Part 37 (1/2)

”Well,” drawled Carl, ”I have fairly good authority. Walter MacMonnies, for instance, and he is probably the best flier in the country to-day, except for Lincoln Beachey.”

”Oh yes, he's a good flier,” said Phil, contemptuously, with a shadowy smile for Ruth. ”Still, he's no better than Aaron Solomons, and he isn't half so great a flier as that chap with the same surname as your own, Hawk Ericson, whom I myself saw coming up the Jersey coast when he won that big race to New York.... You see, I've been following this aviation pretty closely.”

Carl saw Ruth's head drop an inch, and her eyes close to a slit as she inspected him with sudden surprise. He knew that it had just occurred to her who he was. Their eyes exchanged understanding. ”She does get things,” he thought, and said, lightly:

”Well, I honestly hate to take the money, Mr. Dunleavy, but I'm in a position to know that MacMonnies is a better flier to-day than Ericson is, be----”

”But see here----”

”----because I happen to _be_ Hawk Ericson.”

”What a chump I am!” groaned the man in tortoise-sh.e.l.l spectacles. ”Of course! I remember your picture, now.”

Phil was open-mouthed. Ruth laughed. The rest of the room gasped.

Mason Winslow, long and bald, was worrying over the question of How to Receive Aviators at Tea.

And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing the jam.

CHAPTER x.x.x

At home, early that evening, Carl's doctor-landlord gave him the message that a Miss Gertrude Cowles had called him up, but had declined to leave a number. The landlord's look indicated that it was no fault of his if Carl had friends who were such fools that they didn't leave their numbers. Carl got even with him by going out to the corner drug-store to telephone Gertie, instead of giving him a chance to listen.

”h.e.l.lo?” said Gertie over the telephone. ”Oh, h.e.l.lo, Carl; I just called up to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I thought perhaps you might like to come up if you haven't anything better to do.”

Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Dunleavy and English-bas.e.m.e.nt houses with cream-colored drawing-rooms. But he went up to Gertie's.

They were all there--Gertie and Adelaide, Ray and his mother, and Miss Greene, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis; all playing parcheesi, explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on Sunday, but that parcheesi was ”different.” Ray winked at Carl as they said it.

The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a c.o.c.kroach with a ruler.

As the others began to disappear, Gertie said to Carl: ”Don't go till I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday. Lots of news from home. Joe Jordan is engaged!”

They were left alone. Gertie glanced at him intimately. He stiffened.

He knew that Gertie was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would be the inevitable sequence of a friends.h.i.+p which Ruth or Olive could take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man just starting in business, was un-heroically afraid of matrimony.

Yet his stiffness of att.i.tude disappeared when Gertie had read the letter from Joralemon and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy: ”I can just see them out sleighing. Sometimes I wish I was out there.

Honest, Carl, for all the sea and the hills here, don't you wish sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooded bluff over a lake?”

”Yes!” he cried. ”I've been away so long now that I don't ever feel homesick for any particular part of the country; but just the same I would like to see the lakes. And I do miss the prairies sometimes. Oh, I was reading something the other day--fellow was trying to define the different sorts of terrain--here it is, cut it out of the paper.” He produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a clipping hacked from a newspaper with a nail-file, and read:

”'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long gra.s.ses s.h.i.+ne against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the forest, whose leaves are the stained gla.s.s of a cathedral to grave saints of the open; all these I love, but nowhere do I find content save on the mid-western prairie, where the light of sky and plain drugs the senses, where the sound of meadow-larks at dawn fulfils my desire for companions.h.i.+p, and the easy creak of the buggy, as we top rise after rise, bespells me into an afternoon slumber which the nervous town shall never know.'

”I cut the thing out because I was thinking that the prairies, stretching out the way they do, make me want to go on and on, in an aeroplane or any old thing. Lord, Lord! I guess before long I'll have to be beating it again--like the guy in Kipling that always got sick of reading the same page too long.”

”Oh, but Carl, you don't mean to say you're going to give up your business, when you're doing so well? And aviation shows what you can do if you stick to a thing, Carl, and not just wander around like you used to do. We do want to see you succeed.”

His reply was rather weak: ”Well, gee! I guess I'll succeed, all right, but I don't see much use of succeeding if you have to be stuck down in a greasy city street all your life.”