoke to Mr. Boltwood with a.s.surance: "All you need is some rest, and your digestion is a little shaky. Been eating some pork?

Might stay here a day or two. We're glad to have a glimpse of Easterners."

Mr. Boltwood went to bed in the Beaches' guest-room. Mrs. Beach gave Claire and Milt lunch, with thin toast and thin china, on a porch from which an arroyo dropped down for a hundred feet. Fir trees scented the air, and a talking machine played the same Russian music that was popular that same moment in New York. And the Beaches knew people who knew Claire.

Claire was thinking. These people were genuine aristocrats, while Jeff Saxton, for all his family and his a.s.sumptions about life, was the eternal climber. Milt, who had been uncomfortable with Jeff, was serene and un-self-conscious with the Beaches, and the doctor gratefully took his advice about his stationary gas engine. "He's rather like the Beaches in his simplicity--yes, and his ability to do anything if he considers it worth while," she decided.

After lunch, when the doctor and his wife had to trot off to a patient, Claire proposed, "Let's walk up to that ledge of rock and see the view, shall we, Milt?"

"Yes! And keep an eye on the road for Pinky. The poor nut, he hasn't showed up. So reckless; hope he hasn't driven the Teal off the road."

She crouched at the edge of a rock, where she would have been frightened, a month before, and looked across the main road to a creek in a pine-laced gully. He sat beside her, elbows on knees.

"Those Beaches--their kin are judges and senators and college Presidents, all over New England," she said. "This doctor must be the grandson of the amba.s.sador, I fancy."

"Honest? I thought they were just regular folks. Was I nice?"

"Of course you were."

"Did I--did I wash my paws and sit up and beg?"

"No, you aren't a little dog. I'm that. You're the big mastiff that guards the house, while I run and yip." She was turned toward him, smiling. Her hand was beside him. He touched the back of it with his forefinger, as though he was afraid he might soil it.

There seemed to be no reason, but he was trembling as he stammered, "I--I--I'm d-darn glad I didn't know they were anybody, or 'd have been as bad as a flivver driver the first time he tries a t-twelve-cylinder machine. G-gee your hand is little!"

She took it back and inspected it. "I suppose it is. And pretty useless."

"N-no, it isn't, but your shoes are. Why don't you wear boots when you're out like this?" A flicker of his earlier peremptoriness came into his voice. She resented it:

"My shoes are perfectly sensible! I will not wear those horrible vegetarian uplift sacks on my feet!"

"Your shoes may be all right for New York, but you're not going to New York for a while. You've simply got to see some of this country while you're out here--British Columbia and Alaska."

"Would be nice, but I've had enough roughing----"

"Chance to see the grandest mountains in the world, almost, and then you want to go back to tea and all that junk!"

"Stop trying to bully me! You have been dictatorial ever since we started up----"

"Have I? Didn't mean to be. Though I suppose I usually am bullying. At least I run things. There's two kinds of people; those that give orders, and those that naturally take them; and I belong to the first one, and----"

"But my dear Milt, so do I, and really----"

"And mostly I'd take them from you. But hang it, Seattle is just a day away, and you'll forget me. Wish I could kidnap you. Have half a mind to. Take you way up into the mountains, and when you got used to roughing it in sure-enough wilderness--say you'd helped me haul timber for a flume--then we'd be real pals. You have the stuff in you, but you still need toughening before----"

"Listen to me, Milton. You have been reading fiction, about this man--sometimes he's a lumberjack, and sometimes a trapper or a miner, but always he's frightfully hairy--and he sees a charming woman in the city, and kidnaps her, and shuts her up in some unspeakable shanty, and makes her eat nice cold boiled potatoes, and so naturally, she simply adores him! A hundred men have written that story, and it's an example of their insane masculine conceit, which I, as a woman, resent.

Shakespeare may have started it, with his silly _Taming of the Shrew_.

Shakespeare's men may have been real, but his women were dolls, designed to please some majesty. You may not know it, but there are women today who don't live just to please majesties' fancies. If a woman like me were kidnapped, she would go on hating the brute, or if she did give in, then the man would lose anyway, because she would have degenerated; she'd have turned into a slave, and lost exactly the things he'd liked in her. Oh, you cavemen! With your belief that you can force women to like you! I have more courage than any of you!"

"I admit you have courage, but you'd have still more, if you bucked the wilds."

"Nonsense! In New York I face every day a hundred complicated problems you don't know I ever heard of!"

"Let me remind you that Brer Julius Caesar said he'd rather be mayor in a little Spanish town than police commissioner in Rome. I'm king in Schoenstrom, while you're just one of a couple hundred thousand bright people in New York----"

"Really? Oh, at least a million. Thanks!"

"Oh--gee--Claire, I didn't mean to be personal, and get in a row and all, but--can't you see--kind of desperate--Seattle so soon----"

Her face was turned from him; its thin profile was firm as silver wire.

He blundered off into silence and--they were at it again!

"I didn't mean to make you angry," he gulped.

"Well, you did! Bullying---- You and your men of granite, in mackinaws and a much-needed shave, trying to make a well-bred woman satisfied with a view consisting of rocks and stumps and socks on the line! Let me tell you that compared with a street canyon, a mountain canyon is simply dead, and yet these unlettered wild men----"

"See here! I don't know if you're firing these adjectives at me, but I don't know that I'm so much more unlettered---- You talked about taking French in your finis.h.i.+ng-school. Well, they taught American in mine!"

"They would!"

Then he was angry. "Yes, and chemistry and physics and Greek and Latin and history and mathematics and economics, and I took more or less of a whirl at all of them, while you were fiddling with ribbons, and then I had to buck mechanics and business methods."

"I also 'fiddled' with manners--an unfortunate omission in your curriculum, I take it! You have been reasonably rude----"

"So have you!"

"I had to be! But I trust you begin to see that even your strong hand couldn't control a woman's taste. Kidnapping! As intelligent a boy as you wanting to imitate these boorish movie----"

"Not a darn bit more boorish than your smart set, with its champagne and these orgies at country clubs----"

"You know so much about country clubs, don't you! The worst orgy I ever saw at one was the golf champion reading the beauty department in _Boudoir_. Would you mind backing up your statements about the vices of myself and my friends----"

"Oh, you. Oh, I didn't mean----"