The Trail of the Hawk Part 52

She may have had more curiosity than principle, but she did badger policemen pluckily. She was studying Italian, the Montessori method, cooking. She taught new dishes to her maid. She adopted a careless suggestion of Carl and voluntarily increased the maid's salary, thereby shaking the rock-ribbed foundations of Upper West Side society.

In nothing did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither "the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly and tinily telling her difficulties with household work.

When a purring, baby-talking acquaintance gurgled: "How did the Ruthie bride spend her morning? Did she cook some little dainty for her husband? Nothing bourgeois, I'm _sure_!" in reply Ruth pleasantly observed: "Not a chance. The Ruthie bride cussed out the janitor for not shooting up a dainty cabbage on the dumb-waiter, and then counted up her husband's cigarette coupons and skipped right down to the premium parlors with 'em and got him a pair of pale-blue Boston garters and a cunning granite-ware stew-pan, and then sponged lunch off Olive Dunleavy. But nothing bourgeois!"

Such experiences, told to Carl, he found diverting. He seemed, in the spring of 1914, to want no others.

CHAPTER XLI

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, la.s.situde, 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 coa.r.s.e, 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 pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tudinous 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-sh.e.l.l-rimmed eye-gla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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-cus.h.i.+ons 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 cla.s.ses 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,"

"j.a.ps 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 b.u.t.ter 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!"